President Brenneman

Related links:

• View photos from the 2013 Baccalaureate service
• Read the press release about the service
• Commencement speech by Dan Charles, NPR’s food and agriculture correspondent (full-text)

Baccalaureate sermon, delivered by Dr. James E. Brenneman, President of Goshen College on Sunday, April 28, 2013 in the Goshen College Church-Chapel

Scripture Reading:  Ephesians 3:16-19

I.

Today, I am full of joy and profoundly grateful. I rejoice with you and all your loved ones that you made it to the finish line of your respective degree programs, be that a bachelors or masters at Goshen College. I am grateful that you have drunk deeply from the well of knowledge and grateful that in the process you have learned something of the height and depth of the love of God.

Knowledge and love, love and knowledge – two sacred values worth pondering by any would-be graduate of any university, but even more so, a Goshen College graduate. And so, I am particularly grateful, that the Senior Class Planning Committee chose for this baccalaureate service the scripture from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians – a prayer that combines love and knowledge, knowledge and love.

II.

“Knowledge is power” so we’re told by the philosophers, social scientists, civil rights activists, educators, infomaniacs, and just about everyone else. Love is power, we’re told. If so, A.J. Jacobs should be one of the mightiest men alive. He’s the editor of Esquire Magazine who wrote the New York Times best-selling book entitled: The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. A.J. spent more than a year reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, all 44 million words, from a-ak, which is an ancient East Asian music, to Zyweic, which is a town in Poland known for its beer.

A.J.’s the same guy who later wrote the bestseller, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible in which “he lets his beard grow so unruly that he’s regularly mistaken for a member of ZZ Top, tends sheep in the Israeli desert, battles idolatry, and worries about stoning an adulterer he knows, and he tells the absolute truth in all situations – much to his wife’s chagrin.” AJ’s wife also hated it when AJ was writing Know-It-All  because he would tend to throw up his new-found knowledge about almost everything into regular dinner party conversation with friends. For example, one cold night upon arrival at a friend’s home, their friend Shannon opened the door with the usual banter, “A little nippy out there.” To which, A.J. responded, “Not quite as cold as Antarctica’s Vostok Station, which reached a record 128 degrees below zero, but it’s still a little cold.”

Another time at a seafood restaurant, he pointed out, just as the abalone was being served – using less delicate language than I am about to – “Do you know how many “be-hinds” the abalone has? For those of you who just have to know, the answer is five. We all know a few “know-it-alls’ don’t we? At times, know-it-alls are insufferable.

And yet, like any college worth its salt and tuition, we at Goshen College have encouraged you, invited you, prodded you to learn everything you could about everything you can all the time and everywhere and to do so for the rest of your lives. We wanted you to know as much as you could within your particular major or minor or double majors or triple minors and everything in-between. We take pride that your degree hails from among the top 10 percent of all colleges and universities among thousands by almost every measurable criterion by almost any comparative lists. We are thrilled that you will go on to earn Ph.D.’s at a rate per number of graduates higher than almost any school in the nation. Haven’t we done our best to create “know-it-alls” of most, if not all, of you?  At the very least we want to make  “know-as-much-as-you-cans” of all of you. And isn’t that a good thing? Well, yes, of course it is, but …

For the most part, the central project of most western colleges and universities has been to gain and dispense knowledge – to help the students become, well, “know-it-alls.” We are constantly testing your knowledge in college, something that we should do. Yet, “love” is seldom a distinct category for which we design curricula. “To love well” is not usually on a typical course syllabus as one of the stated outcomes of a class.

A math professor was asked in a recent survey of thousands of college teachers, whether he thought part of his role was to develop the moral and spiritual formation of students. Likely typical of his profession on this survey, “I only do math, not spiritual development,” he replied. “That is not in my area of competence.” We seem to have become so silo-like in our respective disciplines that the original intent of universities to develop students of character has all but disappeared. By the way, that math professor was not from Goshen College.

So it was absolutely refreshing to me when choosing the scripture lesson for this occasion, you went against the grain of higher education to describe what you thought was a great Goshen College education. After assessing all your hard work, all those long hours of study, all the newly gained skills and many learned accomplishments. After all that! And as great as that may be, when all’s said and done, you did the exceptional thing. You returned to the prayer of St. Paul to summarize your Goshen College experience. For you, the most important take-away was not simply raw, bare-boned “know-it-all-ism.” The most important take-away was to have been, as the Apostle Paul said, “rooted and established in love,” love of God, love for each other, and love for the world.

