Christian Halls International is a coalition of academics, practitioners, and communities of faith committed to a particular kind of education: tutorial in method, classical in inheritance, Christian in confession, and rooted in the actual towns and regions where our students will live and labor. Our work is operational. We start halls. We train tutors. We accredit programs. We sit on boards. We negotiate with landlords. We are, by temperament, builders.

And builders need a journal.

The reasons that drive a small group of scholars and pastors and craftsmen and physicians to start a Christian Hall in their town are not, in the end, operational reasons. They are convictions about how human beings are formed, about the moral weight of the places we inherit, about the kinds of work that ought to be honored, about the long Christian and classical tradition we are called to keep alive in our generation. Those convictions are arguments. And arguments require a venue.

CHI Magazine is that venue. It is the public-facing intellectual life of the Christian Halls movement: the place where our Senior Fellows, our tutors, and a widening circle of friends will write — slowly, carefully, and at length — about the things we are actually trying to do, and the deeper reasons we are trying to do them.

Six sections, one argument

The magazine is organized into six sections, each tracking a plane of the CHI vision. Place attends to the geographic plane: the towns, regions, neighborhoods, and watersheds in which formation actually happens. Formation attends to the personal plane: the tutorial method, the role of the mentor, the slow cultivation of virtue. Sector attends to the civic plane: the domains of work — education, medicine, trades, theology, commerce, civic life, agriculture, science — in which our graduates build the common good. Tradition situates the whole project inside the long Christian and classical inheritance of which we are stewards. Literature takes up the same questions as the rest of the magazine — place, formation, flourishing — through the moral imagination: fiction, poetry, drama, criticism, the writers who form us. And Land attends to the ground beneath all of it: the given world, its stewardship, its limits, its grace.

These are not categories. They are sections — the way a serious magazine is sectioned. A reader who follows CHI Magazine for a year should come away with a working understanding of why a Hall is worth starting, what it takes to sustain one, and what kind of human being is meant to walk out of it.

Cadence over volume

We are not chasing a content calendar. The magazine is rolling, not weekly; we will publish when a piece is ready and not before. The standard is the standard of a serious quarterly — pieces that an interested stranger could read in twenty minutes and a sympathetic stranger could come back to in three years.

The masthead reflects that posture. The Editor-in-Chief and the Senior Fellows who lead each section are real people with their names attached. Drafts are edited. Final copy is signed off by the Editor-in-Chief before it is published. We are publishing slowly because the things we have to say are not improved by being said quickly.

A Senior Fellows journal

CHI Magazine is written by the Senior Fellows of Christian Halls International. It is not, at present, an open submission venue. The argument we are mounting in these pages is the argument the Fellows have been making together for years — in seminars, on porches, at long lunches, and across the miles between the Halls — and the magazine is where that argument finally goes in public. If you are a stranger to all of this and have wandered in from somewhere on the open web, welcome. The argument is in the open precisely so that you can read it.

— Nicholas J. Ellis
Founder & Editor-in-Chief