Upper House

Tim Mackie, co-founder and lead scholar of BibleProject, will present a lecture on the story of the BibleProject and how it has become a powerful resource for Bible study and biblical understanding. Tim earned his PhD in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and served as teaching pastor at Blackhawk Church. The BibleProject is located in Portland, Oregon.

The annual Kingdom Justice Summit was held Saturday, March 7, 2026 at Upper House. “The morning began with Shane Claiborne passionately calling us into living justly here and now. Maggie Capra gave historical context to the divisive place we find the American church in, and Pastor Marcio Sierra convicted us to start – to ‘just do it’ – in terms of reaching out to build relationships as a way to build unity. ” But before the summit began, about 90 of the participants gathered the night before in area homes to have a meal and conversations to build relationships. The…

Over the past 10 years the University of Wisconsin-Madison student body has grown from 43,000 to 52,000. And over that period of time, a Christian institution has become an established presence in the middle of campus, at 365 East Campus Mall. Last month, Upper House had several events to celebrate it’s first decade, culminating in a final program Thursday evening, January 30, 2025. “Our mission is to lead Christian thought and formation for the UW-Madison community and beyond,” said executive director John Terrill. “We bear fruit as long as we abide in Christ.” Upper House has grown from three staff…

  Numbers are telling. On average, Americans spend nearly 5 hours a day on their phones. Research shows that 45% consider themselves addicted to their devices. Our hands naturally pick them up, open a screen, and voila, we enter another world. Yet there’s another technology that also helps us enter other worlds: a far older technology that might be considered an anecdote to our phone addiction… books. Good fiction, in particular. In this talk, Dr. Cassandra Nelson (Ph.D., Harvard) will discuss promises connected to technology and the ways technology fulfills — or fails to fulfill — those promises. She…

Christian communities active on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus were recognized in a short ceremony at Upper House on Wednesday, January 22, 2025. It came at the end of a presentation by UW Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Lori Reesor, on the importance of religion at public universities. The audience of 50 or so was made up of men and women from 13 different ministries involved in campus ministry on the Madison campus. Those present who had spent 20 years or more in that mission were invited forward to receive gifts in recognition of their service (pictured above). Many more…

There is a long-unquestioned assumption that to understand biblical texts, one must first understand the original historical contexts. However, early Christian Bible readers didn’t share this assumption and often interpreted biblical texts allegorically. Does this mean that interpretations of the Bible from before the Enlightenment are irrelevant today? In this lecture, Dr. Devin White will examine how Biblical Scholars are, for the first time in two hundred years, reexamining the “original historical context” assumption. Dr. Devin White is a Fellow in Biblical Studies at the Lumen Center. He is also the Associate Pastor of Christian Education at High Point Church…

On a clear day, from the tower of the Holy Hill Basilica and National Shrine of Mary Help of Christians, you can see the skyline of Milwaukee, 30 miles away. Madison is 65 miles in the other direction. Perched atop the highest eminence in southeastern Wisconsin, its presence is stunning, especially in the fall when the leaves of the surrounding hardwood forests are at peak color. As the name suggests, it could be described as one of Wisconsin’s holiest sites. It is a minor basilica of the Roman Catholic church, proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006. It’s also on…

Dan Hummel, the Director of University Engagement at Upper House, is a University of Wisconsin-trained historian. After publishing his research on the relationship between evangelicals and Israel in 2019, he has a new book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation, published by Eerdmans. A release party was held at Upper House earlier this spring, where Hummel talked about the book and answered questions. Now, a review of Hummel’s book by the distinguished historian George Marsden has just been published on the UW History department’s web page. The review, and of course…

The Christian church is a multinational, multicultural, multilingual body that spans every society on the globe. In the twenty-first century, the vast majority of Christians live in the “Global South”—Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet in many conversations about “the Church,” Americans tend to focus on themselves. In this summer series of conversations Upper House will host five talks to explore some of the dominant social issues in the global church—issues that affect all Christians, albeit in different ways depending on location. We’ll seek to learn from people in our community who have experience and expertise in other parts of…

We are sad to read of the passing of Rebecca Blank, who was chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2013 to 2022. She died of cancer on Friday, February 17, 2023. She was 67. The report of her death included acknowledgement of her skillful service as a gifted administrator and economist. It also noted that “Blank’s Protestant faith influenced other books she wrote, such as ‘Do Justic’ and ‘Is the Market Moral?’, which examined intersections between economics and religious belief systems.” Her father, also an economist, was a founder of Habitat for Humanity in Columbia, Missouri. “The desire to…