Home

November 12, 2024 By radefolaju Leave a Comment

What can I do with a Master of Arts in Classical and Liberal Education?

Belmont Abbey College’s Master of Arts in Classical and Liberal Education (MACLE) provides essential formation for professionals in Classical K-12 education: whether teachers, administrators, curriculum and resource creators, or homeschooling network leaders.

If your calling lies in classical education, this flexible, affordable online degree program with a 10-12 month completion date offers personal and professional development uniquely capable of transforming your vocation.

As a classical K-12 teacher, you will develop the skills and understanding to inspire students with a shared love of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. By grounding yourself in a pedagogy specifically designed to engage students directly with the riches of the Great Books tradition, you will not only encourage active participation, critical and creative thinking, and thoughtful and genuine communication: you will change students’ lives.
As a classical K-12 administrator, you will learn how best to support classroom instructors and their students, cultivating an authentic community oriented toward learning. Fruitful classroom seminars are only possible where a safe, ordered, and healthy community is free to grow and to engage with the Good, so classical education requires men and women like you who address the essential needs of an academic institution with wisdom and prudence.
As a resource or curriculum creator, you will provide classical educators at all grade levels and across communities with renewed access to the timeless riches of the Western canon, facilitating profound encounters with the great conversation in which generations have engaged as they seek the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Curricular support extends this conversation and helps teachers to challenge their students, offer context, and explore further questions, scaffolding the skills by which students will discover ever more fully how to learn and engage.
As a leader in a homeschool network, you will bring the depths of the Great Books tradition into the first of all schools, the home, by providing the tools and support that parents and fellow educators need to fulfill the mission they have so generously embraced. By taking such direct and active roles in their children’s schooling and their community as a whole, homeschooling educators model the joyful responsibility of lifelong learning in pursuit of wisdom, and offering leadership in such a community entails a profound contribution to the good of our society and culture.

Belmont Abbey designed its Master of Arts in Classical and Liberal Education in collaboration with the CiRCE Institute, ICLE, and the Veterum Sapientia Institute, all leaders in the classical education movement who are committed to forming men and women like you in the best that liberal arts tradition has to offer. In addition to exploring the Trivium and Quadrivium as foundations of classical education, the MACLE candidate gains critical pedagogical training while engaging questions of faith and reason, poetry and philosophy, civic understanding, and the human condition.

As an educator invested in the mission of classical education, you will have the opportunity to more deeply pursue Truth, Goodness, and Beauty while making the fruits of this journey available to your students and colleagues – ultimately inspiring them in their own journeys and nourishing the active community of seekers that lies at the heart of classical and liberal education.

If you are an educator seeking to grow personally and professionally, consider what an MA in Classical and Liberal Education could mean for your calling. Click here to explore the possibilities.

November 9, 2024 By radefolaju Leave a Comment

Why Should I Complete My Degree?

Wondering why you should complete your degree? Explore these 10 reasons to go back to college.

Completing your degree can be a daunting prospect, especially for busy professionals seeking to maintain balance amid work, family, and personal commitments. It’s worth pausing to consider, however, what a bachelor’s could mean for you – especially since assessing the benefits can help shed light on what you want from your career and your life as a whole.

So… if you are a working professional, what ARE the benefits of completing your degree?

Ultimately, a bachelor of arts or sciences empowers you to:

Discern your calling by engaging meaningfully with an area of personal or professional interest. A degree program can clarify unexplored possibilities for growth within your chosen field, helping you to discover where an inquiry or an industry awaits the contribution only you can make.
Increase your earning power. Full-time professionals with a bachelor’s degree earn a substantially higher median salary than those whose highest level of education remains at the secondary level, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Learn from experts in your chosen field, men and women whose combined education, training, and experience uniquely qualify them to provide the formation and the guidance you need to excel both personally and professionally. A degree program provides unparalleled access to educators who have dedicated their exceptional knowledge and skills to helping you achieve success.
Alongside a verified standard of knowledge, skill, and critical thought, a college degree demonstrates your disciplined commitment to a field. A bachelor’s degree signals not only that you are prepared for enhanced responsibilities and greater opportunities, but also that you are willing to embrace challenges, learn new skills, and develop your potential. Colleagues and supervisors recognize this, and the recognition transforms your professional landscape.
Expand your professional network through the connections and opportunities available within a college community. Even beyond hands-on learning, internships, or conferences, the institutional life of a college includes a community of alumni, professors, and peers who can provide support and invaluable connection.
Raise your promotion potential. Don’t let an unfinished degree keep you from career advancement, especially in an industry where education thresholds might otherwise curb your upward mobility or hold you back from the leadership only you can offer.
Learn together with other motivated seekers. Aside from the professional advantages of completing your degree, the personal benefits of a learning community shouldn’t be underestimated. Engaging in the shared pursuit of excellence and exploring the depths and challenges of a chosen field offer a basis for lasting friendships and community.
Open up new career opportunities. As you grow and develop both personally and professionally within a degree program, the career opportunities open to you grow commensurately, providing new challenges and satisfactions that can increase your sense of accomplishment and overall well-being.
Embrace your God-given potential. When you develop your capacities and gifts to their full potential, you participate in God’s creative work and embrace His will. Of course, formal education isn’t the only way to do this, but it can be a powerful means of responding to the vision of our Creator and taking on the vocation that is our particular calling in life.
Transform your community. Remember that embracing your calling benefits not just you but also your entire community. Your gifts transform the world and change the lives of those around you, so developing them through a degree program has truly unimaginable effects.

