Campus Life

Memorization drills, current events quizzes, mock debates and daily reading throughout the summer boosted Grand Canyon University’s Matthew Calderwood and Grace Laidlaw to a 10th-place finish in the Georgia B. Bowman Invitational last weekend at William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo. The pair argued successfully about drone use and germ modification.

The Honors College mentorship program kicked off last week with an event where freshmen went from “Uh, wow. College,” to, “I am not on my own.” The college’s FLIGHT program pairs freshmen with upperclassmen who have gone down a path similar to the one they have in mind. Teresita Figueroa, a senior pre-med major who for the past seven years has volunteered at a hospital, took freshman pre-med major Hadassah Gates under her wing.

A mixture of logical debate strategies for pro-life arguments and anecdotes about the sanctity of human life highlighted GCU’s second annual Bioethics Conference, Human Dignity: Clash of World Views. One speaker refused to abort her daughter and refused to use stem cells from fetuses to aid her brain damaged son. Another speaker shared heartfelt steps to ease grief from the loss of a newborn.

Joni Eareckson Tada’s heartfelt talk Monday at Chapel was all about getting up and doing something for people with disabilities. “Christians are the agents of comfort and mercy,” she said, “and when you reach down and help the least and the last of the brethren, you not only give them the Gospel of friends, you’re becoming the Gospel to them.”

Canyon 49 Grill has released new menus for breakfast, lunch and dinner and has expanded its entertainment options. The new menus have a southwest twang and 90 percent of the dishes are made from scratch, including Executive Chef Marcus Maggiore’s special New York strip steak with a house chipotle honey butter and chorizo potato hash. “We upped our game completely and tried to make food you would get in any high-end restaurant approachable to the student body and to our local guests,” Maggiore said. “It’s a chance for us to kind of show off what we can do as chefs, a chance to make the best food we can.” Both student and employees receive a 10 percent discount to the grill. There’s also a free shuttle that runs from campus to Canyon 49 every 20 minutes until 10 p.m.

If you stick to just Mozart, you’re missing out on a lot, said GCU clarinet professor Tim Haas. So for his bass clarinet recital Sept. 27 in the GCU Recording Studio, he’s turning to new compositions, the oldest of which dates back to 2006. The concert will spotlight works inspired by St. Francis of Assisi, a beast, the Lydian scale, and even the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

The Academic Web Services Department has developed an an award-winning online resource that’s a one-stop shop for GCU students. In the year since its inception, the Student Success Center’s propietary search of more than 1,000 resources already has been used nearly 1 million times. Department Director Miranda Hildebrand says the website is useful to the point where her son’s high school teacher has been using it at the high school level.

Grand Canyon University is known for its hospitality — and, more and more, its hospitality program, too. A kickoff event for the program, entering its fourth year, packed the Canyon 49 Grill, and a recent graduate shared tips about her success in the field and how the program helped her achieve it.

The second annual Bioethics Conference, titled “Human Dignity: Clash of World Views,” is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 20, at GCU Arena and the First Southern Baptist Church.

(Sept. 10, 2018) – The Grand Canyon University Worship Arts program has released its third album – Canyon Worship 2018 – with 10 original songs written and performed by GCU students. The album is available for $9.99 on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify and Shazam as well as the Lope Shop and other locations on GCU’s campus. “Last year’s album was so good that, coming into this project, I actually was a little bit concerned that we may not be able to bring it up to that level,” said Eric Johnson, manager of the GCU Recording Studio and the album’s main coordinator. “But I think we hit the mark and maybe even passed it a little bit because we’re shifting the focus to the corporate worship side. There are a lot of good songs that you wouldn’t necessarily sing as a group in church, but these are songs that you can sing in church.” Corporate worship songs, which can be incorporated more easily into a church setting, are the direction the Christian music industry is headed. For the second consecutive year, the Canyon Worship album was produced in GCU’s state-of-the-art recording studio by two music industry veterans, Geoff Hunker (Satellites & […]