“As she continued talking to her coach and reading works of apologetics—including N. T. Wright’s defense of the Resurrection—Ordway confessed faith in Christ. Now she finds herself in another new country, directing the master in apologetics (MAA) program at Houston Baptist University (HBU), a small liberal arts college in the heart of the nation’s energy capital. There, she is among a burgeoning group of women who are reshaping apologetics in the West.”

Holly Ordway began her conversion to faith in a casino in Reno, Nevada, surrounded by slot machines. She had just competed in a North American Cup fencing tournament and was having dinner with her coach and his wife. “One of the Narnia films had just come out,” Ordway told me. “Our discussion of the film led to the question, Does God exist?”

As they talked late into the night, she traveled through a Lewisian wardrobe that landed her in a mysterious new country. “I discovered it was possible to think rationally about the faith,” says Ordway. “There were arguments that at least stood up to preliminary testing. That was a fundamental aha moment, when my intellect was able to wake up and say, Okay, this is interesting. It was frightening and exciting.”

At the time, Ordway was in her early 30s and teaching literature and composition at a public college in Southern California. Since graduate school, she had thought of Christians as superstitious, Christianity as a “blemish on modern civilization,” and the Bible as a collection of fairy tales. “I was radicalized as an atheist and hostile toward Christians in general,” says Ordway.

But as she continued talking to her coach and reading works of apologetics—including N. T. Wright’s defense of the Resurrection—Ordway confessed faith in Christ. Now she finds herself in another new country, directing the master in apologetics (MAA) program at Houston Baptist University (HBU), a small liberal arts college in the heart of the nation’s energy capital. There, she is among a burgeoning group of women who are reshaping apologetics in the West.

“These women are expanding the scope of apologetics beyond the traditional male bastion,” says Lee Strobel, author of The Case for Christ and now on faculty in the MAA program. He sees his colleagues as building a movement that’s “cutting across gender and racial barriers” to draw more people to faith.

“Women bring a deep relational intelligence to apologetics,” says Kelly Monroe Kullberg, founder of the Veritas Forum, a university-based organization that hosts apologetics events across North America and Europe. “They bring a sense that biblical truth is the highest love for human beings.”

“The next big breakthrough in apologetics will come from women,” says John Mark Reynolds, HBU’s provost and former Biola University philosophy professor. “If Genesis is true—if you believe male and female are deep categories that are tied to the creation of humankind and the image of God—then to fail to hear a woman’s voice on a topic would be to fail to hear something the Holy Spirit is saying to our generation.”

The MAA program was born in part from Reynolds’s experience as a public apologist. “When I would give a talk about the Russian Revolution, a particular kind of person would light up,” recalls Reynolds. “I knew there must be people who wanted something more than analytic philosophy. For every person I met interested in ‘five reasons to believe in God,’ a thousand others were interested in thinking Christianly about film and literature and economics.”

A few years ago, Reynolds was sitting at his desk when the idea coalesced. It eventually became the first US program in “cultural apologetics,” which looks at faith and reasons for faith through an interdisciplinary kaleidoscope of art, literature, film, history, theology, and philosophy. The program has an online arm that draws nontraditional students, many of whom are also raising kids, pastoring churches, and working jobs. “I’ve got everyone from an engineer to an opera singer,” says Ordway.

For some, apologetics brings to mind a bespectacled white male at a podium brandishing the intellectual equivalent of a semiautomatic rifle. Other critics join Martin Luther in calling reason a “whore” who offers herself to the master with the most money. Faith is about heart knowledge, not head knowledge, they say. Some academics dismiss the enterprise of apologetics as presupposing a secularized, Enlightenment view of faith and reason.

Cultural apologetics has emerged in the midst of this discussion. It draws from the best of classical apologetics and yet meets objections by expanding in new, innovative directions. The program at HBU is leading this project. Among the faculty are Nancy Pearcey, author of Total Truth and Saving Leonardo; Mary Jo Sharp, director of the ministry Confident Christianity; Melissa Cain Travis, a national speaker and author for Apologia Press; Kristen Davis, an engineer who runs DoubtLess Faith Ministries; and Ordway, an Inklings scholar with a PhD in literature. They’re thinkers who can pull their weight and evangelists motivated by a deceptively simple objective: Tell people the Good News. And for those who already know that, equip them to “give the reason for the hope that you have.”

Diagnosing Disbelief

“What can we learn about unbelief?” Ordway asks her class, holding The Top 500 Poems. On the table next to her rests The Portable Atheist, a 2007 salvo edited by the late Christopher Hitchens. She looks nearly pastoral in her black blazer and gray button-up shirt. At 5’3”, she commands the class with her voice. Opposite Ordway are seven MAA students, among them a working single mom, a businessman, and a female Chilean doctor. They’re eating Chick-fil-A and Snapea Crisps while listening to Ordway discuss the poem Carrion Comfort.

“How does despair seem like comfort?” asks one student, incredulous that poet Gerard Manly Hopkins has linked the two.

“As a former atheist I quite understand that—the comfort of despair,” says Ordway. “Wrestle with it some more.”

After a moment, the student responds. “If my vision of reality is one of despair, at least I’m fully aware of who I am and what my context is.”

“It’s about being brave and facing the dark,” says another.

“I’m glad you see that connection,” says Ordway, nodding. “Now we’re pulling on some of the threads in the emotional content of atheism.”

If Hitchens could return from the disbelieving dead and hover over the classroom, he might be disarmed by the pastoral care on display here. He might get the sense, as I do, that Ordway is trying to understand disbelief the way a good doctor understands the pain of a patient, conveying that sympathy to her medical students as they lean over a hospital bed.

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