Reflections on LOST

I’ve just seen the entire run of LOST over the course of about two months.  It is time for a few reflections.  To those who intend to watch the show, stop reading now.  There will be SPOILERS.

The show begins with a jet crashing on an island in the Pacific.  The first question is, “Who survives a jet crash, especially one in which a plane cracks in half?”  I thought of that often.  As I watched the program, I wondered along with probably everyone else whether anyone on the show actually survived.  The other possibility is that they are dead and we are watching them move about in the afterlife.  To refine the thought a little, are the characters in purgatory working through their sins?

Things happen in the course of the series to make the viewer think that the characters have not died in the crash.  I know at one point I abandoned the theory entirely.  But by the time I got to the final season, I began to think the matter through again.  By the end, I felt confirmed in my belief.  These people are dead.  They are working out their own salvation.

One thing that sucked me in to the show was the names of some of the characters.  There is a John Locke, a David Hume, a Faraday (scientist), a C.S. Lewis, a Jeremy Bentham, and maybe some others I missed.  For the most part, I think this naming was a display of someone’s dilettante-ish learning in the core curriculum at college.  The names didn’t correlate to the characters.  C.S. Lewis, for example, is a gorgeous redhead.  She is a Brit, but otherwise doesn’t resemble her namesake.  There was, however, one name that seemed to be important.  The most heroic character is Jack Shephard, son of Christian Shephard.  And, indeed, Jack is a man willing to give himself for others.

At one point, some of the characters manage to get off the island (in your face, Gilligan!), but they end up having to return.  They realize (some involuntarily) that they must return.  There is something wrong with them being off the island.  The island isn’t done with them, yet.  This part played into the notion of purgatory.  Their leaving is wrong because they have abandoned the work of the soul.  They must return and continue the process, miserable and trying though it is.

In the final season, the characters are living dual lives.  They are living one life on the island and a parallel life back in the civilized world.  What is interesting is that in their parallel lives, things seem to be going well.  Wrongs are being righted.  Problems are being resolved.  Wounds are being healed.  It is as though their suffering and struggles on the island have somehow been redemptive.  Their lives on the island (a place where wounds heal rapidly and cancer goes into remission) is exerting a restorative effect on their lives in some parallel place.

There is also some exposition about the bizarre nature of the island.  We see something like an origin story about two brothers.  It is somewhat reminiscent of Cain and Abel, but hybridized with the tale of Romulus and Remus.  The brother who lives is the more righteous one.  His twin (not identical) is not unambiguously evil.  He is more like a Lucifer who wants to overthrow God (or God’s will for his life) because he doesn’t understand him (or it).  The dead brother continues on in a supernatural life as something of a monster.  He is the black smoke which has been terrorizing our heroes throughout much of the show.  Certainly,there is a sense of something Edenic which has gone wrong.  The good brother, Jacob, is the protector of the island who is working toward the achievement of some good.

The conclusion of the series centers on the murdered brother living anew in the possessed body of John Locke.  He is determined to leave the island.  It is what he has always wanted.  But we are given to understand that he must not leave.  Somehow, he is evil and must be kept on the island like wine kept in a bottle by a cork.  Ultimately, he must clash with Jack Shephard.

This is the point where I started to see some strong religious themes.  The island has a heart which emits amazingly powerful and destructive light.  Desmond David Hume is the man who can withstand it.  Jack and the monster accompany Hume.  He goes down into the light and removes a stone stopper which is containing it.  This seems to put out the light and trigger the slow destruction of the island.  The monster feels he can now leave the island, which is sinking, but Jack determines the monster has now become vulnerable to physical harm.  They struggle and Jack is able to kill the monster, but not before he is mortally wounded by a dagger in his side.  At this point, one cannot help but see Jesus stabbed the spear in his side.

Jack is dying.  The disruption in the island and his suffering seem to have made victory over the monster possible.  Jack returns to the source of the light to restore the stone stopper.  When he does, the island is saved and the light returns at full strength.  Jack has successfully given himself for all.  His suffering has made victory over evil possible.

Before he died, he made Hurley the new protector of the island.  Though I am not Catholic, what I saw here was Jesus giving Peter the kings to the kingdom and establishing him as the new head of the church.  To me, it looked like the beginning of the papacy!  Benjamin Linus, a man who has been a persecutor of the characters and has been wrongly related to the island’s protector, Jacob, steps up to be Hurley’s co-laborer in the protection of the island.  Looking at Benjamin in this new role, I could not help but think of Paul.  Linus is very much a Saul-Paul type of figure.  (It helps a little that his name, Benjamin Linus, could be linked to the famous scientist Linus PAULing.)

Ultimately, the characters living in their parallel lives encounter each other and come to an astonishing collective memory of their time on the island.  These scenes are quite beautiful.  They all come together in a church (except Linus who stays just outside).  Christian Shephard and Jack Shephard talk.  Jack realizes he is dead and so, too, are the others.  To my mind, it appears that what has occurred is a triumphant tour through purgatory for them all.  They have been sifted like grain and what is of value is what remains.  Though the stained glass contains a variety of holy symbols from the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Christian faiths, the dominant imagery is Christian as is much of the narrative.  The characters gather in the pews as pure light spills over them.  They are moving on, presumably, to Heaven where true reality is (e.g. The Great Divorce).

