Annual Meeting

The 14th Annual Meeting of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers will be held at the North Carolina Study Center (NCSC) in Chapel Hill, NC. NCSC completed $2.4M in renovations on its 180-year-old historic home in fall 2022, which includes an updated kitchen, counseling room, and a library. The home is a 5-minute walk from the center of the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, making it a convenient location for students to participate in programming or utilize the space for study. The 6,500+ sq. foot NCSC home and nearby on-campus buildings will provide Annual Meeting attendees with a taste of southern hospitality and community.

Mia Chung-Yee

Concert Pianist & Executive Director of the Octet Collaborative

Pianist Mia Chung-Yee will teach a celebrated chamber music seminar at Harvard University with the Grammy Award-winning Parker String Quartet beginning this fall. She previously served as a Professor of Musical Studies and Performance at the Curtis Institute of Music from 2012-2023 having joined the faculty for her expertise in piano performance and interpretive analysis of tonal and atonal compositions. Chung-Yee’s CD and DVD recordings of works by Bach, Beethoven, and Schumann, among others, have earned high praise and awards. Chung-Yee received the Avery Fisher Career Grant, the highest national recognition for young concert artists and won first prize in the Concert Artists Guild Competition. She has since performed in major concert halls in the U.S., Canada, Central America, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, and the former Soviet Union. Her first short monograph, Chinese Émigré Composers and Divergent Modernisms: Chen Yi and Zhou Long was published in May 2024 by Cambridge University Press (Elements in Music Since 1945 Series). Chung-Yee was inspired to establish and lead the Octet Collaborative at MIT after visiting Chesterton House at Cornell as a guest lecturer in 2018. She earned her AB, magna cum laude in music, from Harvard College, a Master of Music degree from Yale University, and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Juilliard School.

Christopher Clemens

Provost & Chief Academic Officer at UNC

Christopher “Chris” Clemens, Provost and Chief Academic Officer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has a passion for collaborating and building great things with others. Clemens arrived at UNC in 1998 from Caltech, where he was a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Fellow in Astronomy. Previously, Clemens was a NASA Hubble Fellow at Iowa State University and received his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin (1994) and a Bachelor of Science in Astrophysics from the University of Oklahoma (1985). He is a dedicated mentor of graduate students and in 2012 received the Faculty Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring.

From 2012-2016, Clemens served as chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and from 2016-2019 as Senior Associate Dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in the College. In his role as Senior Associate Dean, he supported the development of the new IDEAs in Action Curriculum, and advocated for building students’ capacities for public discourse and debate. In 2019-2020 he led the effort to establish the Program for Public Discourse and served as its acting director. In 2019 he became the inaugural Associate Dean of Research and Innovation for the College of Natural Sciences, and currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Convergent Science, a pan-campus institute that is supporting research teams as they develop ideas, inventions, and technologies for commercial or practical use.

Greg Jones

President of Belmont University

Greg Jones became president of Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee on June 1, 2021. Prior to his appointment at Belmont, he served as the longtime dean of Duke Divinity School (from 1997-2010 and again from 2018-mid 2021). Between 2010 and 2018, he served in a variety of roles, including vice president and vice provost for global strategy at Duke University and provost and executive vice president of Baylor University.

Jones is the author or editor of 19 books, including the recently released Navigating the Future: Traditioned Innovation for Wilder Seas (with Andrew P. Hogue) which outlines his perspective on traditioned innovation as “a habit of being and living that cultivates a certain kind of moral imagination shaped by storytelling and expressed in creative, transformational action.” Other works include Christian Social Innovation, the co-authored Forgiving as We’ve Been Forgiven: Community Practices for Making Peace (with Celestin Musekura), the co-authored Resurrecting Excellence (with Kevin R. Armstrong), and the widely acclaimed Embodying Forgiveness. An ordained United Methodist minister, he has published more than 200 articles in a variety of publications.

Jones is also a gifted speaker, media contributor and thought leader in higher education, social innovation and theology. He recently joined the National Leadership Council for the Partnership for American Democracy and currently serves as a senior fellow at Leadership Education, which he founded, and senior fellow at the Fuqua-Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics.

It was a very encouraging and inspiring time! I appreciated hearing a wide variety of examples of study center programming, but even more valuable to me was the opportunity to make and strengthen connections with colleagues at other study centers. A highlight for me was the “spiritual history tour” of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, highlighting the role of Christians and Christian organizations at key moments in the university’s past. – Emily Wenneborg, PhD, Executive Director of Pascal Study Center at the University of Illinois