D. Michael Lindsay to Gordon President

From Tim Dalrymple’s interview.

Today Gordon College, one of the premier educational institutions in the firmament of American evangelicalism, catches a rising star as it completes a seven-month international search and names D. Michael Lindsay its new President. It’s a bold, brilliant, sensational choice.

Dr. Lindsay co-authored two books with George Gallup, Jr., while still a graduate student. With degrees from Baylor, Princeton Theological Seminary, Oxford and Princeton University, Lindsay has published in leading journals in three fields, and his first solo book, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, was published by Oxford University Press and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.  Now a professor of sociology at Rice who specializes in matters of leadership, culture and faith, Dr. Lindsay has interviewed former Presidents and world leaders and titans of industry, he has lectured on four continents, and his work—profiled in scores of media outlets from The New York Times and CNN to The Wall Street Journal and Fox News—reached an estimated audience of 145 million readers in the last year alone.

And Dr. Lindsay is not yet forty.

In 2006, the World Congress of Sociology named him the most promising sociologist in the world under the age of thirty-five. Now Gordon College has named him its President, and the chairman of the Board of Trustees, Kurt Keilhacker, calls him “a game-changer.” The selection of D. Michael Lindsay represents a passing of the generational torch, a commitment to new ideas and new approaches, and an opportunity to raise the school’s profile on the national and international stage. Gordon College announced the selection this morning;