Eboo Patel

Interfaith America Partners with Carver Project on Fellowship for Christian Faculty

November 16, 2022

John Inazu, Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, left, and Eboo Patel, Visiting Professor and Founder & President of Interfaith America, teaching a class titled, “Religion, Politics, and the University,” in 2018. (Photo: Joe Angeles/WUSTL Photos)

What does it look like to explore one’s Christian identity and engage in interfaith cooperation on secular campuses? Interfaith America is partnering with The Carver Project to launch a new initiative that navigates this question through an 18-month fellowship cohort experience.

Called the Newbigin Fellows program, the initiative will have three cohorts of 8-10 Christian faculty members, known as the Newbigin Interfaith Fellows, over the next three years. Fellows will receive a $4,000 stipend, engage in reflection meetings and in-person convenings, create multimedia content, and host interfaith activities on their campuses as a part of the project.

“We are very excited to partner with The Carver Project on the Newbigin Interfaith Fellows project. We share a commitment to building civic pluralism that values deep faith and welcomes the contributions of religious communities,” says Eboo Patel, president and founder of Interfaith America. “We have convened a group of top scholars in fields from medicine to computer science, economics to English, for rigorous conversation about the challenges and beauty of living out one’s faith commitments in a world of religious diversity.”

Drawing upon the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, the fellowship aims to empower Christian faculty with the tools and resources to model dialogue and relationships with colleagues, staff, and students of other faiths and of no faith. It also aims to help them learn and understand how to partner effectively and discover common ground in the pluralistic environment in a university and explore why it is an essential prerequisite to implementing these skills and practices in a broader society where the stakes are much higher.

“At both the Carver Project and Newbigin we’re looking for people who affirm the apostle’s creed and are actively engaged in their local church community,” says John Inazu, founder of The Carver Project. “It’s a pretty big tent. It’s going to very diverse —mainline, evangelical, Catholics, Baptist – with a range of cultural and political viewpoints.”

Inazu, who’s also the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis, began the Carver Project when he noticed there was a mutual distrust in non-Christian higher-ed and some churches. He believes that Christian faculty have a unique voice and role to play.

“In higher ed there’s this sense that Christians are these backward people who believe silly things,” says Inazu. “At the same time, at some churches, people believe that higher education is ‘where faith goes to die.’”

Inazu said he wanted to find a way to emphasize the positive upside in both spaces, and to give voice to faculty as “translators between these two realms” and “serve and connect university, church, and society.” So, he met with Patel to collaborate and conceive the Newbigin Fellows program to help these scholars build community and share best practices.

The fellowship is named after theologian Lesslie Newbigin, who was the author of foundational works such as “The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Proper Confidence” and “The Open Secret.” Newbigin worked on a Christ-centered theology of interfaith engagement as a missionary in South India and later, in his work in a largely de-churched London, and the spirit and goals of the fellowship are largely inspired by his work.

Both Inazu and Patel hope the faculty fellows can serve as resources for their campuses, helping connect students with faith leaders within their communities, and also be a resource for churches and pastors in the communities around the university.

“We talk to pastors all the time who are looking for insights from experts on how to engage their congregations on matters of culture and science and law and art,” Inazu says. “When they identify or find Christian faculty who have these areas of expertise, it’s kind of a breath of fresh air.”

For Ned Gorman, one of the eight fellows of the inaugural cohort, the fellowship program is a space to find a sense of Christian community that goes beyond his local church.

“I joined the program with the hope that it would be an opportunity to connect with people who occupy the same kinds of spaces as I do and that maybe some really good things could come out of our connections with each other,” says Gorman, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “The other thing I really like about the program is that when we meet in person, we’re supposed to bring a ministry partner. It’s a great way for pastors to get a better sense of our worlds.”

Other fellows shared that the program would give them an opportunity to find a way to connect and engage with their students and colleagues in deep honest conversations and help them interrogate how their personal and professional identities intersect.

“I’m a person of faith, a practicing Christian in a secular institution,” says Lydia Dugdale, an Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. “Should my personal identity be separate from my professional identity? How should each inform the other?”

Updated July 31, 2023. All three cohorts of the Newbigin Fellows program are full and we are no longer accepting applications.

Meet the inaugural Newbigin Fellows cohort below.

Carolyn Roncolato and Monique Parsons contributed to this report.

Newbigin Fellows

The Carver Project and Interfaith America invite interested faculty to apply to participate in an 18-month cohort experience focused on exploring Christian identity and interfaith cooperation on non-Christian campuses. Learn more about the Newbigin Fellows.

Lydia S. Dugdale, MD

Lydia Dugdale, MD, MAR (ethics), is the Dorothy L. and Daniel H. Silberberg Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. She also serves as Associate Director of Clinical Ethics at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

A practicing internist, Dugdale moved to Columbia in 2019 from Yale University, where she previously served as Associate Director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics. Her scholarship focuses on end-of-life issues, medical ethics, and the doctor-patient relationship. She edited Dying in the Twenty-First Century (MIT Press, 2015) and is author of The Lost Art of Dying (HarperOne, 2020), a popular press book on the preparation for death.

Jennifer A. Frey

Professor Frey earned a B.A. in philosophy and medieval studies (with a classics minor) at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana. She earned her PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to teaching at University of South Carolina, she was a junior fellow in the Society of the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago and Collegiate Assistant Professor of the Humanities.

