How does CTI’s research have impact in the world? How do we ensure the best research is done, but that it also makes a difference to the global issues of our age? For us, excellence in research and excellence in the communication and impact of our research are one and the same mission.

Let us explain how …

Most scholars come to CTI as professors and researchers working on major projects associated with the big questions we are asking in our inquiries. Their research involves gaining new insights and making significant interventions into current questions, and at its best it redefines the questions and even fields of study. Often, we discover that it is only after hard and long research into matters that we uncover what the real worked needed actually is.

These insights need to be effectively shared in order that they can have impact in the world more broadly. The principalway academics disseminate their work is through books (often called monographs). These are longer, single or joint author pieces of work which tend in the humanities to be the gold standard indicator of research quality. The books seek to draw upon all preceding work in the field and on the topic; to synthesize this work; and to present a new angle, insight, or perspective that changes the way the specialists in the field think about these issues.

Books have a broader impact, however, than we might first imagine. They are the places which show why the argument being made is correct and convincing through the evidence and logic used in them. They offer, in this sense, legitimacy to the insights and show their scholarly value and trustworthiness. But the insights in them have a life beyond the book itself:

1. The books are read by other professors and academics. They shape the way these academics think, research, and write. But crucially, they shape the way academics teach their subject and therefore how students learn from their professors about the field. The best books change the field and this will change curricula and change the thoughts and minds and activities of students. The students themselves will go off to have lives in the world, becoming leaders in society, and in this are influenced by the ideas contained in the books as these are communicated by their professors to them in the classroom.

2. The ideas in the books can form the basis of many other forms of dissemination. The ideas themselves can go public. They can be summarized and discussed in all kinds of different formats in the public domain, such as:

·      Podcasts

·      Seminars and Lectures

·      Newspaper articles

·      Magazines

·      Videos

·      Talks

·      TV shows

But these summaries of the ideas are premised on the fact that the work is scholarship of the highest order and has been adjudicated as worthwhile and trustworthy through the detailed evidence shown to other experts through the book published in the first place. These more accessible resources arise from the book, therefore: there a direction of travel and a flow from the research to its communication.

3. These other resources will all have outcomes more broadly in society. Perhaps the debate is changed? Perhaps there is a new moral perspective? Perhaps there is new social capital built? Perhaps art and music and literature are shaped by these new ideas? And the changes these ideas bring about can be measured in the quantitative and qualitative differences they make as the ideas have impact in the world more broadly.

So, while writing books constitutes a good proportion of the work that our scholars at CTI do, the work doesn’t end with the book and its publication. The book is a stamp of approval on the quality of the research; but we also are concerned that the ideas contained go on to have deep and lasting impact in the academy, church, and world. We ensure our scholars communicate the research in their books through other media for other publics—podcasts, magazine articles, websites, and public events. In this way, we can genuinely pursue our mission to bring wisdom to the major global issues of our time and ignite a theological renaissance.

We believe all our groundwork really needs to count on the ground! We pursue absolute excellence in research in the belief that the best research must be readily communicated to the world in order to make a difference. For us, the writing of the book and going public are not two different agendas. It is precisely because we produce the best scholarship in the world that we need to go public with it. For us, theology matters.