“About, With, & From” ft. Calvin University’s Noah J. Toly I Saturdays at Seven – Season Two, Episode Ten

Click here to listen to the episode on Spotify

In the tenth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Noah J. Toly, Provost at Calvin University. As an urban affairs scholar, Toly opens by talking about what he sees when visiting a city and, in particular, what he appreciates about the cultural assets each city possesses. He shares ways those assets can continue to be cultivated and the three cities which he finds most fascinating—Mexico City, Berlin, and Chicago. Toly then details which teachers and authors proved most significant in terms of his appreciation for cities and how his work with Wheaton College’s Center for Urban Engagement fostered within him a desire to continue to learn about people and their communities as well as an even greater desire to learn with and even from those people. Ream asks Toly about his article in the recent issue of Christian Scholar’s Review about Toly’s appreciation for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” the limitations Toly sees in Emerson’s thinking, and about Toly’s understanding of the contributions historic Christian orthodoxy offers in terms of an understanding of the academic vocation. Ream and Toly conclude by discussing Toly’s understanding of the contributions Calvin University has made to the academic vocation and the ways that the relationship shared by the Church and the university nurture such an understanding.

• Noah J. Toly’s The Gardner’s Dirty Hands: Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2019)

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 Noah J. Toly, Provost at Calvin University. Thank you for joining us.

Noah Toly: Thank you, Todd. Good to be with you.

Todd Ream: As an urban affairs scholar, what dimension of a city attracts your attention when you first visit? What challenges do you see that I might miss or what opportunities do you see that I might miss?

Noah Toly: Good question, Todd. The first thing that comes to mind, the first things that grab my attention, are probably the relationship between the natural environment and built environment, even including the city’s location the ways in which that city has a diversity of cultural wealth. And I don’t just mean in terms of, say, arts and entertainment and design, but I mean the cultural wealth that, diverse population brings to that city.

And then finally, the layers and layers of history in any given neighborhood. Any neighborhood that’s been around for any length of time has seen people come and go and has seen the change. And the marks of that change are sometimes still there and sometimes still visible and legible to people walking through and I find that fascinating.

I don’t typically look for the challenges first. I appreciate that question. And it’s not to say that there aren’t challenges, but I tend to look first for the strengths or assets of any given community. And I’m most interested in what those are and how the neighborhood, the community, the city is building on those.

Todd Ream: In terms of, you know, any number of challenges that a city may be facing then and you used the phrase assets, what assets of its social fabric do you believe would prove most critical to citizens when seeking to address them?

Noah Toly: Well, there are lots of ways to frame this. One of the frameworks that’s actually most interesting to me, I find most compelling and that I actually had a hand in helping to develop a little bit is a framework called the Thriving Cities Framework, where it’s called its own framework, the Human Ecology Framework, where they’ve drawn on a lot of thinking about the virtues that are in place in individuals and in communities and use that to frame up what cities need.

And they frame that, that according to the good, the true, the beautiful, the just and well-ordered, the prosperous, and the sustainable, where the good maps onto the realm of religious and social mores, let’s say. The true maps onto the realm of education, and the beautiful wraps onto the realm of design and the arts and so on and so forth. The prosperous maps onto the realm of the economic activity engine in the city. 

And I think the most important thing that I look for is synergy between those different endowments that framework calls them. How do those play together? And also, is there some strength in each of those areas? It’s not so much, is there a strong area, but is there some strength in each of them?

Todd Ream: In what ways could they be strengthened over time, not only in terms of the relationship they share, but in terms of their individual capacities and what practices might allow for such strengthening to occur?

Noah Toly: I think there are lots of practices you’re looking for, but one of them is practices of legibility. You’re trying to make those strengths visible. It’s hard to build on the things that the neighborhood can’t see, or people coming into the neighborhood can’t see. 

There are strengths that we haven’t paid enough attention to. How do we make those visible and legible to everyone? And then what are the practices of synergy, let’s say? How do you make them synergistic? How do you bring them together so that they’re more than the sum of their parts? 

So, for instance some neighborhoods are not strong with green space, but some are. And how is it that you can make the strengths of that green space synergistic with your efforts in, say, public health or synergistic with your efforts in education or the arts?

