With Faith in Mind
With Faith In Mind is intended for academically-minded, ecumenical Christians. Our goal is to engage listeners with a thoughtful and faith-informed perspective on important issues and big questions that our society faces. We do this by having real conversations with people who have great stories and expertise. In our first series, titled “Christian Education at the Crossroads," we’re interviewing top leaders and scholars in the Christian education space.
With Faith in Mind
Study Centers: Intersecting The Academy & The Church
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Karl Johnson, Executive Director of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers, sits down with Dan Hummel to explore the Christian Study Center Movement, his role in starting study centers, and leading the national consortium.
Learn about Karl Johnson & the CCSC
Read Karl's recent article: Remembering David McCullough, a ‘Tour Guide to the Past’
With Faith in Mind is produced at Upper House in Madison, Wisconsin and hosted by Director of University Engagement Dan Hummel and Executive Director John Terrill. Jesse Koopman is the Executive Producer. Upper House is an initiative of the Stephen & Laurel Brown Foundation.
Please reach out to us with comments or questions at podcast@slbrownfoundation.org. We'd love to hear from you.
Hello and welcome to With Faith in Mind. I'm Dan Hummel, today's host and the Director of University Engagement at Upper House. This episode is part of our series on Christian educations at the crossroads, and we're welcoming Dr. Carl Johnson to the show. Hi, Carl. Hi there, Dan. Good to talk to you today. Today we're exploring uh one corner of the Christian education universe that both Carl and I inhabit, and that is the Christian Study Center movement. And Carl is eminently qualified to talk about this, so I want to just introduce Carl real quickly before we jump into the conversation. Carl uh had a first career actually in outdoor education, uh, but uh is better known for his work with the Christian Study Center movement now. He got his BA, MS, and PhD at Cornell in Natural Resources and American History for the PhD. He founded a study center at Cornell in the year 2000, and it's called Chesterton House, and it's still very active and one of the prominent members of the Christian Study Center movement. And then Carl in 2021 became the executive director of the consortium of Christian Study Centers, which is the umbrella organization that many study centers around the country, more than uh 30, 35 now. How many are in the 37, actually, yeah. 37. Um, I'm sure that's a very fresh number. So there are a number of study centers in the consortium, and Carl has been directing that since 2021. So uh, Carl, I want to ask just a quick uh personal question before getting into the conversation. And that is, as I was looking up your bio um on the consortium website, I saw that you also own a tour agency with your wife called First Century Voyage. And just give us a sense of what does it mean to own a tour agency and also direct a consortium of Christian study centers.
SPEAKER_00Well, uh, this was something that came up um very shortly before the pandemic. Somehow it seemed like a good idea to get into the travel business. So uh my wife and I purchased this very small boutique company that runs mostly Christian heritage tours, biblical heritage tours, uh, for Christian nonprofit organizations to places like Greece and Turkey and Egypt. And uh, so this is what we were just starting to get into in 2019. And then and then um the pandemic had other ideas for us. Uh, it pretty much flattened the business for about two years. And um, if there was a silver lining in that, it's that uh it got me back back into uh campus ministry work. So in um 2020, I actually spent most of the year helping um get the Octet Collaborative, the Christian Study Center at MIT, launched. And uh by January 2021, I was I was in this seat as the director of the consortium. And my wife is stuck running the business. She's actually in Italy as we speak. Um, you know, uh in Italy, Sicily, Malta, all over the place. So we thought we would be doing that together. But uh uh I like my job uh running the consortium, so it's all good.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it sounds like there are worse ways to spend your time also than traveling around uh Italy, Greece, and Turkey, I think.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you'll have to ask her.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Um well, great. Um before jumping into just talking about Christian study centers and and what they are, I did want to ask um just a more biographical question about what sort of what made you interested in um starting a Christian study center at Cornell at your alma mater all the way back in 2000. So if you could just give us a sense of sort of um what it what was it, what was the need you saw, and why did you think something like Chesterton House was the right thing to address that need?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I'll start by saying that when I was a student, nothing was further from my mind than anything in the realm of campus ministry work. Uh, I didn't even aspire to academic work per se. Truth be told, what I really wanted to do was to be a professional soccer player, but those dreams were dashed during my college years. And uh I had some other thoughts of maybe being a headmaster of a school. Uh, but really what I was most into was outdoor adventure pursuits, outward bound style education, um, you know, high-altitude mountaineering, rock climbing, whitewater paddling, all that sort of thing. And that was my first career uh for many, many years. That's what I did. And I love that work. I love the fact that it's oriented more or less toward the whole person, not just to the mind, but to the body as well, developing skills, and oriented toward the empowerment of the students and the participants in those programs. And um, so that's what I did really well into my 30s. Uh, but over the course of my time running the program at Cornell, I also picked up uh a master's degree initially, and then later a PhD. And um uh I started to get a little bit sort of frustrated with um, well, two things. Frankly, one was the way in which the university seemed to really um bracket or ignore questions of meaning and purpose, essentially religious questions. Um so there's there's a kind of um rigid secularism uh at a place like Cornell University that I that I thought was it was just frustrating experientially. Um but the other part of it was I I also felt kind of frustrated with the church experience that I had, where I felt like the same sorts of questions also were not being opened up and explored. So there seemed to me a kind of white space. Like who's really talking about what matters most? What does it mean to be human? How should how should we live? Um, you know, what is the good life? Uh, you know, people study philosophy. Philosophy is purportedly the love of wisdom, but we don't even talk much about wisdom as such, right? Um so I pulled together a group of pastors and professors. Uh, this is, you know, in the course of my graduate studies, and I said, hey, uh, I think there's an opportunity here for us to do something new, uh, something that is sort of has one foot in the academy and is very academically responsible, plays by the rules of the game in every way, has the good of the university in view. Um, but on the other hand, you know, has one foot in the life of the church and has a respect for tradition and the intellectual resources of the tradition. Um, so that was the initial concept. I didn't know what it was going to look like in practice, but that that was kind of how the um the impulse, you know, was born.