2019/5
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KLICE Director Rev. Dr Craig Bartholomew is, for this academic year, a Senior Research Fellow at the Carl Henry Center at Trinity International University in Chicago. You can read about his research project here. Each year the Henry Center appoints four fellows, and at the end of this issue of Sibylline Leaves you will find introductory paragraphs from the other three research fellows, and from some of the staff at the Center. In Craig’s absence, Dr Sue Halliday has been appointed Acting Director of KLICE for the year. Below she responds to questions from Craig.
Introducing Sue Halliday
Craig: Sue, we are very grateful that you have taken on the part-time position as Acting Director of KLICE while I am in the US for the academic year. You were, of course, an undergraduate in Cambridge, so this is familiar territory to you geographically. Can you tell us a bit about your academic journey?
Sue: I was welcomed into teaching in a business school on the back of my successful business career; I knuckled down however to studying for a PhD and although to the marketer’s mind nearly five years was a long time to be studying alongside the job, it turned out that for a part-time PhD student I was successful pretty quickly. I retained the mind of a marketer in my academic career, initially changing jobs every three years. I am someone who relishes new challenges.
I focused on services marketing as before becoming an academic I worked in retail and professional services. It was clear that relationships were key and when I was part of running the annual UK-based Marketing Academy conference at the University of Gloucestershire – where I first met and worked with you, Craig – the committee invited Michael Schluter of the Jubilee Centre as part of my commitment to bring a Christian framework to the fore. “Virtue in Marketing” was the title of that conference. Teaching a stakeholder approach to business has also been an area where I have been able to marry my Christian understanding of the purpose of business to enable human beings to become fully human.
I was the first ever Marketing professor at both the University of Hertfordshire and then in Anglia Ruskin’s Business School, in Cambridge, where I was also Head of Department. This provided me with an opportunity to model a much more servant-hearted model of professorship than is often on display. I believe in multi-talented teams and in having others shore up my weaknesses – often a humbling place to be! In developing research units and departments I have tried to model developing an open enquiring community that welcomes students and all kinds of staff into the core purpose of helping each to flourish.
When and how did you come to see that your faith impacts your academic work?
I studied History at Cambridge University, where in my first year I was part of the triennial mission as a member of the Christian Historians group where we presented the gospel in its historicity to appeal to “our” community. I later served on the Christian Union Executive Committee as Mission Secretary. I think this focus on reaching “my” community with the gospel as part of my normal work has guided all my life, but especially my 30 year academic career.
As a specialist in marketing what do you see as the greatest challenges in this area for ethics today?
There is great pressure for Marketing to prove its credentials as an academic discipline by being seen as a science and being based on a quantitative approach to research and a reductionist approach to consumers as really less than fully human. Since world-leading journals publish many more mathematical model-based articles it can be hard to stick to a very rich idea of the human, and to refuse to see management as a predictable discipline that can control human behaviour. As Artificial Intelligence is introduced into so many marketing contexts it seems even more important to provide an ethical understanding of the human person as the basis for work with consumers and marketing managers. I believe this is far more significant than, for example, focusing on the truthfulness of advertisements and preventing deception – important though those two issues are of course.
You have been a participant in the KLICE Research Institute (KRI) since its inception. What attracted you to the KRI and why do you think its work is important for today?
My expertise has been developed with a Christian understanding, but it remains a challenge to have a distinctive all-embracing framework to rival Marxists or Foucauldians. That is really for me the pull of the KRI – working with philosophers, theologians and all kinds of Christian scholars, and together working on how what is often referred to as “worldview” can truly be a foundation for all and each of our disciplines.
The world of ideas drives so much cultural behaviour that it is a great loss for our world that there is not much of a distinctive voice for God in the Academy. I believe God is “stirring” much as Aslan stirred in the winter of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by the wonderful Christian academic, C. S. Lewis. I believe there is work to be done and that KLICE now represents a structure and an institution that can develop to embrace, enable and encourage a growing community of Christian scholars who in time, by God’s grace, will have a voice in academia and be influential therefore in reforming and redeeming the wider culture.
What are you focusing on in your role as KLICE Fellow in Business, Marketing and Entrepreneurship?
I aim to serve business professionals with research into business that affirms it as a means of human flourishing ordained by God, and as part of the work he has given us as stewards and image-bearers. I aim to produce a book where there will be rich discussion of the various ways that the economic infrastructure can support this godly vision for business. Right now there is an exciting development whereby shareholders are losing their primacy among stakeholders in the company and whereby many are seriously questioning the dominant approach to business that said it was all about making profit and making profit for shareholders. A wider definition of purpose is a very Biblical approach and seems to fit a new Zeitgeist blowing in the wind …
I am also interested in partnering say, with Christian Aid, who are using social entrepreneurship to alleviate poverty in UK urban deserts, rather than focusing just on giving aid. That fits another organisation for whom I volunteer marketing expertise –- the Salvation Army, who aim to give the homeless a help up and not just a hand out.