Todd Ream: Thank you. Now, I have to ask, of course, what city more than any other captures your imagination? And if you need to have more than one, we could certainly allow for that. But is there, is there a particular city that rises to that level in your mind?

Noah Toly: Well, I think you already caught me. I’m more than one guy, I think. 

Todd Ream: I thought I’d give you some allowance there.

Noah Toly: Thank you. I have a hard time reducing it beyond three. You know, I can, I can name five. I can name nine. I think I can get it down to three, but I can’t reduce it further.

Todd Ream: So I give you two, you come back with three. This is the where the negotiations going to go here. 

Noah Toly: Exactly. So Mexico City has to be one of them. And I’d add Berlin to the list. And then Chicago. And I’ve had different and I think very special experiences in each of those cities and they each stand out for a different reason. 

And so Mexico City is so interesting with its layers of history and literally layers that you can see not just in the built environment of the neighborhood, but underground as you tour parts of the city downtown. It’s also got an incredible cultural wealth there, and it’s got this mesmerizing immensity at about 20 million people in the metro area, it sprawls and sprawls. There’s always something new to find and learn there. 

Berlin is a place that I spent some time in every year for about seven years, and really came to learn a lot, especially from its museums, its arts but also the way it presents its own challenging, sobering history. 

And Chicago is a place that’s very special to me. I’ve had an opportunity to work there. When I was at Wheaton College, I worked in Chicago for Wheaton for 15 years and developed a lot of friendships, partnerships, learned from a lot of people there and from various communities. And also just came to appreciate the wonders of its waterways, its architecture. It’s probably got an iconic representation of every movement in architecture since its fire. And the things that you can learn there about the built environment are pretty incredible.

Todd Ream: When you look at those cities in what ways are they unique and that the things that make them stand out could not be replicated perhaps by other cities? But also in what ways, you know, might those unique qualities be transferable to cities that are looking to increase what they offer to their citizens, but also to guests that they welcome?

Noah Toly: That’s a great question. I think it really invites consideration of Chicago on that uniqueness point. There are lots of places you could have tried to build a great city in the Midwest, just west of the Great Lakes, but none of them actually would have worked out except where Chicago is, given the traffic that could come through those waterways and the ways that Chicago could connect the Atlantic, the Great Lakes, and through the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico. That’s why Chicago is where it is. That’s why we have a great city there. 

It’s not replicable, even in some other location around the Midwest. So there are advantages and fascinating parts of Chicago’s history that affected its technological developments that were likely the ways it became an infrastructure and transportation hub for the whole country. Its voracious appetite for timber and grain. Those things are going to stand out about Chicago and its history, and they’re probably not things you can see in some other city. 

On the other hand, you can learn a lot from the ways in which any of those cities, say, implements solutions to things. Let’s say transportation solutions. Mexico City, Chicago, and Berlin all have really robust public transit systems. I won’t say equally robust public transit systems, but really robust public transit systems that meet the needs of those metro areas, and meet them in unique ways, but ways that we can still learn from them. 

One of the things I remember seeing first, when I was in Mexico City, was that when you’re on the subway there, each stop is not only represented by a name, but by a symbol. So that those who can’t read, can still access and use the subway system. That’s a fascinating lesson in accessibility. And we have other lessons in accessibility to learn from cities around the world, but there’s something about the principle that Mexico City was embedding in that transit system a long time ago, decades ago, that we can all learn from.

Todd Ream: Thank you very much. I want to transition now to ask you about your own development as a scholar and that which led you to your fascination with cities. 

You earned a Bachelor’s in Interdisciplinary Studies in Spanish from Wheaton College, Master’s in Theology from Wheaton, and then a Master’s and a Doctorate from the University of Delaware in Urban Affairs and Public Policy. At what point did cities begin to captivate your interest?

Noah Toly: That story goes way back to those undergraduate days at Wheaton, but is also full of surprises. So I came into Wheaton as a freshman student, a first-year student, intending to do four things. And long story short, by the time I was in my third semester, none of those four things were still available to me in the same way.

I had decided not to do one of them, and then an injury kept me from doing all the other ones, and I was left with nothing that I had come to Wheaton to do. I didn’t respond to that in the most mature way possible. I responded to that in probably an immature way, even for, say, an 18-year old at the time. And I disengaged from my studies more than I should have. 