I appreciated the final season very much because I felt it was the kind of story which could prepare people’s hearts for Christ.  It was a tilling of the soil.

(One final thing.  What about the DHARMA Initiative?  They are a communal project with researchers and scientists of various types working on the island attempting to pierce its mysteries and perhaps harness its special powers.  In the end, their efforts add up to little of consequence.  Indeed, much of what they do leads to tragedy.  I suspect the story of DHARMA was designed to highlight the instrumental limitedness of science.)

The Great Viking Novelist on Marvel’s Thor

Lars Walker is a wonderful writer of fiction related to Vikings (and Christianity).  He recently took up his pen, so to speak, to review the new Thor movie.  These lines caught my attention:

To anyone schooled in Norse mythology, the Odin of the movie is almost unrecognizable, except for his long beard, lack of one eye, and possession of Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse (which provides an extremely cool special effects moment). Anthony Hopkins’ Odin is wise and good, full of benevolence and cherishing a horror of war. He’s kind of like a professor of English or some social science at an Ivy League university—wooly-headed enough to throw away the gods’ greatest weapon at a moment of dire military threat.

The Odin of the Vikings was most of all an extremely powerful magician, a wizard—not the nice kind of wizard like Gandalf, though he was one of Tolkien’s inspirations for the character, but the old kind of wizard—treacherous and murderous, with lies on his lips and blood under his fingernails. He delighted in war for two reasons—one in order to feed the wolves and ravens that were his familiars, secondly in order to fill his hall, Valhalla, with heroes who would stand with him at Ragnarok, the last great battle. To this end he raised heroes up and then brutally betrayed them. He was also, according to the eddas, a sexual predator and a known deviate.

The difference between these two Odins, I think, is suggestive of important—and generally unrecognized—elements in western culture. The script writers have confused Odin with the Yahweh of the Jews and Christians. It doesn’t even occur to them that a high god could be anything but kind and peace-loving, since we all have so thoroughly internalized Christian suppositions that even people who reject the Christian religion—and I assume that a large proportion of the people who made this movie do—can’t conceive of a religion founded on darkness and brute force and the domination of the weak by the strong.

What Lars is saying here is something we miss when we think about our culture.  So many of our most basic assumptions are formed by Christianity that we confidently declare how good secularism is or will be.  We don’t realize that our type of secularism has a source.  And Lars knows what it is.

The State of Christian Higher Education: A Response to Allen Guelzo

UPDATE: You can read Guelzo’s piece here.

Many are now taking note of Allen Guelzo’s essay in Touchstone on the situation of evangelical colleges in America. He points out a number of troubling issues, such as that few of these schools are selective, alumni are not giving, and many of the schools are in bad financial condition, despite the continued rise in tuition rates.

When I took over responsibility for strategic planning at Houston Baptist University back in 2007, I studied many of these same challenges.  My goal was to get a sense of our position in the market so that we could speak intelligently to donors about what we needed. I discovered the relative lack of high endowments among Christian institutions (and the high reliance on tuition that goes with the lack of such endowments).

In addition, I noted the near complete lack of doctoral programs in areas outside of professional training such as education or counseling. Christian universities are not able to afford graduate fellowships or stipends. If the programs don’t generate revenue, we don’t offer them. Guelzo doesn’t mention that.

Neither does he mention the competitive disadvantage for scholars at our institutions who wish to pursue publication. At many top secular institutions, professors teach only two courses each semester. Sometimes less. Our professors almost always teach four courses per semester, which is a consuming task if you do it well.

I could go on. We have fewer scholarly centers and think tanks, hold less conferences, publish fewer journals . . . You get the idea. We are fighting hard to accomplish our missions, but scarcity is much more real to us than it is to many of our counterparts in state schools who think they have budget constraints.

All of this is why it was such a galactically big deal when Robert Sloan was in charge at Baylor University and working to make that school into a Carnegie research institution which was simultaneously emphasizing its fealty to the Christian intellectual tradition. When he was forced to resign, many who follow these things closely were despondent.  The worst fears were not realized, though, and Baylor has continued to move forward as a comprehensive (and Christian) institution (which really does carry its weight in the Big 12) and has about a billion dollars in endowment.  Baylor is now a haven for some of the finest Christian scholars on earth. This is a huge accomplishment. Kenneth Starr gives every indication of being the right person to shepherd Baylor’s continued flight along this nearly uncharted path. I am somewhat surprised Guelzo would leave the Bears out of his excellent essay.

In addition, Guelzo has missed the ascendancy of some other Christian universities on a smaller scale. For example, just as one Christian school, Lambuth University, announced its closing here in Jackson, Tennessee, Lambuth’s longtime sister school, Union University, has enjoyed record enrollments and is receiving some excellent gifts. Union’s budget has nearly quintupled over the last 15 years and the school outperforms just about all of its peers in terms of financial health. A study of the percentage of students admitted at Union wouldn’t tell the story Guelzo suggests it does. Union likely admits a majority of the students who apply, but that is part of its model. Union sets out to attract applications from students who are a good fit spiritually and academically. Union’s selectivity would be better measured by a look at the mean ACT scores of its recent freshman classes, which have been very high.