Consider investing in yourself, your career, and your community. Take the next step today by exploring Belmont Abbey’s flexible, affordable online degree programs, whether Interdisciplinary Studies, RN to BSN, Business Management, Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or Digital Marketing.

November 8, 2024 By Laura Schaffer Leave a Comment

Seek His Face.

Maybe it’s the family photo I’ve been using as my desktop background over the past few weeks, or maybe it’s this month’s Feast of All Saints… but I’ve been thinking about faces lately.

When we remember someone, either living or deceased, we usually picture their face, investing it with the memories and emotions associated with the particular person in our minds. But a face is also more than a symbol.

Arguably the most expressive part of us – and home to four of the five senses – a face draws our focus when we attend to another person: to listen, ask, or understand. In a sense, it incarnates a site of encounter; we might even call it sacramental. When I look into my brother or sister’s face, something is at work beyond just reading an expression or refining an image-memory. It is essential that this person in front of me is turned toward me as well: another person, vivid with distinctive selfhood, a Thou whose willingness to engage with me is, itself, a freely given gift. That the word “face” is both a noun and a verb seems particularly appropriate to the active and personal nature of the encounter it embodies.

So when the psalmist urges us to “Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always” (Psalm 105:4), this verse points to something beautifully intimate in the way God invites us to relationship with Him. And the mystery of His ineffable tenderness only deepens when we think that God took on our humanity – bringing His face to us in the human face of Christ – so that we could approach Him, encountering Him freely and humanly within our finite capacities, both in Himself and in us: all those called to be Christ to one other. To “seek his face,” then, is neither an abstract nor a purely metaphorical call. Certainly we rejoice in the way God’s image echoes throughout His creation, but “seek[ing] His face” invites us to much more than this. It invites us to personal encounter.

When we orient ourselves freely toward His face, both within our souls and within the mystery of His incarnate and sacramental presence in the world, we respond to this invitation to active and expressive encounter. We seek the face of God each day in the sensory immediacy of the Blessed Sacrament; in the faces of our brothers and sisters, our loved ones; in the Word; and in honest and vulnerable prayer. We seek because we know our God not only comes to meet us but also makes it possible for us to engage with Him, even when His ways are unclear to us. He meets our gaze and does not turn away.

This weekend, as we conclude a hectic and polarizing election cycle, let’s ask for the grace to seek and love His face anew in our neighbor, our community, and in all the circumstances of our lives. May He fill our vision with the truth of His loving presence.

November 7, 2024 By radefolaju Leave a Comment

The Definition of Servant Leadership

“It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.” Usually we think of this as an unarguable dictum of the business world, stressing only the necessity of developing a professional network to advance in a chosen field. But Dr. Brad Frazier relays this to his Belmont Abbey College MBA students on their first day of Christian Ethics & Leadership for the Common Good, the message runs strikingly deeper, resonating with the kind of authentic, servant leadership that is more than a business strategy. It is a calling. It’s who you know.

In the words of Catherine Barber ‘15, Adult Degree Program alumna and pioneering graduate of the Abbey’s MBA, Belmont Abbey cultivates “a holistic approach toward corporate leadership. They focus on the fundamentals of what makes a great leader and the importance of their influence on a community or organization… While learning the ins and outs of business management can make you knowledgeable, the most significant impact is how you influence others with your knowledge. The most outstanding leaders can lead by the Golden Rule while valuing the feedback from those they lead. It’s about establishing trust and influence.”

An education in business goes beyond the knowledge you acquire through instruction and experience – though this is certainly important. It goes beyond the skills you learn and practice – including analysis, communication, creative problem-solving, and networking. And “who you know” is not simply about using influence to climb. Grounded in the Benedictine tradition of education, which orders the mind and the heart to the Good, Belmont Abbey’s MBA understands “who you know” as a call to true, faithful, and ethical leadership within a community. In fact, to servant leadership. The authentic leader builds trust and influence in service to something more – embracing not just “what” or “how” but also, and more meaningfully, “who” and “why.”

