00;00;05;01 - 00;00;19;07

Speaker 1

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 Education at the Crossroads, and we're welcoming Dr. Karl Johnson to the show. Hi, Karl.

00;00;19;09 - 00;00;20;00

Speaker 2

Hi there, Dan.

00;00;21;09 - 00;00;46;08

Speaker 1

Good to talk to you today. Today, we're exploring one corner of the Christian education universe that both Karl nine habit, and that is the Christian Study Center movement. And Karl is eminently qualified to talk about this. So I want to just introduce arl Will quickly before we jump into the conversation. Karl had a first career actually in outdoor education, but is better known for his work with the Christian Study Center movement.K

00;00;46;09 - 00;01;17;15

Speaker 1

Now he got his BAMS and PhD at Cornell in Natural Resources and American History for the Ph.D. 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 Karl, in 2021, became the executive director of the consortium of Christian Study Centers, which is the umbrella organization that many studies centers around the country, more than 30, 35.K

00;01;17;15 - 00;01;19;18

Speaker 1

Now, how many are in the 37?

00;01;19;18 - 00;01;20;05

Speaker 2

Actually.

00;01;20;16 - 00;01;56;09

Speaker 1

37. I'm sure that's a very fresh number. So there are a number of study centers in the consortium. And Karl has been directing that since 2021. So, Karl, I want to ask just a quick personal question before getting into the conversation. And that is, as I was looking up your bio 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 of what does it mean to own a tour agency and also direct a consortium of designers centers?

00;01;56;25 - 00;02;25;08

Speaker 2

Well, this was something that came up very shortly before the pandemic. Somehow it seemed like a good idea to get into the travel business. So my wife and I purchased this very small boutique company that runs mostly Christian heritage tours, biblical heritage tours for Christian nonprofit organizations to places like Greece and Turkey and Egypt. Hmm. And so this is what we were just starting to get into in 2019.

00;02;25;08 - 00;02;55;11

Speaker 2

And then and then the pandemic had other ideas for us. It pretty much flattened the business for about two years. And if there was a silver lining in that, it's that a copy by back into campus ministry work. So in 2020, I actually spent most of the year helping get the Architect collaborative. The Christian Studies Center at MIT launched and by January 2021, I was I was in this seat as the director of the consortium, and my wife is stuck running the business.

00;02;55;11 - 00;03;10;21

Speaker 2

She's actually in Italy as we speak, you know, in in Italy, Sicily, Malta, all over the place. So we thought we would be doing that together. But I like my job running the consortium. So it's all good.

00;03;11;17 - 00;03;16;20

Speaker 1

Yeah. It sounds like there are worse ways to spend your time also than traveling around Italy, Greece and Turkey.

00;03;16;29 - 00;03;20;04

Speaker 2

I think. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah.

00;03;20;05 - 00;03;50;20

Speaker 1

Yeah. Well, great. Before jumping in to just talking about Christian study centers and what they are. I did want to ask just a more biographical question about what sort of what made you interested in 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 what what was it was the need you saw and why did you think something like Chesterton House was the right thing to address that need?

00;03;51;27 - 00;04;21;19

Speaker 2

Yeah. 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. 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 were dashed during my college years, and I had some other thoughts of maybe being a headmaster of a school.

00;04;22;18 - 00;04;53;28

Speaker 2

But really what I was most into was outdoor adventure pursuits, Outward bound style education, you know, high altitude mountaineering, rock climbing, whitewater paddling, all that sort of thing. And that was my first career. 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.

00;04;54;15 - 00;05;30;11

Speaker 2

And so that's what I did really well into my thirties. But over the course of my time running the program at Cornell, I also picked up a master's degree initially and then later a Ph.D. And I started to get a little bit sort of frustrated with, well, two things, frankly. One was the way in which the university seemed to really bracket or ignore questions of meaning and purpose, essentially religious questions.

00;05;32;00 - 00;05;56;22

Speaker 2

So there is there's a kind of rigid secularism at a place like Cornell University that that I thought was it was just frustrating experientially. But the other part of it was 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.

00;05;57;03 - 00;06;16;08

Speaker 2

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? You know, what is the good life? You know, people study philosophy, and philosophy is purportedly the love of wisdom. But we don't even talk much about wisdom as such.

00;06;16;08 - 00;06;38;21

Speaker 2

Right. So I pulled together a group of pastors and professors. This is, you know, in the course of my graduate studies. And I said, hey, I think there's an opportunity here for us to do something new, 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.

00;06;40;02 - 00;06;58;27

Speaker 2

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 that tradition. So that was the initial concept. I didn't know what it's going to look like in practice, but that that was kind of how the the, the impulse, you know, was born.

00;06;59;28 - 00;07;21;21

Speaker 1

Yeah. And I mean, that resonates a lot with 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 organization or ministry, if you want to call it that. What and maybe you would say something similar in terms of what the mission of study centers are filling that white space.