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that I mean that resonates a lot with um how we talk about ourselves here at Upper House. I think this is a good transition into thinking more broadly about study centers as just a type of uh organization or ministry, if you want to call it that. What um uh, and maybe you would say something similar in terms of what the what the mission of study centers are, they're filling that white space. But as you go around and you introduce study centers to uh different people who don't know anything about them, what what is unique about the Christian study center movement or Christian study centers as a form? What is what are their unique traits or what is the unique offering in a pretty crowded space uh where there's a lot happening in the university and in a maybe a more traditional campus ministry environment, uh where do Christian study centers stand out?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so to come back to this um landscape where the church and the academy seem to occupy somewhat separate spheres and don't have a lot of overlap, Christian study centers mix that up a little bit. And one of the ways that they do that is by bringing in speakers who are at once scholarly and yet free to speak in a Christian voice. So most study centers have some kind of a public lecture series, perhaps in addition to that, discussion groups or um, you know, symposia of various sorts where you don't actually have to bracket your religious tradition to walk in the door. Um so it's it's robust academically, but it's not anti-religious, so to speak. So public lectures, discussions, uh that's one of the distinctive features of most study centers. Now, most study centers in recent years have built out their programming um in other various ways. So, for example, uh fellows programs have become a hallmark of many centers. These are uh cohorts of students, could be small, could be dozens of students who are together for a year or two, go through a series of readings, great books in the Christian tradition, or something like that. Most of these are non-credit, so they're sort of like co-curricular. Occasionally they have some sort of a certificate uh attached to them. Um, some study centers have residential ministries, actual, you know, houses where students are living together in a kind of 24-7 community that has some kind of liturgical rhythm, either by the day or according to the liturgical calendar of the year. Um and yet, you know, I can describe study centers according to these sort of elements, but it's a little bit like trying to describe a chair, you know, you say, oh, it's got four legs or whatever, and then you have to ask a question, well, what about a beanbag chair? Is that a chair, right? And you realize uh that these elements, these are what a study center does. It's not what a study center is. And so to dig a little bit deeper, you have to kind of get more into the mission and the purpose of a study center. So I the most concise way I could I could describe a study center is that it's a hub of Christian community and learning. It's a place where people gather. Now, even that's a little bit complicated because not all study centers have their own physical space or place to gather. And yet I think every study center is a place in the sense of a community of people who are gathering, even if they're gathering in different places. Um, and they're having certain kinds of conversations around faith and work, faith and vocation, around the good life, uh, human personhood, this sort of thing.
SPEAKER_01Um, one of the things that uh struck me when we're we've talked to Charlie Cotherman uh in this series as well, uh, who does has written a history of the study center movement, was the importance of hospitality to uh at least the history of of where study centers come from. Can you talk a bit about hospitality and what uh yeah, what what comes to mind when you think of hospitality? We talk a lot about that here at Upper House. I think we mean it in a few different ways, but what what do you think about when you hear uh hospitality in study centers?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I think that um if if we were to go back to say like the 1990s or the early 2000s, um there was uh something along the lines of a kind of evangelical mind movement, right? So this harkens back to the manifestos by Mark Knoll and George Marsden that came out in the mid-90s. And there was a really strong emphasis on the integration of faith and learning or of thinking Christianly. So it's very oriented toward the life of the mind, both for better and for worse, I think. And then over the years, uh more and more centers started to emphasize hospitality in addition to the life of the mind. And uh, for the most part, I consider this to be kind of a good move because I think it takes into fuller account um the complexity of human personhood, right? That we have bodies, we're relational creatures, right? We're not just brains on sticks in the famous phrase. Um so this is a good innovation. At the same time, um, I think those of us who are involved in running study centers need to be cautious about the potential hazards of an emphasis on hospitality, that there is a way of emphasizing the social that is so purely responsive to so-called felt needs that you actually lose that original vision of the life of the mind. And it's really important, I think, for study centers to keep that original vision in view.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's interesting. I think one way um to maybe merge those or or talk about them in conversation too is that um there's a type of hospitality that is intellectual as well. And I've experienced that here at Upper House, which is um being uh uh hospitable to a variety of viewpoints, even though most people uh from the outside might assume a narrowness to what is acceptable uh at Upper House, because we're a Christian organization and and very obviously so, that there's a hospitality to um talk about things that maybe the university uh doesn't always want to talk about, at least a public university around religion and spiritual ideas. Um and that for the most part we're not checking uh we don't have any sort of um things you uh we we check at the door in terms of um ideas. Now uh you know, we want to be a place that's civil and has civic dialogue, but um, that's one way we've thought about hospitality is in a play in an era where there seems to be declining sort of third spaces or spaces where you can go and just have civil discourse on things, that study centers can offer that. I wonder if that is that an upper house specific way of framing things, or have you heard other study centers talk like that?
