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In the twenty-third episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Terence C. Halliday, Convener of the Global Faculty Initiative and Research Professor Emeritus at the American Bar Foundation. Halliday begins by discussing the opportunities that led to the creation of the Global Faculty Initiative (GFI), its mission, and the ways its members advance the relationship shared by theology and the academic disciplines within research universities around the world. In particular, Halliday emphasizes the ways the GFI Method links leading scholars working at a distance in conversations about questions transcending disciplinary boundaries. The end result of those efforts come in the form of a book (such as the one the GFI and Nicholas Wolterstorff recently published on justice). Halliday also emphasizes that just as important as how such a book may impact future conversations are the conversations and relationships that emerge when people invested in the practice of the Christian faith lend their expertise to conversations defined by penetrating and respectful dialogue. Halliday then goes on to discuss his own formation as a scholar, beginning as an undergraduate student at New Zealand’s Massey University, as a master’s student at the University of Toronto, and as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago. Halliday is trained as a sociologist but lends that training to research efforts led by the American Bar Foundation and projects broadly focused on the formation of and support for attorneys practicing law around the world. While not initially anticipated, the focus of those efforts in recent years led Halliday to focus on understanding the rapidly evolving landscape of the practice of law in China. Halliday then closes by discussing the intellectual and moral virtues he believes scholars across the disciplines need to cultivate, the theological virtues those scholars need to pray to receive, and the vices they need to be prepared to confront. In the end, Halliday views efforts he is leading with the GFI as efforts to foster a spirit of integrity that comes when scholars are encouraged and supported in their efforts to appreciate how the lives they lead on Sundays permeate the ways they exercise their calling to the academic vocation.
- Global Faculty Initiative Website – https://globalfacultyinitiative.net/
- Gregory Shaeffer, Tom Ginsburg, and Terence C. Halliday’s (eds.) Constitution Making as Transnational Legal Ordering (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
- Sida Liu and Terene C. Halliday’s Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
- Terence C. Halliday and Gregory Shaeffer’s (eds.) Transnational Legal Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
- Terence C. Halliday’s Beyond Monopoly: Lawyers, State Crises, and Professional Empowerment (University of Chicago Press, 1987)
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 Terence C. Halliday, Research Professor Emeritus at the American Bar Foundation and convener for the Global Faculty Initiative. Thank you for joining us.
Terence C. Halliday: Great pleasure to be with you.
Todd Ream: I’d like to open by asking you about the Global Faculty Initiative or GFI, a group for which you currently serve as the convener. The GFI’s mission is to, “promote the integration of Christian faith and academic disciplines by bringing theologians into conversation with scholars across the spectrum of faculties in research universities worldwide.”
Would you begin by offering an overview of the opportunities which brought the GFI into existence?
Terence C. Halliday: Uh, yes, indeed. Uh, although I think I must precede a discussion of the opportunities with a discussion of need and in fact my personal need, because as my academic career uh, developed I became aware of the fact that an early call that I had to be a Christian scholar had somewhere along the way been lost.
I didn’t know exactly what being a Christian scholar would mean but after I graduated from the University of Chicago, my life bifurcated went in two different directions. So I had a regular scholarly life following my intellectual agendas 60 or 70 hours a week as we scholars do. And then I had a Christian life, a spiritual life, a life in my local church where I love particularly to do biblical exposition. But these two things never converged.
And it wasn’t until some Christian professors in a men’s group I was at uh, here in Evanston, Illinois, near Northwestern University, it wasn’t until they, they essentially said I had a lack of integrity in my life. I hadn’t brought my scholarly work into conversation with my Christian faith or vice versa. And I discovered over the last 15 years as I gave workshops in various parts of the world with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students and InterVarsity here in the U.S., I discovered that many, many academics perhaps most Christian academics are in the same situation, strong uh, academic calling. Strong faith but often never the twain do meet.