There it is: love and knowledge, a formidable team. From Socrates to Nietzsche to Levinas and Habermas, western philosophers have debated about the relationship between knowledge and love and power. St. Paul seems to be aware of those links: “I pray that you will have the power,” he writes, I pray you will have the “power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ (of God), and to know this love that surpasses knowledge.”  Now that’s an epistemology worthy of a Ph.D. dissertation, one, I hope, will be written by one of you in this room someday. “To know a love that surpasses knowledge.” Amazing.

III.

In the 14th century, an anonymous English monk wrote a sublime work entitled, “The Cloud of Unknowing.” He wrote it to counsel a young person, a student of his, as to the limits of knowledge, especially in knowing God. For him, if there is to be a breakthrough to God, it would not likely come about by “knowing it all.” Rather, he writes: “… God can well be loved, but God cannot be thought … You must step above thought stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and, whatever happens, do not give up.” Love in the cloud of unknowing is a love that encompasses the best of learning pedagogies, yet surpasses knowledge. Love in the cloud of unknowing is worthy of our life-long pursuit.

A love that surpasses knowledge, in the end, as St. Paul said, is what “endures forever.” A love that surpasses knowledge can bridge differences, profound differences in what we know to be certain for ourselves, even when someone else is certain about his or her perspective. When Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” it was not just a nice cliché. He was using a form of moral reasoning typical of rabbinic argumentation: state the extreme instance, such that every lesser instance is more attainable and expected. Jesus sensed that until one learned to love someone who profoundly disagrees with you, you, we, have not truly known love. Indeed, one of the best ways to learn, to grow, to know-it-all, is to wrestle with alternative points of view. To not learn to love difference is to stunt one’s mind and, sadly, one’s heart as well.

I hope that as you leave GC, you have learned to love someone you may have otherwise not known had you not come to GC. I hope you have learned to love someone of a different faith perspective, a different interpretation of Holy Scripture, a different life-orientation. Jesus isn’t asking us to agree. Jesus is asking us to love in the midst of our differences with a “love that surpasses knowledge.”

When I look around, I think you have caught the Spirit of that Love, a love that has aided you in adjusting to college, of missing home, of sorrowful estrangements, and losses. Together we suffered the unfathomable deaths of Professor Jim Miller and fellow student Millicent Morros.  And yes, there were anxieties over tests, of choosing a major, of the unknown future. But through it all, we discovered together that “love surpasses knowledge.”

IV.

The same Spirit of love permeated your lives in small and hugely significant ways. I remember the year when most of you arrived on campus (2009-2010), you helped the Athletic department raise enough money in its Leaf Relief Project to dig a fresh-water well at St. Mary’s Mumias Secondary school in Kakamega, Kenya. The following year (2010-2011) some of you travelled to the Mideast to help with summer camp programs at Wi’am, the Palestinian Peace and Reconciliation Center established by Marcelle Zoughbi’s father. During the harsh winter of 2012, you, along with faculty and staff, helped raise $25,000 and build a new Habitat for Humanity house for the family of Eddie Mayorga, a Goshen College Physical Plant staff member. I remember that during the ground breaking, Eddie reached out his hands and said in Spanish, “If I could hug every one of you I would. I thank God … for the support that you have given me.” And then, as if that wasn’t enough, you took-on another house-build for another family this year.

You have volunteered to tutor for the love of kids, you composted waste for the love of the earth, you prayed around the clock for a whole week several different years for the love of God and the world. Your senior class gift is among the top amounts given: given to support Prism programing, SST endowment, and a Community Gardens project.

You have held newborns in Nicaragua, taught English in Cambodia, served the deaf community in Peru, held basketball camps down the street. You have learned to live lives of service and learning on every inhabitable continent on earth. By my estimation, in the four years you were here at Goshen College, all students, along with faculty, staff, and administrators showed God’s love for others with more than 60,000 service hours per year that you were here! You, my dear students, have embodied a “love that surpasses knowledge.”

V.

If as you leave GC, you have more questions than when you arrived; if you are not, in fact, “know-it-alls,” if you have come to the edge of all you know; and yet have learned a bit more about how to love God, love yourself, love others and love creation, then you have received an education of a lifetime.

