We are pleased to announce the Center for Christian Studies – First Things Lecture, to be held in Austin, Texas, on Monday, September 19 at 7:00 p.m. This year’s speaker will be Carl Trueman. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania.
The Center for Christian Studies is excited to cooperate in this lecture with First Things, which is one of the most widely read and influential religious journals in the United States. As an ecumenical endeavor—featuring regular contributions from Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and evangelical Protestant writers—the publication shares many of the same concerns dear to the original Restoration Movement. First Things also shares much in common with CCS in particular, whose mission is to help Christians better understand, practice, and pass on their faith to others, to train teachers of teachers.
Born and raised in England, Carl Trueman is a graduate of the Universities of Cambridge (M.A.) and Aberdeen (Ph.D), and has taught on the faculties of the Universities of Nottingham and Aberdeen before moving to the United States in 2001 to teach at Westminster Theological Seminary (PA). In 2017-18 he was the William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Since 2018, he has served as a professor at Grove City College in the Calderwood School of Arts and Humanities. He is widely published in both academic and popular circles, is a Contributing Editor at First Things and Touchstone Magazine, an opinion columnist at World magazine, and a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC. His most recent books are The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Expressive Individualism, Cultural Amnesia, and the Road to Sexual Revolution and Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (both from Crossway).
Trueman will be speaking on “The Sentimental Death of a Culture.” He writes, “Commenting on Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot declared that he ‘set up Culture in the place of Religion, and… left Religion to be laid waste by the anarchy of feeling.’ Nearly a century on from Eliot’s comment, it is arguable that the same thing might now be said about culture: it is awash in an anarchy of feeling and of sentiment. Yet this is no more a firm foundation for culture than it was for religion. If this is the case, then perhaps the death of traditional religion through sentimentalism is not so much the result of religion mimicking the values of the world around, as religious conservatives often think, as it is a foretaste, a paradigm, of what is happening before our very eyes in the culture at large.”
The evening lecture, and refreshments to follow, will be hosted at the University Avenue Church of Christ in downtown Austin. Admission to the lecture is free, but we ask that you RSVP at https://www.christian-studies.org/event-details/first-things. Parking will be available in the church lot and across the street at the AT&T garage.