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In the eighth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Cherie Harder, President of the Trinity Forum. Harder opens by sharing what qualities make for a good conversation, what we have lost in recent years in terms of the practice of such a conversation, and what we can do to re-introduce such a practice. Ream and Harder talk about Harder’s upbringing in Los Alamos, New Mexico, her formal education at Harvard University and the University of Queensland, and the lessons she learned concerning leadership during her years of service on Capitol Hill and in the White House. Transiting to her own leadership of the Trinity Forum, Harder offers how she and her colleagues pursue the Forum’s mission, how they know when have come closest to fulfilling it, and the qualities of guests who are of greatest service to their mission and audience. With so many of those guests often being public intellectuals, Ream and Harder talk about the pressures against scholars from developing the skills public intellectuals need and what can be done to help develop those skills. Harder closes by sharing what figure from history, if given the option, she would most enjoy engaging in conversation.
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Cherie Harder, President of The Trinity Forum. Thank you for joining us.
Cherie Harder: Great to be here, Todd.
Todd Ream: Even before you joined the Trinity Forum in 2008, you invested in efforts to cultivate meaningful conversations. To begin, in your estimation, what is the good in engaging in meaningful conversations for individuals, families, church communities, and local communities?
Cherie Harder: It’s a great question, Todd. And I think anyone who is a student of the Bible knows that Jesus did his teaching largely through conversation. Jesus was not alone. Plato’s dialogues, we know from classical historical sources that so much of education, instruction and discovery of what it means to be a good person, to live a good life, to understand ourselves and each other as well as God takes place in conversation.
And so a good conversation is a sort of exploration where you’re learning more, not only about a subject, but usually about the person that you’re talking with too. I mean, those are the best conversations of course. So conversations are worthwhile because they teach us about ourselves, about our Creator and about our fellow creatures, as well as the created world around us.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In your estimation, what, if anything, have we lost in terms of the ability to engage in meaningful conversations?
Cherie Harder: Well I hate to be pessimistic, but I do think there’s a lot that we have lost. And there’s a variety of culprits for that, but it’s impossible to kind of answer your question without talking about social media. And that the medium through which we communicate affects not only kind of what we talk about, but sort of how we talk, how we communicate at its most essential level.
That’s not a new insight, of course you know, that’s Marshall McLuhan, that’s Neil Postman. There are many brilliant minds that have really explored that, but yeah, different forms of communication media affect the way we think as well as what we think about. So I think it was Neil Postman who gave the example of like, it’s very difficult to do philosophy by smoke signal. Just the form precludes the content.
And every communication medium has a bias. An oral culture sort of had a bias towards memorizing stories, having a very good memory. A print culture really rewards precision and coherence and logic. A visual culture, sort of like television, rewards the sensational, the flashy, the attention grabbing. And social media basically takes a visual culture, puts it on steroids, and adds new twists too.
So what goes viral in social media and by viral basically being positively reinforced by attention, whether it’s measured in clicks or likes or reposts or retweets or whatever it is, is generally that which is speedy, often snarky, sensationalized, and often aimed at one upping, dominating, or putting down other people. That’s usually the kind of content that will get the most attention that will get the most positive reinforcement.
Introspection, courtesy, restraint reflection you know, an eager interest in the other person, the elements which make for a great conversation in person are generally the same traits or elements that get no interest at all on social media. And so as social media has kind of taken over more of our interpersonal communication, it has cultivated through its reinforcement you know, again, tweets, likes, reposts, retweets, whatever it is, a way of communicating that actually breaks down our ability to converse well with each other.
A great conversation involves trust, it involves curiosity, it involves listening to the other person it involves genuine desire to know what they think, and if your orientation towards the person that you’re conversing with is to dominate them, humiliate them, put them down, look for something much more sensational that conversation isn’t going to go well, but that’s exactly the kind of approach that’s rewarded on social media. So I do see that as being one of the big things that has, has really inhibited the practice of good communication.