SPEAKER_00No, not at all. Uh that's absolutely an emphasis of more and more centers over time and and an emerging emphasis, I think. Um going back, I would go back maybe 15 years or so. I I was doing a an exit interview of sorts with a graduating senior at Cornell, and I said, you know, what has been the value of this experience to you? And he said something very interesting that um I didn't really anticipate because he what he said was he said, you teach us how to disagree. He said, um, you know, our friends, we don't we don't like to actually get into controversial topics because we're afraid that disagreement is going to fracture relationships. And so we don't, we don't go into the difficult topics. He said, whereas we come to these events and you sit there, you know, with a colleague that you're friends with, and and you really dig down into your disagreements, and yet it doesn't seem to have any adverse uh uh effect on your relationship or your friendship. We need that kind of modeling. And I hadn't really thought about that as part of what we were doing, but it was in fact part of what we were doing. And then you can take things to a whole nother level where you're it being intentional about inviting scholars who have uh you know very different kinds of views, whether they're on a panel with each other or you're just kind of inviting them into your space to hear from them, and you're literally extending a kind of warmth and hospitality to their ideas as such, just as you are to their persons, right? Um, and I think of examples of what this looks like, say, for example, at the Rivendell Institute at Yale or the Octet Collaborative at MIT, where they have actual initiatives in intellectual hospitality. And from a student experience, you know, there's been a little bit of a arguably a narrowing of the range of conversations that happens on campus, right? This is kind of related to the trend toward cantil culture, and you know, there's just one right way of thinking, and you have to be on the right side of history and all of that. And some students are now report that, ironically, perhaps, um, that uh Christian study centers and the confessional communities um that they represent are one of the last places where no question is off the table that they that they can come and and say most anything. They don't feel like they have to self-censor the way that they do on campus. And in that sense, um, study centers really stand in the in the tradition of liberal arts learning and and dialogue and conversation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I agree with you there. And I I think um if we can we've been talking a lot about how maybe the study centers contribute to the university culture or the the intellectual life on a campus. I wonder, too, because you talked about the the gray space or the white space that a study center fills between the church and the university. Um what do you think study centers do for the church? And in broadly speaking, how do study centers serve the church? Uh maybe not in the same way as they serve the university, but they all they do serve the church.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean it would be really interesting to actually do some sort of a study along these lines, you know, interviewing uh pastors in cities where there are study centers to see, you know, what they reported as the benefit. I think there's probably a few ways we might speculate as to the answer of this. Um one is uh, you know, the fact is pastors in general are just really busy. And oftentimes they're busy, even if they're really interested in the life of the mind and maybe have academic training, they're busy with things like counseling, uh, things like funerals, uh, you know, things that take them out of the life of the mind. Um and they appreciate study centers coming alongside them and providing some programming and services and resources that they themselves just don't have the time and resources to develop, even if they had the desire and the interest. Um, so there's that, which is just a at a very kind of practical level. I think that study centers um, by their nature, have a little bit more freedom to be ecumenical, right? To be bridge builders across sub-traditions, whether it's Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Anabaptist, what whatsoever. Um and they also tend to have a bit of a focus on recovering historic resources within the tradition, you know, going back over the 2,000-year history of Christendom and um sort of mining those intellectual resources and and bringing them um back up into the present.
SPEAKER_01Um out of necessity in some ways, too, right? Or out of out of a certain motive to reach the most broad Christian community as possible, it's it's better to um maybe mine some of those historic resources than lean on a particular uh subtradition that's more contemporary where you're gonna a lot of you know Christians aren't gonna be familiar with that author or that way of talking about the faith. But if you go back to you know Augustine or or another church father, um there's a sort of shared uh all all the branches sort of go back to that at some point, if you go back far enough. And so there's a shared language in a way that it seems like in a lot of the landscapes on major universities, the even the even the Christian community, let alone the religious community, is very fractured along you know denominational and even smaller uh organizational lines.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's right. Um so I think we want to be um drawing on the full breadth of resources that are out there with respect to both time and place. And I would say that we have generally done better on the former than the latter, because there's a lot of good and interesting Christian scholarship that's happening around the world, right? And outside of North America. Um and yet in some ways that bridge, I think, uh has not been crossed nearly as well as going back in time. So it'll be interesting to see what the future is there. To date, you know, we say that the Christian Study Center movement is to facilitate these centers at colleges and universities around the world, but all 37 centers that are members of the consortium are in North America. And while I have conversations with folks uh elsewhere all the time, it's been very it's been much harder for them to get off the ground institutionally. And so we may need to um turn some sort of strategic attention and resources to see how we can turn it into more of a global movement.
SPEAKER_01In those conversations and in your reflection, is there any particular reasons why um, in the negative, why study centers are harder to found in other parts of the world, or conversely, why they're so uh popular in the US or North America?
SPEAKER_00Well, I do think that um in the United States, there is a little bit of a contagion effect, right? You can look around, you see the other centers, you see how they do it, you talk to them, you copy it. Um, uh a big factor has to do with the role of philanthropy. The United States has a very robust culture of philanthropy, and um, you know, there's the tax advantages for philanthropic giving. When I talk to these folks trying to get centers started in other countries, they report oftentimes just not really having that kind of a culture. Um, there may also be reasons along these lines that are more complicated. So we talk about study centers as um sort of attached to or inhabiting secular universities. Um, and our very concept of the secular is itself uh a somewhat cultural concept, right? So when I talk to folks, say, down uh in uh um Rio de Janeiro or or whatever, you know, the university there, it's like simultaneously public and Catholic, and yet experienced as secular. And that's that's just it's like a different kind of a an experience in an institution than we have here, right? So how do you create A Christian study center at an institution like that. There's not really a model for them to follow. That's as easy and obvious.
