[The following appeared in Reconsiderations 7:1 (September 2007).]
Anatomy of a Study Center
Richard V. Horner
Since the Christian Study Center does not fit established categories in the university, we frequently need to explain what we do. We are something of an enigma, so this past summer we produced our second view book. It articulates our project and includes our newly crafted purpose statement: Rooted in the thoughtful consideration of a Christian understanding of life and culture, and working in cooperation with the University of Florida, the Christian Study Center of Gainesville draws on the intellectual and cultural resources of the Christian tradition and on the scholarly resources of higher education to understand cultural change and to address human questions that are widely shared in the university community.
In that purpose statement we specifically identify with two things. First, we identify with the Christian tradition, and second, we identify with the University of Florida. In identifying with the Christian tradition we talk sometimes about the “thoughtful consideration of a Christian understanding of life and culture” and at other times about “the intellectual and cultural resources of the Christian tradition.” Both phrases express our conviction that the Christian tradition offers an understanding of human experience and culture that everyone needs to consider, both those who profess Christian faith and those who do not. Throughout the modern era Western culture has largely resisted Christian thought, but it is now time to reconsider.
In identifying with the University of Florida we want to identify with the university itself and with the university community at large. We are glad to be in this neighborhood, and it is important to us to be good neighbors not only to the university but to all who are a part of this community – to book stores and restaurants, to churches and campus ministries, to professors and students, to the University of Florida and to Santa Fe Community College. Most centrally, though, when we identify with the university we identify with the work that it does: the work of research and inquiry, of teaching and learning, and of producing knowledge and generating ideas that shape lives and cultures. We are very serious about joining the university in its work and about bringing the resources of scholarship together with the intellectual and cultural resources of the Christian tradition.
The reason we want to bring scholarly resources and the Christian tradition together is to understand cultural change and “to address enduring human questions that are widely shared in the university community.” Study centers and institutes associated with university communities can have various legitimate focuses. We have placed our focus on understanding contemporary cultural change and on addressing enduring questions about what it means to be human. In short, we want to keep the important challenges of what we call human flourishing in view, and we want to bring the best scholarship and the deepest Christian reflection to bear in thinking about important enduring questions in a constantly changing context.
Working from the basic purpose statement, in addition to drawing on the resources of higher learning and the Christian tradition, we also want to contribute to them. Quoting the viewbook: “The Study Center affirms scholarly inquiry, artistic creativity, and Christian reflection and we seek to contribute to each of these critical endeavors out of love of God and neighbor.” We do not mean to be presumptuous, but we do intend to be serious about our work. We have been blessed with precocious, articulate undergraduate students and with thoughtful, hardworking graduate students, with first-rate local faculty/scholars who are doing important work in their fields, and with numerous, excellent guest scholars who come from around the country. From student scholars and artists who are just developing through to Study Center board members who are senior scholars, the Study Center has been making important contributions to the university and to higher learning, and we know we are still just at the beginning of what is to come in both scholarship and the arts as we continue in the tradition of Christian reflection.
Across the page from our statement of purpose our view book lays out four fundamental commitments, and when taken together they help to give a sense for the unique role that the Study Center plays here in Gainesville. Our first commitment is to Christ, and because of that commitment we are also committed to critique or scholarship, to a conversational approach to inquiry, and to questions that focus on culture. Our program flows out of our vision for exploring the intersection of Christian thought and academic discourse and also out of our four commitments, and we are very pleased with the way our classes, lectures, and reading groups have come together this year.
Our purpose and commitments generate and shape our program. Our Monday night classes represent the breadth of what we are trying to do. Therefore, they are a central part of what we offer at the Study Center. Over the past several years we have seen these classes develop into engaging, thoughtful explorations of a wide variety of issues that bring current scholarship and Christian thought together. This class is one of the places where our commitment to bring the university and Christian thought together gets worked out in specific ways. Put simply, we approach these Monday evening classes by starting where the university is and then moving toward Christian reflection and understanding. Let me explain a little of what this means.