Related to that distinct, but, but very related is the norms of partisan combat, which are reinforced and amplified by social media, are huge deterrents to a quality conversation. And then again, a quality conversation involves curiosity about the other person, kindness, a sense of charity, a sense of curiosity, a desire to understand, a desire to go further. Again, those are essentially anathema to partisan political combat, which usually seeks to dominate, to one up, to destroy the enemy.
And you know, usually the methods are twisting what someone has said or picking out the worst or the silliest thing that they’ve said and essentially amplifying it. So all of the norms of partisan political combat, or so many of the norms of social media, really all are about undermining what it means to have a great in-person conversation.
Todd Ream: What practices, if any, can we introduce or can we amplify, reinvest in which could potentially counteract these forces that are impacting the way we interact with each other today?
Cherie Harder: Sure. Well, happily, there are so many, I mean, and many of them start literally just around the kitchen table. Modeling and making a habit of entering into regular conversations with those you love. You know, essentially, it habituates and it cultivates a love for that kind of conversation.
You know, we all want to be listened to. And yet so much of social media communication is not at all about listening to other people. So do we actually make that a habit at home? That’s the kind of habit I think that helps form and grow a love for good conversation, but there’s lots of other things we can, we can do as well.
And of course, so much of the learning that goes on in many universities, especially liberal arts universities or colleges takes place in whether it’s a Socratic setting or a small group setting where you’re discussing the work together which basically kind of calls forth a different kind of engagement with the work, as well as with your fellow students, than would be called forth by just say a test, even an essay test
I think the work of small groups in churches is really important and does a great deal. I think to kind of cultivate both a love for conversation but also an understanding of what it can do.
And I also think that one of the most culturally potent, or perhaps counter culturally potent, if modest and overlooked ways of pushing back against a culture that no longer knows how to listen or talk to each other, is the reading group. And part of what I mean by that is like, essentially kind of what’s a reading group?
A reading group is a small group of people who are gathered together in the context of community and the spirit of hospitality to pay sustained attention to a text and to hear what the other person thought about it. And that is so contra to part of our cultural, I think, dysfunctions of deep distraction and inability to listen, a desire to one up, yeah, the inability to engage with either text or each other. And part of what a reading group is is in many ways a small liturgy, an embodied practice that helps us cultivate both a love for reading and a love of good conversation.
Todd Ream: Yeah, no, thank you. Yeah, it’s wonderful. It implicitly comes with the acknowledgement that there’s something I can learn from the text, but there’s something that I can learn more about the text by engaging it with others and hearing their voices and that perhaps I may have something to offer them but there’s that two-fold acknowledgement of what could be greater as a result of investment.
Cherie Harder: Absolutely. I mean, in some ways, a great reading group is a bit of stone soup where everybody brings something that either they got out of the text or something that they wrestled with the text.
And as a result, not only do you start forming bonds with those people, but you have a much richer, deeper understanding of the text itself and so I think that’s one of the marvels and the joys of a good reading group.
Todd Ream: Thank you Thank you. I want to ask you a couple of biographical details if I may. You grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico and then traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where you earned a bachelor’s in government from Harvard, and then you traveled as a Rotary Scholar to Australia, where from the University of Queensland in Brisbane you earned a postgraduate diploma in literature.
In your mind, what, if anything, do good government, the focus of your undergraduate study, and good stories, the focus of your graduate study, what do they have in common?
Cherie Harder: That’s a great question, Todd. You know, I think one thing they have in common is an imagination for the good. And part of what I mean by that is, it’s been said that the big questions of the humanities are essentially kind of what’s a good person, what’s the good life, and what is a just society? And all those are questions that involve moral and spiritual imagination.
I was a policy wonk. I’ll say this parenthetically, there’s a big difference between like a campaign person and a policy wonk. So I, when I worked for the different bosses I had on Capitol Hill and in the White House and you know, in the National Endowment for the Humanities my job was much more on the policy side.
