Interview with Kelly Monroe Kullberg, Author of Finding God Beyond Harvard

Interview with Kelly Monroe Kullberg, author of Finding God Beyond Harvard.

Editor’s Note: This interview is a conversation between old friends. I’ve known Kelly for years and she’s long been one of my favorite people on the planet. Kelly not only is the founder of the Veritas Forum, but she is one of those friends that you know is rare and that God has given you a special blessing to know her. This interview doesn’t begin to capture her, but if you read her new book, Finding God Beyond Harvard, you’ll get to know a good deal of Kelly. This book follows up on her first book, Finding God at Harvard, which she published ten years ago.

GL: First off, let’s talk about the Veritas Forum and how it got started. Because I was there and thus know part of your story, I’ll ask questions with our CGO readers in mind so they learn about you and this remarkable event.

So what is the Veritas Forum?

KMK: Veritas Forums are events/gatherings in secular universities that raise and explore the questions and ideas of our culture in relation to the story and person (the brilliance) of Jesus Christ for whom many colleges were founded.

GL: And for those who don’t know, would you tell our readers what Veritas means?

KMK: Veritas is Latin for “truth.” Your readers might have heard it in Mel Gibson’s Passion when Pontius Pilate uses the word several times in his mid-trial dialogue with Jesus.

Veritas is also the modern motto of Harvard and dozens of other universities. Harvard’s original motto was In Christi Gloriam. And later, Veritas, Christo et Ecclessiae.

GL: How did the Veritas Forum begin?

KMK: I describe in vivid color in the book including inklings of coherence, of treasure hunts in the archives and museums and mountains of New England, but I’ll try to summarize.

As a visiting student and then chaplain at Harvard, I saw the emptiness of the modern university, with its amorphous and intangible Veritas, with its rise of depression, aimlessness, sexually transmitted diseases, and other confusions including an increase in suicide. It was a stark contrast to the vibrant and brilliant Christian fellowships throughout the university.

I wanted to include the whole university in the conversations and adventures we naturally have as believers. I asked all believers to join together symphonically, to step up to the plate intellectually in grace and truth, to welcome and engage the hardest questions of the university because we believed that the Gospel would be revealed on the far side of complexity.

Friends and I began the first Veritas Forum at Harvard in 1992 because students felt that they couldn’t ask their deepest questions in classrooms. Even if they did ask, most of today’s professors are tone deaf, or don’t have the bandwidth to answer wisely. Sad but true.

In 1992, I expected 100 people. 700 came. The book goes into the actual conversations that week, and then as Veritas emerged (via cargo plane visits, etc) now in 70 universities involving a few hundred thousand people and countless believing scholars coming out of the closet.

GL: Can you say more about what is going on in our universities, and why the good news of Veritas is relevant to our universities?

KMK: The crisis of education and life in universities is widely known. Critiques are everywhere, but hope is rare. We feel much heat, but see little light. After witnessing about a quarter-million students explore their ideas and questions in Veritas Forums, it seemed time to tell that story. But I also included the feeling and experience of Truth as meaning and joy in our lives.

I wanted to share a true story, both mine and Veritas’ story, that reveals hope. And to say that Harvard (and many universities) bears within itself the seed of its only hope, because its founding vision – Veritas (Truth) – is alive. Truth isn’t an intangible abstraction but rather a Person who is raised from the dead. Likewise, Princeton’s first motto is a clue – “I restore life to the dead.”

What a contrast to our culture’s emptiness and confusion. Harvard’s original motto was “for Christ’s glory,” and this understanding of truth as a Person is the secret key to hope, freedom, and joy.

 GL: How does your book tell this story? 

KMK: This is less “telling” and more “showing” that Veritas is emerging strong and true, again – in the lives of quirky and fun believers. It’s a story of adventure, romance, breaking into an observatory and dancing under the stars, the Northern Lights on Lake Huron, friends exploring True Life and building in the ruins of a culture of despair. We’re taken from Cambridge to the jungles of South America, from Yale to Stanford, Cal Berkeley, and many Veritas Forums and adventures in between.

GL: What are some of the intellectual issues where Christians have some valuable perspectives to contribute to the academy?

KMK: Here are some of the questions students and professors ask at Veritas Forums (questions and slogans begin as “intellectual issues” and soon become existential and spiritual questions):

Truth? Whose “truth”? Who cares?

Believers restore revelation to our epistemology/knowing. We explore reasonable faith in a God who speaks, of an Author who has risked entering the Play. In such a life, we are given True North for guidance, True Vine for joy and fruit, and true friends in this life.

What Story are we living in? What does it mean to be human?