“This program,” Catherine states, “made me a better leader. Understanding the fundamentals of leadership with an enhanced ethical approach made me confident in understanding why servant-style leadership benefits the greater good and how Benedictine values reiterate the importance of understanding emotional intelligence. It made me realize how effective leadership is a two-way street built on communication and trust.” It depends on a recognition of personhood from both sides, a recognition that allows us to seek the Good with honesty, humility, and hope.

The Belmont Abbey MBA – while it certainly prepares students to excel professionally – embraces and cultivates leadership rooted in the personal, living dignity of communities. And for Catherine Barber, as a business professional, a wife and mother, and a member of a faith community, this holistic approach to corporate leadership created a meaningful synthesis between the demands of the business world and the essential, Benedictine values that embrace excellence and virtue in all things.

For Abbey MBA graduates like Catherine, and for all those they influence and encounter, these Benedictine hallmarks speak to the definition of servant leadership because they place community, stability, and stewardship at the heart of this calling. In keeping with love and hospitality, they seek to build up thriving communities where all are free to realize their authentic and God-given potential.

It’s not what you know. It’s who you know. Because the person before us and the community behind us give leadership its meaning and its purpose.

Consider what a Belmont Abbey MBA could mean for your future. Click here to learn more and embrace your calling today!

November 7, 2024 By radefolaju Leave a Comment

Why Choose Abbey Online?

As you consider all that a bachelor’s degree can mean for your personal and professional development, choosing where to complete this degree can change the very terms of the question.

Now is the time to explore what sets Belmont Abbey College apart:

Belmont Abbey recognizes the need for a flexible online program that meets the needs of busy professionals without sacrificing access to instructors or collaborative opportunities with peers. In the words of alumna Catherine Barber ‘15: “Being virtual has its perks, as communication between professors and other peers is spot-on. I could email instructors regarding any matters, and they were always quick to respond. They helped clarify instructions or give further insight into lectures when needed.”
We also emphasize affordability and value, respecting the time, energy, and dedication it takes to invest in your future by completing your degree.
Generations of Belmont Abbey alumni continue to excel in a profound variety of fields and leadership roles. You will find Abbey alums among congressmen and politicians, business executives, academics, priests and religious, and professionals in all industries, from motorsports to agriculture and finance to tech development.
The Abbey offers an Interdisciplinary Studies program that leverages the classes you’ve already completed and the experience you’ve gained. Since education never occurs in isolation, interdisciplinary studies ensures that nothing is wasted, recognizing that education builds on and with all that we are.
Belmont Abbey offers programs built not only on a century and a half of excellence and virtue in liberal arts education in North Carolina but also on a millennium and a half of Benedictine commitment to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
This is more than a nod to institutional heredity. Its roots continue to nourish and sustain our work and our community to this day. The monastic community of Belmont Abbey remains at the heart of campus and actively participates in college life, with our monks serving as chaplains, professors, staff, and leadership throughout the history of the college and up to the present day.
To generations of steadfast wisdom and faithfulness to the Benedictine tradition we unite the responsive expertise of faculty – both monks and laypeople – who remain active in their dynamic fields of inquiry, embracing the lifelong learning which is the fruit of liberal arts education.
Our faculty, moreover, are consistently recognized by US News and World Report for their excellence in undergraduate teaching – which is a testament to the fact that Abbey professors bring an exceptional knowledge of their field to an authentic teaching vocation. While they continue to publish papers, engage in research, and exercise leadership within professional conferences and associations, they maintain the essential priority of teaching at Belmont Abbey College.
In each program and each course, Belmont Abbey strives to recognize the full person: body, mind, and soul. We recognize that you are more than the knowledge and the skills you need to excel – and we are fully committed to developing these not for their own sakes but for the greater excellence and virtue they will mean for your personal and professional life.
Ultimately, a Belmont Abbey education remains grounded in the rich Benedictine liberal arts tradition, with the hallmarks of stability, stewardship, community, hospitality, prayer, humility, obedience, discipline, conversatio, and love informing all that we offer and all that we do. An education rooted in these principles is one that sustains a clear and profound vision of the world, our place in it, and our relationships with ourselves, others, and God. While a Belmont Abbey education certainly provides an exceptional formation in your chosen field, it also invites you to embrace your personal calling in ways that can genuinely transform your life.

Discerning where to pursue your education is a way of asking who you want to be. Find out what a Belmont Abbey education would mean for you, and embrace your calling today!

Learn more about all of our online programs at Belmont Abbey College!