And when you’re a policy wonk, essentially what you’re looking into is what works well, what are the ideas translated into policy that leads to a more just and free and flourishing social and political order? You know, and that necessarily involves, whether or not people really articulate it as such a conception for what the good life is, in a communal sense, as well as an individual sense.
As I described that there’s probably you know, you’re already thinking there’s a lot of tie in between that and what a great story does because you know, great stories always deal or wrestle with, well, the truths of the human condition, like, again, what it means to be a good person in difficult times you know, amidst temptations or confusion or chaos or what one does when the heart is essentially in conflict with itself?
You know, it wrestles with what, what are the consequences of moral or immoral decisions and who do we become and what is, what does the good life look like in combination with all these other people that we have bonds with or with whom we’re estranged?
So I do think there is, there’s a lot of connection there in that a great story allows us to sort of imaginatively enter into many of the questions that one has to wrestle with in real life in the policy world.
Todd Ream: Gives greater depth of what’s possible as a result of that engagement. Yeah, oh, that’s great.
Who inspired your interest in government? Perhaps from the youngest age, but also teachers or authors as you progressed?
Cherie Harder: Yeah, so I’ll confess I was one of those really annoying high school debaters which that’s not a real popular thing for a teenage girl to be but I was also just incredibly blessed to have a high school speech and debate coach which in some ways was almost like a second dad to me.
In that, he really encouraged me and he saw, I guess either abilities or whatever that I didn’t realize that I had and he invested in me and helped try to call them forth. And I’ll always be really grateful for him. His name was Paul Black. He’s now 89 years old. I actually got to visit him a couple years ago in Texas but I feel really grateful to him.
You know, I also had again, in high school a literature teacher who was really demanding and just really excellent and made stories come alive and kind of showed me like, oh, there’s any great story has generally a lot more going on than you get just quickly skimming it. So like most people, I had adults who gave generously to me without necessarily a lot of expectation or of return. And I just feel really grateful for those teachers.
So you know, to answer your question, I was an annoying high school debater. And so we often debated different policy ideas. And there was also a program called Girl State and Boy State. I obviously was involved in Girl State, not Boy State, but you know, that kind of helped fire the imagination as well, and so sort of did that, and Girls Nation, and came to D.C. for the first time at 16. And it all just seemed, like, so exciting.
Very little happens in Los Alamos, New Mexico, besides nuclear fission, and so, it just sort of suddenly see you know, you walk down the street, and you see these people on television, and they’re, they’re working on things that are really important. It just seemed really exciting. And so I was getting to kind of as much as a 16 year old or whatever can wrestle with those questions and in a high school debate. But all of that really intrigued me with the prospect of coming to D.C. After graduating from college.
Todd Ream: Some of those people at the Department of Energy are probably worried about what’s going on in Los Alamos, though. Ask you a question then as a follow up and not law school then as what was next?
Cherie Harder: Yeah, no, it’s a very perceptive question, Todd. And you know, we, we didn’t talk about this, but you just picked up on it. I thought quite seriously about going to law school. And so I actually took the LSAT and was thinking about where to apply and that sort of thing. But I had sort of decided, well, I was kind of going back and forth between trying to come to D.C. and work on Capitol Hill, go to law school, or go into broadcast journalism.
And I’d done my kind of senior honors thesis. I did like an organizational study of television news. Well, the way I kind of wound up in D.C, is with broadcasting. I finally figured it out at 21, like, oh, you don’t get to start out as a national news reporter in D.C. or New York. You start out as a weather girl in Duluth or whatever it is.
And then two weeks in, they can decide you’re not cute enough or blonde enough or perky enough or whatever it is. And then you’re insufficiently, cute, broke ex-weather girl in Duluth and life is kind of rough. And so I decided that, well, I’ll, I want, I’ll go to D.C. For just a year or two and then maybe apply to law school after that.
And so I came to D.C. and worked on Capitol Hill. And once I was here, decided, oh, this is much more interesting than law school would be. So stuck around until going to Australia to study literature for a year, which is what you just mentioned.