SPEAKER_01It's very interesting. And it it does uh a lot of the even the way we frame the need and the history, thinking back to uh Charlie Collerman's book, is very uh Anglo-American, I guess, would be the right container for it. Uh so that that makes sense. Um I wanted to talk a bit about the importance of intellectual formation as part of what study centers do, but also think about this in a little broader sense. And I'll just give a really short version of my own story as I entered a study center a few years ago uh here at Upper House, which was I came in very much uh interested in doing intellectual formation work. That is exploring ideas and really exposing students and faculty to some of the great thinkers and some of the great texts and grappling with them and thinking about how those ideas intersect with ideas in the university today. And here a few years later, I'm you know struck by the importance of that work, and and there's very few other places that are trying to do that type of work from a Christian perspective, so it's very important. But how that is very much uh not something you should do in isolation, and that other types of spiritual formation should be happening at the same time. And I wondered if you just had any reflections on how do you think about intellectual formation in the relationship to a broader, well-formed Christian life. And uh maybe there's a tendency on one side to dismiss the life of the mind as not really relevant to the faith. And another side, and maybe this can be found in some academic circles, uh, that really the ideas are what matter. And if you get those right, then everything else will somehow naturally follow. And I think a lot of the study centers are trying to find somewhere in the middle where there's a community uh aspect and a and an ideas aspect and maybe a personal aspect as well. But um, we'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I think that um at least for some of us, and perhaps this was especially the case for those of us who were, you know, coming of age, at least academically, intellectually, in in the 1990s, when there was this um newfound emphasis on the intellectual riches of the Christian tradition, not just in the books that I mentioned previously, but you've got resources like, say, for example, the periodical Books and Culture, and there's the Mars Hill Audio Journal, and um there's um uh the the Richard John Newhouse journal, First Things. First Things, yeah. There was the Veritas Forum that got started in the mid-90s, right? So there's a lot of activity going on, so much so that even the Atlantic Monthly did a cover article entitled The Opening of the Evangelical Mind or The Opening of the Christian Mind, something like that, right around 2000. So it was kind of an exciting time, and there was a lot of energy around the life of the mind among Christians. Um, but then you you you also come to the point where you realize that the emphasis on the life of the mind, even for a Christian, can be kind of Gnostic, right? If it's if it's on its own and um not connected to the rest of our person and even more importantly, to other persons, right? So there's this communal dimension to the Christian life that's really irreducible. Um, and the life of the mind is, of course, never disconnected from the life of the body and the soul spirit. Uh so we have to always keep these things in a kind of more holistic frame of reference. And I think that this is actually one of the things that Christians in general, Christian study centers in particular, actually have to offer to university communities, right? Because universities actually do intellectual formation arguably pretty well in terms of like training for knowledge, uh developing intelligences of various sorts, uh, developing, you know, skills in in all kinds of fields. I mean, we're probably better at this than ever before in history, arguably. Um, but in fairly narrow kinds of ways, right? So things like developing character, uh, training citizens. These things are increasingly bracketed and set aside. Universities don't really know what to do with these because they seem to require a vision of the good life that is kind of irreducibly religious. And uh training in these areas entails something along the lines of discipleship, and universities are very uncomfortable with that notion. Stanley Fish has written on this, you know, basically said we should just just lose all concept of training and character and citizenship and just train people for skills for the workplace. Um, and I think a lot of students find that ultimately not altogether satisfying. And so there's an openness to these so-called big questions. And when we hold events on them, sometimes we find five, six, seven hundred, eight hundred thousand people show up because they're really hungry for these kinds of conversations.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I wonder too, um, you know, one of the uh critiques, I guess, of modern university life is uh the tendency towards specialization and um emphasizing, you know, narrowing and narrowing um maybe fields of knowledge to get at, and maybe part of that is the the ever-increasing difficulty, at least in some fields, of getting new knowledge. And you have to further and further specialize, get more and more of the uh the knowledge behind you before you can make new discoveries. Do you see Christian study centers as some type of uh counter-offering to specialization? Like is it a site where people should be integrating versus uh uh specializing, I guess? Um, is that a way to frame uh what's going on uh or or does that miss the mark? I'm not sure. I'm just thinking out loud right now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so there's no question that there is, in fact, uh a relationship between specialization and and secularization. I we don't have time to get into the complexities of what all is meant by this term secularization. But but one aspect of it is simply specialization. Um and I think specialization is neither good nor bad. There's lots of good aspects of specialization. I mean, we all benefit from it every time we go to see a specialist in the medical field, just to take one example, right? Um but there's also the ideal of knowing everything about something and something about everything, right? So the latter part of that, the something about everything, is the generalist approach uh that you know harkens back to the ideals of great books curricula, um, liberal arts learning. And I think that um as certain majors in particular, my son is studying engineering at Cornell, uh, require almost every credit hour uh, you know, to be in your particular major. There's just very little breathing room left in the coursework for courses in history or literature or what have you. Um and so this the fellows programs uh and other programming of study centers seem to be stepping into this space and providing something like the liberal arts dimension, the generalist dimension of the educational experience for students. And this might actually be uh a good kind of, I don't know, truce, if you will, between universities and study centers, where um, you know, the specialized training uh happens in the curricular part of the student experience. And, you know, questions about the good life are in fact bracketed and set aside. And then you have confessional communities, need not be limited to Christians, right? Um, where people can gather with their affinity group and delve into the texts of their various traditions to consider the ends of education and the ways in which we could or should be shaped into persons.
SPEAKER_01Reminds me of uh a your reference to a truce uh reminds me of an a much earlier episode in that, which would be the sort of early 20th century, where a lot of public universities like UW Madison um invited churches, denominations, mostly Protestant denominations, to plant uh or or sort of buy land around the university and create university churches as a way to basically outsource moral formation uh as that was getting out of the curriculum. Uh a place like UW was founded where um students had to take more classes on morals, classes on uh apologetics, and those were getting moved out of the curriculum. But of course, there was still an interest by students and by parents for those to happen at the university. And so instead of trying to cram that into the ever-in-specializing curriculum that was turning into major, majors and different schools, uh, the university just said, why don't the Presbyterians and Baptists and and Catholics just put churches right next to campus so the students can go do that over there, and then they can do the specialized stuff uh on campus. So it seems like we're in that same story, maybe in a different, obviously different stage with slightly different um uh boundaries on that. Um but it's a it seems like a similar division of labor there in some ways.