Uh, and so some, some time around 2015 perhaps, um I felt myself called to a new chapter of life as my career came into its later stages. Um, and here I was inspired by the example of Donald Hay at Oxford University. Donald had been a senior member of the university administration, an economist, fellow of Jesus College. He felt that the Christian voice inside the University of Oxford wasn’t nearly as strong as it should be, even though he knew there were hundreds of Christian professors in the university. And so he retired early to set up this organization called Developing a Christian Mind which has continued wonderfully to this day.
I, myself had had a blessed rich and fulfilling career. Uh, and as my career wound towards its later stages, I asked myself, what next? Well, many academics just continue doing the same old thing I think until their dying day. I was inspired by Donald. I was ready for a new calling a new chapter in my Christian and scholarly walk. And as Donald and I began talking, we realized that what he’d done in Oxford was really necessary for the world as a whole. There needed to be a way in which faculty at research universities could not only equip themselves, but could help transform their own institutions whatever continent they’re on.
And so we formed the Global Faculty Initiative in 2020. Uh, we’re now 190 professors worldwide, on all six continents principally in research universities. And the founding therefore, of the Global Faculty Initiative, interestingly enough, converges with what seems to be a new enlivened interest across the world of faculty and Christian involvements with university faculty.
And so, GFI, we have our distinctive niche, which is research universities. Uh, and this is the organization that I’m thrilled to lead at the moment.
Todd Ream: Thank you. On the website for the GFI, one can find the GFI Matrix, which in short is a locale or repository where one can find all the theological and disciplinary content generated by GFI scholars. Would you provide an overview of the materials found on that portion of the website and perhaps even some hint at what might be coming in terms of additional materials that are in the queue or the pipeline?
Terence C. Halliday: Uh, for sure. Glad to do so. Uh, let me step back uh, and talk a little bit about what the executive director of the study center at Cornell calls the GFI method. We proceed in GFI, the Global Faculty Initiative, through dialogues. And we’ve had five dialogues to, to date, and each of those dialogues select a master theme of the Christian faith, Christian thought, the Christian intellectual tradition, but a theme which can also easily be talked about in any secular university of the world with which I’ve been associated like the University of Chicago, or the Australian National University, or the University of Oxford.
And we’ve had five such dialogues on justice and rights, on flourishing, on the virtues on order and disorder, and currently we have one in progress on love. And in each of these dialogues, there is an exchange back and forth between the theologian and the disciplinary scholar because the problem that I found and the problem that I think most disciplinary scholars find in research universities is we don’t have time to go and get a theological education. We’d love to. I’ve longed for my entire life. But it just doesn’t fit in the trajectory of our work.
I’d love to be able to read great theological tomes and then bring them to my work, but I don’t know where to start. I don’t have the time and maybe I don’t have the capacity. And so we needed to find a method to bring theology to people like me, crisply, clearly, accessibly, so that I could immediately bring it to my work and start engaging with it. And so that’s why we call these dialogues.
And they go through five cycles. We ask the theologian to write a couple of pages about what they’d like to talk about. Then we send that out to our people and say, can you see any connection with what she or he says here and what you are working on? Not sociology at large, not Victorian literature at large, what you are working on. And they send back a paragraph or two and we send those compiled to the theologian and say, well, this is what scholars across the world are thinking about.
Would you now write a theology brief, 8,000 words in ways that we can all understand it, no matter what our field, then take advantage of this knowledge you now have about the, the leading edges of scholarship. And we did this in our first dialogue on justice and rights. We sent it out the two pages that Nicholas Wolterstorff wrote to 80 people, 50 people wrote back and said, I can see a connection here. I can see a connection there.
We gave this all to Professor Wolterstorff. He wrote a brilliant 8,000-word essay, and then we sent it back out to everybody. And said, would you now think more deeply, think more deliberatively, and write a thousand words, a disciplinary note, or 3000 words, a disciplinary brief and send it back? Um, and about 40 people did. Uh, so we compiled those all, all and sent that material to Professor Wolterstorff.
