Dr. Tom Hibbs, J. Newton Rayzor Sr. Professor of Philosophy and Dean Emeritus

After 20 years in administration, where I spent time as a department chair, dean, and president, I returned to my first love, teaching and writing, at the university where I have felt most at home, Baylor University. It is perhaps odd that a Yankee Catholic would flourish at the world’s largest Baptist University, located in Waco, Texas. But Baylor is a place where the complex set of goods that define the modern university can be pursued in a unified way, even as higher education across the country is increasingly specialized and siloed, and where hope is fostered at a time when despair is a potent temptation. 

Here it is possible to integrate research with the teaching and mentoring of students, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Baylor’s commitment to residential communities encourages students, faculty, and staff to work, eat, and worship together as they reflect on the ways that the life of faith can inform the pursuit of truth, the service of the least of our neighbors, and the cultivation of life-long friendships.

Although there is much in the history, up to the present moment, of our churches that calls for repentance, as members of churches populated by a vast assembly of “every nation, race, people, and tongue” (Revelation 7:9), we have resources for a vision of diversity within unity, where forgiveness does not erase the requirements of justice and where justice is not disconnected from the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation.

For fostering settings where we can think critically and faithfully about all these matters, I am grateful for the work of the Institute of Faith and Learning. Formerly under Darin Davis and now under Elisabeth Kincaid, IFL fosters the cultivation of one of the rarest of goods in the modern university: friendships among faculty across the entire university.