SPEAKER_00So your your your show is entitled uh what is it, education at the crossroads?
SPEAKER_01Christian education at the crossroads.
SPEAKER_00Christian education at the crossroads. I don't know exactly what the crossroads is that you have in mind, but but but uh in a sense, we're always at the crossroads, right? Because our time and place always has a unique dimension to it. And I think it's not always easy to see our time and cultural moment clearly in the present. It's easier to see things in retrospect. But just a kind of a brief historical overview. I think if you were to go back half a century or early 20th century, you know, there's this sense that um if if religion and morality are not going to be taught in the classroom as they previously had been, they could be bracketed off and they could kind of have their separate spheres, right? This is the truth I think you're you're alluding to. And then you have this um for a while, anyway, in some places, uh an emergence of pragmatism as a philosophy, kind of Richard Rorty style, maybe Stanley Fish, um, that basically says, you know, that other stuff is just not that important. I mean, really, we can just focus on the more means-oriented technical training, right? And Christians were trying to hold on to this notion that truth still matters, truth is important, and we're oftentimes roundly ridiculed for talking about this silly thing called truth. Well, it feels to me like in the last few years, bringing up to our cultural moment, that we've seen some of the ill effects of trying to bracket notions of truth, right, in the political sphere. Um, and all of a sudden everybody seems, well, a lot, maybe not everybody, but a lot of people are pretty unhappy with this. And so there's like a kind of a new openness to the fact that, okay, maybe, maybe truth does matter. Maybe, maybe pragmatism isn't the holy grail of education. And I think there's like a little bit of a, at least a little bit of a reconsideration that might be going on right now about how do we how do we recover some semblance of character or tell loss in the educational project. So I don't know where things are headed, but I'd like to think study centers are well positioned to be conversation partners in those in those conversations.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and uh just one last point on that, and then we we can uh move to the next question. But um also that uh study centers are trying to do this um uh in in concert with the university or in in alignment to as much as authentically both sides can be in alignment, there's going to be differences. But in a way that um, you know, when we have students in our fellows program, we really want them to succeed as engineering majors or biology majors or the rare history major, but they they're there sometimes. Um we want them to succeed in their studies, uh, but also be asking these bigger questions. And I think that's part of the key uh for the success of study centers is that they tend to be wanting the university to succeed in its own stated mission in a lot of ways, um, as opposed to another orientation would be trying to undermine the university or save students from the university or something like that. It's much more trying to come alongside them. Um, and I think that'll probably be a secret to or an ingredient to the success.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So these research universities we sometimes call modern research universities, and they raise all the issues of modernism more generally and kind of postures toward modernism. And Christians have have adopted a variety of often unhelpful postures toward modernism, sometimes very kind of reactionary, sometimes triumphalistic, sometimes withdrawing from institutions of high culture, right? And so I think that this is one of the defining aspects of Christian study centers is um a posture of thoughtful Christian presence, entering into the community with the good of the other in mind, being advocates of the mission of the discovery and dissemination of research and knowledge, um, and an interest and a willingness to, in essence, share power, to not um feel like we're here to take over or to say we won't play your game, you know, if we can't have it by our rules, but to just inhabit the place, you know, as as faithful Christians.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So, Carl, as the executive director of the consortium, uh, you probably run into all types of people, many of them positive on the study center movement, but I'm sure some have questions or critiques. What are the most common critiques or sort of points of skepticism people have about study centers and even the study center movement?
SPEAKER_00Well, for sure, I don't know of anybody who has really put a kind of critique in writing anywhere. I I don't know that the movement is actually prominent enough to have to have provoked such a thing. Um It'll be an honor when someone critiques. Yeah, I suppose uh but you know, having and and the and the critique, I think, to the extent that it exists, exists at the local study center level, not at the national movement or consortium level. But having run a study center for 20 years, I certainly ran into people, you know, who um had criticisms of various sorts. I'll mention two. Um the first would just be kind of along the lines of like, I don't know how else to say it, but you're like, you guys are crazy, what are you doing? You know, like that's a kind of new atheist critique, right? Like this doesn't even belong on campus, you know. Um and and and we did run into that occasionally. I I I I just don't, you know, I find it so utterly unpersuasive. I don't think it's actually all that interesting. It doesn't concern me all that much. But some some of these criticisms I think came like the new atheism um was really like in the wake of 9-11, and a lot of it was a reaction to, you know, the violence that was perceived to be emanating out of radical Islam, and um, you know, religion just kind of got clumped into this one big category. So that that kind of a critique is always there. It was there before 9-11, it's going to be around, you know, for a while, but it it had its moment, and its moment coincided with when I was starting uh the center at Cornell. So I heard a lot about that. The other critique that I think is is more concerning, more trenchant, something that we really need to reckon with, is uh is the lack of diversity in the movement, in particular the lack of racial diversity. Um, you know, arguably a lack of diversity with respect to sex among the leaders of the uh centers as well. Um there are aspects of this that are complicated, right? There are reasons why men in general, white men in particular, perhaps feel better positioned to just quit a job and start something entrepreneurial, which is generally what's required to get a study center started. Um, and even with respect to fundraising, there's some evidence that you know men have an easier time fundraising, and in particular uh in the church community than than women do. Um this is not something that has a technical solution that can be implemented in with a three-year plan, right? This is a this is a long game, but I do think that we have seen over the last generation or two uh a huge diversification, racially and otherwise, of the students involved in campus ministries. So we saw that uh I'm going to say maybe starting in the 80s, but more so in the 90s. So in the 80s, a lot of campus ministries were probably 90% white. And by the end of the 90s, they were, in some cases, 90% non-white. I mean, that was a huge difference. And there's all kinds of reasons for that, going back to the Immigration Act of 1964 and what so forth and so forth. Um, and then we saw a delayed effect at the level of faculty. I was involved in convening a Christian faculty group um in in the 90s. That was, you know, 80 plus percent white men. And uh today that same group is uh 80 plus percent non-white male. Um I suspect that demographics alone will result in the diversification of the staff of uh of the study center movement. Um there may be ways in which we can take strategic steps related to that, but that is that's a legit criticism. Um and uh you know, the lack of voices from other cultures, you know, the international Christians, um, what is there is related to that, which I referred to earlier.