Todd Ream: And then came back to D.C., is that correct? In fact, came back to D.C. So in what ways then has D.C. become home to you?
Cherie Harder: Yeah, at this point, D.C., it does feel like home. It’s been a good 30 years or so have lived here longer than any place. And D.C. can be a polarizing place, but there’s also really a lot to enjoy and love about it. It’s a beautiful place.
I think one of the things I really like actually is no building taller than the Capitol so there’s no skyscrapers looming over you. There’s actually, it’s very kind of humane, I think, as well as beautiful architecture.
And one of the nice things about kind of no one in D.C. being sort of from D.C., everyone sort of moves here. There’s an open openness and an eagerness to meet other people that you don’t always find in, in other places.
Todd Ream: You mentioned it can be a polarizing place. In what ways though can also D.C. be a challenging place to live?
Cherie Harder: Oh, yeah. Well, there’s a lot of challenges living in D.C. And you know, and I will say it’s a different place in my estimation than it used to be.
So I worked on Capitol Hill for a number of years, worked for a number of people on Capitol Hill. In 2006 when I was working for Senator Senator Bill Frist, who was the Senate majority leader at the time, and then went to the White House but 2006 was the last time I worked on Capitol Hill. And Capitol Hill is always an intense, extremely fast-paced place. There’s always egos [that] clashes.
But at the same time, there was also, I think some agreement on things that needed to be done. There was a shared idea that it was good to to basically reach agreements whether it was about budgets or bills. I think increasingly, there’s a sense now where more politicians are essentially using their office as a platform to kind of elevate themselves while denouncing the other side, as opposed to doing the hard work of legislating which includes, making the agreements that are necessary to basically come to a resolution over whether it’s the budget or different bills that need to be passed or addressing different crises.
And so we’re, we’re at a place where very big crises go unaddressed just because there’s, there’s no political upside to sort of sticking your neck out and trying to address whether it’s runaway spending or entitlements or immigration bill or whatever else. They’re actually big national problems.
Todd Ream: You mentioned your investment on the Hill, you worked in the White House and that you’ve been part of the city now for 30 years and that it’s changed. In what ways has your experience with the city with your professional interests, but also social interactions and engagement, how has that changed? How has the fabric of the city and your engagement with it changed over the course of your life?
Cherie Harder: Well I, I will say just, there, there has always been political combat you know, and D.C. is the arena for that. But there’s a polarization that’s present now that was not true of even 12, 15 years ago. I think one could basically even look at the debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney and sort of see just what a change in sensibility there has been.
And so working on Capitol Hill, I worked for very conservative members who were at times nonetheless still able to reach agreements or essentially forge very unlikely partnerships across the aisle in order to pass a bill or do something that they thought really needed to be done.
One example of that when I worked for Senator Sam Brownback, who was one of the most conservative members of the Senate, he actually forged a really interesting partnership at one point with Paul Wellstone, now the late Paul Wellstone, the most liberal member of the Senate. And it was around like the Violence Against Women Act. He also did a lot of that in terms of helping to create an office to basically track religious persecution and religious freedom worldwide.
And so there were, there were areas where people who disagreed and perhaps disagreed really deeply and passionately about some things, could find ways to work together on other things for the sake of the common good. That’s a lot harder to do now.
And so, that basically has a cultural impact not only just on the member the level of like members of Congress themselves, but it’s felt, I think, pretty keenly on in terms of staff and the like. And yeah, I think the polarization that has affected the entire country has certainly affected D.C.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I’ll ask you a little bit about what you’ve learned from your experience then. You mentioned your work for, as policy advisor to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, your work as a policy director for Senator Sam Brownback. You also served as Deputy Policy Director at Empower America, Senior Counselor to the Chairman of the National Endowment of Humanities, with Bruce Cole, Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, and Director of Policy and Projects for First Lady Laura Bush, which by the way, my wife, Sara, says was the best job that you had was that last job I just mentioned. So very large fan of the former First Lady there, I’ll say.
