The utter travesty that was the congressional “Super Committee” has led us to even lower depths of skepticism about the government’s ability to control debt and spending. In this new era of malaise, lessons from the time of the Constitution’s adoption — and fears from those days about what the newly-framed government might become — seem more relevant than ever. Some key Patriot leaders predicted in the 1780s that a government with unlimited power to tax and spend would become an ever-growing monster.

Since the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, Americans have had a hard time taking the Antifederalists (opponents of the Constitution) seriously. How could anyone, we may wonder, not appreciate the wisdom of the Constitution? But remember that some of America’s greatest Founders, most notably Virginia’s Patrick Henry, opposed the Constitution. Having fought against the centralized, intrusive British government in 1776, the Antifederalists balked at placing such a government over themselves again. Many of them, including Henry, expressed fundamental doubts — concerns rooted in Christian principles — about politicians’ capacity to handle this kind of power.

Henry was one of the most zealous opponents of British taxes, starting with his stand against the Stamp Act in 1765. He penned resolutions against the act which electrified the colonies and galvanized the growing American resistance movement. Henry, of course, is best known for his “Liberty or Death” oration in 1775, which convinced Virginians to take defensive measures against the British.

Henry served as Virginia’s governor for much of the Revolutionary War and watched as the Articles of Confederation government managed, with great difficulty, to defeat the British military. America struggled to supply George Washington’s army, and in the 1780s, the nation seemed unable to develop coherent policies on trade and diplomacy. Some, like Henry’s young colleague James Madison, thought the time had come for dramatic constitutional change in favor of national power.

Despite the government’s inefficiencies, Henry was convinced that creating a robust central government was not the answer. Henry was particularly concerned that his adversaries Madison and Alexander Hamilton were eager to give the government under the Constitution the authority to tax, a power the Articles government did not have (it depended instead on the state governments to provide operating funds). Taxes had driven the Patriots to revolt against the British. Why, Henry asked, would anyone wish to recreate the same conditions which had threatened the colonists’ rights in 1776?

At the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788, Henry proclaimed that American liberty was at stake in the decision over the Constitution. He asked how Americans would bear the “enormous and extravagant expenses, which will certainly attend the support of this great consolidated government”? America would find “no reduction of the public burdens by this new system.” Taxes would just fuel the “uncontrolled demands” of bureaucrats not contemplated by the Constitution.

To Henry, these fears were rooted in his assumption that in the long term, officials would inevitably misappropriate and abuse the power granted to them. “Did we not know of the fallibility of human nature,” he told the Richmond delegates, “we might rely on the present structure of this government,. . .but the depraved nature of man is well known.” Henry’s Christian worldview made him acutely sensitive to the risks of placing expansive power in human hands. Hoping that only ethical, public-spirited people would serve in national office was foolish, he believed. Henry would “never depend on so slender a protection as the possibility of being represented by virtuous men.”

Henry lost the argument. By a narrow margin, Madison and the Federalists ratified the Constitution in Virginia. Henry’s fears about the size of government did not come to pass in his lifetime, but during the Civil War, his predicted pattern of uncontrolled growth began. Massive new entitlements in the 1930s (Social Security) and the 1960s (Medicare), set the stage for the phenomenal increases in military and domestic spending under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. In the long run, Henry’s forecast has proven true: if the government has the ability to do so, it will spend, and once spending is in place, it is nearly impossible to roll back.

The warnings of Patrick Henry remind us that our Constitution, wise and balanced as it may have been in 1787, cannot control politicians who have the unchecked power to tax and spend. As the Congress scrambles to reduce the debt, it is time for Americans to revisit the possibility of amendments to the Constitution that would really constrain the size and scope of the government — for instance, by requiring a balanced budget. But as we are seeing in recent doomed congressional votes on a balanced budget amendment, getting the Congress to restrict its power presents its own challenges.

Thomas S. Kidd teaches history at Baylor University, and is Senior Fellow at Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the author of Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO CHRISTIAN CENTURY
by Philip Jenkins
Nov 18, 2011

Traveling across Europe elicits constant double-takes for someone of the baby-boom generation. Just as you are relishing the sights in a lovely city like Prague, Dres­den or Budapest, you are startled to see an object or a historical marker that reminds you how very recently these places be­longed to a sinister political and cultural order.

