The Center for Christian Studies–FIRST THINGS 2025 Lecture
- Keith Stanglin
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
We are pleased to announce the annual Center for Christian Studies – First Things Lecture, to be held in Austin, Texas, on Monday, September 22 at 7:00 p.m. This year’s speaker will be author and philosopher (and motorcycle mechanic and electrician) Matthew B. Crawford.
We at the Center for Christian Studies are happy to cooperate in this lecture once again with First Things, which is one of the most widely read and influential religious journals in the United States. First Things shares much in common with CCS, whose mission is to help Christians better understand, practice, and pass on their faith to others, to equip teachers of teachers.
Our speaker, Matthew Crawford, earned a degree in physics, then a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is a Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. A New York Times best-selling author, his books have been translated into 13 languages. His shorter writings have appeared in First Things, Unherd, Compact, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, American Affairs, The New Atlantis, Le Monde, Le Figaro, The Sunday Times of London, and many other publications. He writes the Substack Archedelia: Toward a political philosophy of the present.
Crawford will be speaking on the question, “Can Christianity Be Noble?” He writes, “Young men, if their souls are intact, by nature have a longing for greatness. They want some hard path to follow, some high task demanded of them. But the surrounding society of consumerism and careerism offers them nothing like this. More than that, the moral outlook of progressivism that prevails in institutions looks with suspicion on their most vital inclinations in this direction. Following Nietzsche, one wing of the young, male ‘New Right’ traces the flattened and degraded moral landscape of the present to the influence of Christianity, and has taken up the philosophical idiom of 'vitalism' to voice its discontent. There is a strand in the tradition, call it Christian humanism, that shares some of the intuitions of the vitalists but offers as well a much fuller anthropology, and ultimately a cosmology, that today’s vitalists lack, and which is sorely needed if they are to pass beyond rebellion and rebuild the kind of civilization that supports what is best in the human spirit. My aim in this talk is to bring this anthropology to the surface, and to consider the possibility of something like a Christian vitalism.”
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/firstthings, and consider donating here to help subsidize lecture expenses (we suggest $20 per person). Free parking will be available in the church lot and across the street at the AT&T garage. See here for parking details.
To make a gift in support of this annual lecture, please give here.
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