For Your Consideration

On Thursday, June 4, 2026, Executive Director, Mike Sacasas, moderated a panel discussion inspired by the most recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence . Mike was joined by an ecumenical panel consisting of Ana Siljak (PhD), Lily Abadal (PhD), and Christoper Hampson (JD, MTS). This audio includes the discussion and the Q&A afte...

On Thursday, April 9, 2026, Dr. Grace Hamman sat down with us for an interview where she shares about her faith journey, the beginnings of her interests in Medieval literature and art, and how we might reflect on Medieval uses of virtues and vices to reimagine their modern uses. About the speaker Grace Hamman (Ph. D, Duke University) is a writer, speaker, and medievalist. Dr. Hamman is the author...

On Wednesday, March 4, 2026, Dr. Antón Barba-Kay gave a public lecture at Christian Study Center. Dr. Barba-Kay is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego, and a Fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center at Harvard. Virtues are forms of habitual excellence. They are coherent responses of character to...

On Thursday, February 19, 2026, Dr. Ellen Davis gave a public lecture at Christian Study Center. Speaker Bio:  Dr. Davis is an Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School. She is an established author who focuses her research on the effects of biblical interpretation on the life of faith communities and ways they respond to urgent public issues...

On Monday, November 3rd, 2025, Dr. Samuel Kimbriel gave a public lecture at Christian Study Center. Samuel Kimbriel, Ph. D., is the Founder and Director of Aspen’s Philosophy & Society Initiative. Philosophers from Aristotle onward have often considered love—and friendship in particular—to be very near to the culmination of human life. We cannot attain the fullest version of our human selves witho...

On Thursday, October 23rd, 2025, Dr. Kevin Bird gave a public lecture at Christian Study Center. Kevin Bird, Ph. D., serves as the Center’s Experiential Learning Coordinator and Lecturer with the UF Bob Graham Center for Public Service. Martin Luther King Jr. called the songs sung during critical junctures of the struggle for America’s Second Reconstruction, “the soul of the movement.” Other Black...

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 h...

On Friday, October 10th, Dr. Richard Horner gave a public lecture at Christian Study Center’s 25th Anniversary Celebration. Dr. Horner is one of the founders of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville. In his lecture, Dr. Horner draws from the philosophical work of Saint Augustine, Alasdair McIntyre, and Blaise Pascal to raise challenges to modern thinking inspired by the projects of René Descar...

On Saturday, October 11th, Mike Sacasas gave a public lecture at Christian Study Center’s 25th Anniversary Celebration. Mike is the Executive Director at the Christian Study Center. Two questions framed the contents of Mike’s talk: “How do Study Centers fit into the landscape of the Christian higher education?” and “How do Study Centers contribute to the life of the universities they serve?” In hi...

On Friday, October 10th, Mike Sacasas and Josh Perlin sat down with music artist Jess Ray for a conversation about faith, art, and story. This interview was part of the 25th Anniversary Celebration. Guest Bio “ A singer-songwriter, producer, and creative supernova based in her beloved home state of North Carolina. Crafting a new wave of music for those seeking God, Jess blends fresh sonic style wi...

On Saturday, October 11th, Joshua Perlin gave a public lecture at Christian Study Center’s 25th Anniversary Celebration. Joshua is the current Assistant Director of Educational Programs at the Christian Study Center. In the third lecture at the 25th Anniversary Celebration, Joshua gave a talk about what we might consider when we encounter two or more truths that seem paradoxical. Christian theolog...

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 i...

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...

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 ques...

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...

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...

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 th...

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...

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. Th...

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...

On Friday, September 13, 2024, the Christian Study Center was pleased to host Paul and Emily Pastor for a discussion exploring the place of beauty in the Christian tradition and its relationship to creativity. Paul is an accomplished poet, and Emily is a classically trained a fine artist, specializing in representational oil painting. Beauty is an eternal invitation to join a life far larger than...

In this episode of For Your Consideration , we are pleased to share a lecture that was given by Dr. Lee Vinsel on Thursday, February 1, 2024. Acting wisely in the context of new technologies can be difficult because both utopian and dystopian forms of hype create unrealistic and misleading visions of near-term change. Analyzing historical and contemporary examples of hyped technologies, Dr. Vinsel...

In this episode of For Your Consideration , we are sharing a public lecture delivered by Dr. Esther Meek on Thursday, November 2, 2023. In her lecture, Dr. Meek addresses vital questions about beauty, thinking, knowledge, and our relationship to the world. Our modern age has us presuming that reality is material or reducible to it; inert and indifferent, ours to manipulate to the end of power. We...

In this episode of For Your Consideration , we are sharing a talk delivered by our director, Mike Sacasas, during our spring semester open house on January 23rd. The talk was titled “To See the World Whole.” We live in what the poet Richard Wilbur called a "scattering time." The most powerful forces at work within us and without appear to be disintegrating forces. These trends are long-standing ev...

In this episode of For Your Consideration , we are delighted to bring you a lecture on the role of faith in our reasoning about the good life, which was delivered at the Center by Dr. Meghan Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame on October 5th. Dr. Sullivan is the Wilsey Family Collegiate Professor of Philosophy. She serves as Director of the NDIAS, a university-wide research institute that sup...