00;07;22;00 - 00;07;45;00

Speaker 1

But as you go around and you introduce study centers to 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 where there's a lot happening in the university and in maybe a more traditional campus ministry environment?

00;07;45;25 - 00;07;47;21

Speaker 1

Where do you Christian study Center stand out?

00;07;49;15 - 00;08;13;13

Speaker 2

Yeah. So to come back to this 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.

00;08;13;13 - 00;08;43;12

Speaker 2

So most study centers have some kind of a public lecture series, perhaps in addition to that discussion groups or, you know, symposia of various sorts where you don't actually have to bracket your religious tradition to walk in the door. And so it's it's robust academically, but it's not anti-religious, so to speak. So public lectures, discussions. That's one of the distinctive features of most study centers.

00;08;43;12 - 00;09;05;18

Speaker 2

Now, most study centers in recent years have built out their programing in other various ways. So, for example, Fellows programs have become a hallmark of many centers. These are 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 of great books in the Christian tradition or something like that.

00;09;05;25 - 00;09;27;29

Speaker 2

Most of these are noncredit, so they're sort of like co-curricular. Occasionally they have some sort of a certificate attached to them, and some study centers have residential ministries, actual, you know, houses where students are living together in a kind of 24 seven community that has some kind of liturgical rhythm, either by the day or according to the liturgical calendar of the year.

00;09;29;27 - 00;09;52;19

Speaker 2

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 that these these elements, these are what a study center does.

00;09;52;19 - 00;10;15;27

Speaker 2

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 the most concise way I can describe it, the 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 together.

00;10;15;27 - 00;10;33;21

Speaker 2

And yet I think every study center is a place in the sense of a community of people who are gathered. Even if they're gathering in different places and they're having certain kinds of conversations around faith and work, faith and vocation around the good life, human personhood, this sort of thing.

00;10;35;24 - 00;10;59;02

Speaker 1

One of the things that struck me when we've talked to Charlie Solomon in this series as well, who has written a history of the study center movement, was the importance of hospitality to at least the history of of where study centers come from. Can you talk a bit about hospitality and what yeah, what comes to mind when you think of hospitality?

00;10;59;02 - 00;11;06;19

Speaker 1

We talked a lot about that here in Upper House. I think we mean it in a few different ways. But what do you think about when you hear hospitality and study centers?

00;11;08;03 - 00;11;37;24

Speaker 2

Yeah. So I think that if we were to go back to, say, like the 1990s or the early 2000s, there was something along the lines of a kind of evangelical mind movement. Right. So this hearkens back to the manifestoes by Marc Noel and George Marston that came out in the mid-nineties, and there was a really strong emphasis on the integration of faith and learning or of thinking Christian.

00;11;37;29 - 00;12;02;01

Speaker 2

So it's very oriented toward the life of the mind, both for better and for worse, I think. And then over the years, more and more centers started to emphasize hospitality in addition to the life of the mind. And for the most part, I consider this to be kind of a good move because I think it takes into fuller account the complexity of human personhood, right?

00;12;02;01 - 00;12;35;25

Speaker 2

That we have bodies were relational creatures, right? We're not just brains on sticks in the famous phrase. So this is a good innovation. At the same time, 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.

00;12;35;25 - 00;12;40;16

Speaker 2

And it's really important, I think, for study centers to keep that original vision in view.

00;12;41;13 - 00;13;21;16

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's interesting. I think one way to maybe merge those or talk about them in conversation too, is that there's a type of hospitality that is intellectual as well. And I've experienced that here at Upper House, which is being hospitable to a variety of viewpoints, even though most people from the outside might assume a narrowness to what is acceptable at Upper House because we're a Christian organization and very obviously so that there's a hospitality to talk about things that maybe the university doesn't always want to talk about, at least a public university around religion and spiritual ideas.

00;13;22;12 - 00;13;48;24

Speaker 1

And that for the most part, we're not checking. We don't have any sort of things. You know, we check at the door in terms of ideas. Now, you know, we want to be a place that's civil and has civic dialog, but that's one way we've thought about hospitality in a place in an era where there seem 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.

00;13;48;24 - 00;13;53;22

Speaker 1

I wonder if that is that upper House specific way of framing things, or have you heard other study centers talk about.

00;13;53;24 - 00;14;12;03

Speaker 2

No, not at all. That's absolutely an emphasis of more and more centers over time. And and an emerging emphasis. I think going back I would go back maybe 15 years or so. I was doing 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?

00;14;12;13 - 00;14;36;23

Speaker 2

And he said something very interesting that I didn't really anticipate because he what he said was he said, You teach us how to disagree. He said, 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.

00;14;36;23 - 00;14;56;05

Speaker 2

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 affect on your relationship, 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.