Is it really just a quarter century ago that nations like Czechoslovakia and East Germany were part of a Soviet empire that threatened to engulf Western Europe? Once upon a time—and not long ago—there was another Europe.

Equally consigned to oblivion, at least for most Americans, is the religious story of communist Europe, in which Christians suffered horrific persecutions. Wan­der­­ing in Hungary today, you will casually see signs with names like Recsk and Kistarcsa, with no warning that in the 1950s these were the sites of lethal concentration camps in which Christian clergy and laity were murdered in the thousands.

It was at Kistarcsa, for instance, that Bishop Zoltán Meszlényi was martyred in 1951. In the Czech Republic, you might see the old uranium mining complexes of Pˇríbram and Jáchymov without realizing how many religious enemies of the state died here in the 1950s undergoing forced labor that amounted to torture.

Through the 1960s, Amer­ican Chris­tians, especially Cath­olics, re­mained highly at­tuned to this situation as they followed the career of a heroic resister like Hungarian cardinal József Mindszenty. Today, though, the persecutions seem to belong to ancient history, as remote as the time of Diocletian.

That amnesia reflects the totally changed political situation and the restoration of religious freedom: who could imagine such horrible deeds happening in such benevolently European and democratic settings? The new Hungarian constitution even vaunts the nation’s Christian heritage. Yet it would be tragic if such a dreadful part of Christian history were lost to collective memory, if only because later generations have so much to learn from the various strategies that oppressed churches adopted in the face of crisis.

The need to keep these memories alive drove a heroic scholarly enterprise, one that makes it possible to re-examine those persecutions in astonishing detail. The project be­gan when Angli­can canon Mic­hael Bour­deaux visited Mos­cow in the 1950s. He encountered the city’s surviving Orthodox churches and there­after made it his life’s work to tell the West about the Ortho­dox and about other religious denominations living under communist rule.

In 1969 Bourdeaux founded Keston College in a Lon­don suburb and later moved it to Oxford. For 20 years, Kes­ton was a center for the academic study of religion in the Eastern bloc and the primary source to which media and political leaders could turn for accurate and up-to-date information.

Providing reliable news might not seem like an unusual role for the college, but Bourdeaux’s access to sources on the ground was astonishing in the context of the closed and paranoid Soviet empire of the time. Keston played a critical role in keeping pressure on the Soviets as they made their stumbling moves toward liberalization. In 1984, Bour­deaux won the Templeton Prize.

In later years, Keston became the victim of its own success. Although religious liberty issues remain alive in the new Russia, they are nothing like as prominent or as newsworthy as they were in the epic days of the cold war, and the college faded from the headlines. But Keston retained its staggering ar­chive, which in 2007 found a new home at Baylor Univer­sity in Texas.

Baylor’s Keston Center is a massively underexplored resource, which offers rich pickings for researchers in European history or in the larger picture of modern Christianity. Besides the ex­pected books, news clippings and printed records, Keston has complete runs of the various atheist and anti-religious magazines that the Soviets and their puppets ran to combat the influence of faith, with all the related cartoons and posters.

You could spend days just sorting through the visual materials from 1917 onward, particularly the propaganda posters presenting venomous attacks on Christians, Jews and Muslims. Contemplating the visuals alone, one can trace how confidence in socialist-scientific materialism reached its pinnacle with the Soviet space program and declined through the miserable Brez­nev years.

And then there is the religious samizdat, the underground “self-published” ma­terials that Soviet believers produced through the darkest years, at risk of imprisonment or worse. Among the thousands of clandestine publications at the Keston Center are petitions, news sheets, and memoirs. One evocative item is the 1960s trial transcript of a Russian Baptist organizer, surreptitiously recorded on fragments of cloth. It’s a relic of a terrifying, lost world—but not one that should ever be forgotten.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and Associate Scholar at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. She is the author of many influential works, some of which include Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, and her 2006 Gifford lectures: God, State, and Self. Prior to her arrival at the University of Chicago in 1996, she taught at UMass-Amherst and Vanderbilt University, with visiting professorships at Oberlin College, Harvard University, and Yale University. In conjunction with the Award ceremony, Professor Elshtain will deliver a lecture on Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 at Georgetown University.

Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots

So was the principle “In God We Trust” really “venerated” by America’s founders? To be sure, “In God We Trust” did not become the official national motto until 1956 (although coins bore the phrase beginning in the 1860s). But did the founders strongly believe in that idea too? To an extent, answers depend on which founder you ask. Some of the leading founders were skeptical about traditional Christianity. Benjamin Franklin, a self-described Deist, expressed doubts about basic Christian doctrines, as did Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s cut-and-paste version of the Gospels, currently on display at the Smithsonian, made clear that he saw Jesus only as a moral teacher, not the resurrected Son of God.

But if you look elsewhere among the founders, you can find plenty of evidence for traditional religious belief. Perhaps the best example of an openly conservative Christian among the major founders was Patrick Henry. Henry, a lifelong Anglican (or Episcopalian, as they were called after the war), weaved faith into his speeches in a way that resonated with rank-and-file Patriots. Perhaps that is why Henry became the most inspiring orator of the Revolution: he knew how to speak the people’s language, and during the Revolution, that was a language shaped by the Bible.

Thirty years before the Revolution, the revivals of the Great Awakening had shaken the colonies and converted thousands to evangelical faith. Henry himself had been profoundly influenced by the revivals as a teenager, and later, many said that he spoke like a preacher. Henry’s most famous speech, the “Liberty or Death” oration, came in 1775 as Virginia was considering whether to take up arms in light of the British threat against American liberty. The speech, delivered at Richmond’s St. John’s Church, was a politicized version of a revival sermon. No highbrow political theory or Enlightenment philosophers were in it, just moral exhortations delivered in the literal language of the Bible.

A number of phrases in “Liberty or Death” came straight from the holy text, but one might easily miss those references today, because in the Bible-soaked culture of Virginia in 1775, Henry did not need to cite chapter and verse. People knew the Bible when they heard it. America’s millions, “armed in the holy cause of liberty,” Henry thundered, “are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.” At the speech’s dramatic conclusion, Henry declared, with arms raised toward heaven, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”

For Americans like Henry, faith deeply influenced politics. It supplied Americans with a language of liberty. Even the skeptical Jefferson knew that people’s rights were inalienable because the creator God had authored them. Today we continue to commemorate moments of national import in the broad language of faith, as President Obama did by reciting Psalm 46 at the ceremonies observing the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

Faith also reminded Patriots such as Henry that the American people needed virtue to channel their freedom into moral purposes. In a republic where the people were sovereign, Henry believed, people had to maintain public-spirited ethics, or chaos would ensue. We have been freshly reminded of this truth by the rampant malfeasance in the financial sector that helped create our recent economic troubles.

So yes, the founders would have affirmed “In God We Trust.” We do often underestimate the diversity of personal religious beliefs among the leading founders. In Patrick Henry, however, we see a founder who spoke with unusual power and authority to average Americans, for whom faith and liberty were intimately connected.

Thomas S. Kidd is Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, and the author of Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots.
CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE USA TODAY ARTICLE

Nov. 28, 2011

Follow us on Twitter: @BaylorUMediaCom

Dr. Rodney Stark, Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and co-director of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, will present a lecture, “Doing History A Second Time Around,” at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 30, in Kayser Auditorium of the Hankamer School of Business on the Baylor University campus.

The lecture, presented by the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR), will be introduced by Baylor President Ken Starr. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Stark will discuss his book, “The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion,” which was released in October. He will explain why another book was needed on a topic that already has generated thousands of volumes.

The book is a follow-up to Stark’s 1996 release “The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries,” which sold thousands of copies and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Over the years, as he continued to write historical studies, Stark became dissatisfied with the book. He believed it started too late, not until around the year 40, and ended too soon, with the reign of Constantine. Thus, Stark decided to try again with “The Triumph of Christianity.”