I think that disengagement had to do with the fact that when I came in, I had things I knew I was interested in, I knew I wanted to spend time on, and that was my motivation. And I really wasn’t deeply motivated at the time to do things just because apparently God was calling me to them, even if I didn’t understand them yet, like general education courses. And I finally got out of that funk after a little bit of time because God graciously provided me with other things that did capture my interest. 

And one of those things was a major in Spanish. I found Spanish and especially Latin American literature fascinating. One of my favorite courses I took was, is still, Latin American short stories. And I also majored in interdisciplinary studies, as you mentioned, with a mix of political science and economics and some of the coursework from the Human Needs and Global Resources program. 

And it was then in a course in urban economics and an experience in Mexico City that the light bulb went on and I realized that this um, mesmerizing immensity in Mexico City had captured my interest. I had all sorts of questions. I had all sorts of things I wanted to follow up on. And because of that time in the middle of my experience at Wheaton where I sort of checked out for a bit, it was a little late at this moment. I still had things I wanted to ask, but I was about to conclude my time at Wheaton College.

And so what’s the right thing to do or what’s the natural thing to do there? Find some other school, some other program, a graduate program in which to continue and ask those questions. And so I went to University of Delaware and made, and took a Master’s in Urban Affairs and Public Policy and continued for the PhD there.

Todd Ream: Thank you. When you think about the cultivation of your imagination in terms of what cities can offer their citizens, are there any authors to whom you turn to with greater frequency?

Noah Toly: There are a few, but as I think about this question, I think less about particular authors, but I’ll still name some. I think less about particular authors and more about patterns in my reading and my engagement. And the pattern that I see is an interest in and a natural swing back and forth between those who are taking a really close up look at the city, really zooming in, and those who are really zooming out. 

So, for example, Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford in the middle of the 20th century, both working out of New York City, both urban critics neither one actually formally trained at the graduate level or even at the undergraduate level in at least one of those cases, in urban studies. 

But Jacob’s really interested in the neighborhood level. In her Death and Life of the Great American City, it’s about what’s going on at that neighborhood level primarily. While Mumford is zooming way out, he’s interested in that, in the city in context. And that includes its global context, but that also includes its historical context. Multiple books in which he explores the history of cities, most notably the book, The City in History, which was a 1960 volume.

And I can see that pattern even with more contemporary scholars. So I’ll be interested in reading Saskia Sassen, who’s been quite influential for me. And she is a scholar of global cities, without whom that subfield, that particular angle on cities probably wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t be as thriving as it is. That’s how important she is to that conversation. And she’s interested in how cities fit into global patterns, networks, dynamics. 

And on the other hand, Robert Sampson, with his book on neighborhood effects, is helping us understand how the contemporary city and its neighborhoods have enduring effects apart from who moves in and out of those neighborhoods.

So I see myself swinging back and forth and learning from the people zooming way in and the people zooming way out.

Todd Ream: Thank you. As you mentioned earlier you served as the Director of the Center for Urban Engagement for Wheaton College for a number of years. Would you describe what the center sought to offer the Wheaton community, but also what the center sought to offer the Chicagoland community?

Noah Toly: As I look back on the Center for Urban Engagement, I think I have a slightly different perspective than the one that I took while I was running the Center for Urban Engagement, which is not to say that earlier perspective is wrong. Just to say, I think that I have the advantage of looking back and seeing more clearly maybe what that project was about. And the way I would put it now is that it was about embodying and bringing people along in the lesson of moving from learning about to learning with, to learning from our partners and from Chicago and from other cities. 

There is a tendency, I think, in our higher education spheres to get stuck in the learning about mode. Learning about is something that I can do by myself. If I pull one of those books down off my shelf, I can learn about things pretty well. It doesn’t mean that’s not any sort of learning with, it doesn’t mean that’s not learning from, but it’s, it’s got the flavor, primarily, of learning about. 

Learning with is, is like walking alongside someone, and maybe someone you weren’t expecting to walk alongside. It’s, it’s learning with and it’s learning with someone maybe you’re thinking you’d learn about more than you’d learn with. And learning from is actually like walking behind that person and letting them lead. 