SPEAKER_01Let me add one more critique I've heard and just get your response to it, which is that some and maybe this isn't uh study centers as a form, but maybe a bad version of them, um, is a study center can become a bubble in a in a pluralistic university where Christians can hang out and uh sort of be with each other um and sort of uh not fully integrate into the broader community. And having space, uh having usually having property actually assists that. It allows for an actual um physical, you know, geographic uh isolation from the rest of the university. And so many of the students who engage at a study center basically are more at home at the study center, and then they sort of go out into the university when they have to go to class or something else. And that this really isn't how uh Christian students should learn to sort of live in the world, um, nor maybe from maybe that's a critique within the church, and from outside, it it feels like there's sort of a subculture that's developing that isn't fully integrated. I don't know if you've come across that. I've I've come across that sort of skepticism, maybe, of what a study center is actually doing um on a campus. I wonder, uh yeah, I wonder what you think about that.
SPEAKER_00Oh, uh do we have another hour? Um there there's so much that could be said here. Uh I'll start with an anecdote. Many years ago, um, it might have even been before we started Chesterton House, I can't recall, I was involved in hosting the psychologist Paul Witz uh from NYU. And uh he had this sort of analogy where he said, you know, if if there's a group of people having a conversation about something, and I'm finding it challenging to sort of get into the circle of conversation and to find my voice and have an influence in the conversation, one of the alternatives is to start a new conversation circle and to start a better conversation, and then to start inviting people into that circle. And in a sense, I think that's part of what study centers do, right? We're not just trying to enter into the university community, although we do want to do that, but we're also starting something altogether new. We're starting some new conversations, and those conversations are not closed. We have the freedom to invite others into those conversations, and hopefully those conversations will spill over into the conversations that these people are having elsewhere as well. So there is a little bit of this, you know, uh, we step back and separate from the larger institution for a time, but we do so with a view of stepping back into that larger community, uh, with a view toward reinvigorating, you know, the culture and the conversation of that larger community. And so sometimes it might look like a kind of isolating maneuver, and it has potential to become that, right? If it's just a matter of sort of seeking comfort with like-minded people and never stepping back into. But frankly, I don't know very many students who never step back into other conversations on campus, right? So it doesn't seem an altogether fair criticism to me, but um. And there probably is at least some potential for these communities to err on the side of providing maybe a little bit too much comfort to students. And, you know, if if if the folks that they're gathering with at the study center become their exclusive social circle, I suppose it could have that function.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that makes sense. And I like the thinking of a dialectic where there's a there's sort of different moves you make depending on, and it sort of goes through um its own sequence of pulling in and then uh re-engaging.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Yeah. I'll also just mention that because uh at Cornell we developed a residential community, the question often came up um, well, I'm not sure if I want to live in this intentional Christian community because my real desire is to be, quote, salt and light, and therefore I want to live in the dorm or in the fraternity or in the sorority. And um, you know, my observation is that usually the students who desired to be change agents in the dorm were much more often changed than changing. Uh, and that, you know, those who sought a deep spiritual formation in residential community were better positioned to be change agents on campus.
SPEAKER_01Very interesting. Yeah. Well, um, I think we're gonna transition here to talk a little more about the hit the institutional history of study centers. Um, but having that orientation in mind is helpful. Carl, I wonder if you could just give us the story of how the Christian study centers that were around. Um I say that because uh the consortium was founded in 2009, and that is many years before even Upper House was founded. But in 2009, in that early uh 21st century, what led to the creation of a consortium that brought together a number of study centers which had largely been focused uh solely on their home institutions, their local context. And this consortium sort of signifies a broader uh network uh that's forming. Give us the story of how that happened.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so um I understand that you know, the small number of centered directors that existed back in the 1990s occasionally got together to speak to each other, but that's kind of like prehistory. That's before I was involved. I started Chesterton House in 2000. And um, for the first several years, there were no get-togethers. Um, and in 2007, I invited the other directors I was aware of. And it's it's hard to recover what a scattered landshape it was, because um I didn't know who all these people were, and it wasn't even clear exactly which ministries counted as study centers, right? There wasn't a clear demarcation, but I invited about a dozen or so folks up to Ithaca for a long weekend. And uh about a dozen or so folks came, um, you know, some of whom, like Dave Mahan from Rivendell, are still actively involved. Uh, Richard Horner was there, uh, recently retired from the University of Florida Center. Uh Bob Osborne, uh formerly of the University of Minnesota Center, now called Anselm House. And um, we sat around for about three days uh talking. Uh, we shared best practices. We also shared what I like to call worst practices, you know, the sort of war stories of things that had not gone well. We also invited uh philosopher Nick Walterstorff to join us, and he was with us during that time as well and just sat in uh on the meetings and um gave us a kind of charge of sorts, talked about what he thought were the possibilities of the future of the movement. Uh, and this was in early April 2007, and we had this huge snowstorm, and everybody got snowed in, and everybody was stuck here for an extra 24, 48 hours. And uh it was great because the conversation just continued on and on and on. Um, so so that was a seminal moment um for me, and I think for others. And then actually we formed the consortium in 2008, technically. That was when we kind of did the bylaws and the incorporation. And then 2009 was significant because that was when Drew Trotter uh became our first director. Um and it was a couple of years after that that we started holding the annual meeting. I think the first one was in San Francisco. We had maybe like 20 people there. And um, you know, if you look at the photo, you can see some people there. I believe uh Edward Dixon was there, and he had not yet started the center at Duke, but within a few years you had a center at Duke. And, you know, at each annual meeting, more and more people show up, and some of these people are are starting centers, and you know, now we're up to to 37 of them.
