Harvey Fellow News

Imran Babar ’07 was one of fewer than 80 students selected to attend a prestigious meeting for PhD students in Lindau, Germany this summer. At the meeting, he will meet and interact with several Nobel laureates in the field of chemistry.

Josh Blander '05 is currently teaching in the philosophy department at Loyola Marymount University and is going on the job market this fall. He was awarded "Best Paper by a Young Scholar" by the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy for his paper "Natural Priority, Essential Dependence and Divine Power in William of Ockham". Josh and his wife Jen are expecting their second child in June 2009. And he writes: "Alas, John Duns Scotus is still dead. But his canonization is progressing, so my flickering belief in goodness in this world survives".

Katie Brenner '05 now has a daughter, Ruth "Ruthie" Elizabeth Brenner, born July 2008. She just defended her PhD thesis in Bioengineering at Caltech.

Matt Cabeen ’07 published a research article, “Bacterial cell curvature through mechanical control of cell growth” in March 2009 in The EMBO Journal. He and his wife Rose had their first child, Thomas, in September 2008.

Lia Chavez ‘07’s recent show for Affirmation Arts returned for a two week extension! The innovative Hillman+Chavez work in celebration of The Armory Show 2009 received such a positive response in September-October 2008 that it returned to allow viewers a second chance to see it. It comprised nine large, unique photographic works exploring light and space, while abstractly presenting the figure as form.

Gregg Helvey '06 was recently married to Margaux Stuary (July 2008) and has been hired to shoot part of a National Geographic TV show (to air in about 6 months) about Alaska State Troopers in Alaska. He is finishing up his USC thesis film Kavi, about a boy who attempts to escape from the brick kiln where he's forced to work as a modern-day slave. It was filmed entirely on location in India, and will be premiering at the Nashville Film Festival on April 17 & 19, and then in LA at the Indian Film Festival April 23 & 26. Gregg's other film Overexposed, about the effect of pornography on men, will be shown at the USC First Look Film Festival on April 4. His films are eligible for audience awards; if anyone would like to attend and vote, please email Gregg.

Erik Hom ’01 and his wife Christine had their first child, Nathaniel, in August 2008.

Sam Kho '06 was awarded a part-time curatorial post at Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village based on a 2008-9 Mustard Seed Foundation grant. He also had the opportunity to lead a workshop at last month's IAM conference and is spearheading that group's "LA chapter".

Kyele ’01 and Claire King’oo ’01 had their first child, Edward, in June 2008.

Andrew Legg ’06 was appointed Law Lecturer of Regents Park College, Oxford, and St. Peter’s College, Oxford, where he is teaching Contract Law and Administrative Law as he finishes his doctorate.

David Lewis ’97, having earned tenure at Princeton University, accepted a full Professorship at Vanderbilt University in Political Science beginning Fall 2008. He recently published The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Appointments (Princeton U Press, 2008).

Josh Swamidass '01 is graduating from his MD/PhD program this June and is taking a position at Washington University in St. Louis.

The work of Astri Swendsrud '07 was featured in the exhibition "Domestic Utensils" at COMA Alternative Space in Los Angeles. She also gave a lecture as part of the visiting artist program at Biola University in La Mirada, CA.

Featured Article | Life Together

By D. Michael Lindsay '03

Alan Greenspan was speaking to a packed audience in the room below. A producer from Bill Moyers’ show on PBS was in the audience, said my editor, deciding if they wanted to run a special about my book. It was the opening night of what was billed as a “national book tour”—a phrase that sounded a bit too glamorous for what I would come to experience over the next few months. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I was pretty excited. The kickoff event took place on September 18, 2007, at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side, and being home to New York’s Jewish establishment (it is the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, after all), it is not exactly where one ought to expect to receive a friendly reception to a book that explores how evangelicals have joined the American elite. I probably realized that deep down, which is why I had extra butterflies as I stepped onto the stage. Little did I know, however, that the crowd would soon turn on me. “You’re just defending Bush!” one lady screamed from the audience as I desperately tried to think of a funny retort to this, my first heckler.

When I wrote Faith in the Halls of Power (Oxford, 2007), I very much hoped that I would have the opportunity to share some of the stories of the people I interviewed. For nearly five years, I had the chance to sit down with people like Dennis Bakke, Karen Hughes, Tony Dungy and Mako Fujimura, probing them about the intersection of faith and the challenges they faced as Christians in public leadership. As a Harvey Fellow, I benefited greatly from the generosity of the Mustard Seed Foundation, not just financially but also in terms of community.

In 2003 I met Jacquelline Fuller, one of the very first Harvey Fellows (1992, Harvard) at the Harvey ten-year reunion in Washington; I also participated in that year’s Summer Institute for new Fellows. Following a casual conversation, Jacquelline and I corresponded via email, and later she introduced me to Kay James, a senior member of the Bush administration and a woman Jacquelline had known for years. In the end, Kay James was one of the first leaders I interviewed for my research, and the introduction came through the Harvey Fellow community.

