Carol and George Bauer: Lives Nudged by the ‘Other Reality’

George and Carol Bauer glance back on their long lives with a sense of amazement—their 70-year marriage partnership, their successes, their global experiences. But fundamentally they feel awe about a divine “Other Reality” that intersects earthly lives all along the way.

Providential glimmers have touched Yale Divinity School too. The Bauers are lead benefactors for the School’s new Living Village, having provided more than $25 million toward its design and construction. The living-building residential complex embodies YDS values of community-building, sustainability, and public purpose. In its own way, the project also reflects the Bauers’ credo about stewardship and leadership, guided by a sense of God’s timing.

“It’s certainly mysterious how the Creator interacts with us all,” George Bauer said in a recent interview,. “We don’t really understand this ‘Other Reality,’ as Marcus Borg called it. Nevertheless, there is a spirit that has an influence on us no matter how it comes to us. In our case, we see it more clearly as we look back.”

A ‘Sunday-Monday’ relation

The YDS community came together during Convocation earlier this month to celebrate the opening of the Living Village and its featured building, Carol B. Bauer Hall. Nearly 50 YDS students have been residing there since late August. Championed by YDS Dean Greg Sterling for more than a decade, the monumental project makes for a happy convergence of convictions nurtured by the School and pursued in the Bauers’ own lives: a residential laboratory for the formation of eco-ministry and discipleship. The Bauers describe it as a dramatic example of the “Sunday-Monday” connection, the notion of carrying over Christian ethics into the weekday social fabric, equipping people of faith with an ecumenical vision of ethical leadership and confidence in God. 

George and Carol Bauer, the parents of three and the grandparents of five, are also honorary co-chairpersons for the YDS “We Are Called” campaign that seeks to raise $140 million for students, academic programs, justice work, and Living Village expansion.

“God has made us stewards of his spiritual world and his material world,” the Bauers have written. “In both, we are expected to help ourselves and others achieve the greatest possible potential.” The human challenge, they said, is to accept the love of God and live up to the duty of being good stewards of this world—a “life-long pilgrimage” full of intriguing twists and turns. 

As the Bauers see it, the Living Village idea was divinely in the works at YDS long ago. In the late 1990s, the School almost moved its entire operation downtown. But support from YDS faculty and alums came decisively to the rescue of the Quad and its property, and YDS remained at its ample Prospect Street location. As it turns out, a move downtown would probably have precluded something like the Living Village: there would have been no room in downtown New Haven. Circumstance or providence?

“Looking back, I believe the reason the School stayed on the hill had something to do with the Other Reality,” George Bauer says.

Crucial mentors and moments

A knack for good timing has distinguished the Bauers’ lives. George, now 94, found great success at IBM for three decades beginning at the dawn of the computer age in the 1950s, and then in a second career as an investment banker and builder during the prosperous late-1980s and 90s. Carol, age 93, took her gifts in spiritual care and corporate leadership and forged a life of service of more than 75 years (yes, 75 years). Much of that time investment has gone into creating and nurturing a strong multifaith chaplaincy department at Norwalk (Conn.) Hospital, which has trained many YDS students in the clinical internship program over the past three decades. 

Both were raised in Missouri during the Great Depression, and both grew up Southern Baptist. At crucial moments both had mentors who led them onto a broader Christian path in the larger world. When they met during college years in St. Louis and soon married, they embarked on a life of ecumenical spiritual discovery together. 

Thus as a young adult at Harris Teachers College, Carol Bauer was a Baptist Student Union leader and did mission work in other parts of the U.S. But she found some of the denominational instruction too doctrinally narrow for day-to-day application. A touchstone for her was a St. Louis childhood church memory:

“I had a wonderful grandmother who was Methodist,” Carol recalled. “While we were sitting there in church one time before Communion, the minister said, ‘This is not a Methodist table or a Baptist table—this is the Lord’s table, and all are welcome.’ And I realized: of course it is! That was an influential moment to me.”

For George Bauer, raised on a farm in De Soto, Missouri, a pivotal episode came when he was an undergraduate at Washington University, where he decided to take a class taught by renowned historian of religions Huston Smith.

“I was an engineering major, up to my eyeballs in differential equations, but I took an elective: world religions,” George said. “Huston Smith was fantastic. He had such a way of making those world faiths real. I began to realize there are many doors to God. We’ve chosen to invest our lives in Christian communities, but we became more ecumenical in our many experiences.”

George Bauer’s material success as founder of the GPB Group after his IBM tenure has allowed the Bauers to share wealth across the fields of education, healthcare, and entrepreneurship through the Bauer Family Foundation. For nearly 40 years, the Foundation has been guided by goals that include support for the practice of lay ministry in secular life; efforts to “level the playing field” in economic life for disadvantaged people; and initiatives to strengthen moral leadership throughout the culture. (The Bauers’ biography is comprehensively chronicled in Blessed: The Story of Carol and George Bauer by Joshua M. Sklare, published by Montefiore Press in 2024.)