And what I find most interesting, looking back at the Center for Urban Engagement, is that we had this pattern in place of moving students from, and moving ourselves, moving me, from learning about our community partners and their work, to learning with our community partners in their work, to learning from our community partner in their work.

And if I could put my finger on just one thing that CUE was doing, that would probably be it. And I really hope to weave that DNA into lots of other things that I continue to do in obvious ways or even in more subtle ways. But I think we all need to come along on that journey a little bit.

Todd Ream: Thank you. You’re the author and editor of seven books, including the award winning The Gardener’s Dirty Hands: Environmental Politics, and Christian Ethics. It was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. Is any one of your books more personal to you than others or perhaps more reflective of how you seek to assess the promise of community more so than maybe the others?

Noah Toly: Well, I would say that the book you named is actually the book that I would say is most personal to me. And while it doesn’t set out to try to assess the promise of community in that way, it’s a book that answered a question I was wrestling with for years. 

And I think that generally speaking, we as scholars are at our best when we’re actually doing work that answers questions that are nagging us a little bit that are sticking with us and that we really deeply want answers to for one reason or another. And that was The Gardener’s Dirty Hands for me.

Todd Ream: Can you say a little bit more about what you sought to offer your audience then, that you tried to reach through that book?

Noah Toly: Sure. I’ll tell you about the origins of that question, I said that it answered a question that had been sticking me for years. When I interviewed for the faculty position that I took at Wheaton College in 2006, I taught a class session in the evening that was in some ways a hybrid teaching demonstration and also research presentation. It’s the kind of place that wants to see you do both at once, and that makes sense to me. Calvin wants to see you do both those things too. 

And when I presented it, I ended—I was talking about urban environmental justice, this was the topic for the evening—and I ended with a reference to what was then, an initiative in Wilmington, Delaware called the Zero Brownfields Future Initiative. The idea was to remediate, clean up all the brownfields, which are sites of toxic soil pollution or perceived toxic soil pollution that complicate development or redevelopment efforts in that area. And I presented this as a concluding remark that there are efforts out there like this that might seek to clean up every brownfield in the city. And I took a lot of great questions from the students and others at the end there. 

And just as I thought the dean was going to call the whole Q&A session over and say that we were done with that teaching demonstration, someone in the back of the room who was on the search committee, an economist at Wheaton, raised his hand and said, “I have a question. Why would you want to clean them all up?” I’m sure that I looked at him with great puzzlement. I was transparent about the fact that I didn’t really understand where that question was coming from. It seemed obvious to me that we would want to clean them up. 

And I asked him if he could restate that, if he could help me understand. And he said, well, some of these will be really expensive to clean up. They’ll be expensive and difficult— expensive because they are difficult. Some of them will be less expensive because they’re simpler. And doesn’t it make sense to think about whether or not the expensive ones are worthwhile to clean up, given that you could devote those resources to other good things, like nutrition, public health, education.

And the answer I gave him, in the moment, was an answer that was, I think, credible, but it was more or less meant to get me off the stage. And the answer was, if I’m a policymaker or a politician in that neighborhood or in that city, I’m wanting to walk into one neighborhood and say, we’re cleaning up your brownfields and walk into the other neighborhood and give them the same message. 

I’m not wanting to walk into one neighborhood and say, good news, your’s are getting cleaned up because they’re cheap, and walk into another neighborhood and give them bad news that their’s aren’t getting cleaned up because they’re expensive. It was an appeal to equity. 

But at the same time, I knew that wasn’t an adequate answer because his appeal implicitly to efficiency isn’t a bad idea. The idea that we ought to also consider giving those resources to other good things and that the resources we have to give are limited. Those things are both true. And I was puzzling for years over how do I want to answer this question? And there were people I could go to for some of your typical answers, some of the off-the-shelf answers. And a lot of my friends who are economists could have taught me those answers really easily. 

I actually really deeply appreciate economic thought. I thought for a while about going and doing a PhD in economics. I didn’t do that but at the same time, I don’t think that was a satisfying way for me to answer the question, just to go for an off-the-shelf answer from an economist.

