Students, faculty and staff accompanied the Board of Trustees at the northwest end of the Academic Village to dedicate the grounds for the new Numen Lumen Pavilion, the final building in the Academic Village that will serve as the campus Multi-faith Center.
"(The dedication) was a beautiful ceremony and it really touched many of us emotionally very deeply," said President Leo Lambert. "I hope (the pavilion) will be a very well- used facility on the campus and I'm personally very excited for it."
Prior to the ceremony, university chaplain Jan Fuller asked pairs of students representing nine religions on campus to find a word that symbolized what they hoped the Numen Lumen Pavilion would represent for the campus.
Painted on stones left at the site of the groundbreaking, the words included the Hindu "Namaste," meaning "the divine in me recognizes the divine in you," "charity" for the Church of Latter-Day Saints and "umoja," meaning "oneness" in Swahili for the Baha'i religion. The words will later be engraved on stones, which will be built into the new pavilion.
"I actually just kind of declared myself a follower of (the Baha'i religion) and one of the stones founding it was a Baha'i stone," said sophomore Meagan Casavant, who lives in the Better Together learning community. "I just thought, 'Oh, that's so cool' because ... it made me feel like I was part of the building now. I like that they literally are making several religions the building blocks of the new Numen Lumen site."
The building itself will have many unique features, according to Smith Jackson, vice president and dean of Student Life, including a water wall in the lobby, a large multipurpose room, a prayer room, a meditation garden between the building and Gray Pavilion to the south, a kitchen and a circular sacred space at the northern end. The building is one of the facilities included in the Ever Elon campaign.
"I think the whole campus will benefit from this," Jackson said. "I think this provides a space like we've never seen on this campus that is being viewed by national leaders as one of the most carefully designed and thought-out facilities and programs (in the country). You don't have to be religious or identify with a particular faith to be welcome in this place. This is a place for people to come and learn. It's a powerful beacon for everyone that there's a place for them at Elon."
The Numen Lumen Pavilion will house offices for all religious leaders on campus. Because many of the current occupants of its offices will be moving to the Numen Lumen Pavilion, the Truitt Center will most likely be turned into a campus Hillel House for Jewish students, Fuller said.
"What we're trying to do as a campus is support the individual faiths and religions and world views and provide spaces where people can deepen those," Jackson said.
Construction on the Numen Lumen Pavilion is scheduled to begin in December, according to Gerald Whittington, senior vice president for business, finance and technology, and the building's estimated cost is in the upper $4 million range. Jackson speculates the construction should be completed within about a year. The building is about 15,000 square feet, while many of the other buildings in the Academic Village are less than 10,000. The building should be ready to open in January 2013.
"(The Numen Lumen Pavilion) is very unique and I think that in 10 years, many liberal arts colleges are going to look around and think, 'What are we going to do now? We should've done this,'" Fuller said. "And you know for lots of liberal arts colleges it's not a priority, but what's unique about Elon is that it is. The reason I came to Elon, the reason I wanted to come to Elon is because Elon has made this commitment, and that's what I want to do with the rest of my life"