00;14;56;21 - 00;15;23;07

Speaker 2

And then you can take things to a whole nother level where you're being intentional about inviting scholars who have, 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, too, 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 persistence.

00;15;23;23 - 00;15;47;06

Speaker 2

Right. And I think of example BLS, 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.

00;15;47;06 - 00;16;13;19

Speaker 2

Right. This is kind of related to the trend toward cancel 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 that Christian studies centers and the confessional communities that they represent are one of the last places where no question is off the table that that they can come in and say most anything.

00;16;13;19 - 00;16;25;01

Speaker 2

They don't feel like they have to self-censor the way that they do on campus. And in that sense, study centers really standing in the tradition of a liberal arts learning and dialog and conversation.

00;16;26;16 - 00;16;52;27

Speaker 1

Yeah, I agree with you there. And I think if we can we've been talking a lot about how maybe the study centers contribute to the university culture or the intellectual life on the campus. I wonder, too, because you talked about the gray space or the white space that a study center fills between the church and the university. What do you think study centers do for the church in broadly speaking, how do study centers serve the church?

00;16;54;05 - 00;16;57;28

Speaker 1

Maybe not in the same way as they serve the university, but they they do serve the church?

00;16;59;20 - 00;17;38;18

Speaker 2

Yeah, I mean, it would be really interesting to actually do some sort of a study along these lines, you know, interviewing 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. One is, 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, things like funerals, you know, things that take them out of the life of the mind.

00;17;40;13 - 00;18;14;15

Speaker 2

And they appreciate Study center's coming along side them and providing some programing 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. So there's that, which is just at a very kind of practical level. I think that study centers, by their nature, have a little bit more freedom to be ecumenical, right to be bridge builders across some traditions, whether it's Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Anabaptist, whatsoever.

00;18;16;26 - 00;18;36;28

Speaker 2

And they also tend to have a bit of a focus on recovering historic resources within the tradition. Going back over the 2000 year history of of Christian term and sort of mining those intellectual resources and bringing them back up into the present.

00;18;39;02 - 00;19;00;28

Speaker 1

Out of necessity in some ways to write or it out of a certain motive to reach the most broad Christian community is possible. It's better to maybe mine some of those historic resources than lean on a particular sub tradition that's more contemporary, where you're going to a lot of, you know, Christians are going to be familiar with that author or that way of talking about the faith.

00;19;01;08 - 00;19;26;29

Speaker 1

But if you go back to, you know, Augustine or another church father, there's a sort of shared aisle 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 organizational lines.

00;19;28;09 - 00;19;50;25

Speaker 2

Yeah, I think that's right. So I think we want to be 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.

00;19;51;28 - 00;20;14;16

Speaker 2

And yet in some ways, that bridge, I think, 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 studies and our movement is to facilitate that the centers at colleges and universities around the world. But all 37 centers that are members of the consortium are in North America.

00;20;14;26 - 00;20;31;18

Speaker 2

And while I have conversations with folks 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 turn some sort of strategic attention and resources to see how we can turn it into, you know, more of a global movement.

00;20;32;24 - 00;20;47;06

Speaker 1

In those conversations. And in your reflection, is there any particular reasons why in the negative, why study centers are harder to found in other parts of the world, or conversely, why they're so popular in the U.S. or North America?

00;20;48;16 - 00;21;09;08

Speaker 2

Well, I do think that in the United States, there is a little bit of a contagion effect where you can look around, you see the other centers, you see how they do it, you talk to them, you copy it. A big factor has to do with the role of philanthropy. The United States has a very robust culture of philanthropy.

00;21;09;08 - 00;21;32;04

Speaker 2

And, you know, there's the tax advantages for philanthropic giving. When I talk to these folks trying to get center started in other countries, they report oftentimes just not really having that kind of a culture. There may also be reasons along these lines that are more complicated. So we talk about study centers as sort of attached to or inhabiting secular universities.

00;21;33;00 - 00;21;58;02

Speaker 2

And our very concept of the secular is itself a somewhat cultural concept, right? So when I talk to folks, say down in Rio de Janeiro 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 like a different kind of a an experience in an institution than we have here.

00;21;58;03 - 00;22;08;05

Speaker 2

Right. So how do you create a Christian study center at an institution like that? You know, there's not really a model for them to follow That's as easy and obvious.

00;22;09;11 - 00;22;39;18

Speaker 1

It's very interesting and it does a lot of the even the way we frame the need and the history. Thinking back to Charlie, Solomon's book is very Anglo-American, I guess would be the right container for it. So that makes sense. I wanted to talk a bit about the importance of intellectual formation is 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.

00;22;39;18 - 00;23;07;11

Speaker 1

As I entered a study center a few years ago here at Upper House, which was I came in very much 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.

00;23;07;11 - 00;23;43;15

Speaker 1

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 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 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 that really the ideas are what matter.