And as I puzzled over this, what I wanted to do was frame it theologically to the best of my efforts. And it took me six years, I think, maybe more, before I ran into someone who seemed to be wrestling with a parallel question from a theological perspective. And it was in a course I took on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And in that course on Bonhoeffer, we read a lot of Bonhoeffer, four credit hour course at the graduate level at Wheaton on Bonhoeffer so there was a lot of reading. 

But we also read Ethics, among other things. And there’s a moment in Ethics where Bonhoeffer’s quoting the Greek tragedian poet Aeschylus, and it’s from The Oresteia, from the second book in that trilogy, The Libation Bearers, where the main character, Orestes, cries out, “Right collides with right.” and Bonhoeffer describes this as the definitive context for responsible action. 

I couldn’t not dig into that. I had to learn more about what does he mean, where is he getting this, what are the implications, how does this help me understand what was the question I was wrestling with for six years or more about what seemed like right colliding with right. 

And I was able to spend some time with that idea, to bounce it off really smart people who could help me with it in lots of different contexts. Spent a sabbatical year at University of Chicago at the Divinity School at the Martin Marty Center there and had a lot of great conversation partners. And that eventually became the book that you asked about, The Gardener’s Dirty Hands. Sure, it’s not a perfect book, but I’m sure it helped me answer the question that was on my mind.

Todd Ream: Thank you very much. 

I want to transition now to talking about your service and leadership at Calvin as the Chief Academic Officer and Provost, and in particular an essay that you contributed to the Fall 2024 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review, “The Wholehearted, Daring, Balancing Act of Christian Scholarship,” as you titled it. 

Would you please share how you came to frame that article, and in what ways, if any, does it offer indications of what you hope about Calvin’s past, present, and future in terms of the academic vocation?

Noah Toly: Well, Todd, I really appreciated your invitation to participate in that project. I was grateful for it and I also appreciated the helpful framing that all of the authors had, including that we ought to interact with Emerson’s lecture, “The American Scholar.” And I did that. I spent a lot of time with Emerson, not just with “The American Scholar,” but with other Emerson writings and people writing about Emerson. 

And I happened to be in Cambridge where he delivered that talk when I received your invitation and even walked to the church where he gave the talk to see it. And so I spent a lot of time with Emerson and he’s clearly a compelling and towering figure, really charismatic intellect, obviously charismatic personality, magnetic in some ways and even in the sense that he could probably repel some people. 

I didn’t find Emerson particularly sympathetic actually, despite all of that. And I also have deep disagreements with some of the ways that he interprets the world and some of the conclusions he arrives at. And so it was actually difficult for me for a long stretch of this project to figure out what I would say about the calling of the Christian scholar that would build on what Emerson said. 

And I looked for the most charitable way that I could interact with Emerson, despite my reservations, despite not seeing him as sympathetically as perhaps some others do. And that seemed to me to identify what were the questions he was wrestling with? What. were the tensions that he was living into?

 As soon as I did that, it became a lot clearer to me how I would frame this particular essay and that I could learn quite a bit from Emerson. Despite my reservations about his way of interpreting the world and some of the conclusions he reaches, I could learn a massive amount from an Emerson who’s wrestling with questions like, how can I be wholehearted? How can I be a whole person? 

And Emerson who’s wrestling with, how can I dare, right? How can I be vulnerable? How can I be, he would frame it as self-reliant eventually, and what does that mean about my place in community? Those are questions I do think that we all wrestle with, one way or another we all answer them, even if not explicitly. We all find answers to these. We all live into some answer. 

And as soon as I put my finger on those questions, which is not to say they’re the only ones Emerson’s asking, just to say they were the ones that stood out to me, as soon as I did that. I found there were all sorts of parallels with how we as Christian scholars wrestle with our vocation and with some of the big challenges that we have to meet.

Todd Ream: Thank you. What do you hope, what you drafted, has an influence in terms of how we view things in Church-related higher education on, but also beyond the Calvin campus?

Noah Toly: Sure. One of the things that comes to mind is this wholeheartedness. I’ll just name all three of these parts this essay, but the wholeheartedness that Emerson was wrestling with is a wholeheartedness that we ought to seek and that for the Christian may be even deeper and more important. 

