For Your Consideration

On Friday, October 10th, Dr. Jay Lynch gave a public lecture at Christian Study Center’s 25th Anniversary Celebration. Dr. Lynch is one of the founders of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville.

In the first lecture at the 25th Anniversary Celebration, Dr. Lynch gave a talk about the Study Center’s providential role in his life’s calling as a medical professional, namely its impact on helping him to define and preserve the soul of his vocation. Dr. Lynch posits that medicine is not solely a science, but also an art, and it’s the art of medicine that allows care-providers to step beyond the medicine of modernity to see patients as humans with a soul and a story.

Lecturer Bio

Dr. Jay Lynch is one of the founders of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville along with his wife, Laura Lynch. He served as Board President of the Study Center from 2000-2024. Dr. Lynch received his BA from the University of Virginia and MD from Eastern Virginia Medical School in 1984. He did his internal medicine training at the University of Florida and medical oncology training at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD. He eventually returned to University of Florida College Of Medicine (UFCOM) and has served in multiple roles during this tenure including, course director in Oncology, program director for hematology/oncology, section chief of hematology/oncology at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) and now serves as the Assistant Dean for Admissions at UFCOM.

Dr. Lynch is a nationally recognized, well-published expert in the diagnosis and treatment of lymphomas and has coauthored over 130 papers, book chapters and abstracts. He was the first faculty inductee into the Chapman Humanism Society at the UFCOM and serves on its board of directors. He has received multiple teaching awards including clinical teacher of the year, the Hippocratic award, is a member of the College of Medicine Society of Teaching Scholars, and in 2006 was honored by the University of Florida as one of 5 Distinguished Teaching Scholars. He and his wife Laura, have 4 children and several grandchildren.

This episode has been produced and edited with the help of Michael Lynch.

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On Tuesday, September 16th, Dr. Paul Lim gave a public lecture at Christian Study Center.

What does western civilization have to do with Jesus? How does his life and teaching fit into modern western mores? Does it matter?

Taking Fyodor Dostoevsky’s trenchant and prophetic critique of western modernity’s misappropriation of freedom and its denial of Christ seriously, and engaging further with the ideas of Paul Kingsnorth, Jordan Peterson, Augustine, and Calvin, we will grapple with the allure of civilizational Christianity, Christian nationalism, as we will seek to answer the question: “Is ‘Christian civilization’ an oxymoron?”

Lecturer Bio

Paul C.H. Lim (Ph.D., Cambridge) is a Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He is an award-winning historian of Christianity, with particular research foci on consequences and reception of patristic theologies in modern western Christianity, as his last two books have dealt with the Trinity and Christology from Nicaea to the Enlightenment period. An adult convert to Christianity, he is constantly grappling with the ideal and reality of “life in two cities,” the City of God and the City of Man, always fumbling about, thus in desperate need of grace, forgiveness and restoration from God and fellow men!

This episode has been produced and edited with the help of Michael Lynch.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

On Tuesday, September 2nd, Executive Director of the Christian Study Center, Mike Sacasas, gave a lecture as part of the Fall 2025 Open House at Christian Study Center to kick off our fall programming.

For over a decade, modern society has been frequently described as a “burnout society” in which individuals are worn down by economic and technological forces. While this analysis has its merits, we can now see the limits of the array of cultural responses to burnout society. This talk will draw on the Christian tradition to explore the limits of the burnout critique and offer a critical appraisal in which self-sacrifice — driven by faith, hope, and love — fuel our pursuit of the good for the sake of the world.

Lecturer Bio

Michael Sacasas earned his MA in Theological Studies from Reformed Theological Seminary in 2002. He was later a doctoral candidate at the University of Central Florida studying the relationship between technology and society with a focus on the work of Hannah Arendt. Along the way he has taught in a variety of settings, served as a school administrator, and written extensively on technology and society. He is an Associate Fellow in Ethics and Culture at the Greystone Theological Institute and was recently names a Senior Fellow with the Trinity Forum.

