Like Hawkins, I was both a dutiful evangelical teenager and a stubborn skeptic. Wheaton, with its unusual combination of high academic standards and devout culture, seemed like a good place to learn how to think. Its graduates include politicians, chief executives, influential scholars and spiritual leaders like Billy Graham, an anthropology major in the class of ’43. (Our families are not related.) It places alumni at top graduate schools and draws faculty from other elite institutions.

Though the school never uses the phrase itself, students and alumni often archly refer to Wheaton as “the Harvard of Christian schools.” The phrase is self-deprecating, because in today’s academic culture, there is an obvious tension in the idea of a Christian Harvard. It wasn’t always so. In the first decades of Wheaton’s history, almost every other American institution of higher learning paid at least nominal deference to Christianity. Yale was the scene of several revivals led by the evangelist Dwight L. Moody in the late 19th century; Wellesley was among those that mandated considerable Bible study. At the turn of the 20th century, many state universities required students to attend church on Sunday in addition to campus chapel services, and about half of all American undergraduates attended a church-related school.

Over the course of the 20th century, the academy sloughed off the cultural trappings of Christianity, not to mention the theological commitments. But at distinctly Christian schools like Wheaton, parents expect their children’s religious faith to be stretched but not broken, and they take an active role in the college’s direction. Alumni are unusually devoted, too, not just with the typical fits of nostalgic school spirit but with an abiding interest in the institution’s ideological and spiritual mission. George Marsden, a historian whose books include “The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship,” told me that Wheaton is something like a church denomination, in that its constituents “are invested in it not just as their alma mater but as part of a much larger cause that they are participating in.”

During my four years at Wheaton, I drifted away from evangelicalism. But I never contemplated transferring to another school. I was reading Foucault and Judith Butler (Shakespeare and Milton too); my professors were brilliant and kind and I found plenty of kindred spirits. When the religion scholar Alan Wolfe visited Wheaton for a cover article about evangelical intellectualism in The Atlantic in 2000, halfway through my time there, he found a campus whose earnestness was both endearing and impressive: “In its own way, campus life at Wheaton College resembles that of the 1960s, when students and a few professors, convinced that they had embarked on a mission of eternal importance, debated ideas as if life really depended on the answers they came up with.” At a suburban dive bar on the edge of a marsh, we drank illicit Pabst on Saturday night and talked about politics, music and philosophy like undergraduates anywhere. Then we got up on Sunday morning and went to church.

As Hawkins settled in at Wheaton, she struggled. Though she loved her students, the heavy teaching load was stressful, especially for a self-described perfectionist. As a black woman in a predominantly white community, she was asked to serve on many committees and participate frequently in public events like panel discussions. Those commitments left little time for research and writing, though she still received tenure on schedule in 2013. Her health and social life suffered. She rarely had time for exercise or her book club anymore, dating was difficult, and she battled chronic sinus infections, migraines and high blood pressure, which she attributed to stress.

Much of that stress seemed to derive from her almost bodily awareness of the world’s problems. In one of our half-dozen conversations over eight months, she described seeing people look happy and knowing she was different because she felt so weighed down by the injustices she saw and read about. She quotes Old Testament prophets from memory; several people described her to me as prophetic herself. As we spoke, her concerns veered from the Syrian refugee crisis to Rwandan genocide to gun violence to income inequality. Those worries are a burden she bears as a political scientist and as a Christian, she told me.