And in, in the fifth iteration, he wrote an absolutely brilliant postscript, where he acknowledged that some of his understanding of justice needed to be changed, where he indicated there were fields of justice that he’d never imagined, and the ways that he could extend.
As I’ve already said there’s not enough biblical ground, grounding in your theology brief so it provides an eight-point biblical overview. And so it’s writings like these that now amount to some 230 pieces of various kinds that you can find in the GFI content matrix, which is a powerful engine. If you want everything on flourishing, you press the flourishing button and there it all is. If you want everything simply by hard scientists or by law professors, you press the button on law or you press the button on physical sciences and up come all of the writings of any kind there.
Um, but if you want more of a matrix approach legal professions legal professors thinking about virtues or humanity scholars thinking about order and disorder then you can sort of cross categorize and get precisely the cluster of materials that you want. And to start searching for those who are interested in theology, you can just start with the theology there in the matrix buttons. If you want to go to the disciplines then you can go to the disciplinary buttons.
I myself have fallen in love with with the resource section and the website on topics, a topical guide on each of these dialogues where one gets to see the extraordinary range of the great issues of the academy and the great issues of our day that are being addressed by the Global Faculty Initiatives members which I find both inspiring, heartening and challenging.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For someone who is seeking to get a foothold and start utilizing the vast resources that you’ve just been talking about, is there a particular resource paper? A contribution that you would point that person to that says this, you know, gets at the heart, the animating influence of the GFI, and then can help them, you know, propel further, propel them further into appreciating what’s available there in the matrix.
Terence C. Halliday: Well, the easiest way to begin is with the Global Faculty Initiative website to just uh, enter globalfacultyinitiative.net and look at our call, our mission. Uh, and there one, we’ll also see the GFI content matrix and the resources. I can’t help but advocate buying our first Global Faculty Initiative book that we launched at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford earlier this year. Um, the first in our series entitled, Cross-Disciplinary Encounters with Theology. And the first book is with Nicholas Wolterstorff, and it’s entitled Justice and Rights: Nicholas Wolterstorff in Dialogue with the University, published by Langham Press. Uh, you can see a connection on the website. I go directly to Langham uh, publishing, which has a marvelous worldwide presence of books which are also compared to my other university press books of a very modestly priced, extremely modest.
Uh, another more informal approach is to stay informed by joining the friends of the GFI. Email me at halliday@gfiweb.net. And we will add you to our GFI Friends regular emailing so that you know what we’re up to. And a very lively way of being involved was connecting via LinkedIn and going to either my personal, a site at Terence Halliday or the Global Faculty Initiative site.
Todd Ream: Wonderful. In the years to come, what are your hopes for the Global Faculty Initiative and what points of observation will you and your colleagues use to say that you’re gaining success in terms of the goals that you had for it?
Terence C. Halliday: Clearly the principal intent as one sees at the website is to make impact on the secular university by equipping Christian scholars with the ability to influence their research agendas to influence the way they do research. Uh, perhaps their writings, the way they shape their fields, the way they take the findings of their fields out into public policy or, or public debate. Uh, so we want impact on the substance of scholarship.
But we also want uh, presence. We want scholarly circles at particular universities such as we have at the University of Oxford, or currently the partnership we have at Cornell University. Uh, something similar we’ve done in the past at the Australian National University. Uh, we want to create a global community of disciplinary scholars, so law professors across the world, or engineers across the world who don’t know each other, would never have known each other. Now are brought together in a deliberative community of mutual encouragement and mutual support.
And we want to therefore have impact not only on fields of knowledge, but on academic institutions themselves, on the university of course, where we teach and, and do research and research institutes like mine. But also I think often as Christian academics, we forget what is integral to our academic lives beyond the universities, the publishing enterprises we’re engaged in the whole field of grant making. Uh, the work we do in scholarly societies, the conferences that we attend. Um, how we get involved in honor societies or in public policy debates or the kinds of consulting that we do with governments or with corporations.
