In late March, three DRBU professors and one staff member traveled to Tempe, Arizona to participate in the annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC), of which DRBU is a member. The ACTC brings together and supports programs and schools of higher education that emphasize the study of classical and culturally significant texts from around the world. In 2025, DRBU hosted the ACTC’s annual student conference.

Every year scholars from ACTC member institutions and elsewhere gather at the Association’s conference to share their appreciation of core texts through short papers that examine the texts themselves as well as approaches to teaching them. Most member institutions focus primarily on texts from the Western tradition, which stretches from ancient Greece and Rome through medieval and Renaissance Europe to modern Europe and the Americas. DRBU is one of the few schools that includes a large number of non-Western texts in its curricula.

Shared inquiry is built directly into the conference structure. Presenters are asked to keep their papers short (no more than fifteen minutes) in order to leave time at the end of each panel for discussion between presenters and the audience. Instead of panelists reading their papers without further ado, dialogue opens the presenters’ offerings to new questions, new insights, and new connections. 

This year’s conference, titled We Hold These Truths: Liberty, Equality, and Core Texts, encouraged submissions on core principles of American democracy, celebrating the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. However, submissions were not required to address this theme. Representing DRBU at the conference were professors Franklyn Wu, Sarah Babcock, and Fedde de Vries and admissions counselor Justin Howe.

Professor Wu, participating in a panel on liberal arts education, presented a report on the structure and curriculum of DRBU’s Summer Study Abroad in Taiwan program, held for the first time in 2025. The program combines Buddhist and Western philosophical texts with on-site exploration of Taipei and its surroundings, allowing students to learn about and apply Buddhist theories of perception through firsthand experience.

Professors Babcock and de Vries joined a panel on teaching Asian core texts. Professor Babcock presented on the li (禮) lab, a long-standing and innovative assignment from the bachelor program’s Chinese Classics strand. In this assignment, students explore the Confucian notion of li (rite, ritual, propriety, etiquette) by designing and carrying out their own ritual and recording the results. As Professor Babcock explained, this assignment has often led students to a deeper understanding and transformation—for example, of a difficult habit or a challenging relationship.

Professor de Vries proposed that the teaching of Buddhist texts requires careful preparation and contextualization for the students, especially in cases where one teaching is responding to another. The Heart of the Prajnaparamitra Sutra, for example, cannot be properly understood without understanding the Pali Canon teachings that provide the core principles and terms it reframes.

Professor de Vries also presented in a second panel, on natural and political equality. Here, he suggested that the Buddha’s teachings on universal equality provide a curious counterpoint to the political equality that underpins American democracy, because the Buddha kept this teaching of equality secret and only shared it with those who were ready to hear it.

Justin Howe, who is also a doctoral candidate at Clemson University, presented in this same panel on equality. His paper considered the Mahaparinibbana Sutta and the Samannaphala Sutta, two Pali suttas in which the Buddha encounters the tyrant king Ajatasattu, asking whether insights from these encounters might help us to understand community and freedom today.

DRBU is grateful for the ACTC and the work it does to support liberal arts, humanities, and core texts-based learning, and looks forward to sending representatives to next year’s conference.