What discernment process led you from one role to the next? When you sort of look back on what have you learned from that? And for individuals called the public service, what advice would you offer them in terms of discerning when to make a change and how and who to serve and where to serve?
Cherie Harder: Todd, I wish I could tell you that there was this really well thought out discernment process and grid that I sort of imposed on all those decisions and wound up making the right ones. And it wasn’t that sort of cut and dry. For a while, there were several jobs that I took that I never applied for. The opportunity came along.
First and foremost, and I guess this would also kind of dovetail with just a piece of advice, do I admire and trust who I would be working for? Admire, trust, and agree with them such that the, the work that we would be doing is work that I would be excited about and really want to throw myself in and then after that, it’s like, is this a role where I feel like I have something to offer, where I’m excited about where we would be going together? That sort of thing.
But you know, I will say that on Capitol Hill or in government in general, it was so important to work for people whose character I trusted and that there’s always going to be difficult decisions to be made. And it or just different things that come up, complex situations, especially in government, all the time, people have to make hard decisions with insufficient information, under deadline, under pressure, opposition each way, no perfect outcomes.
And you essentially have to do the best you can, without, without knowing kind of how exactly this will all play out. You know, that’s particularly true, I think, in the conduct of foreign affairs. And so a lot of it really came down to, do you trust the judgment and the character of the person that you are working for?
And one of the things I actually noticed while working on Capitol Hill is how often an office tended to take on the sensibility or character, or just kind of like you know, almost kind of the culture of the member and it was kind of a lesson just in how much leadership plays a role.
So like you have 435 House offices, 100 Senate offices, and that wasn’t true for all of them, of course, but so many of them, like the way that the members of Congress acted, definitely filtered down to the way that staff acted.
And so one, you ask for bits of advice, I guess one bit of advice I would give is to seek out bosses and mentors where you not only kind of admire their, their career you know, or their judgment or their intelligence but you admire and trust that character too.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. I want to shift our conversation now to ask you about your leadership of The Trinity Forum. The Trinity Forum quote, “Works for the renewal of society by cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best in Christian thinking for the common good, and by helping leaders to think, work, and live wisely and well.” End quote. How do you and your colleagues determine how to fulfill that mission via the publications you prepare and distribute?
Cherie Harder: Yeah, a great question. And again, there’s no easy grid. This is art more than, more than science. So probably the three focus areas at Trinity Forum would be faith in public life, the arts and humanities, and then spiritual formation. And so part of what we try to do in our Trinity Forum readings, where we try to take the best of literature and letters, and essentially tenderloin it a bit, make it more accessible to a broad thinking audience.
So for example, we just published “The Pardoner’s Tale” from the Canterbury Tales with an introduction by Karen Swallow Prior. Now, the Pardoner’s Tale, it’s a great story but it’s one that perhaps the average or just the thoughtful lay reader, may not have been exposed to. And it may be that they’re unlikely to read through the entire thing but they’ll read kind of an excerpt from one of the tales with the introduction and that might help give them a sense of why this, to know the Canterbury Tales are so important, why they still have something to teach us today, and may whet their appetite to kind of, like, dive in.
You know, so you know, we’ve done that with other works like Augustine’s City of God. Now, City of God, it, it’s pretty you know, it is dense but Book 19, which is the one we publish is one of its most significant. In there, essentially we take a shorter book and we unpack it like why is it so important? What is there for us to learn today from it?
And so we do that for a variety of both you know, classic and more contemporary literature. You know, to essentially try to welcome the thoughtful lay audience into some of the best thinking that the world has to offer on the big questions of life. And we essentially think all the big questions are ultimately spiritual questions. So that’s with our readings, kind of what we do.
We also do a variety of programs, whether they’re in person events or our online conversations, where we essentially have the the pleasure of getting to interview or talk with different scholars and public intellectuals, whether it’s about a recent book that’s out that’s significant or about just big questions that that fall into to one of those buckets. So it’s a wide variety of topics and people that we’ve spoken to.
