Belmont Honors Program Instructor Laura Hohman and Jonathan Thorndike, Honors Director, recently presented at the “Teaching the Christian Intellectual Tradition” conference at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. The conference, supported by funding from the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, focused on the formative Christian theologian of the West, St. Augustine, and featured plenary speakers Peter Kaufman (University of Richmond) and Kristen Deede Johnson (Western Theological Seminary). The conference was hosted by Samford’s Core Texts and University Fellows Honors Program. Samford religion professor and conference co-chair Scott McGinnis said the series was designed to provide an opportunity for scholars from across the disciplines to share ideas about teaching Christianity’s rich intellectual heritage to today’s undergraduates. Hohman and Thorndike’s presentation was titled “Teaching Augustine in the Interdisciplinary Honors Core,” and they discussed the design of the Honors Core courses, Honors curricula and the use of primary texts such as St. Augustine’s Confessions to provide a bridge between the Classical Civilizations and Medieval World courses.

Laura Hohman is a doctoral candidate through the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. She is writing her dissertation on early medieval sermons and religious culture.  Laura specializes in Ancient, Late Antique and Medieval history and teaches the Honors Classical Civilizations course as well as First Year Seminar. She has spent time in Europe, most recently doing manuscript work in Paris under a research grant through the Council for European Studies.  Jonathan Thorndike is Honors Program Director and served on the National Council of Alpha Chi Honor Scholarship Society as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Southeast region. He is Belmont’s representative to the National Collegiate Honors Council and teaches interdisciplinary Honors Core courses including Classical Civilizations, The Age of Exploration, Discovery and Revolution and Topics in the 20th and 21st Centuries.  He teaches a study abroad course in London on C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Inklings.

Dr. Brianna Witherspoon, adjunct faculty member in the School of Nursing, presented a scientific poster titled “ACNP Intensivists – Evaluating A Model of Care” at the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) National Magnet Conference in Dallas Texas last week. Witherspoon’s work described patient outcomes such as mortality rates and intensive care unit length of stay before and after acute care nurse practitioners (ACNPs) joined the critical care team. Witherspoon teaches adult health clinical and lab in the undergraduate nursing program.

Joyce Searcy, director of community relations, received the 2014 Amiga of the Year Award at the Nashville Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s Business and Community Awards.  The presentation took place at the program culminating Hispanic Heritage Month.  The award recognizes Belmont University as well as Searcy’s efforts and dedication in support of the Hispanic Chamber. Searcy is the first woman to receive the award.

Dr. Stephen Shin, an assistant professor in sport administration, presented “Adapting Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI) Scale to Ethnic Consumers” at the poster session in the World Association for Sport Management (WASM) conference in Madrid, Spain. In order to make psychometric properties of the CSI generalizable to ethnic subcultures, the CSI was applied to the context of Korean American consumers to identify shopping orientations. Then, the essential consumer decision-making styles were validated on the purchase of golf clubs as a selected sport product category. Profiling ethnic consumers by exploring their decision-making styles and demographic variables provided more critical ways to identify and understand the differences between consumer segments and to target each segment with the tailored marketing strategies. Dr. Shin shared his experiences and information obtained from the conference with his students in the sport administration program. Based on the context of the global sport platform, it was discussed in his class how Spanish professional soccer clubs have been developed and how their organizational and financial system is different compared to American sport organizations.