“We live in days of ferment, agitation, and transition.”
This is the opening line from a 1967 statement on academic freedom written by Carlton Gregory, a longtime professor of philosophy at Barrington College, a Christian college once located near Rhode Island’s capital. It closed its doors due to financial troubles in 1985, the year I was born. My own connections to Barrington go well beyond the coincidence of its death and my birth. Shortly before its closing, my father attended the college, and before that so did three of my grandparents, two of whom had distinct memories of Dr. Gregory’s lectures, and one of whom also led expeditions in the Christian Service Brigade (think: an evangelical Boy Scouts) with Dr. Gregory’s son.
Dr. Gregory’s path to the professorate at a small, conservative New England Christian college was unconventional at the time. He earned his bachelor’s and doctorate from Brown University (where I’m told he studied Paul Tillich’s philosophy of language), and his master’s from Harvard. Reading between the lines of his fifty-seven-year-old statement, you can see some of the mid-century fissures and cultural challenges he must have felt after shifting from the most liberal of the Ivies to the neo-evangelical enclave of Barrington. Much of the statement is aimed at a series of epistemological questions: How should Christian scholars and researchers approach critical inquiry? Is there a “distinctively Christian logic or scientific method”? (No, he argues.) Is all truth God’s truth? (Yes, clearly so.) Amid all the cultural turbulence, he wrote, Christian professors “must ration problems carefully enough to make our students swim, not so many as to make them lose sight of their goal.”
The epistemological questions that Gregory raised in 1967 were questions that animated my own young adulthood in the late ‘00s. Raised in an evangelical subculture, educated at a Calvinist Great Books college before going on to a Catholic research university and then a secular Ivy—I, too, had to develop new habits of mind to adapt to a broader world that did not share my basic assumptions about ultimate things. In this period, the writings of Mark Noll, Nicholas Wolterstorff, George Marsden, and others shaped my sense of vocation and licensed me to imagine a career in the academy as a Christian. Many Christian academics around my age could probably tell a similar story: these exemplars offered an intellectual awakening and pointed me toward a vocation to pursue truth wherever it might be found—even in the God-haunted Ivy League.
And yet, as important as these epistemological questions are, I have the nagging suspicion that they may not be the primary ones facing the next generation of Christians in higher education.
My own thoughts on this began to take shape when I was studying with Dr. Gregory’s grandson, who now teaches religion at one of those God-haunted Ivies in central New Jersey. I read deeply in Augustine, Aquinas, John Calvin, Mary Wollstonecraft, James Baldwin, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Jeffrey Stout, and Marilynne Robinson. I encountered competing visions of the good life from the Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and atheistic traditions. Even amid all the obvious theological difference, I began to notice that the best exemplars of these traditions cared deeply about the human person—in all his or her irreducible complexity. To put it simply, these traditions cared about formation in all its intellectual, moral, and spiritual dimensions.
I began to wonder: what if the most pressing challenges facing us in the next twenty to thirty years are not so much epistemological, but anthropological? In other words, what if the task facing us in this moment is not so much about what and how we know, but who we are?
“We live in days of ferment, agitation, and transition.”
If we fast forward from 1967 to the present moment, some dynamics remain strangely similar: growing distrust in elite institutions, mounting political unrest and violence, confusion over shifting norms around gender and sexuality. And yet, other social dynamics appear relatively novel, and are particularly challenging for the landscape of Christian higher education:
- The rapid growth of artificial intelligence has already permeated the classroom and put a question mark on what sort of knowledge we ought to be cultivating among our students.
- The global pandemic accelerated the decline of in-person education and also led to lack of socialization among the students who lived through it.
- Radical political activism on the right and the left has repeatedly stymied university administrators who have tried to protect academic free speech while maintaining rules about “time, place, and manner.” Not a new tension in itself, of course, but one substantially altered by the omnipresence of social media.
In all these points of tension, the question about formation is ever present. What sorts of distinctive human excellences do we hope to cultivate in our classroom? In our writing? In our service to campus, the church, and our communities? How much should we fight to maintain the centrality of in-person instruction and mentorship in our institutions? What habits of mind and soul should we pursue in the midst of increasing political polarization? How might our own Christian institutions have contributed culpably to the social injustices and culture wars that characterize our present moment? And can Christian college administrators overcome the economic pressure to view students as consumers to be entertained rather than souls in need of nourishment?
I have written elsewhere that I see Christian universities as possessing a distinct responsibility, vocation, or even charism, to pursue intellectual, moral, and spiritual formation. That is not to say that we have always done that well. But the responsibility remains regardless of our past failures. Are we approaching the task of human formation with a robust vision of the good life? Do we think about education as merely the mechanical transferal of skills and techniques? Or do we offer our students a way of flourishing constituted by the crafts or practices that make for an excellent human life? In short, are we dedicated to giving our students a chance at an intellectual, moral, and spiritual awakening?
These high-level questions are challenging enough; providing concrete examples of what we are hoping for can be even more challenging. Later this fall, my own institution is hosting a conference (“Renewing Mind and Heart”) about what this kind of formation might look like in Christian colleges and universities. Several friends and mentors of mine, including James K.A. Smith, Jessica Hooten Wilson, and the previously mentioned Eric Gregory, will gather to think through the distinctive challenges and opportunities we face as educators a generation (or three) removed from Carlton Gregory, Noll, Wolterstorff, and Marsden.
Despite cultural shifts, fundamental questions about human flourishing and formation remain constant in our Christian communities. Amid all these agitations and transitions, however, one of my reasons for hope is the generational faithfulness that keeps showing up at unexpected times and in surprising places. It is the mentors who pass down what is best in the tradition and call out the worst: the Mark Nolls of the world who offer a bracing jeremiad against anti-intellectualism; the Nicholas Wolterstorffs who remind the church that justice is integral to piety; the Drs. Gregory who show their students how to swim and not drown in deeper intellectual waters. This sort of vocation—in all its intellectual and spiritual dimensions—seems to be something worth examining and renewing.