First, because we think scholarship is important and because the university is our starting point, we accept the university’s standards for scholarship and its expectations for those who teach. There are other completely legitimate ways to operate in this community, but this is the path we have chosen for ourselves. We have made the deliberate choice to offer classes that could just as easily be offered on the campus. While members of the university community may not agree with our conclusions, they should have no reason to complain about the quality of the scholarship, the qualifications of our teachers, the legitimacy and importance of the issues addressed, or the genuine academic freedom that our guests have as they stand at our lectern. With regard for the university’s standards of scholarship, we believe we could take our classes to the campus and no one would have any reason to complain.
Second, because the university is our starting point, we ask questions that are, or ought to be, shared in the university community. While members of the university community often do not share our answers or conclusions, we do want to be addressing questions that matter widely in the university, so we seek to begin with shared questions that arise in the context of human experience and specifically in the course of inquiry and learning. Having said that, we also want to formulate questions that ought to be asked, even if they are not already being asked. In fact, we view the framing of questions as a central part of our work. We want to ask questions that keep the focus on what it means to be human, and we want to ask questions that provoke thought, deepen reflection, and lead to engagement with Christian wisdom and understanding.
While we start with the university and draw on its scholarship, we aim at Christian thought in a way that asks both those who profess Christian faith and those who do not to consider more deeply a Christian understanding of whatever the issue happens to be. Our conversational approach seeks to bring together different voices for the sake of finding understanding about our genuine questions. There are voices from scholarship, voices from the Christian tradition, voices from those who attend our events, and each adds something to the conversation so as to allow us to take seriously the ways that Christian insight might respond to particular questions.
A couple examples come to mind of how these two objectives, staring with the university and aiming at Christian reflection, have shaped our classes.
Last fall we offered a class on “How We Got Four (and only four) Gospels.” This may not sound like it starts where the university is, but stop and consider. In the year previous to this class Dan Brown’s best-selling book The Da Vinci Code had been turned into a movie, the Gospel of Thomas and the Nag Hammadi documents had become the stuff of 24-hour news programming, and National Geographic had published the Gospel of Judas. Questions about the biblical text, and especially the gospels, had become questions for everyone, including scholars. We were starting right where we needed to, and we moved by way of first-rate scholarship to a consideration of the biblical texts that gave us good reasons to see why the canonical gospels would have been received as they were by the early church.
Last spring’s class on poetry provides another good example of how we shape the questions that we think ought to be asked on the campus. We entitled the class, “The Poet as Priest” and we asked our five speakers to address the question, “How do you account for the power of poetry?” We unpacked this question as follows. Does poetry put us in touch with something that transcends the poem and the poet? If not, how do you make sense of the power of poetry? Is a poem just the sum of its parts or is it something more? These are the sort of questions that we think are well worth asking on university campuses. It is the sort of question that we want students and faculty to struggle with, and we are very grateful to the three students and two faculty who did struggle with it for our benefit and hopefully theirs as well.
By starting where the university is and moving toward Christian understanding and reflection, these classes served both Christians and those who do not hold to a Christian understanding of human experience. In the first case, Christians, who do not always take scholarship as seriously as they ought where the biblical text is in view, had to do some demanding thinking about ancient history, and in the second case, Christians, who do not always think as deeply as they ought to about such things as the power of poetry, had to think more deeply and carefully about what a Christian understanding of human experience entails. Meanwhile, people who have dismissed the biblical text too easily had to deal with the fact that solid biblical scholarship suggests a far more coherent and reliable canon than 24-hour news anchors indicate, and people who have dismissed a Christian understanding of human experience too easily had to grapple with the fact that this understanding offers a compelling way of thinking about poetry and about other deeply moving works of art.
