I arrived at the University of Minnesota painfully shy and painfully grateful for acceptance into my PhD program. Left to my own devices, I might have spent years shuttling between a silent cubicle and a spartan dorm room—but God had other plans. At my first church service in Minneapolis, three people told me I should check out Anselm House.

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So I did. Soon I was enrolled in the MacLaurin Fellows program, living in the pilot residential community, and Editor-in-Chief of the student journal Between Cities. I couldn’t get enough. Anselm House was the home I hadn’t known to long for, engaging more of my mind than any Sunday school or sermon and asking questions closer to my heart than any academic course ever had. 

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Some students need to be lured with free food and fun activities to engage with theology; I was eager for academic discussion, but paralyzed at the prospect of small talk. Anselm House bridged the divide. The relationships cultivated there are whole-person friendships that stretch from the lecture hall to the local pub, from Augustine to late-night runs to Aldi’s. Through the friends I made at Anselm House, God healed my loneliness. 'He also guided my intellectual life. In the Colin MacLaurin Fellows program, I refined my thinking about my career using a new vocabulary of vocation. I encountered James Davison Hunter’s account of what it takes

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He also guided my intellectual life. In the Colin MacLaurin Fellows program, I refined my thinking about my career using a new vocabulary of vocation. I encountered James Davison Hunter’s account of what it takes To Change the World, and I began to see a strategy to win a hearing for the Gospel within the university by providing goods it values but lacks: interdisciplinarity, hospitality, and grace for deep disagreements. Learning these is learning to live well.