How do we act Christianly in these contexts? How do we give others they do, which is what Nicholas Wolterstorff challenges us to do in the first dialogue. All right, now we have this dialogue on love by the great Scottish theologian, Oliver O’Donovan. Um, and he’s arguing that we need a whole new concept of neighbor love inside the academy to think of our academic peers as neighbors, different, all of the kinds of people who comprise a university or comprise our scholarly networks, what does academic neighbor love look like for those of us in the Global Faculty Initiative and beyond, who really want to make an impact on our scholarly fields?
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. I want to transition now to asking you about your own development as a scholar and your own formation. You are a native of New Zealand. Uh, you began your academic journey at New Zealand’s Massey University where you’re in a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. And then after earning a second master’s degree, as you echoed earlier in our conversation, you then went on to earn a PhD at the University of Chicago.
At what point in time did you discern the study of sociology would play an important role in your vocation?
Terence C. Halliday: Well, like much of my academic life it went by a series of strange twists and turns because I began studying as an undergraduate in the academic field of education because I thought I was going to be a teacher. I discovered that the sociology of education was the path that interested me most. My undergraduate double major is in history. Um, but earlier on I got captured by the concept of historiography, that there are various kinds of social sciences and other theories of history that provide different interpretations of the origins of the American Civil War or the rise of national socialism.
And so now I came to see the social theories, i.e. sociology could have some kind of salience in these great issues. And so I then went off to the University of Toronto and did a degree in sociology before going to the University of Chicago my dream institution in the field. Uh, that’s what sort of brought me eventually to the field in which I’ve stayed wonderfully and very richly ever since.
Todd Ream: Were there any mentors along the way who impacted your vocation greater than perhaps others and/or authors that you read or continue to read to this day maybe even?
Terence C. Halliday: There were certainly mentors at every stage. Um, the professor who called me aside only in my first or second year of college and said, “Halliday, you are not working hard enough. Uh, you’ve got much more ability than you’re displaying. Um, get to work.” Uh which I found very sobering. And in fact, I think I did try and get to work or the professor who taught history and therefore sent me in the direction of sociology or the professors of sociology of education who themselves were very appreciative about the field of sociology and encouraged me.
And, and, and that process went on all the way through to the University of Chicago, where I became a research assistant to a professor working on a major project that turned out at the American Bar Foundation, which used to be on the campus of the University of Chicago right next to the law school um, and as it were channeled my more general sociological interests into a particular channel.
I would say though, that in a way it’s been my co-authors and my collaborators who’ve been the most influential. Uh, my first book I did by myself, as many of us know, that’s hard and lonely work. Uh, but I was at an international conference in Madrid in 1990 and in the same session was a French intellectual who had been working on much of the same problem but on France since the 1300s, and so we discovered that my book on the US in the 1950s and 60s and his book on France from 1300 to 1850 we’re actually dealing almost exactly with the same problem.
We became great friends. He was much smarter than me. Um, and uh, so we did a series of books and articles together over the next 30 years. So there’s a great influence.
Former doctoral students a couple of them who were particularly outstanding became then collaborators and co-authors. Um, former research as assistant. And then I can talk more about a couple of my academic colleagues in the last 10 years. Uh, law professors with whom I’ve co-authored and co-edited books. Again, these are sort of marvelous and relatively painless ways to learn to have a wonderfully stimulating very smart coauthors who know a lot of things that you don’t and need to know.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. As you mentioned you served in various roles with the American Bar Foundation, an institution with which you’ve served since 1983. The mission of that organization is the principle that deep understanding of the law is vital to a more just and equitable world. And to that end, they conduct rigorous empirical research that explores the intersection of law and society, creating insights that underpin today’s most pressing issues and affect millions of people every day.