SPEAKER_01You mentioned the 37. Well, thanks for that story. Um, I think that's good to uh to get a sense of how uh you know a small movement has turned into a medium-sized movement, and um and it really starts with these really close relationships between a few people uh that turned into an organization uh that now people, uh even me coming in in 2019, assume there had been a consortium for a very, very long time because uh there seems to be so much connectivity between the study centers. And to learn that that was a very recent development is always uh humbling. I wonder if you could just talk about uh as you get, you're probably the best person uh with a vantage point to see all these different centers, how some of them are succeeding, some of them are facing challenges. If you could generalize, just what are a few uh of the successes that uh you're seeing across the board at study centers? And then uh we'll get to challenges after that. But what as as you can sort of summarize all the conversations you have, all the observations you're making, what what stands out to you as the success points for study centers?
SPEAKER_00I'll do my best with this question. Um, but I'll also confess to um uh just having a a little bit of skepticism about talking about success in this whole realm of what we're doing. Um I I used to write newsletters, you know, in the early years and say, you know, uh, we did this event and it was successful. And then I got to ask, I got to wondering, like, how do I know that? You know, what is what is the actual measure or the metric? Uh and I realized we don't really have one, right? Like, we I mean, what is the yardstick that measures spiritual formation, you know, in the long term? Right. So anyway, I just it's that said, I do think that um, you know, we see centers growing not only in number, but also in size. So they are addressing uh and they don't have um a captive audience, right, the way uh classes for credit tend to have. So students who attend these events are attending voluntarily, and um these events are often well attended, right? Lectures drawing hundreds or fellows programs drawing dozens, and in the latter case, students putting in a lot of time, right? Uh so at some level, this seems to be a meaningful measure of success. I think we can also see a kind of growing um sophistication, if you will, in the level of programming, right? Uh kind of a more robust thoughtfulness around issues of vocation and formation, kind of layered on top of that original emphasis of developing the Christian mind. Um, so I think that's uh all very promising as well. Um, when it comes to the relationship that Christian study centers have with their host institutions, the universities that they aspire to serve, um, there are a lot of instances where that is a very good, healthy relationship, and study centers have been invited to be conversation partners in very important sorts of ways. You know, there's a great article that Nathan Barzi of the Octet Collaborative wrote about um his experience being invited by a geneticist at Harvard to talk about the implications of the doctrine of the image of God for uh genetics research. And uh there's a lot of other examples uh along those lines. At the same time, these relationships with host institutions are sometimes challenging. Um, there has been a little bit of a movement in recent years for universities to um become more skittish about having religious communities affiliated with them and have been disaffiliating various Christian ministries. Um, I'm not aware of any Christian study centers that have been disaffiliated, um, but uh some of those relationships have some tension to them. And it's entirely possible that uh, you know, some study centers may need to learn in the future how to get along in a sort of purely independent way without a formal relationship to that host institution. So um that's you know, uh a challenge that exists in in the present and for the foreseeable future.
SPEAKER_01Do you, on the on the success front, um, or or maybe a different way to phrase this, just what gives you encouragement as you um you know learn more about how different study centers are are functioning and growing? I wonder about something I observed, uh, Carl, you and I were helped um organize the consortium meeting last year. And uh one of the things I noted was just how many affiliate organizations are interested in study centers and how many are different types of on a maybe on a piece of paper, I'd segment these out into different sort of subcultures within campus ministry or within church world. Um, but there seems to be a lot of interconnection between the faith and work movement, between different arts, uh Christian arts organizations. Um, and there seems to be a lot of at least they, these outside organizations seem to see promise in the study center movement, or at least some type of uh potential collaboration. Can you talk about how the study center movement and the consortium fits into sort of a broader ecosystem of partners and organizations that are trying to do similar work uh on campuses?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, let me start by saying that uh related to this, another success, if you will, of the movement in recent years is how quickly some of the new centers are coming out of the starting gates. Okay. So if you look at, you know, two of the largest centers would be the centers at University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and the University of Minnesota. Um, but they've been around for 40, 50 years, right? They have a very long history, generations of alumni. At the same time, if you look at um, let's say Upper House uh or the center at the University of North Carolina, these are much newer institutions, and yet they got to a kind of critical mass with really nice facility and multiple staff much more quickly. Even on a slightly smaller scale, if you look at the centers like, say, the Wheelock Society at Dartmouth, the Octet Collaborative, or even the Emerging Center at the University of Michigan, which is still just a steering committee, you know, less than 12 months in, all of these are getting started and developing a kind of critical mass much, much more quickly than was the case with hardly any of the centers that some of us were trying to start 20 years ago. There's lots of reasons for that, but I will say this is very encouraging to me. I think it bodes well for the future. And I think it's one of the reasons why a lot of these other organizations that are not study centers that you're referring to are really interested in the movement and um, you know, trying to partner in various ways. So uh I think most any Christian ministry that has some kind of a curriculum, product, service that they're hoping will impact the next generation, they need a means of connecting it to the next generation, right? So how do you do that? Um, study centers seem to be a kind of effective point of connection, right? So, you know, just take as an example, maybe say, like, you know, the Wind Rider Institute is generating all these wonderful films, right? They're really well designed for discussion groups with students. Um, how do they get them in front of students? Well, uh in the Christian college world, you can, you know, sort of go through uh CCCU, right, uh, to which Christian colleges belong as members and kind of roll it out to campuses. Um, but if you want to reach the students at the secular universities, how do you do that? Uh, well, the consortium and the Christian study center movement would be one pretty logical way. So the Windwriter Institute, just to take one example, uh, partners uh with the consortium and um, you know, makes their films available to the center staff and indirectly, you know, to students and lots of other organizations are doing something similar.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it seems it really enriches the even the the formation opportunities, the teaching opportunities uh at the study centers when there's so much more overlapping uh sort of networking going on. I want to just turn briefly to the challenges that study centers are facing. Carl, you mentioned relationships uh sometimes with the home institution can be strained. Any other challenges that you ex you sort of observe that are more than just one-offs, but but a pattern in the movement?
