Personal Affirmation for Christian Higher Education

I had half of my day blocked out for the kind of assignment at HBU I would normally avoid. Our student life director wanted me to help interview candidates for Mr. and Ms. HBU. When I was an undergraduate, I avoided student life activities and spent most of my time with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship or friends from Landis Hall. This sort of competition was, in my mind, likely to be a contest of resume’ builders.

How wrong could I have been?

The students I met through the interview process stunned me with their poise, records of accomplishment, desire to experience community with their fellow students, and their spiritual insight.

One young man had overcome a stuttering problem to become the determined editor of the college newspaper. He has interviewed me before. The kid is tough. Despite the bad economy, he has a job lined up ready to go when he graduates.

Another one has studied to be a pastor. When we asked about his legacy at the institution, he wept as he recounted his experience of reaching out to others and finding them ready to reciprocate. His record at the university showed he had taken up almost every helpful task he could find.

One young woman talked about being a leader for other students. She explained that she understood the role of leader to be striving to follow Jesus so that when others follow her, they will be following him. When I asked her which outside speaker had made the biggest impact on her, she mentioned Archbishop Chaput of Denver. She was impressed by his “humble boldness.” As she was speaking, I was taking notes. Spiritual wisdom seemed to flow from her like water from a spring. I could imagine her as a great English professor with a big family of her own.

We interviewed a girl who trained at our school to be a nurse. She discussed her determination to learn the liberal arts in addition to nursing so that she would avoid a narrow, professionalized view of the world. With regard to her faith, she insisted on the need to embrace a “God-centered reality.”

Still another talked about her failures, but distinguished herself through an indefatigable commitment to maintaining a great attitude and working to succeed. I felt so proud listening to her. I can’t know the mind of God, but I can’t help feeling that he would observe her and smile.

I could go on. Each student did something that touched me personally. How long will it be before I forget the girl who went to Mission Waco to learn about being homeless and who gave up her senior cruise to witness to kids on the beach at spring break, instead? Interviewing the candidates for Mr. And Ms. HBU turned out to be the most encouraging thing I have seen in a long time. I only wish I could have had ten good donors to the university sitting there with me, taking it all in. They would have realized that their money has been well spent. I wish I could have had the people who have yet to donate.

I learned something else as I talked with these kids today. The entire group, ten kids or so, had something in common. Without exception they put themselves forward among their fellow students. They volunteered. They got involved. They reached out, risked rejection, weren’t afraid of looking like eager beavers. Many of their peers think that just being in school is enough. They go through the prescribed motions. They want grades to be given to them. They want someone to give them a job. They want to be given a really good salary. This group of students I met today could show their friends something about living.

Understanding Secularism for College Students

When I wrote my book The End of Secularism my best hope for it was that it would become a regularly recommended text for college students.

I want college students at state schools and non-religious schools to read it so they can understand how oppressive, marginalizing, and spiritually illiterate secularism can be. At the same time, I hope Christian college students will read it so they will be inspired to reject the idea that secularism is the solution to religious difference.

If I had to pick one overarching theme in the book that I would like students and academics to engage, it would be the idea that accepting the deliverances of modern science does not in any way mean that one would be required to embrace a secularizing approach to politics. We are encouraged to think that is true, but it is not. I have made a serious effort to prove my case.

If you are running an honors college, a course in law and religion, or modern political philosophy, then do consider assigning it to your students. This is not the kind of book that is going to make anyone wealthy or become a gigantic bestseller along the lines of a Sean Hannity current events project. But I hope it will last longer than that sort of book and prove convincing to many young people for years to come. If you are an academic and would like to preview the book before assigning it to your class, just contact me by leaving a comment here or sending me an email or twitter message (@hunterbaker) and I’ll be sure to help get you a copy.

The Moral Disaster of Modern Life

If you really want to have your sensibilities twisted up in a knot, try listening to sports talk radio when the topic of discussion is some player’s malfeasance. The current version of that particular play has to do with Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s treatment of a 20 year old woman who was intoxicated at a bar.