A far-flung legacy

YDS is the most recent, but other institutions and programs nationwide have benefited from their relationship with the Bauers and the largesse of the Bauer Family Foundation. Here are some examples: 

• The Bauer name is famous at Norwalk Hospital, a connection exemplified by Carol Bauer’s longtime presence in its patient rooms, emergency corridors, and executive offices. She spent 19 years on the hospital board, where she was the first female chair. A certified nondenominational chaplain, she has been a spiritual care volunteer at the hospital for five decades, a beloved and reassuring caregiver to countless families facing medical crises. The Bauer Foundation made possible an Emergency Care Center; the Jeffrey Peter Bauer Newborn Intensive Care Unit, named in memory of the Bauers’ infant son; the Carol Bauer Nursing Scholarship; and most recently a new hospital wing, the Patient Pavilion.

• Bauer beneficence has been bestowed on Washington University, George’s alma mater—scholarships for students; an endowment for emergency financial aid to students; a professorship in organizational ethics and governance at Olin Business School; capital fund support for the school’s Leadership Center and also its Bauer Hall; and a gift to establish a named deanship in the School of Medicine.

• In Connecticut, the Bauers started a state chapter of the “I Have a Dream” initiative, a mentoring and tutoring program for underserved children to help them improve study habits and career planning and fulfill their dreams of college education. In the last decade, the Bauers have personally “adopted” more than 40 children who live in a South Norwalk housing project and who committed themselves to the program.

• An abiding interest in entrepreneurial self-help stirred the Bauers to underwrite the Innovation Center at the University of Bridgeport. With a podcast studio, conference rooms, and individualized workstations, the center helps students, alums, local citizens, and others sharpen entrepreneurial skills, connect with mentors, and improve career prospects. 

• During a trip to Asia, the Bauers learned of the plight of Thai girls who are enslaved by human traffickers. Soon the Bauers became involved in the New Life Center in Thailand, a rescue sanctuary from prostitution. Currently about 150 women and girls are sheltered and educated there.

Behind many such endeavors, including their involvement also with Habitat for Humanity and AmeriCares, is the theme of empowering laypeople to energize and spread humanitarian work. That’s been a Bauer theological principle as laypeople themselves.

“It’s our feeling that the main job of ordained ministers, important as they are, is to motivate laypeople to go out in the world and be value-driven leaders at every level of a dramatically changing culture,” George Bauer said. “The real ministers are the folks sitting in the pews.”

A multiplier effect

That’s one of the hopes for the Living Village: that it creates a multiplier effect throughout church and world for sustainability practice and ecological reform.

“If these young ministers residing in the Living Village can learn what living sustainably is all about, then maybe they can convey that to their parishioners and multiply the message and make the world a greener place. That would be magnificent,” George said.

A decade ago, the Living Village idea was not an easy sell. When Dean Greg Sterling arrived on campus in 2012, he knew the School’s student housing options needed an upgrade. The three apartment buildings facing Canner Street were built when Eisenhower was president. In the new century they were now in disrepair and beyond rehabilitation. New funds would somehow have to be raised for new buildings—preferably regenerative, durable structures in an era of intensifying climate change. 

At that point, George Bauer was on the YDS Dean’s Advisory Council, having joined after serving as an Andover Newton Theological School trustee years before. Call it good timing. He had met Sterling only recently but was touched by the Dean’s plea for new, sustainable housing—and by the Dean’s fear that the project might never get going because of lack of funds. 

The Bauers provided $2 million to support the project’s initial planning. The fateful moment came at a 2015 meeting of business entrepreneurs at the Yale Club in New York, where the Dean addressed his frank worries about the Living Village’s future. “I had spoken with George Bauer about this fear the previous Friday,” Sterling recalled, “but during the break at the Yale Club, George committed the $2 million for the plan. When I walked back into the event, I announced the gift, admitting that the attendees might think it was all staged. But it illustrates the point that sometimes you have to take real risk to move things forward.”

That was only the beginning. The Bauers later made a series of major gifts totaling $25 million that proved crucial in designing the Living Village and in the groundbreaking—or ground “healing,” as Sterling calls it—that took place in October 2023. Through it all, they provided advice and encouragement.

‘We need to be good to the land’

In a sense, George Bauer has been ready for this intricate, carbon-neutral building project since he was a boy growing up on an Ozarks farm: at age 12, he helped his father build a barn with eco-sensitive filtration and rainwater-capture.

“As we finished that work one evening, my Dad looked back at the fields and said something more profound than I realized at the time,” Bauer remarked during the Living Village groundbreaking in 2023. “It was 80 years ago, yet I remember it as if it were yesterday. He said, ‘George, the land has been good to us. We need to be good to the land!’”

The Bauers thank the “Other Reality” for many a right-place-at-the-right-time moment. Life is short, Carol Bauer says, and the chances to “gladden the hearts of those who travel with us” are finite. Best to frame the adventure with love, seen and unseen:

““We know there is love because we feel it,” she has said. “There are many definitions and expressions of love, but we know it is real because we see it—we experience it and we see the outward expressions of love all around us.”

Ray Waddle is editor the Divinity School’s Reflections magazine.