Harold Heie Bio

Harold Heie served as  the Founding Director of the Center for Christian Studies at Gordon College (now the Center for Faith and Inquiry) from 1994 to 2003. He also served as Vice President for Academic Affairs at Messiah College (1988-1993) and Northwestern College in Iowa (1980-1988). Prior to that, he taught mathematics at Gordon College (1975-1980) and The King’s College (1963-1975).

Heie has a BME degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now the Polytechnic Institute of NYU – 1957), an MSME from the University of Southern California (1959) and an MA and PhD in aerospace sciences from Princeton University (1961, 1965).

Heie has held a number of leadership positions at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), primarily focusing on leading national and regional faculty development workshops. He has spoken or consulted at over 50 CCCU instututions. He has served as a member of the Board of Fellows for the Ph. D. Program in Organizational Leadership at Eastern University and as a Senior Fellow at The Colossian Forum. He has been active for many years with the Center for Public Justice (Annapolis, MD), including service as a trustee for 9 years.

As he reveals in his book Learning to Listen, Ready to Talk, Heie’s interest in orchestrating respectful conversations can be traced to his boyhood days in Brooklyn, New York. This lifelong interest evolved into a passion during his service at the Center for Christian Studies, where he hosted a number of conversations among persons having strong disagreements. These included a colloquium at historic Faneuil Hall in Boston around the theme of “International Public Policy,” an interfaith dialogue co-hosted with the American Jewish Committee that brought together Jewish and Christian scholars and public leaders to discuss “The Role of Religion in Politics and Society,” and a seminar series in which Protestant and Catholic laypersons discussed the theme “Unity, not Uniformity.”

Since his retirement (sort of) in 2003, Heie has been actively writing and speaking (mostly at various Christian colleges) on themes related to “respectful conversation” and the “integration of faith & learning.”

Contact Information:

708 2nd Street SE #107

Orange City, Iowa 51041

(712) 360-1145

heieharold@gmail.com

Harold Heie’s Sermon

The entire content of this website flows from Harold Heie’s deep conviction that Christians are called to plant tiny “seeds of redemption” on earth (Matthew 13:31-32). The following video is a sermon delivered by Harold at American Reformed Church in Orange City, Iowa in 2012 that presents this foundational premise.

Text for this sermon can be found here.