00;23;43;15 - 00;23;56;29

Speaker 1

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 aspect and and an ideas aspect and maybe a personal aspect as well. But I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

00;23;58;10 - 00;24;31;28

Speaker 2

Yeah. So I think that 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 the 1990s when there was this 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 there's the Richard John Neuhaus Journal.

00;24;31;28 - 00;24;32;20

Speaker 2

First things.

00;24;33;04 - 00;24;33;22

Speaker 1

First things.

00;24;33;22 - 00;24;48;08

Speaker 2

You know, there was the Veritas Forum that got started in the mid-nineties, 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's kind of an exciting time.

00;24;48;08 - 00;25;12;13

Speaker 2

And there was a lot of energy around the life of the mind among Christians. But then 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 not connected to the rest of our person and even more importantly, to other persons.

00;25;12;13 - 00;25;39;21

Speaker 2

Right. So there's this communal dimension to the Christian life that's really irreducible. And the life of the mind is, of course, never disconnected from the life of the body and soul spirit. 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?

00;25;39;21 - 00;26;14;18

Speaker 2

Because universities actually do intellectual formation arguably pretty well in terms of like training for knowledge, developing intelligences of various sorts, developing, you know, skills in in all kinds of fields. I mean, we're probably better at this than ever before in history, arguably, but in fairly narrow kinds of ways. Right. So things like developing, correct to training citizens, these things are increasingly bracketed and set aside.

00;26;14;18 - 00;26;44;07

Speaker 2

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 training in these areas entails something along the lines of discipleship, and universities are very uncomfortable with that notion. Stanley Fischer's 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.

00;26;45;03 - 00;27;03;09

Speaker 2

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 under 800,000 people show up because they're really hungry for these kinds of conversations.

00;27;04;05 - 00;27;32;16

Speaker 1

Yeah, I wonder, too, you know, one of the critiques, I guess, of modern university life is the tendency toward specialization and emphasizing, you know, narrowing and narrowing 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 furthermore specialize get more and more of the the knowledge behind you before you can make new discoveries.

00;27;32;25 - 00;27;51;20

Speaker 1

Do you see Christian study centers as some type of counteroffer ing to specialization? Like is it a site where people should be integrating versus specializing? I guess? Is that a way to frame what's going on or does that miss the mark? I'm not sure. I'm just thinking out loud right now.

00;27;53;10 - 00;28;21;28

Speaker 2

Yeah. So there's no question that there is in fact a relationship between specialization and secularization. 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. 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.

00;28;21;28 - 00;28;54;03

Speaker 2

Just to take one example right. But there's also, you know, the ideal of knowing everything about something and something about everything, right? So the latter part of that, but something about everything is the generalist approach that, you know, hearkens back to the ideals of great books, curricula to liberal arts learning, and I think not as certain majors in particular.

00;28;54;04 - 00;29;30;00

Speaker 2

My son is studying engineering at Cornell, require almost every credit hour, you know, to be in your particular major. There's just very little breathing room left in in the coursework for courses in, you know, history or literature or what have you. And so the fellows programs and other programing 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.

00;29;30;00 - 00;29;57;07

Speaker 2

And this might actually be a good kind of, I don't know, truth, if you will, between universities and study centers where, you know, the specialized training happens in the curricula or 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.

00;29;58;14 - 00;30;14;06

Speaker 2

Where people can gather with their affinity group and delve into the texts of their various traditions to consider the end of education in the ways in which we could or should be shaped into persons.

00;30;15;18 - 00;30;46;03

Speaker 1

Reminds me of a bit your reference to a truce reminds me of in a much earlier episode in that which would be the sort of early 20th century where a lot of public universities like UW Madison invited churches, denominations, mostly Protestant denominations, to plant or sort of buy land around the university and create university churches as a way to basically outsource moral formation as if that was getting out of the curriculum.

00;30;47;01 - 00;31;21;14

Speaker 1

A place like UW was founded where students had to take classes on morals, classes on 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 specializing curriculum that was turning into major majors and different schools, 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 on campus.

00;31;21;14 - 00;31;32;09

Speaker 1

So it seems like we're in that same story, maybe in a different obviously a different stage, which slightly different boundaries on that. But it just seems like a similar division of labor there in some ways.

00;31;32;09 - 00;31;36;27

Speaker 2

So your your your show is entitled What is it? Education at the Crossroads.

00;31;37;17 - 00;31;38;18

Speaker 1

Christian Education At the.

00;31;38;21 - 00;32;03;23

Speaker 2

Christian Education at the Crossroads. I don't know exactly what the crossroads is that you have in mind, but but, but in a sense, we're always at a 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 kind of a brief historical overview.

00;32;03;23 - 00;32;23;16

Speaker 2

I think if you were to go back half a century or early 20th century, you know, there's this sense that 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.