This Friday, I’m talking with Paul Miller who is a professor at Georgetown, as well as a, a former member of the CIA and the Army, and a member of the National Security Council staff under President Bush, who wrote The Religion of American Greatness, which talks about what Christian nationalism is, how it’s different from Orthodox Christianity, how it’s different from patriotism. It’s a question that’s been a lot of confusion around it. So we will talk about that this Friday.
Later this month, I will be talking with Abram Van Engen from Washington University on his new book, The Word Made Fresh, which looks at poetry and why poetry is so significant and so important and the insights it can give us into better understanding the the original, the ultimate poet who spoke the world into existence.
And so then we basically take a lot of that content, also make it available in podcast form, which is perhaps unimaginatively called as Trinity Forum Conversations. And so part of our hope with all of this is basically taking some of the best of Christian thought from across the millennia contemporary as well as classic and inviting a broad, thoughtful lay audience to the table to benefit from it. So there’s a lot of brilliant people who are not necessarily going to be full-time scholars, but who are interested. And so, we see that as part of our mission and our joy.
Todd Ream: I would say as one who’s benefited greatly from that programming that you’ve shared, I’m particularly grateful for it and I’m thankful. So thank you for all that you do.
What do you and your colleagues consider as evidence when a particular effort has served that mission well? And given those sensibilities, how, if at all, have you adjusted those efforts over the years in relation to your mission?
Cherie Harder: Yeah. You know, addressing the latter part of it first before the pandemic, all of our events had been in person just because we’re big believers in in-person interaction we’re embodied creatures and I thought that was really important. Of course, that became impossible once the pandemic struck, so we pivoted to online conversations. And that’s sort of one example about how our efforts to pursue our mission have changed with different circumstances and over time.
And so we continue to have in-person events now that the pandemic has subsided, but we’re also kind of keeping up the online conversations, just because we were so delighted to see what the response was and how much interest there was. So we’re now kind of in a hybrid model.
In terms of kind of how we measure of course, one of the, the big challenges, I think, for perhaps anyone in the education or formation businesses, how exactly do you measure formation? And I’ll be really interested in, like, what what you think about that and that the way universities often do it seems a highly imperfect yardstick in that they sort of will measure graduation rates or starting salaries or what have you, which doesn’t exactly seem to be a great yardstick for for personal transformation or formation. That is one of the challenges.
So one of the things we often do after an online conversation is we send out a survey. Not everyone fills it out but a good chunk do. And we do ask people, how did this affect your thinking? You know, or is there anything you’re going to do differently as a result? So we gather a fair amount of, I guess you could call it anecdotal data, but you know, but there’s certainly a lot of it in the aggregate, it kind of the impact of it grows.
And part of what we are hoping for is just to encourage that kind of reflection too— the very exercise itself is we’re not just hearing stuff. We’re now encouraging reflection now that I’ve heard this, now that I’ve engaged with it. What then does it mean for me, for my thinking, for my relationships, for the way that I live my life, my embodied practices?
And so, frankly, what we really hope for is exactly that kind of thinking, which is hard to measure, but you know, is the basis for, for all the rest of it, you know our thinking, our relationships and our habits ultimately form who we are.
Todd Ream: Thank you. And I would speculate that for some that reflection will come soon. And they may have an immediate, but for some, it may come in a moment that occurs later or comes as a result of I listened or participated in this program and this one and then the sort of the cumulative component that that grows by engagement in those conversations, then allows them to see the world in ways enhanced ways than they otherwise would.
Cherie Harder: Maybe at some point we can even have an off the record conversation about how you all measure impact. Yeah, it’s a good question.
Todd Ream: If I may then, is there one program that you hosted and you probably understandably think of all of them as having their own unique significance and the contribution that the conversation partner offered as being significant, is there one that stands out in your mind?
