The Center for Christianity and Public Life’s Public Life Fellowship is our flagship Christian Civic Formation program, and the focus of this project. Our Public Life Fellowship is a nine-month program serving an intergenerational class of established Christian civic leaders interested in intensive, community-based learning about virtue and character, and how these things contribute to their leadership and life of public service.
The program combines world-class resources related to practical civic leadership issues with an integrated, foundation-deep emphasis on personal character and spiritual formation. Through two completed cohorts, we have proven the value of the fellowship. Fellows tell us they have a radically deepened understanding of character formation, and how it relates to both the personal and the public. Through this program, our fellows become teachers in their own communities, disseminating and representing knowledge about character formation from positions of influence and authority.
This grant will enable us to sustain this vital work, and deepen the capacity of this program to introduce established Christian civic leaders to cutting-edge science and research that establishes character formation and virtue as fields of knowledge. In addition to the deep, measured impact of the fellowship itself, we have built this program to have the infrastructure and earn the ongoing engagement of alumni so that they remain connected to a rich and growing ecosystem of civic leaders who are similarly-formed and in influential leadership positions of public import. As our alumni programming grows, this ongoing community of fellows will serve as ambassadors for this knowledge in civic life, where it is so deeply contested.