Are we mere animals groveling about and reduced from soul to body, or are we made in God’s image with intrinsic value, re-animated by God’s Spirit and the mind of Jesus to live the Kingdom into being? That’s a question worth exploring.

Do faith and science align or conflict?

Believing scholars show us what they see through their microscopes, telescopes, computers and eyes. How intriguing to find a Treasure Map (Genesis 1-3, parts of Isaiah, Psalms, etc.) that so perfectly align with modern cosmology and the necessity of a genius, immaterial and omnipotent “uncaused cause” that wills (speaks) into existence time, space, matter, and energy.

 

Microbiologists speak of the strange world of quantum chemistry and signs of intentionality at the subcellular level. DNA reveals a language of encoded instruction (the Word became flesh). It’s very exciting to get beyond what George Gilder calls “a 19^th century materialist myth” (naturalism) and into the 21^st century. It’s exciting to get beyond the polemics of “ID v. Evolution” and to blow open the doors of wonder once again.

Is there hope for sexism and racism? (The Gospel…) 

What of our clash(es) of civilizations? 

Why does beauty mean something? 

From where does love flow? How does love last? (ecology of abiding in the True Vine)

If I dive into all the questions Glenn will edit me (not a bad idea!), but they’re “in the book” and on our website as free MP3 downloads of talks (www.veritas.org)

GL: Students are not just intellectuals in training. They’re also living out scripts from culture, which we usually call “lifestyles”. What are some aspects of living in which the Gospel could lead to students to greater joy? 

KMK: Jesus frees us from the world’s pseudo-success Matrix. We’ve been branded from birth and told what we desire, what abundant life looks like, what “knowledge” is, what story is real. So we confuse sex for intimacy, success for significance, knowledge for wisdom, and so on. We build our resumes and get all full of ourselves, all the while forgetting to love the people God’s given us. Abstract “bests” tyrannize concrete goods. We often forget to dive into community, perhaps to marry, nest, raise children (by biology or proximity), be good to our parents and neighbors and churches and strangers. We forget to save the Shire (I’m a big fan of Sam and Frodo). Sometimes we just forget to love in tangible ways, which is a sophomoric tragedy.

Living in truth, in reality, is to begin to live freely. We break out of the mediated (man-interpreted) world and into immediacy (God’s interpretation). This happened for me in Chapter 10 of the book, in a wildlife estuary on the ocean. To live in Truth is to trust the real Author, to learn our own human story, and to enter our role in his play.

GL: You could have told the story of the Veritas Forum without your own story included. Why did you weave the rise of Veritas together with your own real life joy and despair?

KMK: I first did tell the story of Veritas without myself in it. Early drafts read “like the phone book” of people involved in Veritas Forums. One editor asked, “Is this a book of floating apologetics? Did you not have a personal life?” I was writing around the problem of pain, and stayed above the surface. And I thought, who cares about my story anyway. I’m just the readers’ travel guide on an intellectual road trip, the journalist.

But it read flatly. It was “outside-in.” I didn’t lead with God’s beauty that so often captures my attention. There was no narrative thread, and little sense of why all this matters in someone’s actual life. So, the final draft, the book, now includes the perceptions of your’s truly (for better or worse) – for example, hitching rides on cold cargo jets through the night (I was the cargo with the yellow earplugs and blue sleeping bag amidst boxes marked BioHazard, headed for university towns).

GL: In the book you are unflinching in your portrayal of personal pain, the profound loneliness of being single, dating the same guy for years into your late 30s, with no offer of marriage from him. Personally, your honesty pulled me in even deeper.  I found the Lord used your story, supplying wisdom and comfort regarding painful experiences in my own life. What was your thinking in including such gut level stuff?

Yeah, because I really did have a life during those years, beneath the surface of the Veritas story, I rewrote the book to include my near-fiancé in the age-of-the-almost-marriage. I believe that I was as charitable as possible. I wouldn’t have written this if from open wounds rather than scars (healed wounds). 

I also added some stream of consciousness journal entries. The candor is a bit wrenching at times I suppose. But it’s honest, which the reader should want in a book about truth. I hope I didn’t overshare (tomboys like me don’t like that sort of thing) but wrote just enough to connect to real people. Biblical truth may hold water at any angle, but what about at any depth? So the story takes a personal dive (as my life did). We spend time in a lonely cabin, awash in the problem of pain, in which God himself enters the story. As the hero.

GL: What thoughts and feelings occurred to you as you put your heart into this book for the public to read?

