Every day, Benjamin Phillips helps students take their first steps into the life of the mind. As dean of academics and Latin teacher at Southeast Ohio Classical Academy, he credits much of what he brings to that work to his years in Boyce College’s Augustine Honors Collegium.
Boyce launched the Collegium in 2016 as a selective program for academically advanced undergraduates. The program prepares participants to serve the church as Christian scholars who think critically and communicate the gospel effectively. Drawing on the classical Western tradition, the Collegium trains students to bring ancient resources to bear on modern concerns. Students move together through six themed seminars on ontology, liberty, culture, apologetics, ethics, and aesthetics. They then write and present a senior thesis and graduate as Augustine Scholars.
Phillips, the second of three in his family to attend Boyce, studied humanities with a history emphasis and a minor in classical education from 2019 to 2022. He served as president of the Boyce Society of Prayer and now serves as an elder in his local church.
The Collegium helped draw him to Boyce in the first place.
“The AHC served as a concentration of the personal and intellectual formation that I received at Boyce,” he said. “Many of my closest friends during and after Boyce, including, most notably, my wife, graduated from or spent time in the AHC.”
That community pushed him toward both excellence and humility.
“Those friendships were a joy to share life and the campus experience with, and they pushed me on to be a better and fuller student,” he said. “One of my favorite things about Boyce in general and the AHC in particular was that many of the things I prided myself on were done better by other people around me. This called me to greater humility and a more sober pursuit of using my talents so that God, not I, would be glorified.”
The authors he met in seminar have stayed with him ever since.
“Essential to the course of the Collegium was a great training with many of the great minds of the tradition,” he said. “Anselm, Shakespeare, Lewis Mumford, and Václav Havel have now become a part of my mental furniture. That is a very valuable experience.”
Later that year, Phillips juggled an engagement, a job, and a full course load. He sat down with Tyler Flatt, Associate Professor of Humanities and a Director of the Collegium, laid out everything competing for his time, and asked for help thinking wisely about it all. Faculty invested in him well beyond the seminar room.
Today, Phillips draws on that formation as he shapes young minds himself.
“It made me a better reader, listener, thinker, and writer, as well as helping me pursue and come closer to wisdom,” he said. “It taught me both what and how to think in a very good and humane way. As someone responsible for helping others begin or cultivate the life of the mind, I could not do so if the AHC had not already sent me further down that path.”
The Collegium typically enrolls 35 to 45 students, who share seminars, trips, and community events across four years. Recent seminars have explored Shakespearean drama, Platonic philosophy, totalitarianism, and technological change. The seminars fit alongside every Boyce major, and most students complete the honors curriculum without adding courses to their degree.
Phillips offers simple advice to students considering the program.
“Count the cost and do it,” he said. “You will get out of it what you put into it.”
Learn more at boycecollege.com/the-augustine-honors-collegium.