This episode has been produced and edited with the help of Michael Lynch.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

On Thursday, August 7th, Dr. AJ Poelarends visited the Christian Study Center to give a lecture on the vocation of a Christian University Professor.

Lecture synopsis

The value of education has been under question for some time now. C.S. Lewis’s sermon, “Learning in Wartime” from 1939 emphasized that scholarly work can be a vocation—a calling from God. In this session, we’ll think through such questions as: What is the deeper significance of being a Christian faculty member? How does it differ from those around us who are not Christian? How do we lean into this calling? What challenges do we face when we do?

Lecturer Bio

Dr. Poelarands joins us from the Anselm House as Director of the Center for Faith and Learning. He received his PhD in Computational Astrophysics and was an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Wheaton College. Dr. Poelarends is married with four children and lives in Minneaopolis, where he serves the higher education community at the University of Minnesota.

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On Wednesday, June 18th, Dr. Karl Gunther visited the Christian Study Center to give this lecture.

In 1530, monasteries were some of the wealthiest and most prestigious institutions in England. A decade later, they were gone and in many cases literally dismantled. In his talk, Dr. Gunther will consider the causes and consequences of this dramatic historical episode and help us think about our own moment of collapsing confidence in institutions, including public and private universities.

Lecturer Bio

Dr. Karl Gunther is a historian of the English Reformation and Associate Professor of Humanities within the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He earned his B.A. in Philosophy and History from Wheaton College (IL) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University. Gunther’s first book, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525-1590 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) was a finalist for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize and the Runner-up for the American Society of Church History’s Brewer Prize. He has published articles in Past & Present, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, Reformation, History Compass, and in volumes on Freedom of Speech, 1550-1850 (2020) and Early Modern Literature and England’s Long Reformation (2021). He was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2015 and served as President of the Southern Conference on British Studies from 2015-2017. Before joining the Hamilton School in 2023, he was an Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami, where he taught for fifteen years, serving as the department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies, the co-convener of the UM Medieval and Early Modern Studies Research Group, and the chair of the UM Faculty Senate’s Student Affairs Committee.

Gunther is currently in the final stages of completing his second book, entitled Wrong! Responding to Error in the English Reformation.

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On Friday, March 7, Sara Hendren gave the second lecture in her two-part series here at the Christian Study Center.

Rituals of gift-giving and receiving are global, ancient practices that tell us something important about being human: Not all of life can be organized as transactions or as projects. The gift economy — freely offered goods, graciously received and passed along in a repeating pattern — exceeds those everyday bounds. But when and how might we think about our dependencies, our needs and weaknesses, as gifts? Hendren draws examples from anthropology, history, and design to offer a vision for life as a gift that both liberates our possibilities and constrains our choices.

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Northeastern University. Her book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World explores the places where disability shows up in design at all scales: assistive technology, furniture, architecture, urban planning, and more. It was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR and won the 2021 Science in Society Journalism book prize. Her art and design works have been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama presidency, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Vitra Museum, and many others, and her work is held in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt. She has been an NEH Public Scholar and a fellow at New America, and her commentary and criticism have been published in Harper’s, Art in America, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

On March 6-7, 2025, the Christian Study Center welcomed guest scholar Sara Hendren to give the first two lectures in a two-year series titled Virtue Ethics for the 21st Century. This series of lectures is made possible through our participation in a project led by Upper House, a Christian study center at the University of Wisconsin, and funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

Virtue Ethics for the 21st Century

The philosopher Bernard Williams once observed that we suffer from a “poverty of concepts.” This is true of modern conceptions of ethics and the good life, with consequences for both how we live our lives now, and what we are able to imagine for our future.

Without a better way of thinking about ethics and the good life, we remain trapped within the horizon of possibilities drawn by our reigning set of concepts. With regard to ethics and the good life, our imagination is ensnared by the language of utilitarianism, efficiency, and the cost-benefit analysis.

In order to confront the challenges we face in the 21st century, we need a better way of imagining the moral life. We also need a way to think not just about what is right, but also about how we become the sort of people do what is right. Is there a better way of thinking about ethics and the good life that might sharpen our thinking and equip us to face the challenges of this century?