Our Monday night class has been the context for an emerging, new initiative that is taking shape called the Forum on Religion and Scholarship. The Forum on Religion and Scholarship seeks to promote a broad ongoing discussion of religion in the university. While the Study Center’s own staff and teachers will obviously contribute in ways that are rooted in Christian faith and understanding, the Forum as a whole will welcome a wide discussion of religions and of the issues that arise at the intersection of religion and scholarship in the university setting. For the most part, we expect to develop this discussion on the campus. Currently, for instance, we are working with historians at UF in both Christian and Jewish history to develop a series of lectures on the issue of “Teaching the History of Religion.” These lectures will take place on the campus of the university. This fall, meanwhile, we are going to get the Forum on Religion and Scholarship started by including it in our Monday evening class.
The Forum grows largely out of last fall’s Monday night series on Religion and Scholarship, which grew, in turn, out of John Sommerville’s book on The Decline of the Secular University. As John observed in his book, over the past century and more, universities have resisted and marginalized religious thought, and it is now time for them to reconsider. We agree with John, and we hope that the Forum on Religion and Scholarship will help in thinking about how religion can contribute to higher education. We are encouraged, frankly, that the main criticism of John’s book has been from people who argue that religion has already been making a comeback in the university. We are glad to hear this argument being made, but this takes nothing away from John’s call to explore far more fully the role that religion can play in higher learning.
We also agree with John when he notes that where religion and the university are concerned, secularism is not the only challenge. In recent years the university has moved increasingly away from liberal arts education and toward professional and vocational training: medicine, law, engineering, education, business, sports medicine, family youth and community services, etc. This trend creates two polar challenges. First, just as the Study Center explores the relationship between Christianity and the liberal arts, so we need to explore the intersection of Christian thought and the professions. Second, as the trend toward vocational training marginalizes the Humanities, and as literature, philosophy, history, and religion become relatively less and less important with every passing semester, we have reason to be concerned from the standpoint of Christian understanding. While some of the demise of the liberal arts is the fault of scholars in these disciplines, as a Study Center we believe it is important to support the humanizing role of the Humanities and of religion specifically.
It is difficult to argue for the broad exploration of religions these days without being misunderstood. Often the study of religions is framed by the view that all religions are equally valid and pretty much interchangeable. In such an understanding, religion or spirituality denotes a realm that is either imaginary or malleable and thus open to being fashioned as we wish to fashion it. In this approach to religion, one notion of spirituality is seen as good as any other, and the only truths worth taking seriously are the truths we create for ourselves rather than truths that we discover about humans as humans. In such a framework, ironically, the attempt to affirm and promote the study of religion flattens and empties all actual religions and robs them of their differences and their significance.
The opposite problem arises when people who do take religion seriously and do hold their convictions deeply conclude that they will simply shut out other viewpoints. Here at the Christian Study Center we do, in fact, take religion seriously, and we hold our Christian convictions seriously, but for this very reason we want to encourage dialogue rather than cut it off. We want to begin and sustain conversations rather than end them, and we believe this means inviting people, who come from a variety of religious viewpoints and from both religious and secular viewpoints, to speak to us as well as listen to us. For this reason, we invite a broad range of speakers to participate in our classes and lectures, and we will seek to be especially broad and inviting in our Forum on Religion and Scholarship.
The fact is, the sort of issues that we have just identified are exactly the sort of issues that we want the Forum on Religion and Scholarship to explore. At such points as these we begin to touch on some of the reasons why we need an ongoing exploration of the issues that arise at the intersection of religion and scholarship in the context of the university. We are, therefore, eager to take this initiative, and we are very pleased and appreciative of the faculty from the religion and history departments who have agreed to lead the way in our series this fall. We are also glad that John Sommerville will once again contribute a paper that will not only address the issue of studying religion but will also provide an example of the sort of thing that John has called for in his book.
These essays are never long enough to explore all the issues that we would like to explore or all the issues that we deal with regularly as we seek to serve the university out of love of God and neighbor, but we trust this brief essay provides some additional insight into our work as a Study Center. There are several other facets to our work that we have not touched on here, so again we encourage you to read through the view book and also to peruse the center pages of this issue of Reconsiderations to see more fully how the Christian Study Center contributes uniquely to the university community.
Richard V. Horner is Executive Director of the Christian Study Center.