In what ways did you sense then your vocation as a sociologist intersected with the needs of the American Bar Foundation?
Terence C. Halliday: Well, this is a wonderful example of God’s providence. Uh I was a second or third year doctoral student at the University of Chicago, and I needed money to help keep my wife and children, um alive and well. And the professor had got a lot of money to do a research project on lawyers. And this project was going to be run through the American Bar Foundation, as I said, that live, that was just right across the road from the sociology department at the University of Chicago. And so he hired me.
I already had an academic interest in the role of expert professions in advanced capitalist societies, and this was a very general interest that I had in professions of all sorts, architects and engineers, and the military and the clergy. This research project essentially narrowed those interests to focus on law and legal professions. Uh, and so I ended up doing my doctoral dissertation in that line of work. And the first book that you just mentioned.
Uh, I went off to the Australian National University to teach for four years. When I came back to the US I came back with the intent of coming to the American Bar Foundation for one year before becoming a regular academic. but this Institute of Advanced Studies is such a remarkable place. Um, I never managed to leave because we are comprised of a faculty at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University who are jointly appointed to this institute of advanced studies. Uh, we’re all either law professors or social scientists, or both but we all converge in a study of law and legal institutions.
And one of the great merits of this institution is that it gives tremendous freedom to set academic agendas. It’s a rich organization by the standards of most academic organizations so the resources to do pioneering work. and because it was a research institute or is a research institute and this doesn’t have regular teaching demands there’s the flexibility to do research that requires sudden movements here and there which was invaluable for my international field work on globalization.
I’ve been working mostly on international organizations for the last 25 years, and so the ability to be able to take the time whenever it was needed to fly to Washington or Vienna or Jakarta or, Seoul, South Korea was fantastic.
Altogether, the ABF, the American Bar Foundation has enabled me to also be active in fighting for the just world that you quoted and most dramatically in my own career that’s been my work on China, which I began around 2000 and which came to fruition in, in, in one book on China and markets. And then perhaps even more importantly, on another book on human rights in China that I published in 2016 I think.
And much of that struggle both on the economic side and on the human rights side, I came to see through the Global Faculty Initiative there’s a struggle for justice. Only when I was working on those projects, I didn’t have the theological sensibility to understand that that’s actually what I was studying implicitly. And so I was not able to bring a theological edge to it that I think the Global Faculty Initiative would have given me had it been up and running in the year 2000.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. If I could ask, of all of the questions, you know, that you’ve pursued over your time with the American Bar Foundation, are there any that you would contend or more closely or most closely expressive of the core of your vocation as you came to understand it?
Terence C. Halliday: Well, my scholarship through the American Bar Foundation and, and eventually the focus on globalization, dealt with some big events like the Asian financial crisis or the generic problem of what happens when businesses fail, how can they be revived or rehabilitated or liquidated? Um, I studied money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism. I looked at great political transitions. I looked at the creation of legal rules for global commerce. Uh, and all of those in a way come down to two big questions or can be subsumed under two big questions.
Um, I recently was asked to write an intellectual autobiography for a journal, the Journal of Law and Society in my interdisciplinary field. Um, And it helped clarify my thinking on exactly the question you’ve just asked. And so uh, on the work of globalization in law and markets, the big question there is, who is it that makes rules for world trade? And in whose interests?
Because there are many organizations out there like the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the OECD Club of Rich Nations, all of them are making rules every day for how the world’s economies work. And very little sociological research had been done on who makes those rules and, and how those rules are made. And so, um all of my writings on this line of work since 2000 have been focusing generically on that question.
And then the question, as I mentioned earlier is on legal professions. And the question here is, what role do legal professions, not any private lawyers, but legal academics, judges military lawyers what role do they play in the rise and the fall of political liberalism of countries moving from an illiberal, absolute monarchy or authoritarian or military dictatorship into something like a democracy or a rule of law society?
