If you did not secure a seat, make sure and sign up to the waiting list. There will be cancelations throughout the year.

The 2025 CiRCE National Conference will take place in Charleston, SC, July 17-19, at the Francis Marion Hotel.

The 2025 pre-conference will be held Wednesday, July 16th from 9am-4pm ET. Breakfast and Lunch are provided along with coffee, tea, and water during the day.

There are four pre-conference sessions available:

Dr. Matthew Bianco & The Art of Hospitality

Hospitality, that thing by which we might entertain angels unawares, is not just a thing we do. Hospitality is an art, and to do it well is to open up physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual paths that can enable real growth, learning, and union. As an art, hospitality is more than just inviting neighbors over for dinner or offering a guest room for a night to visitors. Hospitality is a way of being that extends, or should extend, to everything we do.

In this pre-conference, Dr. Matthew Bianco will look at the art of hospitality: what it is, how we do it, and what are those paths that open up and allow for growth, learning, and union? Since the art of hospitality is most easily recognized in the sharing of a meal, we will look at hospitality through that lens and then consider what lessons and principles can be drawn from the shared meal and brought into the classroom, the church, and all aspects of life.

• This pre-conference is priced slightly higher at $157 than the others because it will include a special lunch experience to embody the principles of hospitality that will be learned as part of it. Not only will participants be learning “about” hospitality, but they will actually get to practice hospitality. The special lunch will include a full, special menu for the meal and wine. Please come prepared to participate in the full hospitality experience with food and wine.

Heidi White & The Divided Soul: Reuniting Duty and Desire in Literature and Life

Ancient thinkers considered every person to be a little world–a microcosm of the universe embodied in the individual. Among other applications, this means that the stories of our lives share a common narrative. We are all created good, we all fall into sin and suffering, we all are rescued and restored by intervening grace. By extension, the great stories of the literary tradition reflect this universal story, conveying shared experiences, preoccupations, conflicts, and yearnings. Over the centuries, literature tells this common tale in myriad ways, creating overlapping layers of meaning with fiction, psychology, and faith.
In this interactive pre-conference, Heidi White will take you into this intersection of human psychology, literary education, and Christian spirituality through the lens of her book, The Divided Soul: Reuniting Duty and Desire in Literature and Life. Heidi will reveal how the conflict between what we want to do and what we ought to do is the dividing line of every enduring story—including our own—and what we can do about it.
Heidi White is a teacher, podcaster, therapist, and author with a lifetime of experience as a divided soul. She has spent the last several years researching, speaking, and writing about the divided soul in literature and life.

Andrew Kern & Unless the Lord Builds the House

Join Andrew Kern for the book launch for his highly-anticipated new book, Unless the Lord Builds the House! This pre-conference launch will feature a day long discussion of Andrew’s new book and the core ideas surrounding its development, see the description of the book below:

In this new treatise on Christian education, Andrew Kern returns to the roots of education by exploring the Hebrew Temple as a pattern for learning. He shows how this pattern applies to all of education, from selecting the course of study to practicing life-giving pedagogy and argues that if we rightly understand this pattern, it will transform all we do in education.  

Going beyond merely diagnosing the symptoms of conventional education, Unless the Lord Builds the House prescribes a cure: returning to the eternal foundation of Christ the Logos and building a house of wisdom on that Rock. 

Attendees will also receive a free copy of Andrew’s new book along with their registration fee!

Buck Holler & Latin – Fabulae

In this year’s Latin workshop, attendees will work through five sessions on the reading and teaching of Aesop’s Fables as translated by Phaedrus. Each session will introduce a new set of fables and apply a different mode for reading, understanding, and teaching the text. In the final session, participants will have an opportunity to fabulam agere, perform a skit of a selected fable Latine! While instruction will be in Latin, participants may use either Latin or English. Selected fables and instruction will be taught at a beginner/intermediate level (A2-B1 fluency), though all are welcome.