Each year Baylor’s Institute for Faith and Learning hosts the Symposium on Faith and Culture to address significant issues from the vantage point of Christian intellectual traditions. In doing so, it attempts to realize Baylor University’s aspiration to cultivate reflective engagement with the world of public ideas and issues, especially in a way that acknowledges the relevance of Christian questions, convictions, and contributions.

This year’s symposium, “Higher Learning,” held October 27-29, 2016, welcomed nearly 500 participants, convened 53 sessions, and hosted 127 presentations from approximately 190 scholars over the course of three days as it engaged participants in conversations about the profound challenges facing American higher education.

Keynote speakers included Dr. Candace Vogler, the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Philosophy and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago, and Principal Investigator on “Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life,” a project funded by the John Templeton Foundation; Dr. James Davison Hunter, the LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia; and Dr. John Haldane, the J. Newton Rayzor, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University.

In an era in which higher learning has largely been divorced from questions of meaning and purpose, Dr. Vogler reminded conference participants that Christian higher education has, perhaps now more than ever, a vital mission to answer the fundamental human desire for one’s work to be rooted in a common good oriented beyond self-interest. In its attempt to cultivate virtues that connect vocation to transcendent meaning and purpose, Christian higher education still has enormous potential to promote human flourishing.