And so over the years with Lucien Karpik and with the professor Malcom Feeley at Berkeley we coordinated, coordinated dozens of country experts on these kinds of transitions. Uh, again, on five continents over 400 years. Uh, trying to see if we could develop empirically based theory, of this kind of to, to answer this question. And then my work ultimately focused on China.
Both of those questions have enabled me then to engage in public policy and rights activism with global publics, where what I seek to do is to take the fruits of my research and to inform congress or to inform international organizations or to inform the international media of my findings.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You’re the author and editor of eleven books, with your first book published by the University of Chicago Press in 1987, Beyond Monopoly: Lawyers, State, Crises, and Professional Empowerment. Then your most recent book published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, right before you transition to establishing the GFI is Constitution Making and Transnational Orders.
When you look back at all of the book projects in which you participated and the people with whom you participated in those, is there a discernible arc to that work that you can see?
Terence C. Halliday: Uh, that, that again is a wonderful question that I’ve been grappling with over the last several years as I’ve been asked in one or another setting to revisit my career and see if there is any sort of rational course of development there. And I came to recognize there was an arc but also rather interestingly, that arc was punctuated by what I called serendipities in the article I just mentioned previously, or as Christians, we may see as providentialities, where completely out of left field something happened.
Somebody contacted me and my trajectory went off in a somewhat different direction within kind of some reasonable coherence of an arc. So let me give you an example. Uh, that first book you mentioned is focused on the politics of professions particularly when states are in crisis. I published a couple of other books in the 1990s and then got a phone call in 1999 from the World Bank. And the person said, China is about to work on its new five-year plan. Uh, you’ve written some things on professions. They want to reconstruct their whole mode of regulating professions. Would you come and sit down with some policy makers with the state council office on restructuring the economic system and indicate what are the models out there in the wider world that we might consider?
I mean that, that’s an example of, in my mind, a wonderful way in which God came into my life in a manner I never anticipated. I had no interest, particularly in Asia, really no knowledge of China apart from reading the newspaper. And so an arc of writing, developed then on the professions and the role of professions. And another arc of writing on creating economic orders. And I would say that both of these came together in my edited book in 2015, Transnational Legal Orders I edited with a law professor at Georgetown, a distinguished international lawyer Gregory Schaefer.
Uh, and that book essentially says all social behavior anywhere in the world these days is influenced by legal orders beyond nation states. Uh, and what we need to do is to understand those legal orders are out there. We need to know how to think about them. We need to know what brings them to being, how they fail, how they conflict. And so we wrote a book where we’ve tried to set up a new paradigm. We invited numbers of scholars to contribute to that.
And then there have been a series of books in that vein, culminating in the constitution book, that you just mentioned, which I also co-edited with Gregory Schaeffer and my distinguished colleague at the University of Chicago Law School and the American Bar Foundation, Tom Ginsburg, which really says the constitution’s book says there’s constant constitutional revision going on around the world, but there’s a global set of norms, a global set of standards that are always exerting some influence on what those constitutions looked like.
And so looking back I see these arcs. I also see, as the article points out in the Journal of Law and Society four or five inflection points where I felt God called me in a direction and to an opportunity, to a possibility that I had never imagined something far beyond the rational organization of a conventional academic career.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. In what ways then, this arc, as you’ve talked about it, if any, then channel your interest toward the establishment of the Graduate Faculty Initiative?
Terence C. Halliday: In a way, all of these books implicitly addressed questions that every Christian in my field should be thinking about. But most of us are not. And so my answer to your question is somewhat paradoxical. It was really my lack of theological equipping, my lack of theological engagement to address any of the issues that I’ve just talked about that brought about the Global Faculty Initiative. I just couldn’t get a theological education for the reasons that I mentioned. Um, I really wanted a life of integrity where my faith really influenced my scholarship, but I, like hundreds, maybe thousands of other Christian scholars, didn’t know how.