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Denver in 1959, Stark began his career as a newspaper reporter. Following a tour of duty in the Army, he received his doctoral degree in sociology from the University of California-Berkeley in 1971, where he held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society.

Stark joined the Baylor faculty in 2004. He has published 30 books and more than 140 journal articles on subjects such as prejudice, crime, suicide and life in ancient Rome, but his main focus has been religion. He is a former president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

Hankamer School of Business is at 1428 S. Fifth St.

Register online or call (254) 710-7555. For more information, contact the ISR at (254) 710-7555 or email ISR@baylor.edu.

About the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion

Launched in August 2004, Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR) exists to initiate, support and conduct research on religion, involving scholars and projects spanning the intellectual spectrum: history, psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, political science, epidemiology, theology and religious studies. ISR’s mandate extends to all religions, everywhere, and throughout history. It also embraces the study of religious effects on such things as prosocial behavior, family life, population health, economic development and social conflict. While always striving for appropriate scientific objectivity, ISR scholars treat religion with the respect that sacred matters require and deserve.

by Katy McDowall, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805

Patrick Henry was homeschooled? Henry was born in 1736, when there was almost no educational infrastructure in Virginia, except in the major towns. His father largely schooled him at home. This mainly meant reading and history and classics: He had deep exposure to the Christian tradition, to Greek and Roman antiquity, to the heroes of the ancient past and the Reformation. This stuck with him through his career.
CLICK HERE TO GO TO WORLD

2nd Opinion: The last acceptable prejudice?

By Byron Johnson
Published: November 11, 2011

In early May 1990, after turning in final grades for the spring semester, my departmental chair walked into my office with a big smile on his face and handed me a letter from the university president. It was a non-renewal letter. I had been fired. Although I knew the chairperson would not do me any favors when I applied for tenure, I never suspected something like this was possible

By all accounts, I was doing well as an assistant professor. I had very high teaching evaluations, was publishing one or two articles per year in refereed journals, and to my knowledge, received the first federal grant in the history of my department. I was involved in a number of departmental committees and got along with faculty colleagues in my department.

Shortly thereafter, I scheduled an appointment with the provost, the second-most-powerful person on campus, to see if the decision might be reversed, an action the provost clearly had the authority to make happen. He started the meeting by stating: “I really like you. You’re a very nice guy—an honorable person. But the reality is you simply don’t fit in here.” He then asked if he could give me some personal advice. “I think you need to consider getting a job teaching at some small Christian college, because that’s where you’ll really fit in.” The provost then added: “Can I be honest with you? If you do end up at another state university, you are going to have the same problem you’ve had here.”

I remember thinking to myself at that moment: He’s essentially saying the “problem” has nothing to with my research, teaching or service. It was all about my visibility as a Christian. The pivotal point of the conversation happened when I responded, “If I were a Marxist, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation would we?” The provost nodded in agreement and stated, “You simply run against the grain … and you need to end up at a place where your beliefs are a better fit than they are here.”

Thankfully, the provost was only partially right. He was correct in his assessment that most universities would be uncomfortable with a faculty member who refused to keep faith a private matter. The provost was wrong, thankfully, in predicting I wouldn’t survive at any state or secular university as long as I was an outspoken Christian. In spite of the fact I did not become a closet Christian—something the provost suggested I would need to do to survive—my career assumed a rather remarkable upward trajectory. Within a few years, I would be recruited by Vanderbilt University to launch and run a research center dedicated to the study of crime. Several years later, I would be recruited by the University of Pennsylvania to help launch and run another major research center.

After several years at Penn, I was approached by Baylor University and asked if I would consider launching at a new research center dedicated to the study of religion and public life. I turned down the offer because I was convinced an Ivy League platform coupled with partnerships with East Coast think tanks and sister Ivy League schools was the stage one needed to promote the serious study of religion in ways that would carry the most weight, especially among those apathetic or hostile toward religion.