And I’m not trying to diminish in any way that wholeheartedness or integrity or being a whole person is important for others too. But throughout Scripture, we see commandments to be wholehearted in our devotion to God. As Christians, we have to see that in Scripture, understand that it’s part of our calling before God, in the Church, in the world, all the time.

And that means that we need to bring our scholarship in, not as something that’s compartmentalized, and set aside, and somehow firewalled from all the rest that we are, but as something that’s integral. We’re not called to be, we’ll say mere disciples in one context and mere scholars in another. Scholarship is part of our discipleship. 

We’re not called to be worshippers in one context and teachers in another. Teaching is part of our worship. And I think it’s important that we see it that way, and probably not only that we see it that way, but that we name it. It’s helpful to us to name that.

Daring vulnerability, or vulnerability in the sense of being susceptible to change, is something that I think we all need to wrestle with as scholars. It’s not obvious to everyone who observes the world of scholarship, the world of higher education, observes the academy, that susceptibility to change, vulnerability in that way, is part of who the scholar is. It’s one of the characteristics that marks the scholar. 

And every scholarly project that we start, including this one for me, this one on Emerson and the Christian Scholar for me, involves starting with, I don’t know. And somewhere in the middle, I still don’t know. And somewhere toward the end, I think I know. And somewhere when you’re publishing it, I know enough to publish this. 

Hence , somewhere after that, I may yet change my mind. And for the Christian scholar, well, that’s true for every scholar, but for the Christian scholar, because of that wholeheartedness that doesn’t allow us to firewall our scholarship from the rest of who we are before God, I don’t know, that wrestling, that patient waiting in wonder and awe and expectation at what God will be up to through our work and learning what He’s up to in the world, what that amounts to is something that can touch even our deepest convictions, our deepest and seemingly most stable convictions about God, self, and world are not divorced from what I just had to go through learning about Emerson. 

And we need to realize that the project that we’re up to is a project that could change us. And we need to be open to that. And that’s not just any one single project like an article or a book. It’s the project of devoting ourselves to this work for decades and decades. 

And then the final piece of the essay is on the delicate balancing act that we’re called to while Emerson emphasized this self-reliance or radical independence from tradition, from community. I’m not so sure about that conclusion. In fact, I’m pretty unsure about that conclusion. I’m pretty sure I disagree with Emerson about that radical self-reliance, that radical independence. 

On the other hand, it’s given us a lot of good things, to protect that independent scholarly spirit. And for the Christian, I think we need to balance the fact that we are as individuals called to explore, to test limits, to learn more, to challenge conventional wisdom. 

And at the same time, we’re called to do that in the context of community that shapes who we are and shapes our faith and our work together. And with an eye toward what the Church has always taught about God and His Word. And that’s more of a delicate balancing act than Emerson wanted to be part of, frankly but I think it is exactly the delicate balancing act that we’re all called to as Christian scholars.

Todd Ream: Thank you. You mentioned that this essay that you offered is part of a larger project, a project which you took on with three other provosts Pepperdine’s Jay Brewster, Wheaton’s Karen An-hwei Lee, and Samford’s Mike Hardin. In what ways did your interactions with them contribute to your understanding and then shape what you offered here?

Noah Toly: I think those interactions were indispensable. I needed to hear what Mike and Jay and Karen were seeing in Emerson. And what questions they were wrestling with. They’re all coming from different institutional perspectives. They’re all coming from slightly different parts of the Christian tradition in North America. They’re all coming from different disciplinary perspectives. We’re all bringing different disciplinary lenses to the project. 

And that enriched my ability to see things in Emerson that I needed to appreciate. And I needed to wrestle with myself. I would never have put my finger on so many important parts of what Emerson was up to without listening to them. And that included listening to their questions as much as listening to their answers, just sharing in and sitting with some of the questions that they had to ask.

Todd Ream: As our time, unfortunately, begins to become short, I want to make sure we make time to ask a couple of questions and talk through some details about Calvin’s legacy in relation to the academic vocation. 

It has a long history of offering its educators, as well as educators from other institutions, programming designed to cultivate the academic vocation, and in particular, as shaped by the Reformed theological tradition. As the provost, would you highlight a couple of those efforts and then offer a couple of examples of ways that you think they’ve been meaningful to educators who serve at Calvin?