00;32;23;27 - 00;32;51;15

Speaker 2

And then you have this for a while anyway. In some places, an emergence of pragmatism as a philosophy kind of Richard Rorty style, maybe. Stanley Fish 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.

00;32;51;15 - 00;33;13;20

Speaker 2

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. And all of a sudden everybody seems well made.

00;33;13;20 - 00;33;44;23

Speaker 2

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 a little bit of 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 telos in the educational project.

00;33;44;26 - 00;33;55;07

Speaker 2

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.

00;33;56;07 - 00;34;23;07

Speaker 1

Yeah, And just one last point on that, and then we can move to the next question. But also that study centers are trying to do this in concert with the university or in alignment to as much as authentically both sides can in alignment. There's going to be differences, but in a way that, 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.

00;34;23;07 - 00;34;46;26

Speaker 1

But they're there sometimes, and we want them to succeed and exceed in their studies, but also be asking these these bigger questions. I think that's part of the key 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 as opposed to another orientation, would be trying to undermine the university or save students from the university or something like that.

00;34;46;29 - 00;34;52;19

Speaker 1

It's much more trying to come alongside them. And I think that will probably be a secret ingredient to the success.

00;34;52;28 - 00;35;52;01

Speaker 2

Yeah, 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 adopted a variety of often unhelpful postures toward modernism, sometimes very kind of reactionary, sometimes triumphalist dick, sometimes withdrawing from institutions of high culture. Right? And so I think that this is one of the defining aspects of Christian Studies centers is a posture of thoughtful Christian presence, entering into the community with the good of the other in mind being advocates of the mission of discovery and dissemination of research and knowledge and an interest and a willingness to, in essence, share power, to not feel like we're here

00;35;52;01 - 00;36;01;24

Speaker 2

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. Yes.

00;36;01;24 - 00;36;19;07

Speaker 1

So, Karl, as the executive director of the consortium, 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?

00;36;20;06 - 00;36;31;28

Speaker 2

Well, for sure, I don't know of anybody who has really put a kind of critique in writing anywhere. I don't know that the movement has actually prominent enough to have to have provoked such a thing.

00;36;32;28 - 00;36;35;24

Speaker 1

There'll be an honor when someone critiques. Yeah, I that that's great.

00;36;37;08 - 00;37;07;08

Speaker 2

But you know, having 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 had criticisms of various sorts. I'll mention two. 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.

00;37;07;08 - 00;37;35;07

Speaker 2

What are you doing? You know, like it's a kind of new atheist critique, right? Like, this doesn't even belong on campus, you know? And we did run into that occasionally. 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 of these criticisms, I think, came like the New Atheism was really like in the wake of 911.

00;37;35;07 - 00;37;53;19

Speaker 2

And a lot of it was a reaction to, you know, the violence that was perceived to be emanating out of radical Islam. And, 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 911. It's going to be around, you know, for a while.

00;37;53;19 - 00;38;24;28

Speaker 2

But it had its moment and its moment coincided with when I was starting the center at Cornell. So I heard a lot about that. The other critique that I think is is more concerning, more trenchant. It's something that we really need to reckon with, is it's the lack of diversity in the movement, in particular the lack of racial diversity, you know, arguably a lack of diversity with respect to sex among the leaders of the centers as well.

00;38;25;27 - 00;38;54;27

Speaker 2

Now 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. And even with respect to fundraising, there's some evidence that, you know, men have an easier time fundraising and in particular in the church community than than women do.

00;38;57;12 - 00;39;29;08

Speaker 2

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 a huge diversification, racially and otherwise, of the students involved in campus ministries. So we saw that. I'm going to say maybe starting in the eighties, but more so in the nineties.

00;39;29;08 - 00;39;59;08

Speaker 2

So in the eighties, a lot of campus ministries were probably 90% white. And by the end of nineties they were in some cases 90% nonwhite. So that is a huge difference. There's all kinds of reasons for that. Going back to the Immigration Act of 1964 and what so, so forth. And then we saw a delayed effect that the level of faculty I was involved in convening a Christian faculty group in the nineties that was, you know, 80 plus percent white men.

00;39;59;25 - 00;40;38;23

Speaker 2

And today that same group is 80 plus percent non white male. And I suspect that demographics alone will result in the diversification of staff of of the space center movement. There may be ways in which we can take strategic steps related to that, but that is that's a legit criticism. And you know, the lack of voices from other cultures, you know, the international Christians, what is there is related to that which I referred to earlier.

00;40;39;05 - 00;41;19;20

Speaker 1

But let me add one more critique. I've heard and just get your response to it, which is that some and maybe this isn't study centers as a form, but maybe a bad version of them is a study center can become a bubble in a in a pluralistic university where Christians can hang out and sort of be with each other and sort of not fully integrate into the broader community and having space have it usually having property actually assist that it allows for an actual physical, you know, geographic isolation from the rest of the university.

