ST. DAVIDS, PA: The Campolo Center for Ministry at Eastern University is pleased to announce the Fall 2019 Campolo Fellows Lecture Series. This year, the Campolo Fellows program has been underwritten by a generous grant from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Family Foundation in San Antonio, TX.

The Campolo Fellows Lecture series begins Wednesday, September 12, 2018 at 10 AM with Eastern alum and professor emeritus, Dr. Tony Campolo, preaching at Chapel in the Eastern University Gym.  This service is open to the public and all are welcome!  A live stream of the chapel service is available HERE.

September 13-14, Rev. Dr. Curtis W. Freeman, research professor of theology and Baptist studies and director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke Divinity School in Durham, NC, will be our visiting Campolo Fellow.  He’ll be guest lecturing in both undergrad and seminary classes on September 13^th and delivering his lecture on The Dys-eased Conscience of American Evangelicalism at the Windows on the World forum, September 14^th at 10 AM in the McInnis Auditorium.  This lecture is open to the public and is followed by a luncheon (cost $5) and Q & A in the Walton Hall Baird Library from 11:30 AM to 1 PM.

Modern evangelicalism began with an uneasy conscience, which became awakened. Prophetic voices like Carl F.H. Henry, Ron Sider, and Tony Campolo sounded the call for Christians to attend to the social reality of God’s love for the whole world. In his lecture, Curtis Freeman will argue that the conscience of evangelicalism has become dys-eased from the traumatic effects of long-term stress in caring wrongly about the world. The effects are so serious, Freeman will argue, that American evangelicalism is exhibiting signs of a disordered condition that is not simply dys-eased, but can now rightly be described as diseased. The pathology of this moral disorder is degenerative and progressive, and unless it is halted, the diagnosis will be terminal, as it is hard to imagine that evangelicalism as a religious movement can long survive without a healthy and functioning conscience.

Dr. Freeman’s most recent book, Undomesticated Dissent: Democracy and the Public Virtue of Religious Noncomformity (Baylor University Press, 2017), “provides a sweeping intellectual history of the public virtue of religiously motivated dissent from the seventeenth century to the present, by carefully comparing, contrasting, and then weighing the various types of dissent—evangelical and spiritual dissent (John Bunyan), economic and social dissent (Daniel Defoe), radical and apocalyptic dissent (William Blake).”  Freeman argues that dissent is an essential quality for establishing democracy and for ensuring democratic societies flourish.

His earlier books include Contesting Catholicity: Theology for Other Baptists (Baylor University Press, 2014), A Company of Women Preachers: Baptist Prophetesses in Seventeenth-Century England (Baylor University Press, 2011), and Baptist Roots: A Reader in the Theology of a Christian People (Judson Press, 1999). He is an ordained Baptist minister and serves as editor of the American Baptist Quarterly and serves on the Baptist World Alliance Commission on Doctrine and Christian Unity.

Additional visiting Campolo Fellows include the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, Senior Minister at Middle Collegiate Church in New York City (October 24-26, 2018) and the Rev. Dr. Amy Butler, Senior Minister at the Riverside Church in New York City (November 7-9, 2018).

For more information about the Campolo Center and the Campolo Fellows Lecture Series, please contact Executive Director, Robert Gauthier, at 610-341-1715 or rgauthier@eastern.edu.