In the end, though, I believe that to know such love, is less about our capacity to “beat on the thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love,” than it is a simple gift unbidden by us from an all-knowing God, who broke through the clouds of unknowing as the Christ, and continues to do so, to bid us welcome! In the end, in his great epistemological masterpiece on Love (1 Corin.13), St. Paul concludes:  “faith, hope and love, abide, but the greatest of these is love.”

So, graduates of 2013, I pray with St. Paul and all your beloved professors, that more than any diploma presented to you later today, that each of you for the rest of your days may continue to “receive power to know the height and depth and the breadth and the width of the love of God in Christ – a love that surpasses all knowledge.”

Dan Charles

Related links:

• View photos from Commencement 2013
• Read the press release about the service
• Baccalaureate sermon by Dr. James E. Brenneman (full-text)

Commencement address by Daniel Charles, food and agriculture correspondent for National Public Radio, at the 115th Goshen College Commencement on Sunday, April 28, 2013

Thank you so much, President Jim Brenneman. Thank you faculty and staff of this college. Greetings to you, graduates! Congratulations!

It’s a privilege to stand here at a commencement of Goshen College. It’s also extremely daunting to me, personally because Goshen has played a really important part in my own life.

I grew up in a Mennonite community in Lancaster, Pa. – a farming community. I always knew about Goshen, out there in Indiana, and my best friend from high school came here to study.

I didn’t. I had my own personal issues to work out. First, I had to stay home for a year after high school to help milk the cows. Then, when my oldest brother came home, to take over the farm, and I could leave, I wanted to really leave. And the cheapest, safest way I could find, to go as far away as possible, was a work exchange program in Europe that the European Mennonites had set up. I worked on a farm in France, which I have to admit, was kind of disappointing because I wanted to get away from farming and then at a retirement home in Germany washing dishes and sweeping floors.

After that, I decided I wanted to study something international, and I transferred to a university in Washington, DC: American University. After I graduated, I stayed in Washington, figuring out a way to earn a living. And that’s where Goshen came to my rescue; not Goshen directly, but graduates of Goshen.

I was in my early 20s; many of you will soon be in your early-20s. I’m not sure I even realized that I needed to find other people who understood me, who shared some of my story, some of my questions, and who were on a similar path.

But I realized it when I finally met them, through friends of friends, at parties or concerts or weekend volleyball games. We were all a similar age, all trying to find our place in the world; figuring out things like jobs and friends and beliefs.

I was drawn to a network of people who already knew each other from Goshen. They were kind, generous, interested in the world, and I felt like I could trust them. They became my closest friends. They still are. Some, I see at church; Others, I get together with for lunch or dinner every few weeks. Some have moved away, but we still stay in touch through mail, e-mail or the occasional phone call.

This is why I’m grateful to Goshen. I feel like it created a community that became my community. So that’s my main connection to this place.

Let me stick with this personal story for a bit, because it’s connected to the title of my talk: This idea of searching for what’s real, what’s authentic.

When I went off to Europe, and then when I moved to Washington, my parents, I’m pretty sure, were a little anxious about me. Maybe some of you have felt that cold draft of anxiety from your own parents from time to time. Maybe you’re just starting to feel it now that you’re graduating.

What were they anxious about? That I’d lose my way, I think or that I’d lose my connection to them, and to things that they felt were really important. They probably wouldn’t have used these words, but I’ll put it this way: They were worried that I was wandering away from a life that was genuine and real; as real and true as the hay that we stacked in the barn every summer, the clothes that my mother sewed, the weeds and the green beans that grew in our garden. Also, as authentic as relationships – good and bad relationships – that are pieced together from shared experiences of living across the fields from each other for 30 or 40 years; from sitting together in church, going to each other’s weddings and funerals, helping each other out when sickness comes, or a barn burns down.

They worried that when I ran off to the big city, I was entering a kind of make-believe world; a world where – to borrow an advertising slogan from many years ago – image is everything; where people earn their living from words that ultimately are just empty words; where nothing is quite what it seems, because people work so hard at creating an impressive facade; communities where people come and go. They all seem very nice, but you really only see one side of them – the side they choose to show you; where relationships are superficial; not authentic.

Just imagine: They worried about this – and Facebook wasn’t even invented yet!