00;41;20;02 - 00;41;44;15

Speaker 1

And so many of the students who engage the 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 Christian students should learn to sort of live in the world, nor maybe from maybe that's a critique within the church and from outside it feels like there's sort of a subculture here that's developing that isn't fully integrated.

00;41;44;15 - 00;41;54;03

Speaker 1

I don't know if you've come across that. I've come across that sort of skepticism maybe, of what a study center is actually doing on a campus. I wonder I wonder what you think about that.

00;41;55;22 - 00;42;47;06

Speaker 2

Oh, do we have another our? There's so much that could be said here. I'll start with an anecdote. Many years ago, it might have even been before we started Chesterton I was I can't recall. I was involved in hosting the psychologist Paul Fitts from NYU, and he had this sort of analogy where he said, you know, if there is a group of people having a conversation about something and 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

00;42;47;06 - 00;43;15;24

Speaker 2

that circle. And in a sense, I think that's part of what study centers do right now. We're not just trying to enter into the university community, although we 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.

00;43;16;05 - 00;43;45;20

Speaker 2

So there is a little bit of this. You know, we step back and separate from the larger institution for a time, but we do so with a of stepping back into that larger community with a view toward reinvigorating, you know, the culture in 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?

00;43;45;20 - 00;44;10;16

Speaker 2

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, you know, there probably is at least some potential for these communities to to air on the side of providing maybe a little bit too much comfort to students.

00;44;10;16 - 00;44;18;29

Speaker 2

And, you know, 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.

00;44;19;29 - 00;44;31;28

Speaker 1

Yeah, it 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 its own sequence of pulling in and then reengaging.

00;44;32;02 - 00;44;55;06

Speaker 2

Yeah. I'll also just mention that because at Cornell we developed a residential community, the question often came up, 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.

00;44;55;25 - 00;45;18;28

Speaker 2

And, you know, my observation is that usually the students who desired to be change agents in the dorm were much more often changed than the changing. And that, you know, those who sought a deep spiritual formation in residential community were better positioned to be change agents on campus.

00;45;19;26 - 00;46;00;05

Speaker 1

Hmm. Very interesting. Yeah, well, I think we're going to transition here to talk a little more about the the institutional history of study centers. 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. I say that because the consortium was founded in 2009, and that is many years before even Upper House was founded, but in 2009, in that early 21st century, what led to the creation of a consortium that brought together a number of study centers which had largely been focused solely on their home institutions, their local context.

00;46;00;14 - 00;46;07;10

Speaker 1

And this consortium sort of signifies a broader network that's forming. Give us the story of how that happened.

00;46;08;19 - 00;46;33;29

Speaker 2

Yeah, So I understand that, you know, the small number of center directors that existed back in the 1990s occasionally got together to speak to each other, but that's kind of like pre-history. That's before I was involved. I started Chesterton House in 2000 and for the first several years there were no get togethers, and in 2007 I invited the other directors.

00;46;33;29 - 00;47;02;08

Speaker 2

I was aware of. And it's hard to recover what a scattered landscape it was because 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 about a dozen or so folks came, you know, some of whom, like Dave Mehan from Rivendell, are still actively involved.

00;47;02;16 - 00;47;28;20

Speaker 2

Richard Horner was there recently retired from the University of Florida Center. Bob Osborne, formerly of the University of Minnesota Center, now called Anselm House and we sat around for about three days talking. 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.

00;47;28;27 - 00;47;55;15

Speaker 2

We also invited philosopher Nick Wolterstorff to join us, and he was with us during that time as well. We just sat in on the meetings and gave us a kind of charge of sorts, talked about what he thought were the possibilities of the future of the movement. 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.

00;47;55;29 - 00;48;26;19

Speaker 2

And it was great because the conversation just continued on and on and on. So so that was a seminal moment 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 became our first director and it was a couple of years after that that we started holding the annual meeting.

00;48;26;21 - 00;48;44;10

Speaker 2

I think the first one was in San Francisco. We had maybe like 20 people there. And, you know, if you look at the photo, you can see some people there. I believe 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.

00;48;44;10 - 00;48;49;11

Speaker 2

And some of these people are starting centers. And, you know, now we're up to 37 of them.

00;48;51;01 - 00;49;20;21

Speaker 1

You mentioned the 37. Well, thanks for that story. I think that's good to get a sense of how, you know, a small movement has turned into a medium sized movement and and it really starts with these really close relationships between a few people that turned into an organization that now people even me coming in in 2019 assumed there had been a consortium for a very, very long time because there seems to be so much connectivity between the study centers and to learn that that was a very recent development.

