Five new academic programs will begin this fall for Cornerstone University undergraduate students.

The Humanities Division will receive four new emphases: philosophy, literature, creative writing and linguistics. The Fine Arts Division will offer a worship arts program. Associate Provost Tim Detwiler has worked to get the new programs approved and finalized.

“It’s more of preparing students—putting together programs that are valuable,” Detwiler said.

A few of the new majors are previous majors that have been renamed and slightly adjusted. Humanities with an emphasis on creative writing has replaced English with a writing emphasis, and the philosophy major is now a thread under the Humanities Division.

“The humanities faculty has put together a creative program,” Detwiler said. “The creation of the humanities major allows all those things to be put together in a creative curriculum design. A student, for example, could come and study humanities, which is really liberal arts, and focus on philosophy.”

All humanities majors will have an opportunity to spend a semester at the University of Oxford in England. Senior humanities majors will have a common capstone course.

“All the areas will link together,” Detwiler said. “Those sorts of threads will be all brought together in that senior seminar.”

Michael Pasquale, chair of the Humanities Division, has been working on adding more foreign languages into the curriculum.

“We’re starting Arabic and Latin in the fall, along with regular courses in French and Spanish,” Pasquale said. The Humanities Division is hoping to make German and Japanese available in the future for students to study as well.

The worship arts major will be specifically geared to students going into the context of church ministry.

Donna Bohn, chair of the Fine Arts Division, said a new course called Church Music Methods and Materials will be a requisite for all music majors who want a worship arts focus.

“We feel that there is a strong demand for this major,” Bohn said. “We have several current students who are very interested in shifting to this major. We have incoming students who are interested in pursuing this major already and we have only advertised it right at the beginning of this semester.”

Bohn first arrived at Cornerstone during the fall of 2006. The Fine Arts Division was still discussing a worship arts major at that time, which would be distinct from the Contemporary Christian Music program.

“We were talking about the option because they had discovered that the CCM emphasis was drawing students who really wanted to be working in churches,” Bohn said. “But that is not a church emphasis degree program. For CCM students, the major is performance. For worship arts students, the major is music.”

Steve Tuttle, a Cornerstone freshmen, came to the institution because he heard about the worship arts emphasis that will be available this fall.

“I chose worship arts because I love music and it’s something for someone who wants to be in the music ministry,” Tuttle said. “If that’s you’re interest, such as being a worship pastor, then that’s the main priority of being a worship arts major. I love music and I want to have it as a ministry.”

The proposal to add a worship arts emphasis was submitted to the National Association of Schools of Music last year in spring. It was approved in December.

“It’s a collaborative effort with several faculty,” Bohn said. “I think this is a great opportunity for our current students and our future students.”