Announcing a New Wabash Center: The Christian Studies Center
I am pleased to announce the establishment of a new center at Wabash College. It will be called the Christian Studies Center, and I invite students, faculty, staff, and alumni to begin thinking about how you can support this important new project.
The Center is the product of many conversations I have had with students and faculty over the years, and as I’ve talked to people about it, I have had tremendous interest and support. In the next year, we will be putting together a board, planning our mission, and filing the necessary papers to begin fund raising. Expect me to come calling! This is going to be a fantastic opportunity for any Christian students or alumni to have an impact on the future of our beloved College.
I sent a proposal for the Center to President Pat White, Dean Gary Phillips, and Dean Joe Emmick on February 8, 2007. Although I did not receive any reply to my proposal, let me make it very clear that I absolutely support the administration and totally understand their silence. To be brutally honest, it would be very hard, if not impossible, for the administration to establish anything like a Christian Studies Center through official College channels. The faculty has become increasingly secular over the years, and many faculty, as amply demonstrated in the recent quality of life survey, are suspicious if not downright hostile to expressions of faith at Wabash. That is why this new Center will have no official relationship to the College. It will be completely independent of the College, yet its mission will be completely dedicated to the College.
The Christian Studies Center will serve the College, including students, staff, faculty, and alumni, by creating and supporting programs to promote Christian excellence at Wabash. We want to support Wabash Christians in both their intellectual and spiritual pursuits. Indeed, we believe that Christians anywhere and everywhere cannot separate the intellectual from the spiritual. To grow spiritually, you need to be challenged intellectually, but intellectual challenges work best when they are theologically informed and spiritually nourishing. The Wabash Christian Studies Center will unite hearts and minds in the pursuit of Christian excellence.
If you want to be on an email list that will provide updates for the Center, please email me with that request at webbs (at) wabash.edu. If you would like to take an active role in helping with the Center, let me know that in your email. Here is what we need:
Student leaders. This Center will be for the students, primarily, so we need their participation and their contributions. We will organize a student board that will contribute ideas for the Center. This board will also begin some modest fund raising activities among current students, as a way of demonstrating student support and excitement about this project.
Alumni fund raisers. Our goal is ambitious, just as our vision is broad and inclusive. We are in this for the long run. We envision buying a house near campus as a place for some student leaders to live and for some of our programs and meetings to take place. We envision having a staff, perhaps part-time at first, with experience in the ministry as well as professional training in theology. This will take several years, but I am absolutely confident that these goals will be reached. Let’s start working now!
Faculty leaders. We will need to explore similar programs at other schools, and thus an exploratory committee will be one of the first items of business. A project like this needs faculty leadership, so faculty who would like to be members of the team to get this project launched, just let me know.
Crawfordsville Christians. We envision working with Crawfordsville churches to achieve our goals. People with connections to local churches are encouraged to become a part of this project. We want this Center to be a place that makes connections between local churches and Wabash students.
Endowment support. The hardest part of this project will be the initial fund raising efforts. To get that ball rolling, some start up costs will need to be met. Support from established endowments will be very important in meeting some of these relatively modest costs. People with connections and experience in this will be greatly valued!
Are you interested? If so, read on. Historical background. Many people think that Wabash has always been a secular school. This is not true. Wabash College even had a Chaplain for several decades in the first half of the twentieth century, and before that, the Presidents of the College regularly taught courses in moral theology. The story of how we lost that Chaplaincy is interesting, but instead of telling it here, let me just point you to an article I’ve written. It can be found at StephenHWebb.com. On that site, click on the essays tab, then click on “A Ghostly Department.” This essay is a revision of ch. 6, “The Mystery of the Disappearing Chaplain,” from my book, Taking Religion to School (Brazos Press, 2000). That chapter includes a broader history of the Wabash religion department.
For those who want a very brief version of the story about how we lost our Chaplaincy, let me say that after World War II, the College decided to join the duties of the Chaplain with the newly created religion department. Thus, religion professors were explicitly assigned the duties of the Chaplain. For example, the first group of religion professors at Wabash, Fred West, Hans Frei, Thomas Altizer, and Eric Dean, all held the title, one right after the other, of Director of Religious Activities. This was in addition to their faculty rank. During the long course of Eric Dean’s service to the college, he took the duties of directing religious activities very seriously. He was, in effect, the Wabash College Chaplain, and those duties were an official part of his position. Eventually, the title of Director of Religious Activities was dropped from Eric’s official title. I have found no documents as to when this occurred. The title was dropped, but not the implicit expectation that the religion department should direct and support religious activities at Wabash. When I first joined the department, in 1987-88, for example, the idea that the department as a whole functioned as the unofficial chaplaincy for the college was taken for granted.
Now, for a variety of reasons, it is hard, if not impossible, to expect any department or any professor to take on extra duties not related to teaching and publication in their field. I have over the years written several articles for The Bachelor and The Wabash Commentary spelling out the need for a Chaplain at Wabash. I have now become convinced that this idea is both bad and impossible. It is a bad idea because college chaplains must answer to the faculty and the administration, and thus there is tremendous pressure for them to be all things to all people. It is an impossible idea because the faculty at Wabash would never accept a Chaplain. There would be endless debates and outcries over the favoring of Christianity. Even in our own department, when this idea was discussed briefly several years ago, someone insisted that a Wabash Chaplain would have to be committed to addressing environmental and gender issues, as if a Chaplain would not have enough to do addressing theological issue. I don’t think anyone wants to debate the desirability of having a chaplain on campus.
