Arts & Culture

Will Willimon has served at Duke University in a variety of roles for decades, but he always left to continue his calling as a Methodist minister.

He knew from an early age that he had a special connection to God.

"I think I always had an extraordinary sense of the divine," he said.

Though, he said that his fundamentalist upbringing in rural South Carolina scared him off from faith for a while.  

"I sort of decided that Christianity was for people who weren't very good at thinking things through," he said.

When he went off to Wofford College, he was exposed to a religous studies professor who helped him see a different view of Christianity.  

State archeologists say they have the ambitious goal of recovering eight cannons from Blackbeard's ship.  The Queen Anne's Revenge sunk near Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, in June of 1718, and the state Department of Cultural Resources has been leading efforts to recover artifacts from the ship since 1997. Divers use good weather during the summer and fall months to bring artifacts to the surface.  Last week, bad weather prevented divers from starting their yearly digs, but Fay Mitchell of the Department of Cultural Resources says they hope to surface up to three sunken cannons this week.

Our State magazine has been telling the stories of North Carolina since 1933. It’s celebrating its 80th anniversary this year with a party at the Museum of History in Raleigh tomorrow.

Mention the name Sheila Kay Adams to any traditional old time musician and you’re likely to elicit a reverent response.  In the world of American ballad singers, Adams remains one of the pillars of tradition, drawing on her Madison County roots to perform and teach the old style of singing and banjo playing passed down in her family for generations.  This week, her lifetime of nurturing and sharing traditional music earned her a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.