I met Will Inboden, another Harvey Fellow (1999, Yale), during the summer of 2003, and he quickly became a good friend as I tried to navigate the political terrain surrounding faith in the nation’s capital. Not only did Will introduce me to many people whom I would eventually interview for my book, but he frequently offered feedback on my preliminary conclusions, becoming an incredibly helpful sounding board for my thoughts and impressions. Drew Ladner (1996, Harvard), Randy Heinig (1993, Yale), and Sean Womack (2002, USC) provided similarly helpful feedback early on in the project’s development. And of course, Duane Grobman (1995, Harvard) is the glue of the Harvey Fellow community. At nearly every turn he supplied support, encouragement and counsel for me and my research.

Indeed, by the time I drafted the list of friends I wanted to acknowledge for their help and encouragement, I had become indebted to nearly two dozen Harvey Fellows. Brian and Christy (2002, Northwestern) Gardner let me sleep in their spare bedroom while I collected data at Wheaton. Dano (1998, Johns Hopkins) and Jennifer Jukanovich hosted me for multiple meals at their home in Seattle. But perhaps the most serendipitous hospitality occurred during the fall of 2007, during which time I came to value the Harvey Fellows community the most.

Over ten weeks I traveled to twenty-four cities, logged over 25,000 miles, and often gave the same book talk multiple times in one day. I was a walking hodge-podge of emotions—pride, fear, excitement, anxiety—but most of the time, if I’m being honest, I was lonely. Excepting the three trips where my wife Rebecca was able to join me and the one time my mom was able to tag along, I spent most nights on the road alone, away from family and friends. The busyness of the day’s activities could usually occupy my mind, but nighttimes were particularly lonesome, especially on evenings when I got back to the hotel too late to call home.

I will always be grateful for the friendship and support that the Harvey Fellows community provided during that season of my life. Kyle Van Houtan (2005, Duke) and Brian McGraw (2002, Harvard) went with me to a talk I gave at an Atlanta-area Barnes & Noble. I was incredibly glad for their attendance, for they instantly doubled the audience’s size! Micah Watson (2004, Princeton) hosted me at his new institutional home, Union University, as I visited the campus in October. In Boston Erik Hom (2001, UC San Francisco) organized a late-night dessert visit with area Harvey Fellows after a talk at Harvard, just as Kristen Gustavson (2004, Berkeley) had done a few days earlier on the West Coast. Christy Gardner brought together Chicago-area Fellows for a show of support in mid-November. In fact, in just about every city I visited, I met up with a friend or acquaintance I knew through the Harvey Fellows community.

But support came not just in the form of shared meals or late-night conversations. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in Life Together, “It is the fellowship of the Cross to experience the burden of the other.” In late November of 2007, another Harvey Fellow, Tim Shah (1997, Harvard) lifted my burden in a way few could. My book received a negative review in The New York Times by a well-known scholar who called me a “sociological dictation machine.” The review concluded by saying, “[Lindsay] is clearly on a mission, one, moreover, he obviously loves. Unfortunately for Lindsay, if you do not agree with him beforehand, you are unlikely to agree with him after he has had his say.” No doubt, there was truth in the review, but it really did sting.

At the time, Tim was just beginning a major research project with Peter Berger, the esteemed sociologist. Tim learned of the Times review a few days before it was published and approached Professor Berger about co-authoring a rejoinder. In the end, the rejoinder was circulated fairly widely, largely blunting the effect of the Times review on my academic career. I am forever grateful for this show of support.

It’s too early to tell if my book helped make the Gospel more plausible. I certainly hope so, but the thing I have to come to appreciate the most from my experience with this book is the way it has allowed me to develop and deepen friendships with fellow pilgrims, especially with other Harvey Fellows. For this community and the blessings it has bestowed, I am incredibly grateful.

D. Michael Lindsay is a 2003 Harvey Fellow (Princeton) and is a member of the sociology faculty of Rice University. Faith in the Halls of Power was named a “Best Book of 2007” by Publishers Weekly and received one of the 2008 Christianity Today Book Awards.

Harvey Fellow Profile | Jacquelline Fuller ‘92

By Matthew Cabeen

It’s not always clear how the choices we make at one moment might affect our lives and the lives of those around us at the next moment. The life of Jacquelline Fuller, one of the first class of Harvey Fellows in 1992, has been marked by the bold decisions, amazing blessings, and difficult challenges that come to one who walks by faith rather than sight.

As the daughter of a military intelligence professional who served three tours in Vietnam and taught at West Point, Fuller remembers the dinner table conversations about international diplomacy and global political processes that led her to eventually study political science. Though her parents were not Christians, they encouraged their children to attend Sunday school, and Fuller became interested in God at an early age. By high school, she was active in Young Life programs and was baptized at age sixteen.