I’ve now heard this conversation multiple times on various shows. The great interest, of course, is focused on whether the alleged bad behavior will affect the quarterback’s career. What will the NFL do? Will he be suspended? Will the Steelers perhaps lose a few games as a consequence?

The point that callers and some hosts keep returning to is this: Is there an NFL rule that has been broken? If there is not a specific rule against this behavior, then how can the commissioner do anything?

This is a mistake people often make. Contra Aquinas and Martin Luther King, Jr., many people are obsessed with what the law and official rules as the arbiters of right and wrong. No. Human laws and rules are merely instruments by which we attempt to give life to our understandings of right and wrong. They are not, themselves, ultimacies. Laws and rules can be wrong. They can be unjust. What if there were an NFL rule encouraging quarterbacks to take advantage of intoxicated women? Would that make Roethlisberger’s conduct righteous? Should he then receive an award for fulfilling the rule very well? Would the existence of such a rule cause us to endorse such behavior?

The question for us as fans is not whether Roethlisberger broke a rule or regulation. The question is whether he did something wrong. And if he did, he may have injured a young woman, himself, his team, and his league in the process. That might require some action by those who employ him to demonstrate their commitment to justice and correction. If they do otherwise, they send the message that they don’t care and that they find his qualities as a man, outside of leading a football team on the field, irrelevant. If that is what we believe, then we merely think of human beings as cogs in a machine designed to fulfill a function. As long as they fulfill that function, nothing else matters. Is that what we think about people? Are people just things we use?

To obsess about the rulebook is to leave aside the ability to engage in moral judgment. Moral judgment is what makes us human.

A Short Easter Homily with Hemingway and Buechner

Ernest Hemingway once wrote a short one act play about Jesus. Very few people know about it. The title is Today is Friday.

The play opens with three Roman soldiers are in a bar drinking away the stresses of a long, brutal day of crucifixion.

The third soldier is sick and rueful. He complains about something being wrong with his stomach. It is clear something has gotten to him.

The second soldier tries to make him feel better by minimizing what has happened and by running down the victim as nobody special.

But the first soldier refuses to go along. The second soldier mocks the crucified man by saying it was obvious he was a poser because he couldn’t come down off the cross. But the first says, “He didn’t want to come down from the cross. It wasn’t his play.” The first soldier goes on to recount in a somewhat tragic and admiring fashion, “He was pretty good in there today.”

In Hemingway’s vision, Jesus is the bad conscience of the world, the mistreated and martyred man of peace, but not necessarily its savior. There is no hope in these men drinking to get rid of their ugly memories after a day of torture.

The haunting and memorable line is repeated throughout the scene, “He was pretty good in there today.”

Hemingway only grasped part of the picture.

Let’s turn to Frederick Buechner, the novelist, preacher, and memoirist. Buechner once had a conversation with his aging mother in her later years in which she asked him, “Do you really think anything happens after you die?” He was surprised because she usually didn’t want to talk about death. He responded loudly, against her usual deafness, “YES.” He said he believed, “SOMETHING HAPPENS.”

Buechner ended up writing his mother a letter because he didn’t feel he could get what he wanted to say past her deafness and general fear of discussing spiritual matters. In his letter he reasoned with her about the mind of God and our intuitions about eternity, but the key point he made was “I believe that what happens to us after we die is that we aren’t dead forever because Jesus said so.”

Jesus said so.

Now, why did a learned and sophisticated man like Frederick Buechner think that would matter?

Jesus said so. Who is this Jesus?

Look at The Gospel of Mark, Chapter 8 starting at verse 27:

27 Jesus went out, along with His disciples, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way He questioned His disciples, saying to them, “Who do people say that I am?”
28 They told Him, saying, “John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; but others, one of the prophets.”
29And He continued by questioning them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered and said to Him, “You are the Christ.”

“And who do you say that I am?”

THAT is the question.

What makes the Christian faith different is the resurrection of Christ. The resurrection is the reason it matters what Jesus says about life and death. The resurrection is the reason martyrs endure.