Are there ways in which readers interested in this area might connect with you and KLICE?
I am glad you have asked this question. I’d love to hear from anyone interested in working with me in any of the areas I’ve mentioned – and others that readers may feel would connect well with me and my expertise. I am keen on collaborative working; fostering a community of those in the business, marketing and entrepreneurship area is an unarticulated aspiration for my current pioneering role. I need more financial support to be able to run the Bristol Christian Aid project and any other data collection and analysis projects … so if any readers would like to commission work that too would be very welcome. I’m able to make the start I have due to the generosity of a donor.
You can contact Sue Halliday at klice.actingdirector@tyndalehouse.com.
Worth Reading: In relation to the interview with Sue, readers may find be interested in the article available here. There is a movement starting among big USA CEOs who are signatories to a new way of “doing” capitalism which could be quite revolutionary.
KLICE relies on the generosity of donors. If you would like to support our work you can do so using PayPal via the link provided.
Other News
Farewell, and Welcome
Genevieve Wedgbury ended her three years with KLICE as our Development Officer at the end of September. We are immensely grateful for all she has done for KLICE and delighted that she will remain involved in the KLICE Research Institute (KRI). Good news is that for the coming year Dr Adam Sparks has been appointed part-time to assist with the administration of KLICE and to ensure that Genevieve’s good work continues. Adam is also a dedicated member of the KRI.
Book notice
From Craig: many of you will know of Jonathan Haidt’s work and especially his The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Here in Chicago I picked up his 2018 book, co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. This is a fascinating and disturbing account of what is happening on many university campuses in the US and beyond today, and how to rectify it. A must read!
Herman Bavinck lecture: Spirituality, Mysticism, and Ethics
On September 18 Craig Bartholomew gave the Annual Herman Bavinck lecture at Kampen Theological University on “Spirituality, Mysticism and Ethics.” The lecture, which will be published in their journal in Dutch, is available here. The lecture and the conference that followed all related to the discovery and publication in Dutch and English of Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics.
Fellows and Staff at the Carl Henry Center, where Craig Bartholomew is based for this academic year:
Brian Matz holds an endowed chair and is Professor of the History of Christianity at Fontbonne University in St. Louis, Missouri (USA). His project at the Henry Center during Fall 2019 is an analysis of the debate in the Carolingian Era over divine foreknowledge and human freedom and then in connecting the contours of that debate to contemporary research in the cognitive sciences on human freedom and determinism. In furtherance of the project, He is translating for the first time into English a number of Carolingian theological and imperial texts. Recently, he enjoyed reading Raymond M. Bergner, “The Case against the Case against Free Will,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 38.3 (2018): 123-139.
Jordan Wessling (PhD University of Bristol) recently transferred from Fuller Theological Seminary, where he was an adjunct professor and instructional designer, to the Henry Center, at which he is a Resident Fellow. While at the Henry Center, Jordan's project is to write a book in which he argues that the doctrine of deification provides good reason for supposing that human salvation takes place by way of the human's freely-willed cooperation with God's transformative work. Jordan's recent research has caused him to return to Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology by William P. Alston, and he recommends the book to all of those interested in systematic and philosophical theology.
Paul M. Gould (PhD Purdue University) is a philosopher interested in the intersection of the gospel and culture. This year he is working on how we might recover a view of the world as sacramental. He is married to Ethel and has four children. He recommends to you his book Cultural Apologetics!
Matthew Wiley is the managing editor at the Henry Center and a PhD student in Systematic Theology at Trinity, researching pneumatology and ecclesial unity through the theological interpretation of John's Gospel. One recent book that he would recommend is Jonathan King's The Beauty of the Lord: Theology as Aesthetics, which offers a compelling argument for the recovery of aesthetics in evangelical theology.
Brenda Brainerd works part-time in administration at the Henry Center: she is a second career student, beginning the first year of the Masters of Chaplaincy program at Trinity following a corporate career. She has a heart for the marginalized and elderly and will be concentrating on Hospice Care. Outside of the many textbooks she is reading, she has just completed John Ortberg's book on Soul Care. It helps put things into perspective.
The name “Sibylline Leaves” has various connotations; we derive it from a description of the writings of J.G.Hamann (1730-88), one of the greatest but least known Christian thinkers. Hamann recognized the significance of the challenges presented in his day by the Enlightenment, and sought to produce a corpus of writings responding accordingly. Our hope is that our “leaves” will contribute towards understanding and responding to the challenges of our own day.
The Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics (KLICE) is part of Tyndale House. Where a writer is named, views and opinions expressed in this bulletin are those of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of KLICE or Tyndale House.
Photos used by permission.
