Westmont College

Wow.

What's cool? He's at Westmont College, which is a small, small school in Santa Barbara, but a division two powerhouse.

They have a national championship.

They have people in the pros.

And k- turns out there's, like, multiple pro-abortion professors on the faculty.

60% of the faculty at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, voted for Obama both terms.

And so I just decided to stay and, like, raise holy hell-

[laughs]

So how do people actually grow? Not just breaking a habit, not just managing a symptom, not placing a self-help Band-Aid on an existential wound, but how do people become in a way that moves them into the kind of wholeness that we imagine when we think about what really makes life worth living? Now, this episode is motivated by a project that looks at how Christian practices might help cultivate virtue, not merely religiosity for the sake of religiosity, but the kind of practices that might inculcate human excellence, and of course, the kind of practices that might induce the opposite.

But to speak of virtue development and to speak of habits and practices that might lead to those virtues developing, I thought, "I really need to know how people grow in the first place." This line of thinking was present at the Martin Institute's Christian Formation Workshop, which gathered at Westmont College back in the spring of two thousand twenty-six, bringing together theologians, psychologists, philosophers, biblical scholars around a project called Practice Unto Virtue.

It was formed in the conviction that Christianity is actually a way of life aimed at transforming people into the likeness of Christ.

That vision of spiritual formation holds things like prayer, fasting, service, gratitude, solitude, silence, a long list of these, as somehow essential to the Christian life, and perhaps beneficial to forming virtues like humility, modesty, honesty, patience, courage, generosity.

We also look at the question of growth through trauma and suffering, considering Eleanor Stump's perspective on sin as a kind of inner fragmentation.

Or Gordon Smith's picture of human agency as nested within God's love.

So special thanks to Steve Porter and the team at the Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture at Westmont College, as well as the Templeton World Charity Foundation, which helped to fund this work, and thank you for listening today.

Hope you enjoy.

Huh? How does creation declare things about God? What does it mean that the rocks will cry out? When Meredith was in college, her campus pastor used to, from time to time, give the students an orientation to remind them where they were.

They were in chapel, he'd say, Westmont College, Montecito, Santa Barbara County, California, United States of America, North America, Western Hemisphere, planet Earth, solar system, Milky Way galaxy, universe, mind of God.

The sheer vastness of creation tells us something about the grandness of God, God's power, God's majesty, and also the grandness of God's vision.

God's purposes stretch further and deeper and higher than we humans can comprehend.

Um, I actually have a history both in the evangelical world and the Catholic world.

I went to Westmont College in Santa Barbara.

That's right.

So, and my husband-

A bit of a heads up warning in our show today, my friends.

Paul is a professor emeritus of English at Westmont.

He is also a former poet laureate of the city of Santa Barbara.

He comes to us today from Santa Barbara, California.

Um, Paul Willis, Professor Emeritus and, and poet, uh, poet to the stars of Santa Barbara, I would love to hear where you are finding hope these days.

Mm-hmm.

You know, y- yesterday, Sharon and I hosted a brunch for, uh, retired faculty at Westmont.

Mm.

And so when I went to college, I decided to get a degree in vocal performance, and I was in this group that we had with my school called Zephaniah.

I went to Westmont College, which is a Christian liberal arts school in I had this group where we would go and perform all around at churches and community organizations and juvenile halls and rescue missions and things like that.

And it gave me such a great experience of performing on stage and knowing what to say, being myself on stage, learning how to be comfortable talking in front of people and performing a lot in front of people and playing the piano with a band and all that stuff, learning to sing backup harmonies.

And it was just such a great experience.

There's these boxes and boxes of all of his unpublished materials and notes and artifacts.

At the Westmont College in the basement of their library there, they have his beekeeping suit.

Unless you, you know, in case you want to visit there and try that on for yourself.

But one of the things I spent weeks out there, did multiple trips when I was researching, writing my dissertation.