Dr. Edward H. Chandler

Dr. Chandler was born and raised in Greenville, SC. First pursuing business as a vocation, Dr. Chandler graduated from Clemson University with a BS in Accounting and then earned his MBA from Ole Miss, along the way working in Accounting and in Real Estate. Much more important than the MBA, though, he left Oxford, MS with his wife, Victoria, whom he met there in 1988.

Having cut his teeth in the classroom at Ole Miss teaching Economics to undergraduates, and having a burning desire to teach Theology and the Scriptures, Dr. Chandler earned his Master of Divinity from Covenant Theological Seminary and then his Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America. He fed not only his desire to know the Bible, but he also discovered a gift for and love of languages. While his graduate study was focused on the Biblical languages Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, he has also taught or tutored in Latin (extensively, including AP), Classical Arabic, and Akkadian. He has been teaching Theology, Bible, Greek, Latin, Rhetoric, and assorted other humanities in colleges, seminaries, and Christian schools, much of that time in classical education, for the last 22 years. He’s also kept his hand in Economics, having taught it at the senior level for a number of years. All of his and Victoria’s four children were classically educated.

Dr. Chandler lives with Victoria in an empty nest in Concord, NC. He teaches at Christ the King Catholic High School and at Belmont Abbey College near Charlotte, NC. He enjoys being overwhelmed by the task of keeping up his heavily wooded acre of land and never misses an opportunity to hike the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia. He only wishes those opportunities would come more often.

Teaching Philosophy

The purpose of any truly Christian education is, in loco parentis, to develop the whole human person—body, mind, and spirit. To accomplish this, each class individually, and the curriculum as a whole, can be likened to a symphony whose goal is to train up young men and women to believe the Truth, to think God’s thoughts after Him, and to love and serve their neighbor. Thus collegiality and, to the extent that school structures allow, broad integration across disciplines is always to be cultivated.

I have always considered my “job” to be a vocation, one that is a daily application of that great commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Romans 13:8-10). Part of that calling is to pursue personal excellence in whatever disciplines that I teach, not only for my own sake but for the sake of my students. The other part of my calling recalls the life of the farmer, who tends his crop, diligently providing all that is necessary for its fruitfulness, but trusting God to make it grow (cf. 1 Corinthians 3:6-9). Thus I seek to plant and/or water, as necessary, trusting that God through them produces real, meaningful fruit.

Statement of Faith

I affirm the Nicene Creed in all its particulars: that God spoke the cosmos into existence out of nothing; that God exists eternally as three co-equal persons in one Godhead: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; that our first parents Adam and Eve sinned by eating the fruit forbidden them by God and became subject to death and corruption and that, as their descendants, we are born under that subjection; that Jesus Christ, the Son, is a divine person who was born of the Virgin Mary to free us from death and corruption, by means of his atoning death and resurrection and his glorious ascension; that the Holy Spirit was poured out by Christ on his Church at Pentecost and continues to dwell in the Church and in its people as temples; that Jesus will return as judge personally and bodily at the end of the age; he will raise all humanity bodily from the dead, to the final salvation of believers and to the final condemnation of those who persist in unbelief. Thus the faithful will become fully "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) forever. I am a Byzantine Catholic and a member of the Parish of St. Basil the Great in Charlotte, NC.