Philosophy
As a Catholic educational institution, Belmont Abbey College reflects a Christian inspiration, recognizing the importance of faith in and reverence toward God. The College encourages all members of the community to cultivate a relationship with God by providing opportunities for moral and spiritual growth, by a curricular program in Theology and Philosophy, and by example through a continuing close relationship with the monastic community and through ecumenical programs.
The College is committed to the people of God and to the human family. Belmont Abbey encourages service by all members of the College to the local community through outreach programs. Through these activities, the College recognizes the inherent dignity of all individuals and expresses its desire to promote the common good through social justice, an active concern for others, and the rejection of all prejudice.
As a Catholic educational institution, the College recognizes its responsibility to search for understanding in the context of the Scriptural message as it comes to us through the Church. This requires constant application of the intellect and careful study of the human experience, together with reflection on, and reverence for, God. In its curriculum, the College exposes students to many of the world’s major problems and helps them develop a responsible social consciousness guided by Catholic teaching. Recognizing that intolerance and narrow sectarianism retard learning and the pursuit of truth and understanding, the College recognizes that the community benefits from the presence of people of different faiths, racial backgrounds, and cultures.
Outside the classroom, the Campus Ministry program offers students an opportunity to build a faith community through participation in sacramental liturgy, social issues, and group interaction.
Benedictine heritage and tradition are based on the Rule of Saint Benedict. It is necessary to examine some basic elements of the Rule in order to appreciate the corresponding values that influence the College community.
The Rule begins with the word “Listen.” Listening places a person in a receptive mode and promotes openness to life, to truth, and to communication. The monk is instructed to listen in order to be open to God, to others, and to all of creation. St. Benedict says in The Rule that he is establishing the monastery as a school for the Lord’s service. In this school, the monk seeks to learn wisdom and to grow in holiness.
The College encourages its faculty and students to cultivate a deep love of learning and an appreciation of the human faculties of mind and spirit. The College ensures that students are provided with sufficient space and quiet time to cultivate the habits of serious study and healthy reflection.
The Rule is permeated with reverence for God, for others, and for all of creation. Reverence for God is expressed through prayer. Prayer reminds the monk of God’s importance and it points to the presence of God in our midst, the divine dimension in human life.
The College provides students with programs and opportunities designed to nourish their faith and encourage expressions of prayer and worship.
Reverence for others is expressed through living within a community. Community living is designed to moderate the extremes of individualism and competitiveness and to promote the common good. Hence, community is the context in which the monk must live his daily life and relate to other people.
The College fosters a spirit of community and helpfulness on campus through appropriate social activities that complement its intellectual aims. The Office of Student Life promotes programs and activities that provide wholesome and responsible social interaction. Reverence for others is encouraged by providing an effective, just, and responsible system of social discipline on campus. Students are encouraged to develop an appreciation of good order and of the importance of relating to others in a responsible and peaceful way.
Reverence for creation is expressed through the monk’s use of the environment and of the goods and property of the monastery. The monk understands that material goods and property are intended to serve the good of all and to enhance the quality of life.
Accordingly, the College actively encourages all to exercise a responsible care for buildings, equipment, and the campus grounds so that our environment will enhance and promote our academic mission. To help promote reverence for the environment, the College employs competent and effective maintenance, ground and housekeeping crews, and provides them with leadership and supervision.
As a liberal arts institution, Belmont Abbey College seeks to assist its students to become both liberally educated and well prepared for the tasks and responsibilities of professional life. Such an education implies a curriculum that integrates the traditional ends and means of liberal education with majors and minors that help prepare students for particular professions.
In an era when most college students need to plan their education around future careers, the College makes various majors and minors readily available. These majors provide the facts, principles, and questions that form the crucial underpinnings of specific professions. When promoting its studies and programs, the College conveys facts of permanent or fundamental import as well as current developments and research in particular fields. In the course of such studies, due appreciation of work and of professional values is fostered along with growing competence in special areas of learning.
Since profession-oriented studies take place within an institution that is Catholic and Benedictine in character and within a liberal arts-based curriculum, the College helps its students perceive professions in the broader perspectives of just action, the common good, and environmental concern. Such an approach helps nurture a sense of commitment that goes beyond autonomous efficiency and can temper the unrestrained pursuit of profit and prestige.