And so Donald and I created the Global Faculty Initiative explicitly to equip extremely busy people like most academics and research universities at elsewhere and at the academy, to equip us effectively and dare I say, efficiently to at least begin start thinking about our work right away.
And so I’m, now in the rather peculiar position I find as each of these dialogues unfolds of rereading my own writings with a new lens, theological lens, and discovering things that I wrote that I didn’t see and that I didn’t write about because I didn’t have these theological ends. So I’m in a kind of a phase of life of reinterpretation now, now with the theological equipment that the Global Faculty Initiative has given me.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Before we close our conversation today, I want to turn and ask you about how you came to understand the academic vocation, and in particular the qualities and/or characteristics that you believe define it.
Terence C. Halliday: I like to think of it now as a vocation where there is a love for the gifts of the mind, that God has called some of us who are gifted in thinking in certain kinds of ways and the heterogeneous ways we do in the academy, God has given us certain gifts, that we can use with creativity, we can use in discovery, and those are accompanied in the academic vocation with a joy in learning. I love to learn new things. The wonderful thing about sociology and the wonderful thing about law is you can study anything under the sun if you can frame it in the right kind of a way. So I love to learn new things. And I think that’s part of the academic vocation for so many of us.
And also, I would say there is a joy in learning together. I love the collegiality of scholarship certainly in teaching, certainly being in research teams. It’s wonderful working with collaborators who know things you need because they know things that you certainly don’t. And so one is constantly in this learning mode. And so that’s part of the joy of the Global Faculty Initiative for me that here we are focused as an institution, our organization on the love for the gifts of the mind of loving the Lord our God with all of our hearts and minds, our university minds, our minds as intellectuals in addition to our minds as Christians in general.
Uh, the Global Faculty Initiative stimulates a joy in learning together. Uh, I was just looking at the people who have signed up for our partnership with Cornell University Study Center, our justice and rights workshops in the next few months. Look at these, listen to these fields—scholars in English, sociology, business, archeology, environmental science, forest ecology, epidemiology, health sciences, biomedical sciences, Reformation literature, performance studies, chemical engineering, political science, communications.
For me, that’s sheer joy because most of my colleagues love lots of other things in the academy, but we are so specialized and we are so busy that we simply can’t follow that. So this joy of being able to, um sit down together around the table in mutual respect and learn together in the Global Faculty Initiative is for me, just a thrill.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You mentioned that the virtues were part of one of the dialogues in which the Global Faculty Initiative has invested. I want to ask you then now for individuals who embrace the academic vocation as they’re calling, what moral and intellectual virtues do you believe are most important for them to cultivate in order to flourish in such a capacity and, and such a calling?
Terence C. Halliday: Well, may I begin by, by commenting on three vices since sometimes it’s easier to think about vices than virtues.
Todd Ream: I was going to ask that question eventually, but I thought I’d start with the more positive side of things.
Terence C. Halliday: Uh, thank you. Well, most of us may be familiar with what I think is probably the worst of the vices in the academy, and that’s the pride and arrogance that one I discovered over and over again. My mind is so superior to somebody else’s mind. My precursors whose shoulders actually on whom I am standing, my precursors missed so much. And so there’s that pride and arrogance vice.
There’s the, there’s a fear vice I’ve found many times of putting your work out there, of trying to publish, of a fear of being rejected by referees. Uh, a fear of going into print and then having people say, my goodness, I never realized that person who was so limited or so foolish or so wrongheaded.
Um, when we switched to the virtues as you say, we had this series on virtues, in part because I grew up in a Christian tradition where we never talked much about the virtues. We were a bit nervous about them actually. It sounded like uh, gaining salvation by works. Um, and so when this brilliant theological ethicist at Yale Jennifer Herdt, wrote this sort of overview of the virtues, and 20 or 30 disciplinary scholars responded to her, including me. Uh, there were four that, that jump out. Uh one is the virtue of love. Uh, we’re working on this love dialogue and Oliver O’Donovan, is just emphasizing how much we need to be thinking of our scholarly peers as neighbors, as scholarly neighbors and exerting neighbor love towards them. What does that look like? That’s exciting.