What a Christian Center Can Do. Fortunately, there is an alternative to a chaplain! There is a movement on America’s college campuses that is dynamic, vibrant, and coming soon to Wabash. On many college campuses, Christian alumni, students, and faculty have cooperated to establish what are sometimes called Christian Study Centers. The purpose of these centers is to enhance the education students receive in the classroom. These Centers are set up with the cooperation of the college administrators, but they are also independent from the college. There are different models to choose from, and obviously we would want to do this in a way that meets the needs and respects the traditions of Wabash. I have already examined similar programs at Charlottesville, VA, Gainesville, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. Christian Centers are also already established or being established at many Ivy League universities, including Brown, Cornell, and Princeton. At Princeton University, the Witherspoon Institute has been established to promote the study of the natural law and traditional moral values. Each of these centers has its own special characteristics and mission. What they have in common is the belief that many students are hungry for educational opportunities that unite traditional values, orthodox doctrine, and spiritual nourishment, and that the best way to integrate the spiritual and the intellectual is to do so in a way that avoids typical college politics.
Most of these Centers combine the intellectual and the spiritual with a strong emphasis on lectures and scholarly sessions. They employ theologians with Ph.D.s as well as people trained in ministry. All are charitable 501 c(3) organizations. By being independent of but serving the college community, staff, faculty and students, these centers do not become mired in unproductive debates about the separation of church and state or the evils of having Christianity represented on campus.
What the Center Will Do. This center will serve Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant students equally. Indeed, I think it would be great to have someone on staff who has a Ph.D. in Catholic studies. The Catholic students at Wabash are the most neglected and underserved of any student group. Sociologists now argue that evangelical and conservative Protestants are hungry to know about Catholic traditions, and the political alliance between devout Catholics and conservative Protestants is turning into a theological revolution. We do very little on this campus to reach out to Catholics or conservative, traditional, orthodox Protestants.
I once took a group of 14 students for an alternative Spring Break trip. We worked on a church affiliated camp that builds houses for the poor in Appalachia. It was transformational for all of us. I asked the then dean Mauri Ditzler to continue funding this program, but he declined. I could have done it on my own, but it is hard to do such things when you are so busy and you receive no institutional help. An alternative spring break trip is just the kind of thing the Center would organize.
We have a growing number of students going on to seminary studies and getting internships at churches. Many students also want to connect their spiritual vocations with overseas charitable work and service to the poor. Butler University has a Volunteer Center that helps connect students to charitable programs. Many of those programs, of course, are faith based, so any emphasis on volunteering always comes around to the role of religion on campus. Wabash College could never provide students with this kind of support, because that would offend secular and liberal faculty, but the Wabash Christian Studies Center will be a meeting place for students who want to think about the vocation of helping others.
I help out sometimes with the Wabash Christian Men organization. WCM is strong and vital, with 40 or 50 students attending their Wednesday evening meetings. They get very little help or encouragement from the College. Indeed, there is a religious revival going on around the country, not just Wabash, with young people seeking a firmer foundation for their faith and parents looking for colleges that support and sustain the religious and moral convictions of their children.
The admissions people send me lots of high schools students each year who are interested, along with their parents, in these kinds of questions. I cannot tell you how often parents ask me about the religious life at Wabash. What can I tell them? I try to put the best spin possible on what it is like at Wabash for a devout Christian, because I want these students to come here. Nonetheless, sometimes I wonder if I am not misleading them. Sometimes I suspect that, when the College uses me or faculty like David Kubiak as spokesmen, it is not being absolutely honest and open with perspective students about what commitments the college does or does not have to religious students. They like potential students to meet us, but they do not tell potential students that there are actually very, very few devout Christians on the faculty who are willing to help students of faith integrate their intellectual and spiritual lives.
Role of Alumni. Wabash is gearing up for another capital campaign and mission statement, but there is little or no talk about meeting the needs of Christian students. There is a renewed interest in religion in almost every scholarly field you can name, but the Wabash faculty, as a whole, remains very secular. Surveys show that a significant and increasing numbers of college students want more Christian history, ethics, and theology in their studies, but they are not getting that at Wabash. We act like we are a state school worried about the first amendment, rather than a school founded in the Christian tradition.
I do not think this Center will compete with the other fund-raising projects for the College. Some alumni who have not supported Wabash in years will now be brought back into active engagement with the College. Some alumni who give to the College will give a little extra to include this Center in their plans. In any case, this is a Center that will be a direct benefit for the College. I’m not asking anyone to do anything that I wouldn’t do. The time, money, and energy I am giving to this Center is my gift to the College. This will be my life’s project, and I am staking my career on it. There is much work to be done. There is a great future ahead of us. The Spirit is moving. Please keep this Center in your prayers, and ask God what you can do to make Wabash a place where devout Christians can flourish—a place where the highest standards of intellectual and spiritual excellence can be promoted and achieved. Email me. Please join me. And let’s get to work.
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