Jewell set to launch new Center for Faith and Culture in fall 2021

William Humphrey — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Center for Faith and Culture logo.

In the approaching fall semester, William Jewell College will be launching a Center for Faith and Culture on campus. Dr. Brendon Benz, professor of history and theologian-in-residence, will be serving as part of the leadership for the Center.

According to Benz, the Center at Jewell is a result of a very generous gift from Philip and Patricia Love. Philip is a Jewell graduate and served as managing director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Yale University, which will serve as a blueprint of sorts to the Center at Jewell. In fact, there are already some similarities between the Center at Yale and the Critical Thought and Inquiry program here at Jewell, as Benz points out.

“One of the driving features of the Center at Yale is to consider, from a broad, ecumenical perspective, what a life of flourish looks like,” Benz said. “To that end, faculty at the Center offer the course Education and the Life Worth Living to undergraduates at Yale, and Christ & Being Human to students at the Divinity School. The intentions of these courses broadly correspond to the intentions of our beloved CTI 100.”

The Center will work hand-in-hand with the Sacred and Secular category of the CTI program, with the goal of providing a better focus on spiritual exploration, one of the core values of the College.

Benz is particularly excited about one aspect of the Center.

“A particularly exciting feature of the Center that I believe will deeply impact the lives of our students and the community at large is that we aim to recruit leaders from the wider Kansas City community to develop and teach Sacred & Secular courses at Jewell as Fellows of the Center,” said Benz. “In addition to diversifying the perspectives presented in the classroom, it is our hope that these courses will provide more opportunities for students to encounter and participate in movements and activities that give flesh to what they are learning in the classroom.”

One of these courses has already been announced. Dr. Vernon Percy Howard – a Jewell graduate who is a pastor at St. Mark’s Church in Kansas City and the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City – will develop and teach a course titled 21st Century Social Movements & The Black Freedom Struggle in the U.S. Howard has also been very influential in his community, as he received the Harold L. Holliday Sr. Civil Rights Award from the Missouri Branch of the NAACP just last year.

“This course studies key social movements in the United States and their impact upon the cultural, economic, religious, and political strata and structures of the nation,” according to the course description. “Central focus is placed on the prolific Black struggle for freedom and justice in America with particular emphasis on the African American Prophetic Tradition, a sacred stream of influence within that struggle that is infused by a biblical hermeneutic serving as the ethical norm and trademark of secular political praxis amid Black social movements for justice in America. Historical periods and phenomena under investigation include the Antebellum South, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Exceptionalism, and Black Lives Matter. Through the prism of the historic Black struggle for freedom and its enduring Prophetic Tradition, this course researches the new and unfolding national/global reckoning with the moral aims of movements around anti-racism, labor rights and worker justice, gender equity and sexual orientation, reparations, climate justice, Indigenous People’s rights, women’s rights, peace, democracy, and youth activism.”

It has also been confirmed that Father Nathan Rueb, another Jewell graduate who, among other things, serves as an associate pastor at St. Andrew the Apostle Catholic Church and a chaplain at St. Pius X High School, will also teach a Sacred and Secular course.

The Center will also work to get the outside community involved.

“In the end, we are looking to foster meaningful relationships among individuals and groups on and off our campus in part through the marriage of theory and practice,” said Benz.

The Center for Faith and Culture will be something to keep an eye on as it launches next semester.

Dr. Brad Chance

Chance is the head of the religion department. He received his bachelor of arts from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, his master of divinity fromSoutheastern Baptist Theological Seminary and his doctor of philosophy in religious studies from Duke University. Chance’s area of expertise is in Christian origins, primarily in the books of Luke and Acts. He is also very interested in how religion and culture work together.

“I’m very interested in how religion works socially and particularly the kind of social cultural environment that religion can create to then influence and shape people within that environment,” said Chance.

Chance said that he loves that Jewell is “an interdisciplinary exploration of our ideas.” He also thinks that the caliber of students at Jewell gives him the opportunity to present them with some challenging curriculum and some challenging texts. He likes his colleagues and enjoys Jewell’s environment.

Chance’s favorite class to teach is CTI 238/REL 270 Religion in the Modern Age, because it has the “deepest roots.” The course was once called Religion and Meaning and has been through many changes. He sees this class as important because he believes that one cannot discuss most major issues in today’s world without talking about religion.

“Religion is everywhere whether people like it or not,” said Chance.

Dr. Milton P. Horne

Horne received his bachelor of arts from the University of Missouri, Columbia, his master of divinity from Midwestern Theological Seminary and his doctor of philosophy in theology from Oxford University. His area of expertise is the Hebrew Bible, more specifically the wisdom texts, including the apocryphal books of Ecclesiastics and Wisdom of Solomon.

While Horne is still very interested in the wisdom texts, he finds that he has also become interested in economics’ influence on religion.

“I think economics and religion, for instance, dovetail a lot more than people are aware of,” said Horne.

Like Chance, Horne enjoys the interdisciplinary environment that Jewell creates as well as its students. He also likes the size, because it is a close community.

“They like that kind of close conversation, they like to work with professors, they like interesting research ideas, they like co-curricular activities where you’re talking about the applications of what you might be talking about in the classroom,” said Horne.

He doesn’t have a favorite class, but the three he enjoys the most are CTI 239/REL 272 Judaism, Christianity and Islam, CTI 236/REL 275 Science, Magic and Religion; and CTI 407 The Economics of Well-Being. He likes these three classes for different reasons, but he sees students engage in these classes in a way that he doesn’t see in others.

Dr. Brendon C. Benz

Benz has his bachelor of arts from Taylor University, his master of divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and his doctor of philosophy in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East from the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. His area of expertise is the Hebrew Bible and context, specifically the history of the Ancient Southern Levant and the history of the Ancient Near East as a whole.

Benz said that he’s still working with the topic of his dissertation. In fact, the first book that will come from his dissertation is in the final stages of publication. However, he has become more interested in what he refers to as “a hermetic of relationship,” which means reading the Bible in a way that influences the way an individual forms relationships with others.

Similar to Chance and Horne, Benz likes Jewell because the students’ ability to engage in study in a close and critical way. He also likes that, while Jewell doesn’t reject its history of religious affiliation, it is not defined by that history.

“You can teach the Bible in a critical way and there’s no party line that has to be held and so in that way as opposed to many institutions that I have been affiliated with or know about it is an institution of higher learning,” said Benz.

Benz says his favorite class to teach is REL 110 Introduction to the Bible, because the students are able to suspend their own judgments and embrace new ideas in a way that “really blows their world open.”

“I also like Christianity and Tyranny because at the core of that class is promoting healthy relationship and it’s something that goes beyond knowledge,” said Benz.

Critical Thought and Inquiry (CTI) classes allow students to learn subjects outside of their major and get to know professors in other departments. However, you take only one class in each of the CTI categories, so there are some faculty you may not know. This is the second part of a series of articles highlighting different departments on campus so one can become familiar with the faculty at William Jewell College.

dr. benz – The Hilltop Monitor

Jewell set to launch new Center for Faith and Culture in fall 2021

Meet the Department: Religion and Culture