A second is the, is the question of humility as an antidote to pride. A third, I would say is courage in a way. Um, it takes a certain amount of courage to open up a new frontier, a certain kind of a boldness to lay oneself open to criticism and to scorn even.
And then lastly I become quite interested in as it relates to my China work on prudence, on practical wisdom. I’ve never thought about prudence in my entire academic career. I’ve never really known what practical wisdom was. Um, and so now here’s the question how do I take my work into the wider world? How, and how do I present it in a way that the rest of the university can comfortably hear and wider audiences in public policy domains or in the public arena can hear.
And so for me, the virtues have become a new sort of a learning edge for my Christian walk. And again I’m just so grateful for Jennifer Herdt and this dialogue on the virtues and the dozens of scholars who responded, opening up my eyes to a new vista of faith in the academy.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. What theological virtues then do you also believe are perhaps most important for Christian scholars? Christians who embrace the academic vocation to pray to receive?
Terence C. Halliday: Well, I certainly think the virtue of love. Um, I am sort of the classic theological virtues as I mentioned. Um, and I’ve come to see following Wolterstorff’s uh, leadership on the first dialogue in his book on justice and rights, the centrality of justice as a theological virtue.
Uh, I myself am amazed by myself because for so many years I taught in our adult education, the major prophets, the minor prophets, where justice just runs like a river through those books but I never managed to extract it out of the biblical text and apply it to my academic work, which is shameful in a way. Uh, and so, understanding that these theological virtues need to be front and center in my own prayerful encounters, where my scholarship and also in working through GFI that’s been for me an exciting a new frontier for in, in my own Christian walk.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. As we now close our conversation, I want to ask you to consider in what ways do you believe individuals who embrace the academic vocation as they’re calling, can be of greater service to the Church? And in what ways can the Church be of greater service in uh, cultivating the calling to the academic vocation?
Terence C. Halliday: Uh, I think that’s also a most important question because we see what inadequacies in the way in which the academy, Christians in the academy and Christians in the Church relate. The Christians in the Church, Christian academics in the Church forget about what they’re doing in the rest of the week when they’re in church. Or people in the academy are completely dismissive of the Church. Uh, or there’s a kind of a negative apologetics, um that occurs when academics and the Church relate.
Uh, I love the expression that Vivek Matthew, the executive director of Chesterton House at Cornell, has coined about academics being the presence of the Church in the university. Uh, and so I think in part what we are called to do is to not only bring our scholarship into the university, but to bring our scholarship inside the Church.
A number of years ago at First Presbyterian Church in Evanston next door to Northwestern we um, found we had about 20 or 30 faculty in the congregation, and we created an adult education program called First Faculty, in which we invited each faculty member of whatever field to speak to the rest of the congregation about how their work related to their faith.
That was a fantastic experience. I thought that about three or four people would turn up because we arcane academics would be thought to be arcane. Uh, but 40 or 50 people were coming to see how the Sunday school teacher they knew, or this choir person they knew, or this person sitting on session they knew, what did they actually do during the week and did it have any relevance to their faith?
And so um, I think that we can not only as academics serve our local church, but we can also serve the Church universal. And the Global Faculty Initiative is really trying to reinforce over and over again the universal, the universality of the Church not only across Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions but also across every continent. And as academics, we often have a way of doing that that many other Christians don’t because we tend to be engaged in international and global networks. And so there’s much that we can bring to the Church.
I could say a thing or two about the church to academics but perhaps I’ve run out of time.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. It was wonderful conversation today.
Our guest has been Terance C. Halliday, Research Professor Emeritus at the American Bar Foundation and Convener of the Global Faculty Initiative. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Terence C. Halliday: Thank you. It’s been a great privilege to be 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.