But Baylor offered something far better and profoundly more important—a vision and commitment to build a world-class research university that is unapologetically faith-based, one that not only supports, but embraces, objective research on religion—let the chips fall where they may. What a contrast that would be to my experience at top secular universities, where faculty and administrators alike would cringe whenever we published and disseminated studies confirming the striking benefits of faith to mental, physical and social health.

The decision to come to Baylor in 2004 certainly was the right choice. Having directed research centers at five universities, and having interacted with colleagues at scores of other university research centers, Baylor has enthusiastically provided all the essentials for success—core funding, access to donors and the unequivocal support of the university administration. With a half-dozen distinguished professors, post-doctoral scholars and close to 100 resident and nonresident research fellows, the Institute for Studies of Religion has in seven years become the most muscular research center in the world dedicated to the scientific study of religion.

Byron Johnson is distinguished professor of the social sciences at Baylor University, director of Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion and author of More God, Less Crime: Why Faith Matters and How it Could Matter More.

Wisdom often peeks into our lives unannounced, while at other times we plan curricula to transmit its tenets. Participants in Baylor University’s recent conference on wisdom (more than 400 registrants) experienced both aspects of the journey to a wiser academy—and wiser alumni. Entitled “Educating for Wisdom in the 21st-Century University” and held under the auspices of Baylor’s Institute for Faith & Learning, this symposium engaged a diverse audience in which many academic disciplines were represented. The sessions also evoked reflection on our own intersection with lessons on wisdom.

While helping to direct the Scriptorium initiatives in the 1990s, I had gathered our board members in our Hampton Court offices near Herefordshire, England. One morning, Walt Kaiser, Edwin Yamauchi, and Bruce Metzger serendipitously joined Scott Carroll, Robert (Bob) Van Kampen, and me for tea and scones. Rather suddenly, and disconnected from our casual conversation, Bob (our patron) asked Dr. Yamauchi a question about Greek grammar, one related to a favorite Ephesians passage Bob claimed was often “misquoted” in defense of Arminian theology. (Bob was on the extreme opposite end from Wesleyan theology.)

Dr. Yamauchi didn’t hesitate in responding. Even though he obviously knew the answer (one found in lessons early in Mounce’s Basics in Greek), he replied, “Mr. Van Kampen, in the presence of the master of Greek studies, I would always defer such a question to Dr. Metzger.” Then he nodded to Dr. Metzger, who gave a stately and clear answer—and also avoided the theological debate.

The difference between knowledge and wisdom manifested itself at that moment. Dr. Metzger relayed knowledge and exercised wise restraint. The sagacious Dr. Yamauchi seemed to represent both qualities without thinking! Sounds oxymoronish, but throughout the Baylor conference there was an element of mystery about the highest manifestations of wisdom, about “natural” abilities and “learned” qualities, and the convergence of multiple data demanding a response. Candace Vogler (University of Chicago) set the tone for the conference with her intense transparency in her opening plenary lecture, “Keeping Track of What Matters.” Vogler described her experience designing and leading (with a colleague) an innovative and profoundly countercultural master’s degree program in humanities—countercultural, that is, in the context of an élite research university. It is difficult to get a good education, Volger said, even at the best universities, because “It’s hard to get something when you only have a hazy idea of what it is you’re seeking,” and such is the condition of most students. Like Anthony Kronman, Stanley Hauerwas, Doug Henry, Perry Glanzer and many others, Vogler finds the answer in a humanistic education. She highlighted the irony in her provost’s comment, ” ‘The startup cost in the humanities is very very low.’ In his field [physics] it’s around $2 million.”

Her opening session went deep as her transparency transcended our disciplines and degrees. She recalled that her father, a man given to episodes of violence, nevertheless taught her “that if I had a serious question, I could find a serious answer—through reading, writing, and praying.” She did have questions, beginning with the discordance at home. And those questions led her to the university and to a lifetime of inquiry. All of our students, she reminded us, have fundamental questions growing out of what it means to be human, even if they don’t know how to ask. The master’s program in humanities at the University of Chicago took up such perennial questions, which used to be at the core of moral philosophy. Vogler tried to model lessons, not just talk “about” the readings. “We need to try them on to learn,” she said, not “just write about” them.

