What is The Lumen Center?
The Lumen Center is a team of scholars at the intersection of Christianity and culture with the aim to build bridges between the academy and the church. We are located in the heart of the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This university is our primary community, audience, and interlocutor for honestly engaging with contemporary academic conversations.
As a center for the study of Christianity and culture, The Lumen Center combines top-rate scholarship, teaching, mentorship, and public engagement to contribute positively to the intellectual, cultural, and institutional life of UW-Madison and to aid in the intellectual and spiritual formation of faculty, staff, and students at UW-Madison and beyond. We undertake this mission by assembling scholars to work individually and together.
What Does The Lumen Center Do?
The Lumen Center is a new and experimental model for supporting Christian scholars in the twenty-first century. Based on our unique history as an initiative of the Stephen & Laurel Brown Foundation alongside Upper House, a nationally leading Christian study center, The Lumen Center is a hybrid of an academic institute, a think tank, and a Christian study center.
With our initial team and launch we will becreate resources in multiple media while hosting teaching opportunities in Madison. We intend to:
Support the study of Christianity and culture for the benefit of the church through our individual and , collective research that bring scholarly insights to bear on pressing issues in the contemporary church.
Support the study of Christianity and culture for the benefit of the academy through research informed by the Christian intellectual tradition that honestly engages contemporary academic conversations.
Host lectures, courses, reading groups, and symposia in Madison advancing the study of Christianity and culture at UW-Madison.
Why “The Lumen Center”?
Our name is intended to signal three overlapping images:
Lumen, or “light” in Latin, has deep roots in Christian history and has historically been invoked in educational settings to signal understanding, enlightenment, and wisdom about God, humanity, and the world rooted in the gospel message.
One such educational setting (among many) is the University of Wisconsin, founded in 1848 with the motto Numen Lumen, or “God, our light.” While this motto is fittingly, for a public university, non-sectarian and can be interpreted in non-religious terms, at The Lumen Center we want to signal our support for the institution of UW-Madison while affirming that the Christian intellectual tradition can play a vital role in achieving its core educational mission to “discover, examine critically, preserve and transmit the knowledge, wisdom and values.”
Finally, we are an initiative of the Stephen and Laurel Brown Foundation. Steve, a UW alumnus and longtime benefactor of UW-Madison, was inspired to create a foundation in part because of a repeated image he held of light bathing the hills of campus, especially the iconic Bascom Hill at the center of campus. The Lumen Center honors and continues Steve’s vision in its name and its work.
The Stephen & Laurel Brown Foundation exists to serve the University of Wisconsin and Madison communities. Through Upper House and the Lumen Center, the Foundation advances Christian theological training and formation for students, faculty, and staff in a world-class public university community.