00;49;20;21 - 00;49;41;08

Speaker 1

There's always a humbling. I wonder if you could just talk about as you get, you're probably the best person with a vantage point to see all these different centers, how some of them are succeeding or some of them are facing challenges. If you could generalize, just what are a few of the successes that you're seeing across the board at study centers?

00;49;41;08 - 00;49;54;18

Speaker 1

And then we'll get to challenges after that. But 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?

00;49;56;09 - 00;50;23;25

Speaker 2

I'll do my best with this question, but I'll also confess to just having a little bit of skepticism about talking about success in this whole realm of what we're doing. I, I used to write newsletters, you know, in the early years and say, you know, we did this event and it was successful. And I got to ask you and I got to wondering, like, how do I know that, you know, what is what is the actual measure or the metric?

00;50;24;19 - 00;50;58;22

Speaker 2

And I realize we don't really have one, right? Like, 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, you know, we see centers growing not only in number but also in size. So they are addressing and they don't have a captive audience right the way the classes for credit tend to have.

00;50;58;25 - 00;51;37;04

Speaker 2

So students who attend these events are attending voluntarily, and 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? So at some level, this seems to be a meaningful measure of success. And I think we can also see a kind of growing sophistication, if you will, in the level of programing rate, kind of a more robust thoughtfulness around issues of vocation, information.

00;51;37;04 - 00;52;11;07

Speaker 2

And kind of layered on top of that original emphasis of developing the Christian mind. So I think that's all very promising as well when it comes to the relationship that Christian study centers have with their host institutions, the universities that they aspire to serve. There are a lot of instances where that is a very good, healthy relationship. And study centers have been invited to be conversation partners and very important sorts of ways.

00;52;11;07 - 00;52;37;12

Speaker 2

You know, there's a great article that Nathan Barzee of the Octet Collaborative wrote about his experience being invited by a geneticist at Harvard to talk about the implications of the doctrine of the image of God for genetics research. And there's a lot of other examples along those lines. At the same time, these relationships with host institutions are sometimes challenging.

00;52;38;16 - 00;53;16;04

Speaker 2

There has been a little bit of a movement in recent years for universities to become more skittish about having religious communities affiliated with them and have been just affiliating various Christian ministries. I'm not aware of any Christian study centers that have been affiliated, but some of those relationships have some tension to them, and it's entirely possible that, 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.

00;53;16;25 - 00;53;24;08

Speaker 2

So that's, you know, a challenge that exists in the present and for the foreseeable future.

00;53;26;02 - 00;53;57;14

Speaker 1

Do you on the on the success front or maybe a different way to phrase is just what gives you encouragement as you, you know, learn more about how different study centers are, are functioning and growing. I wonder about something I observed, Karl, You and I were helped organize the consortium meeting last year, and 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.

00;53;57;14 - 00;54;20;00

Speaker 1

I'd segment these out in a different sort of subcultures within campus ministry or within church world, but there seems to be a lot of interconnection between the faith and work movement, between different arts, Christian arts organizations. 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 potential collaboration.

00;54;20;17 - 00;54;32;05

Speaker 1

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 on campuses?

00;54;33;25 - 00;54;58;00

Speaker 2

Yeah, let me start by saying that 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.

00;54;59;01 - 00;55;26;02

Speaker 2

And that 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 let's say, upper house 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.

00;55;26;02 - 00;55;49;21

Speaker 2

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.

00;55;49;22 - 00;56;10;01

Speaker 2

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, you know, trying to partner in various ways.

00;56;10;01 - 00;56;43;25

Speaker 2

So 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 that next generation. Right. So how do you do that? Study centers seem to be a kind of effective point of connection, right? So, you know, it's just take as an example, maybe say like, you know, the Wind Reiter Institute is generating all these wonderful films, right?

00;56;43;25 - 00;57;10;03

Speaker 2

And they're really well designed for discussion groups with students. How do they get them in front of students? Well, in the Christian college world, you can, you know, sort of go through CCU to right to which Christian colleges belong as members and kind of roll it out to campuses. But if you want to reach the students secular universities, how do you do that?

00;57;10;20 - 00;57;30;06

Speaker 2

Well, the consortium and the Christian Study Center movement would be one pretty logical way. So the Wind Reiter Institute, just to one example, partners with the consortium and 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.

00;57;31;09 - 00;58;01;13

Speaker 1

Yeah, it seems it really enriches the even the the formation opportunities, teaching opportunities at the study centers when there's so much more overlapping sort of networking going on. I want to just turn briefly to the challenges that city centers are facing. Karl, you mentioned relationships sometimes with the home institution can be strained. Any other challenges that you you sort of observe that are more than just one aspect, but a pattern in the movement?

00;58;04;13 - 00;58;25;06

Speaker 2

Well, you know, resources are always a challenge. I mean, if you talk to almost any startup director, they will lament that, you know, they just have so many more ideas than they're able to implement for lack of resources. The generation of resources just takes. It's a very time intensive takes. It takes a lot of time, takes a lot of energy.