One that you remember, one that people resonated with. Maybe it was the moment in which it occurred. Maybe it was what was said. But yeah, is there one that you heard?
Cherie Harder: I don’t know if there’s just one there were several, well I should say I, it’s like who’s your favorite child or whatever.
Todd Ream: Right, I realized the question was unfair from the very beginning, yeah.
Cherie Harder: But I’ll mention a few that I thought were, were special. One of them was a conversation we hosted between Jonathan Haidt and Andy Crouch that had to do with technology. And they had not met each other before. So it was the first time I think they had met each other even virtually. So the first time that they had really talked, and I think there was something special about that too. Just you know, Jonathan Haidt is very faith-friendly, but you know, he’s not a person of Christian faith. Andy Crouch obviously is.
Jonathan has done incredible thinking, I think, just on the broad topic about how social media and our media habits are forming us and and in particular forming digital natives who have never known another land, you know beyond our media landscape. So that was one, I think that I would if, if no one, if any of your viewers have never seen an online conversation before that I would particularly recommend.
I really enjoyed our recent online conversation with David Brooks around his book, How to Know a Person which I think actually picks up on some of the things that we’ve just sort of talked about here. You know, and he synthesizes an extraordinary amount of psychological, organizational, sociological research into an immensely readable book that in many ways is, you know, is a book about loving your neighbor well, and the implications and consequences are.
But you know, there’s also a number of not nearly as well known guests that we’ve hosted that I just really enjoyed and appreciated. We’ve hosted two online conversations, at least two that well, we’ve hosted many on suffering. We’ve hosted two on, on dying one with Lydia Dugdale and another with— Lydia is a clinical physician who’s also teaching at Columbia and with Amy Lowe, who recently wrote the book The Brave In-between and who herself it You know, only in her late 40s has stage four colon cancer.
So on one hand, it was like a grim subject, but I think it was a really beautiful conversation. And actually kind of adding to that Kate Bowler as well, essentially conversations that are hard to have but really important to have, so I would recommend those.
And I guess I’ll throw one more in, which is our conversation with Arthur Brooks on his book, From Strength to Strength which talks about some of the challenges of midlife. And it may just be that seemed particularly resonant to me. I give it my own situation, but that was also one that I felt was quite special.
Todd Ream: I may have watched that particular conversation and read the book with great interest for the same reason. So exactly. Thank you very much.
As our time begins to get short, I want to ask just a couple of questions about how your efforts have intersected with individuals who have committed their lives to the academic vocation a lot of whom we try to serve through the conversations that we host here. And they form and have benefited greatly from your programming there.
But when you consider possible participants who’ve committed their lives to the academic vocation, what qualities do you find most compelling? And in particular, what virtues intellectual, moral, or theological virtues do you find most compelling that those guests sort of resonate with or, or radiate in your interactions with them?
Cherie Harder: Part of what we look like just in terms of what we look for in terms of suggesting guests are some of exactly what you would think like, is do they have expertise on a topic that is compelling and of broad interest? Is there an accessibility there in that there are many absolutely brilliant scholars who are the world’s living expert on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I think that’s a quote from a, you know, some Meg Ryan movie, but they have a deep expertise on a very specific and particularized topic.
And part of what we’re looking for are scholars who have thought deeply on a topic that would be of interest to a thoughtful lay audience. And that they are able to communicate it in an accessible way. We’ve probably all talked with scholars who are utterly brilliant and perhaps slightly incomprehensible to even the thoughtful lay person. So you know, people who are, you know, good communicators of often very complex topics and can make it more accessible.
And I think embedded within that strength is a certain virtue, one of you call it intellectual hospitality, which is essentially kind of making something dense and meaty and difficult, more accessible, more digestible, more welcoming to you know, to people who are quite bright, are quite thoughtful, but are not scholars themselves.
And you know, thinking through again what does this mean? You know, my particular area of scholarly expertise, why does it matter? How should it impact one’s life, the way one thinks, or relates who or how much one loves how one loves God and neighbor? Like what, what does it mean for the broader world?
