College launching Chapel Lecture Series Friday

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College launching Chapel Lecture Series Friday
The interior of Hillsdale College’s Christ Chapel. Courtesy | Ethan Greb

A new lecture series in Christ Chapel will explore the relationship between faith and reason, starting with an inaugural talk by conservative civil rights leader Robert L. Woodson Sr. at 4 p.m. on April 23.

Woodson said he will talk about “the challenge that we as a nation face with race and poverty.” 

“The college received a gift to endow a series of lectures to be delivered in the chapel,” Associate Vice President for Curriculum David Whalen said. “Every year we expect several lectures concerning in some broad way the intersection of faith and learning. There is no prescribed topic or theme.” 

These will be lectures, not sermons, Whalen said. The symbolic integration of faith and reason will be mirrored by the physical lecture (reason) being given in the chapel (faith). 

“The chapel is a place for worship and for high learning, as college chapels ever have been,” President Larry Arnn said in an email. 

 According to Whalen, the lectures will be oriented toward inquiries concerning “the life of the mind and the activity of the rational soul engaged in the world and informed by and moved by faith.”. They will also help counteract “the tendencies of the day.”

 “We happen to live in a time when the wedge driven between faith and high learning is wide and deep. We live in a time when people are increasingly persuaded that matters of faith are not just private, but almost shamefully private,” Whalen said, “Learning is presumed to be independent of faith to the degree that any admixture of faith is corrupt to learning.” 

Whalen pointed out that the college already enjoys a vibrant spiritual life, but that “outside of certain events, there’s little the college does as an institution to address directly the matter of faith and learning.”

“There’s such a vibrant life, but it would be a mistake to say the college is hands off in cultivating the spiritual and religious environment,” he said. “This lecture series is an additional way of doing that.” 

The lectures will not focus on any theological disputes, however. 

“What we’re talking about is the fact that all high learning finally points toward the divine. We need to talk about that. We need to think about that,” Whalen said. “There will be theological disagreements and I’m sure those will be made. But that’s fine. We’re aware there’s a lot of religious discussion on campus. This is not meant to stop that. If anything, perhaps it can inform that.”

Woodson’s talk will be directed toward conservatives, he said. 

“Race and poverty have not been engaged in a way that is helpful,” he said. “It is important to understand why and how it is important for the conservative movement to re-engage in this area. What is a positive way forward for conservatives.”

Woodson is the founding president of the Woodson Center, which works to eradicate poverty using market-based solutions centered on faith and implemented by leaders indigenous to their communities, according to the organization’s website.

The talk will touch on faith and reason insofar as “faith is the fundamental ingredient that has lifted people out of poverty, despair and discrimination. That has been the pathway out,” Woodson said. 

Woodson was involved in the civil rights movement as a young man, having led several demonstrations in the late 1960s. However, he left the movement after it abandoned the poor, he said. 

 “The civil rights movement was beginning to abandon all blacks,” Woodson said. “Poverty programs came along and exacerbated that bifurcation in the black community.” 

 Woodson’s essential point is that America’s problem isn’t race-based, but class-based. 

 “Race has become a proxy for poverty,” he said. “I have been working to help empower low-income people of all races. That should be the focus and our attention as Americans. I’m using my civil rights experience to really challenge the emphasis on race in America.”