KMK: I wanted the story to fire on all pistons – heart, mind, body, soul, community – because that’s what in fact did, and is, happening with kindred fellowships and with Veritas. It’s just that I didn’t first imagine it would be my own heart on the line. I went away to a farm in Southern Ohio around Thanksgiving of last year, and prayed about the direction of the book (of “floating apologetics”). I sensed the Lord saying, “It has to go through the cabin.” I understood his meaning – it has to go through the problem of pain, unfortunately my own, when I crashed in a pine cabin an hour north of Boston. (I’d been making a place for Veritas publicly but found myself struggling to believe it privately given the events of my life).

I remember at that time leaving the Harvard Faculty Club, and seeing the word “VERITAS” backwards through beveled glass, which spells “SATIREV.” The satire felt like a mockery of my own life and faith. I began to ask the hardest questions of Veritas Forums, but from the inside out, as a skeptic once again. So, yeah, the book is pretty personal and honest.

When I saw the list of people IVP was going to send the manuscript to for reviews, I panicked. “We can’t send it to (for example) Owen Gingerich, Armand Nicholi, Mark Noll, George Marsden” and others, I said. “The book is too personal.” (I’m crazy, I realize).

 A month later, I was shocked by their endorsements. I guess this kind of writing is refreshing in the academy. Anyway, I’m a hypocrite because it was much easier for me to ask others to write so honestly, in Finding God at Harvard, 1996, than to write this way myself in 2006.

 But again, THANKFULLY, it’s much bigger than a story about me, but points far beyond me to more impressive people I’m privileged to call “friends.” Dallas Willard, Bill Edgar, Fritz Schaeffer, Walter Bradley, Jamey Pappas, Jeff Barneson, Brenda Birmann, Finny Kuruvilla, Tim Keller, Os Guinness, Kurt Keilhacker, Dan Cho, Matt Bennett, William Lane Craig, Hugh Ross, DJ Snell – hundreds of awesome comrades including many CGO readers. And it’s about the privilege we share together of building in the ruins, of living in the Kingdom.

 GL: Why should CGO readers buy Finding God Beyond Harvard? 

KMK: Hmmm. There’s a really cool “trail map” but no pop-ups (sad :)

Okay, just kidding, because Jesus is the only hope of the world and this book points to him in a hundred ways, disciplines, cultures, ideas, adventures. And because, together, we’re on an excellent journey of knowing him ourselves, and of loving his world back to sanity and life. I’m seeing it happen. After all, Jesus said that he would reach the world through his people and that the gates of hell won’t prevail against us. I love telling those stories. Also, the book is funny, quirky, full of our passionate bunglings which God often uses in his mercy and sense of humor.

The first book (Finding God at Harvard) won the CBA book of the year for evangelism and mission. My heart is for the seeker (including some of my own family members) – so I hope this new book (Beyond) not only builds our faith but also leads skeptics and seekers to the quality of life we all want, to Jesus himself. 

IVP encouraged me to be the readers guide on an “intellectual road trip” into many universities. But the story is much more than intellectual; it’s also an embodied and spiritual adventure of a winsome group of friends. We’re taken on a journey from Harvard to the Amazon, to Yale, Princeton, UVA and Duke, Texas, Michigan, Iowa, Ohio, UCLA, USC, Stanford, Berkeley and so on.

I wrote the book to extend the purpose and value of Veritas – Exploring True Life – to the reader at home. A person no longer needs to physically be in a Veritas Forum to be immersed in the ethos and substance of Veritas, though readers are also invited to Veritas Forums in person.

So the book reads as a novel filled with adventure, fun, heartbreak, and hope. Memoir both of a person and a movement to restore an essential conversation to a dying culture. It’s an exploration of truth, and how and where true life is found.

© 2006, Glenn Lucke and Kelly Monroe Kullberg.

Comments

[Karen Miedrich-Luo]

Thank you, Kelly, for your single-minded focus on this project. I first read FGH in 1997 on my way to teach English in China where I faced students who were asking these same questions, but from the cultural malaise of communist ideaology re-forming into gross materialist pursuits. For them, the biggest, most mind-boggling revelation was that intellectual people even believed in God. Your book was shared with several questioning students. I look forward to reading Finding God Beyond Harvard.

[bob gardner]

very good interview look forard to reading your book

[Rev. Dr. Donald N. Nichols UCC Clergy]

Thanks so very much for your work. There was an article in todays Repository Newspaper in
Canton, Ohio. I'll make it a point to get your books and read them.
Agape,
"Dr. Don"

[aircon-hire]

thank you for this wonderful blog it was well worth the read

[Justine Wright]

Kudos to Kelly for her message and her books. We need people just like her at every one of those kinds of institutions, MIT, Stanford, Yale, etc. What courage! Keep up the good the fight of faith!