So you know, we’re looking for folks who have thought and written really incisively and insightfully on those subjects in a way that’s compelling and accessible and welcoming to others beyond their discipline.
Todd Ream: Yeah. I greatly appreciate the way you framed that ability on their part as an exercise of hospitality, their drive and commitment to inviting others into a conversation that they have a mastery of, but doing it in such a way that doesn’t reduce the complexity of the conversation, but makes it great space for others to enter into it who may not have the time, spend the time, et cetera investing in the ways that that particular person. I think that’s, yeah, it’s a very, very thoughtful way of saying that.
A considerable amount of effort has been invested in the documenting and lamenting the withdrawal of individuals committed to the academic vocation from service to the public. Oftentimes we call them public intellectuals, even. In what ways, if any, do you find that withdrawal to be true? And what do you think, given the people with whom you interact, can we do to reverse that trend?
Cherie Harder: You know, when I worked at the National Endowment for the Humanities, my boss at the time would joke that part of becoming a scholar was knowing more and more about less and less until you eventually knew everything about nothing. I think it’s an old joke, but you know, it sort of speaks to the specialization.
Todd Ream: So true and still funny.
Cherie Harder: It speaks to the specialization and the pressures to specialize. And not just specialize, but silo in so many universities. You know, so one of the things that we actually do with our senior fellows, we have a little more than two dozen senior fellows representing all sorts of both scholarly disciplines, but also people who are public intellectuals and not scholars per se is once a year, we have a senior fellows meeting.
And a big purpose of that meeting is to essentially better connect them and network with them with each other for the purpose of encouraging interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations. I mean, it is really hard to do that when all of the pressures at your university or beyond are towards specialization, siloization and the like to essentially you know, distinguish yourself by knowing a great amount about a very tiny thing and that just kind of working that more and more.
So we’re trying to provide from outside the university for the kind of conversation and imagination about, what does this work mean for the broader public? What does my discipline and my research, how does that basically connect to, how is it in conversation with someone from a different discipline?
And we’ve seen really kind of fun things come out of that. So for example, a couple of our senior fellows. One is James KA Smith, who’s an Augustinian scholar at Calvin. Another is a guy named Kurt Thompson, who is a clinical psychiatrist practicing in Arlington, Virginia. A third is Mako Fujimura, who’s a visual artist.
In one of Kurt Thompson’s books, he actually draws quite heavily on the work of both Jamie, the Augustinian scholar, as well as the visual work of Mako Fujimura to basically build his argument and his examples that appear in his book. And his book, he’s a brilliant writer, but his book is the richer for it.
And so, part of our hope is to kind of encourage more of that that you know that the Christian scholars are Christian scholars because the truth that they’re pursuing, it’s not just a tiny kind of siloed thing. It’s a truth that affects all of us. You know, and there’s a relational aspect to it. So part of our hope is to encourage that.
And we’re, we’re trying to do it in our small way, even through, you know, our senior fellows meeting and providing networking and collaborative opportunities for them.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For our last question, if I may, I wanted to ask you if you could interview one public intellectual from the past, who you never got a chance to interview, would that person be?
Cherie Harder: Oh gosh. Well, how far past am I allowed to go?
Todd Ream: As far back as you’d like, but I only gave you one.
Cherie Harder: You know, it’s a cliche to say, but of course it would be great fun to have C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton. But I think I might go with Augustine. I think he’d be fascinating in that, I mean, the guy was obviously just off the charts brilliant, but there’s also just a sense of, like, you don’t know what exactly he would say. And there’s something just, like, almost kind of emotionally raw about him too, like, you just kind of get the sense that, like this guy, he’s a colorful character and so, yeah, it’d be, it’d be kind of fun.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Our guest has been Cherie Harder, President of The Trinity Forum. Thank you for sharing your insights and wisdom with us.
Cherie Harder: I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Todd.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