It was clear that our opening address was being given by someone who had embraced the true nature of classical philosophy, of living what is learned while learning to live, with a Christian spirit of humility. She was proposing that professors needed to walk the arduous journey with their students. “You don’t even begin to critique unless you owe a debt to the thing you’re studying,” she said, adding: “You have to be prepared to be implicated in the very things you find unsatisfactory.” And so the three-day conference began.

During an engaging session entitled “Models for Moral Formation,” Perry Glanzer (Baylor University) presented a helpful definition of wisdom: “Wisdom involves the skill and knowledge necessary to piece together a good life among disparate identities.” He argued that a key aspect of assembling these various parts is to come to terms for oneself with the meaning of life and, more specifically, one’s purpose. Next was to understand and articulate a working response to our competing identities, such as what we profess and our professions, e.g., a Christian nurse or a Christian educator. Perry’s notions helped to objectify the subjective, or at least to categorize steps in a conceptual journey to gaining wisdom.

The stately John Haldane (University of St Andrews) gave the closing address, and brought to light the wisdom of John Stuart Mill. In an address as rector to the students at St Andrews, Mill noted that being other than wise can simply be due to natural limitations, but it can also be the result of an improper education. Perhaps a sentence from Mill’s essay “Road to Progress” captures the essence of the conference in the light of the academy’s current struggle for significance:

The unwise are those who bring nothing constructive to the process, and who greatly imperil the future of mankind by leaving great questions to be fought out between ignorant change on one hand and ignorant opposition to change on the other.

It is along these lines that another of the conference’s plenary speakers, Anthony Kronman (Yale University), has entered the national spotlight. Perhaps his biggest contribution to the great dialogue is his frank recognition that some questions are indeed weightier than others. Although elsewhere I have challenged some of the key assertions in his provocative book, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given up on the Meaning of Life (2007), and certainly his governing conviction (the unabashed endorsement of secular humanism), I strongly encourage all who care about higher education to read Education’s End. And kudos to Baylor for recruiting Kronman as a keynoter: he’s a master of the speaker’s art. Perhaps his calculatedly cautious address was an attempt to exercise the very classical definition of wisdom he was parsing before 400 people with worldviews likely at odds with his; most of his listeners unapologetically acknowledge a reality that transcends human understanding.

Sharing the plenary platform with Kronman was the literary scholar and cultural critic Andrew Delbanco (Columbia University), and the DVD from their session is worth acquiring (“Does Wisdom Have a Role in the 21st-Century University?”). Delbanco closed with a riveting story of two students attending Shakespeare’s King Lear. As they leave the theater, one flippantly dismisses the outcome: the old king got what he deserved. What a waste of time! The other student is deeply moved, though he can’t fully express what he has experienced. The series of events in the play, the probing of family ties, of justice and injustice, the playwright’s provocative insights into the human condition—all this has touched and changed the student. Perhaps he identifies with Cordelia but recognizes selfish streaks of Regan and Goneril in himself as well. Perhaps he doesn’t want to collapse in grief at life’s end, and seeks the better life. Delbanco’s story suggests the inner critique that Vogler espouses. It prompts the “purpose” questions that Glanzer promotes. In essence, Delbanco reminded us of the mystery of learning, of the amorphous contours of wisdom and the sharp edges of knowledge. As with Yamauchi, knowing the basic knowledge was only part of the equation. To memorize the characters’ names and virtues or vices is to chronicle, to begin that solid base for inquiry. To find their meaning in the context of life is begin to understand the complexities of God’s creation.

So too, John Haldane’s superb closing address demonstrated both wisdom and knowledge in a witty, whimsical style—not only his written text but also his impromptu answers during the Q&A. On one point, however, he failed to persuade. Paraphrasing John Henry Newman’s notion that scholarship and research are not synonymous, Haldane said that scholarship takes one deeper while research produces new knowledge. He added then—and here was the unpersuasive point—that, contrary to current trends in the academy, one need not engage in research to be a better teacher. Indeed, he found that idea risible. Scholarship deepens teaching, he said. Reasearch? No.