Let’s examine the way it is presented by Paul as he speaks to the Athenian philosophers at Mars Hill where he made a spectacular entrance into their debating society. We all remember how he takes note of their statue to an unknown god and how he describes the true God, not made by human hands or living in a temple. It is less common to recall the way Paul finishes in Acts Chapter 17.

30″Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent,
31because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.” (Bolding added by me.)

The reason the church persisted under persecution and attempts at outright extermination is that it was built upon a claim of historical fact. The tomb was empty and many people saw Jesus after he was supposed to already be moldering in the crypt.

Several decades ago, two astronomers using a radio telescope heard a sound in the background that they couldn’t get rid of. Eventually, they came around to theorizing that the sound was the reverberating echo of the Big Bang, the massive explosion associated with the creation of the universe. Think about that. The moment of creation still with us even now. A sound so incomprehensively powerful that it continues to be heard.

The resurrection of Christ is like that. It is the biggest event of all human history and the booming power of it echoes throughout our civilization. Everything changed. Everything is still changing. The kingdom of Christ lies before us. And the question remains: And who do you say that I am?

An Obligation, Not a Loan

I finished college early and had about 10 months to kill before starting graduate school back in 1992. Living at home with my parents, I heard about a job with the neighborhood pharmacy and went to visit the owner. His name was Bob Brunton. He hired me on the spot and sent me out with his delivery girl who I’d be replacing.

To my horror, we got into the truck and she began expertly manipulating the five speed manual shift. I had given up on shifting when my dad taught me to drive years earlier. THIS was the truck, a Mitsubishi Mighty Max, that I would have to drive.

I went home that night and thought about how I could bow out of the job. I knew I couldn’t drive the truck and considered slipping a note under the door. I didn’t think I could face Mr. Brunton and explain that I couldn’t drive a stick shift.

Instead, I had my dad take me out to work on a manual shift that evening. I was bad at it, but decided I would really try. In addition, I had to take a map to figure out where the deliveries needed to go.

The next day, Bob’s delivery girl went out with me as I drove the truck. She didn’t say anything as I ground the gears and lurched around. If she told Mr. Brunton, he didn’t tell me anything about it. I took over the job and spent the next several months delivering drugs to Brunton’s customers and working the cash register when I was in the store.

The job turned out to be great. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I worked four hours each weekday for $5 an hour. The goal was to save up money for expenses my graduate assistantship wouldn’t cover.

At the end of several months, it was time for me to leave for school. Mr. Brunton, who let me call him Bob, sat down to make out my last paycheck. He gave it to me and I thanked him. He said, “I have something else for you.” He made out a second check for $500 which was more than I made in a month. “Hunter, this is not a loan. This is an obligation. I am helping you. You are obligated to help others you come across as you are able.” The money was a big help to me as I started graduate school the next month. I have always remembered what he did for me both in providing the job and in passing on the $500 gift that was really an obligation.

Since that time, I have followed in the spirit of what Bob told me he expected me to do. I know I will continue to have opportunities to do more. I heard Bob died recently when I was back in my hometown and visited the barber shop a few doors down from where the pharmacy used to be. I hope somehow that he knows I took his words to heart.

Rework by 37signals

My line is the humanities, but I also happen to have a management degree and am an academic administrator. When I saw that the software company 37signals — renowned by productivity geeks — had a new book out, I wanted it. After enduring a few days of not being able to find my kindle, I finally located it and ordered the book.

Rework is a very good management and entrepreneurship manual. The authors have a very good sense of how to get started and how to make tangible progress from a very small base. There was literally nothing in the whole of it which I thought was bad advice. Instead, it seems to me that if we could make a controlled experiment in which one group of new business owners had read the book and the other group hadn’t, I believe you would see a higher rate of success from group one.

My only complaint is that the authors worked so hard to keep the book short, there were many places where I felt they had more to say, but restrained themselves. Really good advice is tough to find. You WILL get some for your $13 from Rework.