Noah Toly: We have a very rich faculty development program here. We have that rich history of cultivating generous, hospitable, humble thought across the disciplines and engaging others and learning from them for a long time. One of the ways that we do that, and one of the ways we invest in continuing it, is through faculty development.

With our first-year faculty, we work with them in what’s called the Kuiper Seminar. And no, that’s not K-U-Y-P-E-R, it’s not for Abraham Kuyper, I know that everyone will automatically think that. It’s K-U-I-P-E-R named after one of the Calvin greats. And the Kuiper Seminar is about helping people come in and become better teachers and understand integration of faith and learning, primarily, but not only, in the classroom, in teaching.

After that, we have a second and fourth-year seminar, through our DeVries Institute for Global Faculty Development. And that’s for faculty to go deeper with faculty development, specifically on integration of faith and learning. And we also have for, for faculty who are not new to Calvin, but everybody we have our Center for Christian Scholarship, which offers significant grants for doing integrative, scholarly work. And we also have teaching groups that come alongside and help people to teach better. 

We have reading groups where people will engage some of the best thought about teaching and scholarship from among Christians and non-Christians alike. Our Kuyers Institute, which a lot of people know through David Smith’s work does fantastic work, not only with us here at Calvin, but also with K-12 teachers. 

And we try to take all those resources and make the most of them, not only for Calvin, but for others. So for example, the DeVries Institute has modules that anyone can take on integration of faith and learning. And those modules are available to other institutions as well that want to take advantage of what Calvin has to offer in that space.

Todd Ream: Thank you. When you think about the faculty that serve at Calvin, but also the faculty across Church-related higher education today, what virtues, whether intellectual, moral, or theological, do you believe are most important to cultivate in terms of how we understand and then exercise the academic vocation?

Noah Toly: I would say it’s some combination of curiosity, humility, hospitality, teachability. Those virtues have in common that they’re all about engagement and change.

Curiosity is, I want to know more. I want to engage God’s world with a sort of wonder and awe at what He’s up to already in some space and learn more about that. I’m going to fearlessly go into that space with my curiosity and just see what He’s up to there. Not with anxiety, but just wonder and awe. 

The hospitality and humility are relational versions of that same impulse. I want to, to receive well. I want to be changeable and understand that I don’t know everything. I don’t have it all down now. I might even need to change not just in what I know, but who I am in some way. And teachability is about that same thing. 

And that helps us with that delicate balancing act that we were talking about. I want to be curious and take initiative and engage with wonder and awe in every corner of God’s world and also be teachable before the Church at the same time. I’ve got to do those two things together.

Todd Ream: Thank you. For our last question then today, you just mentioned the Church. And in what ways do you believe the health of the academic vocation then is related to the health of the relationship that the Church and the university share?

Noah Toly: I think those are integrally related throughout Christian higher education. I know that institutions have different relationships with the Church. Some are affiliated loosely with a denomination. Some were historically affiliated and still stand in that tradition, but don’t have a relationship. Some like Calvin are denominational schools. Some are independent entirely. 

But I would say that no part of Christian higher education can thrive without the Church. And even those non-denominational, independent schools need to be attending to Church relations, need to be walking alongside the Church somehow. If you can’t answer that question, I think you’ve got an opportunity to do better then.

We at Calvin can answer that question in our formal relationship with the Christian Reformed Church in North America, but I think even a non denominational school has to be able to say, here’s how we’re walking alongside the Church. These are examples of that. And I think part of that is to keep us grounded. And part of it is to serve the Church well. 

And I would hope that we have shared institutional logic, shared virtues, shared commitments to, again, wonder and awe at what God is up to in the world. And that may, in the Church, drive a certain sort of response. And it, in the academy, drives a response that’s all about engagement and learning. This might, might be a little bit different. The Church isn’t going to have, like, 100 and 200 and 300 level classes in physics, but I think that same wonder and awe should be present in both of those places. We should see it and feel it when we’re together.

Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Noah J. Toly, Provost at Calvin University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us

Noah Toly: Thank you, Todd. I appreciated being with you.

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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.