Celia Deane-Drummond (University of Notre Dame) would disagree with Haldane’s comments on the disconnection between research and teaching. During her plenary address on “Wisdom Remembered: The Place of Theological Wisdom in the Academy,” she described her arduous journey through heavy teaching loads in England, and the staleness (and tiredness) of the task divorced from research. Later she shared with a couple of us, that personally, and in her observation of others, researching with students is among the most invigorating learning experiences for all involved. Deane-Drummond’s observations resonate with my experiences, not to mention the evidence of the Center for Undergraduate Research and serious “research” on the matter. (Full disclosure here, as head of the Green Scholars Initiative, I’m constantly aligning professors across the nation with the documents of the Green Collection—with the requirement that they mentor students in their research.)

The conference prompted many questions, none larger than “So what?” And in the light of the dominance of Christian institutions among participants, the session “Educating for Wisdom in the Christian University” proved spot-on in suggesting answers. Todd Ream (Indiana Wesleyan University), author and co-editor of recent books on this subject, placed two case studies as bookends of his speech. The first was the role of the late Arthur Holmes in shaping the discussion, especially in the pages of his well-traveled The Idea of a Christian College. Ream called for “a shift from epistemological matters being the primary focus to ontological matters.” He contended that “Christian universities are places that afford community members, and the publics those individuals serve, diverse yet interconnected opportunities for well-practiced theology. The end result [of] well-practiced theology is divine or saving wisdom.” The other bookend was an account of a relative who continues to play a significant part in restructuring struggling K-12 schools (applying hard-won knowledge), and yet whose strongest experience of gaining wisdom came in a personal encounter with an orphan. (More disclosure: Yes, Todd Ream is colleague and friend—but I would be remiss if I failed to report on his contribution to the conversation.)

In the same session, Michael Cartwright (University of Indianapolis) called for more emphasis on the service side of education, that is, the “curriculum beyond the curriculum.” Cartwright countered Stanley Fish: “To pretend that we are not responsible for the [moral] formation of students is to turn a blind eye to our engagements in a world in which engaging students is part of a larger political economy in which education is both a product of consumption and a consuming endeavor for all concerned.”

As I moved between the common areas in Baylor’s Bill Daniel Student Center and the conference’s main lecture hall, the Barfield Drawing Room (a room worthy to stand alongside the great halls at Samford University), I often stopped at the smorgasbord of books displayed by Baylor Press, flanking the hall’s entrance. After buying over thirty books, I thought it wise to take alternate routes to the lecture hall. Many of the Baylor titles, along with those at likeminded presses such as Abilene Christian University Press, reveal serious interest in life’s ultimate questions.

Conferences like “Educating for Wisdom” should remind us that there are hundreds of programs across the nation where strong cohorts of students are indeed challenged by both professors and self-inquiry. The undergraduate and graduate students at the conference, many from Oklahoma Baptist, Union, and the throng from Baylor’s Crain Scholars Program, talked with passion and precision about a mélange of important books. From the casual table conversations to the co-presentations of sessions, these students revealed well-honed intellectual virtues.

But keeping such programs alive, as Vogler ruefully said, can be an enormous challenge. If colleges are to implement sustained programs that educate for wisdom, they will need to be institutionalized. If an institution is indeed a systematic response to a recurring need, and educating for wisdom is an established need, then faculty, administrators, and trustees need to establish the necessary systems.

In time, some aspects of these systems become traditions. David Bebbington (University of Sterling/Baylor University) reminded a conference session that traditions are alive. After a pause, he added: “Wesley is dead. Methodism is alive.” As another generation of wise professors pass, we need to keep the best of their wise counsel alive. And we need to keep returning to the great books that too often have been brushed aside for utilitarian degrees. It’s little wonder that we left Baylor celebrating a conference on educating for wisdom.

Jerry Pattengale is Assistant Provost at Indiana Wesleyan University, Executive Director of National Conversations, and Director of the Green Scholars Initiative. He also serves as Senior Fellow, The Sagamore Institute; Distinguished Senior Fellow, Baylor University’s ISR, and; Research Scholar, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

GO TO BOOKS AND CULTURE