Most broadly stated, a liberal education cultivates the mind. A mind properly cultivated enhances one’s humanity and graces one with thoughtfulness, openness, and the spirit of inquiry in the most important areas of life: faith, family, friendship, community, work, and leisure.
The College curriculum provides a liberal education in three ways. First, liberal education seeks to promote the acquisition of knowledge through particular arts, skills, and abilities. Traditionally, these have been known as the “liberal arts” because of their liberating character and because of their close connection to the intellect, as opposed to those arts that are manual in character or ordered primarily to some external product. Strictly speaking, the liberal arts are intended to develop the mind in, of, and for itself. The arts, skills, and abilities being developed are reading, writing, speaking, listening, and reasoning (mathematic, analytic, synthetic, and critical).
Second, liberal education aims to acquaint or introduce students to particular areas of investigation and knowledge and to the questions, facts, principles, and methods found in them. Most important are those areas having to do with God, humanity, and nature. None of these three fields of study belongs exclusively to one particular discipline. They may be treated in different ways and from differing perspectives in several disciplines. Among the disciplines shedding light on one or more of these matters are theology, literature, history, the natural sciences, political philosophy, sociology, economics, and psychology.
Third, liberal education seeks to foster exploration of life’s most important questions and of the various answers that great, thoughtful, and influential persons have provided in both the past and the present. Here, too, the formulation of questions and responses is not the exclusive domain of any one discipline. Indeed, adequate appreciation of such issues often requires reaching across disciplines or transcending disciplines in order to confront questions in a holistic fashion. One of the goals of a liberal arts education is to be able to integrate what one learns through faith and reason. Such integration is critical to the humanistic formation of the whole person, enabling young men and women to be at once persons of integrity and faith, responsible citizens, and specialists in a given academic discipline.
A liberal education fosters an appreciation of what is beautiful, a growing awareness of what is good, and a quest for truth through a thorough examination of life’s most important perennial and contemporary questions.
In pursuit of the good, the true and the beautiful, Belmont Abbey College seeks to attract students who are compatible with its purpose and educational mission, namely students who:
- have the potential, the commitment, and the character to master the skills, knowledge, and concepts of liberal learning;
- are open to the transcendent dimension of life and willing to cultivate a deeper relationship to God through faith and prayer;
- have, or have the potential to develop sufficient maturity and self-discipline to respect other persons, property, and the campus environment, and to make a meaningful contribution, whether inside or outside the classroom, toward constant improvement in the quality of campus life; and
- are mostly drawn from various geographical locations both inside the state of North Carolina and within the eastern portion of the United States so that the College maintains its regional identity while providing a diversity of viewpoints to enrich intellectual and social development.
Environment
Belmont Abbey College is located in the historic town of Belmont, North Carolina, approximately ten minutes west of Charlotte, which is the largest city in the Carolinas. Students who come from other areas have a chance to see and become part of the educational, economic, and cultural dynamism of the Piedmont area of North Carolina.
Interstate 85 conveniently abuts the campus on its way to other thriving areas in the Carolinas. Charlotte Douglas International Airport, one of the South’s major transportation hubs, is ten minutes away.
The campus is impressively scenic. Most of the older buildings, which were engineered and built by the monks themselves before the beginning of the twentieth century, offer enduring charm to the Abbey’s atmosphere. There are also many modern buildings, and the wooded, landscaped grounds provide an ideal setting for study. The entire central campus was designated as a National Historic District in 1993.
The oldest building on campus is the Monastery, the residence of the monastic community. The Abbey Church of Mary Help of Christians, built in neo-Gothic style in 1892, was completely renovated in 1965 in a most striking manner. The church, which contains prize winning painted glass windows and a unique baptismal font, is listed on The National Register of Historic Places. In 1998, the church was named a minor Basilica by the Pope John Paul II.
Robert Lee Stowe Hall contains classrooms for many of the liberal arts courses, several administrative offices, the College Relations department, some faculty offices. The ten classrooms in the building have a combined seating capacity of 307, and building also features a computer lab that accommodates 19. Located in St. Leo Hall are the Grace Auditorium (with seating for 99), one classroom (with capacity for 21), the Office of Career Services, the College Bookstore, The Catholic Shoppe, and many faculty offices. The Music Building houses the College’s archives and Institutional Research offices. The William Gaston Science Building houses laboratory facilities, science equipment, additional classrooms, and faculty offices. The building has eight laboratories, while the nine classrooms have a combined seating capacity of 252.