SPEAKER_00Um well, uh you know, resources are always a challenge. I mean, if you sort of talk to almost any startup director, uh they will lament that, you know, uh they just have so many more ideas than they're able to implement um for lack of resources. The generation of resources uh just takes a it's a very time-intensive takes takes a lot of time, takes a lot of energy. And most study center directors did not get into this work because they wanted to focus on fundraising. Um, so that's that's just a perennial um kind of a challenge. Somewhat related to that, I think um the starting of a study center requires a fairly diverse skill set. You have to be relatively academic. Uh, most study center directors have a PhD, not quite all, um, but you need to be, you know, pretty comfortable and conversant with the academic world. Um you kind of need to have a pastoral side or dimension to things. Uh, some study center directors have backgrounds as pastors, not all. Um, but uh, you know, we do operate in the sort of extracurricular sphere of students' lives, and they come um with the full messiness of their issues, whether those are, you know, addiction issues, eating disorders, conflict, financial problems, family problems, you know. Um so uh staff of study centers really need to be prepared um to work with students and to care for them. This honestly is one of the ways in which universities really value campus ministry staff because universities oftentimes feel rather overwhelmed and not fully equipped to uh address all of these issues for the entire student body. Um and then on top of this, uh a study center director has to be entrepreneurial, has to generate uh resources. So, how many people, you know, are there that can do the academic, the pastoral, and the entrepreneurial work? Um it's just hard. Uh so the startup, the barriers to entry are significant. And then you add on top of that the cost of real estate in a college town, you know, um, you know, Cambridge might be the worst uh place, you know, San Francisco, tough, tough neighborhood, but but almost any place, it's just expensive to acquire property and to develop it. Um so the barriers to entry are are pretty significant.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And then and then to take care of the property. So that's a maybe a fourth hat is that you're the landlord often as well.
SPEAKER_00I remember at the time I was on vacation, I got a phone call, and property manager says there's a skunk in the in the window well, you know, like what do I do? And uh there's just there's so much stuff like that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um I think that that is definitely a challenge. I have appreciated in a in a much different context at Upper House here, where we do have a pretty large staff, but being able to frankly come out of an academic culture and learn a lot of different skills that uh you're not encouraged to learn about uh as uh as an academic, um, but uh skills around entrepreneurs, you know, drawing up budgets, um, thinking about managing people, other things, um you do get a lot of exposure to that stuff in the study center context. Um Carl, I want to just end with a question about the future. And um, you know, as we look at Christian education as a whole, in maybe the next decade, we can limit it to that. What what hopes do you have for Christian education? And then what what hope do you have for the study center within that uh within that vision?
SPEAKER_00Sure. So uh the way you framed the question is interesting. You said, well, what are the hopes for Christian education? You didn't say what are the hopes for the Christian study center's Christian study center movement. So I'm kind of glad you framed it broadly. Um the reason being sometimes people talk about Christian higher education as if that refers exclusively to Christian colleges and universities, right? But I don't want to make the equal and opposite error of talking about this as if Christian study centers are the entirety of Christian education. Um so my I think my first hope, as strange as this may sound, is that I really want Christian colleges and universities to flourish. Um I think they're a very important part of the landscape, um, intellectually and otherwise. You know, the Christian scholars and the Christian scholarship that's taking place at these institutions is really important to the educational landscape. And it I say this partly because I know the headwinds for these institutions are significant. Um, you know, enrollment and finances and what have you are very tough. And I think that um, you know, we should all do whatever it is that we can to try to preserve this important variety in the educational landscape. Um and then at the same time, I guess uh, you know, in the past, as a parent of college-bound students, you look out at the landscape and you see secular universities on the one side and you see Christian colleges on the other side. There's different different advantages and disadvantages to each of these choices, but it does tend to be a little bit of a stark choice between the two without a lot of middle ground. And I would love to see a future where that choice is not so stark, right? Where the opportunity to send a child to a so-called secular or preferably a pluralistic institution, whether it's a a state institution or a private institution, um wouldn't be secular in the militant sense of secular, right? But but would be pluralistic in the best sense of pluralistic, uh an institution that includes multiple robust confessional communities within it, including Christian communities, right? Um that would be my hope is that uh Christian parents and college bound students would not feel like um the choice is stark and that opting for a pluralistic institution comes at some huge expense of their educational experience.
SPEAKER_01Well, we agree with that here at Upper House. Uh thank you, Carl, for uh your time today and for um your work with the consortium. Thanks for your time.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. It's been great to visit with you.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for joining us. If you've enjoyed today's podcast, be sure to subscribe and give us a rating on your favorite podcast app. Also, be sure to check out our upcoming events on upperhouse.org and our other podcast, Upwards, where we dig deeper into the topics our in-house guests are passionate about. With Faith in Mind is supported by the Stephen and Laurel Brown Foundation. It is produced at Upper House in Madison, Wisconsin, hosted by Dan Hummel and John Terrell. Our executive producer and editor is Jesse Koopman. Please follow us on social media with the handle at Upper House UW.