This series of lectures proposes that the answer to this question lies, at least in part, in the recovery of the virtue ethic tradition.

Sara Hendren

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Northeastern University. Her book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World explores the places where disability shows up in design at all scales: assistive technology, furniture, architecture, urban planning, and more. It was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR and won the 2021 Science in Society Journalism book prize. Her art and design works have been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama presidency, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Vitra Museum, and many others, and her work is held in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt. She has been an NEH Public Scholar and a fellow at New America, and her commentary and criticism have been published in Harper’s, Art in America, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.

The Virtues of Dependence: Design and Disability

Prosthetics, assistive technologies, and accessible architecture all bridge the gaps between our many bodies and the built world, forming a creative legacy of flexible, generative design. But the paradox of disability under technocratic modernity presents a mixed picture of both the body and personhood. In this talk using stories and examples from all scales of design, Sara Hendren helps us to ask: What is the nature of the dependent body, assisted by its many tools and extensions? How does disability shape all our lives, and the meaning we make in both giving and receiving help?

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

On February 12, 2025, we were delighted to welcome Dr. Brad East to the Christian Study Center.

In this lecture, Dr. East explores both the challenges and the questions which the advancement of technology raises for Christians, offering ideas for what discipleship, worship, and spiritual formation might look like in our time and place.

Dr. East earned his PhD from Yale University and is currently associate professor of theology in the College of Biblical Studies at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. He is the editor of Robert Jenson’s The Triune Story: Collected Essays on Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2019) and the author of multiple books including The Doctrine of Scripture (Cascade, 2021), The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Eerdmans, 2022), The Church: A Guide to the People of God (Lexham, 2024), and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry (Eerdmans, 2024).

His articles have been featured in multiple publications, including, but not limited to, Modern Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology, and the Scottish Journal of Theology.

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In this episode of For Your Consideration, we would like to offer this public lecture given by Tara Burton at the Christian Study Center on Wednesday, November 6, 2024.

We often think of transhumanism as a distinctly modern phenomenon. But the history of magic suggests that the desire to transcend our humanity -- and become gods -- through knowledge, is part of a far older religious tradition. This talk looks at the history of the Hermetic tradition -- which flourished alongside proto-orthodox Christianity and Gnosticism in Hellenized Alexandria before being rediscovered in the West during the Renaissance -- and the influence of both Hermeticism and early modern ideas on magic on the development of what we now think of as modernity.

Tara Isabella Burton is an astute interpreter of contemporary culture, particularly regarding matters of religion, media, and identity. She received a doctorate in theology from Oxford in 2017 and is currently a Visiting Fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center and a Visiting Research Fellow at Catholic University of America's Institutional Flourishing Lab. Burton is also the author of two books of cultural criticism, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is also an accomplished novelist, having most recently published Here In Avalon.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

On Friday, October 11, 2024, Pascal’s Coffeehouse at the Christian Study Center celebrated its 20th Anniversary. As part of the celebration of this milestone, Dr. Paul C. H. Lim gave this lecture, which we are delighted to share with you on this episode of For Your Consideration.

In our times of political and cultural polarization, the word “Christian” has often been either hijacked or weaponized. So, what does it actually look like to be a Christian and follow the King whose kingdom was not of this world? How do we seek the greater good of humanity while seeking to serve the Lord of grace and glory?

By juxtaposing perspectives from Augustine’s City of God, Aquinas’s exitus-reditus doctrine, and Jesus’ teaching on double-belonging, Professor Lim presents a pathway for faithful flourishing for Christians. This will also highlight the strategic significance of Christian Study Centers by presenting a more authentic and credible fabric of a “Christian plausibility” of love and truth.

Dr. Lim is Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education and Affiliate Professor of Religious Studies with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He came to UF after nearly twenty years at Vanderbilt University and visiting appointments at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Cambridge University, and Yonsei University in Korea. His Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2012) won the 2013 Roland H. Bainton Prize as the best book in history from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. Along with his distinguished academic work, Dr. Lim was for a number of years the lead instructor with the Nashville Institute for Faith and Work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com