Discover your gateway to a lifetime of fulfillment and success, connecting the liberal arts to the real world through our Common Ground core academic program.
Embrace a nurturing, challenging, exhilarating opportunity to change your mind, your self, your world, for the better. Explore your soul alongside classmates and faculty from a range of backgrounds, viewpoints and perspectives. Join a community seeking together, serving together, growing together.
Become the type of leader you’d like to follow, reaching across disciplines and continents to hone your skills as a communicator, researcher, planner and thinker.
First-Year Seminar
Build relationships with your hallmates through small class discussions about individuality and community.
Convocation
Connect as a campus community twice a week to hear renowned guest speakers, performing groups and presentations that expose you to issues in politics, society, religion and the arts and sciences.
Cross-cultural Learning
Engage a culture significantly different from your own, whether you’re hiking through a cloud forest in Costa Rica, singing with the choir in the great cathedrals of Europe, speaking to Israeli and Palestinian religious leaders and scholars in Jerusalem, asking questions of a playwright in Chicago or sharing a meal with members of a mosque in Wichita.
Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies
Engage questions and develop practical skills on how to actively pursue peace and justice, seek understanding where others might demand vengeance, and find common ground in our world – both global and local – that’s so often in conflict.
Integrating Faith and Life
Explore the relationship between your personal beliefs and chosen career through focused biblical study or classes investigating the world’s major religions. Before graduation, Basic Issues of Faith and Life (BIFL) brings together students and faculty for a common educational experience, studying issues of historical and contemporary significance.
URICA
As a senior, you will complete a URICA (Undergraduate Research, Internships and Creative Activity) project – a rigorous, independent study experience, the crowning achievement of your academic career. You’ll finish your studies at Bethel confident in your ability to plan and successfully complete a major independent project.