00;58;25;15 - 00;58;56;00

Speaker 2

And most studies and our directors did not get into this work because they wanted to focus on fundraising. So that's that's just a perennial kind of a challenge. Somewhat related to that, I think the starting of a study center requires a fairly diverse skill set. You have to be relatively academic. Most study center directors have a Ph.D. not quite all, but you need to be, you know, pretty comfortable and conversant with the academic world.

00;58;57;12 - 00;59;26;07

Speaker 2

You kind of need to have a pastoral side or dimension to things. Some studies under directors have backgrounds as pastors, not all. But, you know, we do operate in the sort of extracurricular sphere of students lives, and they come with the full messiness of their issues, whether those are, you know, addiction issues, eating disorders, conflict, financial problems, family problems.

00;59;26;07 - 00;59;56;24

Speaker 2

You know, so staff of study centers really need to be prepared to 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 the university is oftentimes feel rather overwhelmed and not fully equipped to address all of these issues for the entire student body. And then on top of this, associate director has to be entrepreneurial, has to generate resources.

00;59;56;24 - 01;00;21;16

Speaker 2

So how many people, you know, are there that can do the academic, the pastoral and the entrepreneurial work? It's just hard. So the start up 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, you know, Cambridge might be the worst place, you know, San Francisco, tough, tough neighborhood.

01;00;21;16 - 01;00;30;07

Speaker 2

But but almost any place it's just expensive to acquire property and to develop it. So so the barriers to entry are are pretty significant.

01;00;31;06 - 01;00;37;12

Speaker 1

Yeah. And then and then to take care of the property. So that's maybe a fourth had is that you're the landlord. Yeah. Often as well.

01;00;37;13 - 01;00;48;17

Speaker 2

I remember in the time I was on vacation I got a phone call property manager says there's a skunk in the in the window. Well you know like what do I do. And there's just there's so much stuff like that. Yeah.

01;00;49;15 - 01;01;17;16

Speaker 1

Yeah. I Think that that is definitely a challenge. I have appreciated and 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 you're not encouraged to learn about as, as an academic, but skills around entrepreneurs, you know, drying up budgets, thinking about managing people, other things.

01;01;18;21 - 01;01;43;05

Speaker 1

You do get a lot of exposure. That stuff in the study center context. Karl, I want to just end with a question about the future. And, you know, as we look at Christian education as a whole, in maybe the next decade, we can limit it to that where hopes you have for Christian education. And then what what hope do you have for the study center within that, within that vision?

01;01;44;03 - 01;02;04;16

Speaker 2

Sure. So the way you framed the question is interesting. You said what are the hopes for Christian education? You didn't say what are the hopes for the Christian Study Centers? Christian study kind of moving. So I'm kind of glad you framed it broadly. The reason being sometimes people talk about Christian higher education as if that refers exclusively to Christian colleges and universities.

01;02;04;16 - 01;02;43;28

Speaker 2

Right. But I don't want to make the the equal and opposite error of talking about this as if Christian study centers are the entirety of, you know, Christian education. So my I can think my first hope as strange as this sound, is that I really want Christian colleges and universities to to flourish. And I, I think they're a very important part of the landscape intellectually and otherwise, You know, the Christian scholars and the Christian scholarship that's that's taking place at these institutions is really important to the educational landscape.

01;02;43;28 - 01;03;18;04

Speaker 2

And and I say this partly because I know the headwinds for these institutions are significant, you know, enrollment and finances and what have you are very tough. And I think that, you know, we should all do whatever it is that we can to try to preserve this important variety in the educational landscape. And then at the same time, I guess, 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 see Christian colleges on the other side.

01;03;18;04 - 01;03;52;24

Speaker 2

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 state institution or a private institution, wouldn't be secular in the militant sense of secular.

01;03;52;24 - 01;04;24;27

Speaker 2

Right. But but would be pluralistic in the best sense of pluralistic, an institution that includes multiple robust confessional communities within it, including Christian communities. Right. That would be my hope is that Christian parents and college students would not feel like the choice is stark and that opting for a pluralistic institution comes at some huge expense of their educational experience.

01;04;26;27 - 01;04;34;10

Speaker 1

Well, we agree with that here at Upper House. Thank you, Karl, for your time today and for your work with the consortium. Thanks for your time.

01;04;34;18 - 01;04;36;03

Speaker 2

Thank you. It's been great to visit with you.

01;04;37;28 - 01;05;04;04

Speaker 1

Thanks 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 Upper House dot 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 is produced at Upper House in Madison, Wisconsin, hosted by Dan Hummel and John Terrill.

01;05;04;06 - 01;05;11;17

Speaker 1

Our executive producer and editor is Jesse Koopman. Please follow us on social media with the handle at Upper House, UW.