WATCH: Celebrating Western Civilization on campus
Oklahoma Baptist University Honors Program director Benjamin Myers discussed how students can benefit from a Great Books program and the impact of literature in academia.
As director of the Honors Program at Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU), professor Benjamin Myers is committed to establishing a curriculum rooted in Christianity that emphasizes the “development of Western civilization” through literature.
I’ve stepped into the position of director of the Honors Program at OBU, which means, if you are looking for a Great Books program committed to reading the best that has been thought and said and to preserving the permanent things, I’m your guy.
— Benjamin Myers (@BenMyersPoet) June 24, 2022
“Our goal is to restore to students the intellectual, the spiritual, and the emotional resources of antiquity and of Christendom,” he said. “Our idea is to expand our students’ sense of what it means to be human.”
By exposing students to Plato’s Republic, the Bible, the Divine Comedy, and other masterful works of literature, students will be well-versed in philosophy, theology, and history.
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“We focus on reading more of the great books, rather than sort of the piecemeal approaches,” Myers explained. “We’ve tried to cover as much as we can.”
His vision for the Honors Program is for students to learn the “great tradition of thought in the west” and to “prepare students to live lives in pursuit of truth and goodness and beauty.”
“We’ve been told [our] whole lives to live in the moment, but the moment is a very small place to live,” Myers said. “You really need to spread out in time to see fully what it means to be a human being, and live among other human beings in relation to a transcendent God.”
Click on the video to watch the full interview.
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