Ready for a change, she packed up and headed to UCLA for college. Deciding between two loves of hers—political science and brain science—was made easier for her after experiencing the difficulty of math and science classes, and she was content to minor in psychobiology while concentrating on political science. Fuller had initially imagined a glamorous career in international politics but felt drawn to the study of urban poverty in America instead.

She returned from California to Washington, DC, where she was soon married to her husband John. She got a job though a church connection with Kay James, whose children she had taught in Sunday school before leaving for college. James was one of the most senior black women in the George H. W. Bush administration and worked with the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS)—a bureau of the U.S. federal government so vast that its budget outpaced all but three nations of the world. Fuller was hired to help with the National Commission on Children, and was soon writing on issues of minority violence and health disparities among different groups of citizens. The secretary of HHS under George H. W. Bush, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, took such a liking to Fuller’s writing that he soon had her writing speeches for him. She had studied urban poverty, putting her in an ideal position to write about health care reform, one of the hot-button issues at the time. “I felt in over my head,” she says as she recalls her sudden rise to become a speechwriter, a position she held for two years.

One reason for her success at work was that her knowledge of urban poverty was not merely academic. She and her new husband quickly enlisted as Young Life leaders as they settled in Washington. While they would usually work with high school students, their neighborhood was full of high school-age dropouts. They primarily worked with teenage mothers at the Sursum Corda housing cooperative, within sight of the Capitol. One day, one of these mothers, named Mechelle, announced that she and her six month-old baby girl were moving out of her mother’s apartment to a homeless shelter. Mechelle had discovered that her crack-addicted mother had put bleach in the baby bottle—she didn’t know if it was deliberate or not—and needed to get away. Despite being a newlyweds, Fuller and her husband decided to undertake a bold rescue, taking take Mechelle and her daughter into their one-bedroom apartment to live. The pair ended up staying with the Fullers for eight months.

Her everyday experience with the urban poor yielded insights at meetings and in her speeches that got Jacquelline Fuller noticed. Reading an internal statistical report in 1991, she realized that there were more children in the U.S. killed by urban violence in 100 hours than there were war casualties during the Hundred Days War in 1978. She wrote this into one of Dr. Sullivan’s speeches, and this line made newspaper headlines and became one of Newsweek’s quotes of the year—a highlight of Fuller’s speechwriting career.

Next, she moved to Boston to attend graduate school at the Kennedy School at Harvard, where she got a master’s degree in public policy and became one of the first Harvey Fellows in 1992. During her second year, she was blessed with her first daughter, Hosanna. Having a child was more challenging than she imagined, and she remembers her first Summer Institute in 1994 as feeling overwhelmed. Here she was, surrounded by amazing scholars, while it was all she could do to get her homework done and nurse her baby! While a part of her wanted to run with her career and solve difficult public policy problems, her maternal instinct was also strong. Feeling conflicted about balancing work and family life, she talked to Eileen Bakke that summer. Was she letting the Harvey Fellows down if she decided to take time for her family? Eileen assured Fuller of her confidence in Fuller’s ability to make a right decision regarding her family life, and Jacquelline left the conference with peace in her heart.

Fuller decided to stay home for awhile, to concentrate on being a mother. Just after graduating Harvard, her family moved to Washington state to be closer to John’s family. Their second child, Sophie, was born 18 months later. A few years later, still interested in public policy and poverty, she was taken by the nascent Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s directive to help the poorest of the poor around the world. “I badgered them until they gave me a job,” she says, and she worked on projects regarding global health disparities there for the next 8 years, during which the Gates Foundation grew from12 to over 400 staff. In 2004, the Gates Foundation launched its first and only internally-run project, focused on HIV/AIDS prevention in India. She was asked to help with the launch, so she and her family moved to Delhi for a year—John taught at an international school and the girls went to fourth and fifth grades there.

As the Gates Foundation grew, Fuller realized she preferred working with a smaller organization. She had heard of google.org, a philanthropic organization of the ubiquitous Internet search company. Intrigued by their creative approach that combined grant-making with for-profit solutions, she took a job there and moved to Orinda, California, where she lives now. She loves the whimsical, innovative style of Google—her office even has a slide that one can take from the third to the second floor! The Fullers attend First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, CA, and Hosanna and Sophie are now 15 and 13 years old. Jacquelline, despite having been a political appointee in the Republican George H. W. Bush administration, is excited about the upcoming Obama presidency. She is optimistic about America’s ability to take on health care reform and clean energy policies in the next few years.

And what advice would Fuller give Harvey Fellows who are still discerning their vocations and facing tough decisions? “Follow your heart, where your true passion is, where God is leading you, more than concerns about pay and prestige and power.” The astonishing path that her life has taken so far is more than enough evidence that this strategy is effective.