Thornbury was formerly dean of the School of Theology and Missions, vice president for spiritual life, and professor of philosophy at Union University in Tennessee. … Thornbury’s appointment is significant on two fronts. First, he is the nation’s first hipster president. … Second, Thornbury learned at the feet of evangelical theologian Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry.

About 20 years ago, historian Mark Noll surveyed the evangelical academy and opined that there “was not much of an evangelical mind.” This, according to the memorable title of his jeremiad, was an intellectual “scandal.” How could evangelicals worship the super-intelligent being who programmed the human mind and yet fail, in his view, so deleteriously in their intellectual engagement?

The question has lingered. Its mere presence has helped to launch a thousand research degrees, and then some. Evangelical students have flocked to the Ivy League and top overseas universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and St. Andrews. Evangelical academic programs at the secondary, collegiate, and graduate levels have begun, with classical schools run by believers, among others, drawing recent notice from CNN. Christian scholars now nest, if a bit surreptitiously, in many small teaching colleges and research universities, winning awards and whiling away at books for elite presses.

Yet American evangelicals can be forgiven for wondering if they will see, in this age, their own academic institutions in the centers of culture and public life. In his incisive, eye-opening study Faith in the Halls of Power, D. Michael Lindsay uncovered believers in just these places—finance and movies and government and more—but left the telling of the ascendant evangelical intellect to another leading thinker. So the wondering has continued; the questing has not ceased. To the present, there is not a major evangelical college or university in one of the country’s top three cities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago—that focuses on high-level academic engagement with the broader guild.

But all that may soon change.

James Davison Hunter has argued that in order for real cultural change to happen in a certain place, there must be present dense, inter-connected networks of elite leaders and thinkers. Hunter’s To Change the World suggests that such a task is not for the faint of heart, and not easy to come by. This is particularly true given the narrative of many well-placed twentieth-century evangelicals, who found themselves displaced from positions of influence in the 1920s and 30s. Lindsay’s book showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that believers had indeed returned to the halls of power, but the reader could not help but sense that many of these people had won their influence alone, and worked in their own sphere. Closely coordinated grand strategy, you might say, was not everywhere present.

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