Just as Guelzo wrote about institutions with which he is familiar, I have referenced some of the ones I know best. I imagine some could come forward with success stories and others with tales of fingernail-hanging survival. I suspect the reality is that Christian universities, as a sector, are undergoing some serious sifting. A wise man once told me several will close in the next decade. I agree with Guelzo that there are very possibly too many and that we would benefit from consolidation. Imagine if we could have Baylor as the research flagship and then 5-10 very strong liberal arts universities.  They would all be cultural gamechangers if they remained faithful.

We don’t control these things (the life and death of universities), though, from some central Christian planning office for what we perceive to be the maximum advantage.  Some institutions will fail. Others will surprise us and announce amazing new gifts and innovative programs.

What we can control, however, are matters to which Guelzo alluded. We can hire faculty who care about the mission and not just about their guilds. We can hire presidents with vision for distinctively Christian higher education and NOT for education as a commodity to be sold like gasoline or grain. We can install core curricula which actually help students become well-rounded and well-educated human beings who understand their cultural context, their history, and the interrelationship of the disciplines.

Finally, we can make the case to donors to meet our greatest needs. We need scholarships and scholarship endowments so we can compete with the state universities on price. We need investments in endowed chairs, funded centers, and journals which can provide lighter teaching loads for our productive scholars. Donors, if you are reading this, then understand that the Christian university can provide a tremendous bang for the buck culturally. We educate the student. We provide the student with a spiritual community.  We teach them to put their minds and spirits to work in tandem.  Our scholars can teach, write, and speak into the world conversation. We can convene scholars into networks of influence.

Read Guelzo. Heed this essay. And help us do what only the Christian university can do.

When a Wife Is Like a Mother . . .

When we came to Union University, we checked off the box to get dental insurance. During the last year, my wife, Ruth, has faithfully taken herself and the children to regular dental visits. I especially admire the fact that she takes the children, as I imagine they are not especially happy to submit to having their mouths pried open and allowing a lot of poking and scraping. My son is capable of creating dramatic oral fountains in the dental chair as he struggles to figure out that whole “don’t swallow wait to spit” thing.

At various times, Ruth has mentioned that I have not been to the dentist. A few times I indicated I didn’t want to make any decisions at that moment and she accepted it. Then, she tried to press me on times and I said I’d have to get my calendar. I would then count on her forgetting about me getting my calendar. That worked a few times.

Two days ago, she had enough. She asked for a time to go to the dentist. I said I don’t want to go. She stopped for a moment and said, “This is ridiculous. Why do I even ask you? I might as well ask the kids when they want to go to the dentist! You aren’t going to say yes. I’m just going to schedule your appointment.”

My schemes of passive resistance exhausted, I expect to be in the contoured chair soon enough.

Advice to New Graduates in Recessionary Times

The job you try to get as you graduate from college is likely to be the hardest one to obtain for the next 20 or so years of your life. It is doubly hard when you are trying to get that job in a time of high unemployment. This is the moment at which you are an unknown.

At college, we attempt to prepare you for real life. Papers and tests are proxies for projects and tasks to be completed. If you can do the one, you can probably do the other, but no one can be sure. At this point in your life, employers are looking at you like a player in a sports draft. Is this student going to be a star or a bust? Will they regret having brought you on board? Are you the person who will figure things out or endlessly look for direction? Many “A” students will despair of finding out how they should use their gifts, while a number of less successful students will plug right into a job, feel immense relief at the end of homework, and start cranking out useful performance immediately.

Once you have taken your first professional job, you will be more of a known quantity and (if you are good) subsequent jobs will be easier to find.

Here’s my advice for getting through this time:

1. Don’t rush into a career and take advantage of EVERY job you hold. Don’t worry that you are determining the rest of your life. I had a job in a local drugstore right out of college that helped me save money and taught me a lot about working. If you keep your mind active, you can benefit from every work experience. Think about how the operation runs. Try to understand things from the manager or owner’s point of view. Work on doing what your boss needs you to do. Take satisfaction in the completed task. I can remember feeling good about a freshly mopped floor or a clean toilet. Today, I have that same feeling when I give a good lecture or write a good article.

2. Be curious about the people above you. In saying this, I absolutely do not mean that you should be a suck-up. People see through that. What I mean is that you can find your way by learning about the experiences and decisions of your bosses and senior employees. View their lives as stories VERY relevant to your own. NOTHING has benefitted me more in my working life than asking questions about the lives and careers of co-workers and superiors. It can backfire, as it did on me once when a female boss (many years ago) began weeping as I probed recent professional events, but the other 97% of experiences have been very positive.

3. Avoid the accumulation of consumer and housing debt when you are young. You need to be able to move. You need to be able to change jobs. You need to be able to return to school if you decide you want a different career. Travel light. You are still figuring out who you are and what you want to be.

4. Learn how to sustain attention away from electronics. In the future, the person who is able to devote their attention to the substance of a meeting and contribute meaningfully is going to look like a superstar.