The Abbot Vincent Taylor Library contains more than 125,000 print books, 150,000 ebooks, over 100 databases, and other digital sources, multimedia collections (DVDs, CDs), periodicals and microfilms, all searchable through the online catalog—Alexandria (www.belmontabbeycollege.edu/academics/library-information-services). The main floor houses the Learning Commons, featuring reading and reference areas with workstations, group study tables, laptop plug-in carrels, and the Carter Center computer lab where reference librarians teach research skills and information literacy, and which are also available for faculty reservations. The Main floor also houses the technical services and interlibrary loan department, administrative offices, and equipment for printing, scanning, faxing, and photocopying. On the lower floor are current and bound periodicals, rare books, the monastic collection in the Benedictine Room, and multimedia materials and equipment. The open-stack book collection is classified according to the Library of Congress system. The book stacks are located on both the main floor and the lower level.
The Abbot Walter Coggin Student Commons houses a one-stop shop for student services including the registrar, admissions, business office, financial aid and student life. Additionally, the Student Commons is open 24 hours a day for students to study, socialize and check postal mail. The Dining Hall is adjacent.
Raphael Arthur Hall is suite style with four rooms that can accommodate single or double occupancy. Four to eight residents may share bathroom facilities. Cuthbert Allen Apartments are four (4) bedroom apartments with a combined living room, dining room. St. Benedict Hall and St. Scholastica Hall are suite style with two (2) residents sharing a bath and small common room. Poellath and O’Connell Halls which are suite style with typically eight (8) or nine (9) residents sharing a bath. Poellath and O’Connell Hall contain rooms for double and triple occupancy. The New residence hall is for upper-classmen and features dormitory-style living with double occupancy and two shared bathrooms per floor.
Residence Life and Campus Ministry (including FOCUS offices) are located on the first floor of O’Connell.
Campus Police is located on the lower level of Raphael Arthur; police monitor the campus 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
MiraVia at Belmont Abbey College is a residence hall for pregnant college students. This home is managed by a separate, non-profit organization. More information at www.miravia.org.
Located in the midst of the residence halls, the St. Joseph Eucharistic Adoration Chapel is open daily for prayer with daily Eucharistic Adoration during the academic year. (Students sign up for hours through the Campus Ministry office.)
The Wheeler Center for physical education houses a gymnasium, which seats 1,500, instructional facilities, and a recently renovated fitness center. The fitness center is open to the College community. Large playing fields provide excellent space for outdoor athletics. This student activity area includes a baseball diamond, a soccer field, a softball field, and intramural fields. A quarter-mile track of asphalt circles the soccer field.
The Chi-Rho House contains the physical plant operations including maintenance and housekeeping for the campus.
The Haid includes the Abbey Theatre (home of the Abbey Players and Belmont Community Theatre, with seating for 200), a ballroom for college functions, the campus Information Technology operations, and the Wellness Center. The Wellness Center is accessible only from the outside entrance on the basement level.
Maurus Hall houses Holy Grounds, a campus coffee house and grille.
The Sacred Heart Campus is located on the outskirts of downtown Belmont, and currently houses the Sister Christine Beck Department of Education, the Department of Mathematics and Physics, and the Department of Sport and Motorsport Management, and classrooms. The ten classrooms in the Administration Building on the Sacred Heart Campus have a total seating capacity of 266, while the five classrooms in the Mercedes Building can comfortably accommodate 82 total students.
Belmont Abbey College is a member of the Greater Charlotte Consortium, a cooperative venture that includes 8 colleges and universities in the greater Charlotte area. The free exchange of library facilities and transfer credits multiplies educational opportunities for all members, which include Belmont Abbey College, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Central Piedmont Community College, Winthrop University, Queens University of Charlotte, Johnson & Wales University—Charlotte, NC Campus, Pfeiffer University.
Students wishing to apply should see the Registrar or visit www.greatercharlotteconsortium.org.