Now, my parent’s fears were not realized – at least I don’t think they were, partly because I found friends like the ones I mentioned. Also because I found out that you can, in fact, build communities in the city that are just as strong as those in the country. I even met someone in Washington who also grew up without television. Brigid and I fell in love, got married, and had children. My friends and I, we’re also watching our children grow up together, and we’re going to weddings and funerals together.

But I still sympathize with my parents’ worries. In fact, I now share them when it comes to my own children. And I think a lot about this question of what’s real and not real; what’s authentic and not authentic; what’s true and not true, because Facebook, and Photoshop, and online dating – they now do exist! But also, I think about this because of my work.

I’m a journalist.  I tell stories on the radio. And there are two ways in which my kind of work is connected to this search for what’s real.

The first way is pretty obvious. Something isn’t real if it’s not true, if it’s a lie. And we journalists, part of our job is to try to figure out what’s factually true. We all hear all kinds of things and we have a professional responsibility to ask: What’s the evidence for that? How do you know that?

If somebody says, “I heard it from my neighbor,” we say, “OK, who’s your neighbor? I need to find out how he or she knows this.” We need to find the person who saw this thing first hand and then check with other people who were there, to see if they saw the same thing.

If it’s a scientific kind of fact, we ask to see the evidence, and not just the I-read-it-on-Wikipedia sort of evidence; actual here’s-the-data kind of evidence. Because we know, from bitter experience, that people believe all kinds of things that aren’t true.

I was working on a story about coffee just a few months ago, and I kept coming across this fact: Coffee is the world’s second-most valuable traded commodity, after oil. I read this statement in a book; I saw it on a Fair Trade Coffee web site; in a column in Time magazine, all kinds of places; so many places, in fact, that a lot of people figured it must be true.

But it’s not. If you take the trouble to look up the actual statistics of traded agricultural commodities, kept by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, coffee actually comes in at number 16, tucked in between chicken meat and sugar, and way below soybeans, wheat, and palm oil. That’s not even considering other, non-agricultural commodities, like steel or copper.

OK, so it doesn’t really matter that much where coffee ranks in global statistics, but this kind of thing happens a lot. People believe things just because they heard it somewhere, and it sounds good or because it fits our prejudices or because we have to believe it to get along with our friends.

I’ll mention just one more example – again, sticking close to something that I write about:  Genetically engineered crops. Every time I do a story about these crops, and it shows up on NPR’s web site, people jump in on the comments section and start an argument over whether GMOs – genetically modified organisms – are good or evil.

Some say, on the one hand, that GMOs produce sterile seed; if you try to replant that seed, it won’t grow. Others explain that the company Monsanto is suing farmers who happened to be growing some Monsanto’s genetically engineered soybean varieties in their field, even though those varieties just blew in on the wind; the farmers didn’t know those plants were there and didn’t want them there, but they get sued anyway. On the other side of the argument, people write that genetically engineered crops are absolutely essential to feed the world’s growing population or that they’re necessary to improve the lives of poor farmers in Africa.

I get depressed when I read the comments section. I get depressed partly because the claims, at least as stated, aren’t really true. I’m not going to go into the details of why I say that. It would take too much time, and I’m not really here to do a seminar about GMOs. Also, it’s not the main thing that I find depressing.

The really depressing thing is that I get the feeling that the people who write these comments aren’t even interested in knowing whether or not what they think is true. They seem to simply reject, out of hand, anything that would challenge their own beliefs.

The only really important thing in this debate, like many other debates, seems to be simply which side you’re on. Once you’ve picked a side, your brain can only absorb information that’s in line with what you already know – or think you know.

Now you’re probably thinking: OK, but there are a lot of cases where it’s not clear what to believe, because we can’t know for sure. That is exactly true. We don’t know, absolutely for sure, whether, say, new charter schools in the poorest parts of Chicago are going to be make life better for children there or whether a law requiring background checks on people who want to buy guns really will reduce the amount of killing in this country.

But there’s always at least some information that can help us make decisions about these things, and improve our chances of doing something sensible. And our job – not just my job as a journalist, but the job of all of us – is to search for the best, the most true and useful knowledge and understanding that we can, not fake facts that sound really good, like that amazing statistic about coffee.

I’m pretty sure that I’m just reminding you of something you already know. You’ve certainly heard some version of this before. This is, after all, that core value of Goshen College that President Brenneman and others have been talking about from the very first day of classes this year, repeat after me: Passionate learning.