Evan Gurney

Prof. Gurney earned a B.A. and Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He enjoys teaching a wide and eclectic range of literature courses at University of North Carolina, Asheville. He is especially interested in teaching students how to study premodern literature with careful and joyful attention, and in discovering with students how these older literary forms and traditions become renewed, reformed, and reinvigorated in the work of contemporary writers. In his classes he typically does one or the other, and often both.

His scholarship focuses on the literature and culture of early modern England. Love’s Quarrels: Reading Charity in Early Modern England (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018) examines a central irony of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England: how charity, which was supposed to be the “sweet cement” binding the community together, in fact motivated and intensified many of the era’s most contentious disputes. Currently he is working on a second project that investigates the presence of vagrancy and roguery in early modern English literature. Additional scholarly and teaching interests include contemporary poetry and Appalachian literature.

Alexander J. Hartemink

Prof. Alexander J. Hartemink is a Professor of Computer Science and Biology at Duke University . He is the faculty director of the Office of University Scholars and Fellows, previously directed the Graduate Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and is an active member of the Center for Genomic and Computational Biology and the Center for Advanced Genomic Technologies. He has been at Duke since September 2001, when he received my Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of David Gifford, Tommi Jaakkola, and Rick Young.

His research interest is the development of new algorithms in statistical machine learning and artificial intelligence, and on the application of those methods to complex problems in computational genomics. Specific application areas include regulatory genomics and systems biology, although he is also interested in other domains. Current high-level projects include:

discovering principles and mapping networks of transcriptional regulation,
understanding the role of chromatin organization in enacting this regulation, and
revealing the mechanisms that control dynamic cellular processes, like the eukaryotic cell cycle.

Andrea N. Leep Hunderfund

Andrea N. Leep Hunderfund, M.D., MHPE, conducts research in medical education. She studies the relationship between learning environment factors and important educational outcomes related to high-value care, professionalism and well-being. Her research seeks to better understand how educational systems can better support the development and expression of caring, character and skills that are aligned with societal needs.

Dr. Leep Hunderfund is working to develop robust programs for the assessment and continuous improvement of clinical learning environments in undergraduate and graduate medical education. Her ongoing research aims to identify faculty behaviors and programmatic factors associated with high-value care, learner well-being, professionalism and physician professional development. Dr. Leep Hunderfund’s research explores the attitudes, experiences and behaviors of medical students toward high-value care and relationships with regional practice patterns. She also contributes to studies examining associations between burnout and professionalism, and develops and evaluates educational assessments to ensure they provide valid results.

Dr. Leep Hunderfund’s research aims to support leaders, clinical teams and students in co-creating environments that reflect professional values, facilitate learning and promote healing.

Paul Lim

Professor Paul C.H. Lim is an award-winning historian of Reformation- and post-Reformation Europe. His latest book, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012), won the 2013 Roland H. Bainton Prize as the best book in history/theology by the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. He has published two other books in that area: The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008); and In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty: Richard Baxter’s Puritan Ecclesiology in Context (Brill, 2004).

In addition, history of evangelicalism and global Christianities are his other foci of research. Currently, he is writing a book on the transformation of global evangelical attitudes toward and endeavors on eradication of human trafficking and structural poverty.

Professor Lim welcomes inquiries from students interested in graduate studies in: (1) history of theology and intellectual history of the Long Reformation period; (2) global Christianity and changing trajectories of evangelical theology and praxis; (3) early modern English history, particularly religion and politics.

His research has been funded by fellowships and grants from the Luce Foundation (Luce Fellowship in Theology, 2011-12); the Folger Shakespeare Library; the Yale Center for Faith & Culture; the Vanderbilt University Research Scholars Grant.

He has delivered papers and lectures at Oxford, Cambridge, London, St. Andrews, Rotterdam, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, and Pomona College, as well in Sri Lanka, India, Cambodia, Switzerland, France, Ethiopia, Kenya, China, Japan, and South Korea.

Ned O’Gorman

Ned O’Gorman is Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he writes and teaches about the history of rhetoric, media studies, and political culutre. He is the author most recently of Politics for Everybody: Reading Hannah Arendt in Uncertain Times (2020, University of Chicago Press). He is also author of the award-winningLookout America! The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War (written with Kevin Hamilton, 2019, Dartmouth University Press), the award-winning The Iconoclastic Imagination: Image, Catastrophe, and Economy in America from the Kennedy Assassination to September 11 (2016, University of Chicago Press), and Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy (2011, Michigan State University Press). He has written numerous journal essays on topics related to rhetorical theory, aesthetics, religion, political theory, and political history, and has appeared on a number of podcasts and radio shows. He is former President of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric and editor of Journal for the History of Rhetoric. Learn more here: nogorman.org

Greg Phelan

Gregory Phelan is an associate professor in the economics department at Williams College and currently on sabbatical from Williams, working as a Senior Researcher in the Office of Financial Research, Department of the U.S. Treasury.

Prof. Phelan focuses on macroeconomics and financial theory and his research has been accepted for publication in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and the Review of Economic Dynamics, among others.

He primarily studies how characteristics of financial markets affect the broader economy. Much of his work considers the appropriate monetary and regulatory policy responses to pursue financial stability.