It takes passion to sort out rumor from truth; to be willing to consider evidence that contradicts our assumptions; to spend the time searching for answers to hard questions.  It takes passion to really learn.

That’s one side of this search for what’s real. There’s a second side of this that I’d also like to talk about, and I think it’s actually a little more difficult or at least the road isn’t as clearly marked. This is not so much a search for what’s true, but what’s authentic?

And here, I think, journalists like me aren’t great role models because there’s an aspect of what I do for a living is really quite inauthentic.

I’ll try to explain this with a little thought experiment. Would you say that I’m talking to you right now? Are you hearing me? Seems like it, right?

OK, let me step away from the mic for a second. Do you hear me now? No? You can’t hear me? Obviously, you weren’t really hearing me before. You were hearing the loudspeaker, a reproduction and amplification of my voice.

You may be saying to yourself: This is kind of a silly distinction, but let’s think about this. Our real voices have limitations. I can’t talk loudly enough to fill this room. So we call in technology to help; in this case, microphones and amplifiers and loudspeakers.

But that technology changes the nature of what happens here. This is not a conversation; you can’t talk back. But at least you know that this is really me standing here, talking to you. Even if you aren’t hearing my real voice, you can be pretty sure you could, if you were close enough.  And then we could have a conversation.

OK, now let’s think about my work. People tell me, “I heard you on the radio.” But they didn’t, really. They heard a reproduction of my voice duplicated millions of times by radio speakers and ear buds in homes and cars and offices. That can’t be me, obviously. There’s only one of me.

And you know what? Most of the time, when somebody tells me that they heard me on the radio, the next thing they say is, they can’t actually remember what I was talking about. If we were talking face to face, I think they would remember.

This is what technology does. The radio or the Internet magnifies my voice incredibly, but it also changes the quality of the communication and you completely lose any sense of a personal relationship.

Now think about conversations that happen by means of your favorite screen: Your cell phone or your iPad or whatever. How authentic are those conversations or the relationships that you create through that form of communication? What are those relationships like?

How much of you gets communicated through text messages? To put it another way, how real is the version of the world that you encounter through that screen?

These are tricky questions, and I’m not even going to try to answer them today. I will just leave you with a few ideas to stimulate your own thinking.

I’m part of a church that’s small enough that we’ve never needed an amplifier. We call it House Church, even though we don’t meet in each other’s living rooms anymore. But we stick with the name, in part, I think because we want to act like we’re still meeting in houses.

I think it does make a difference that we don’t speak through loudspeakers. I have a feeling – I can’t prove it – that when we’re talking in our normal voices, the way you would around the dinner table, we’re a little less likely to say things because that’s what we’re expected to say in church. I think we’re a little more likely to say what we really think, to be authentic.

Or think about music. It’s a totally different experience, when someone is standing here singing, or there’s an orchestra playing, compared to when we’re listening to a recording. From a recording, we expect unnatural perfection; there’s no drama, no uncertainty about what might happen next.

I’m not saying stop listening to iPods or the radio. I’m not saying stop going to any church with a microphone and loudspeakers or stop looking up things on your iPad. Technology is amazing and wonderful and useful.

What I am saying is: Don’t use it to replace actual life with something that’s endlessly entertaining and always at our fingertips, but less authentic.

What I wish for you is the same as what my parents wished for me. This authenticity I’m talking about is connected to values that they treasured – values that also are at the heart of the religious tradition that built this college: humility, honesty, community.

Those are values to live by, even today – especially today.

So cook a meal. Have your neighbors over for dinner. In fact, make that dinner a regular tradition. Plant a garden. Make it a community garden. Sing a song. Play an instrument. Paint.  Use that iPad to make your own movie. Build a life that’s true and real.

Thanks for listening. And best wishes to you.

David Cortright, director of policy studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, will present the annual Goshen College Yoder Public Affairs Lecture on Tuesday, Oct. 30 at 7:30 p.m. in the Music Center’s Rieth Recital Hall. The lecture, titled “The Power of Nonviolence: Lessons from the Unarmed Revolution in Egypt,” is free and open to the public.

Beyond a moral and religious choice, nonviolence has proven to be a practical way to effectively achieve peace and justice, as illustrated in the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Cortright will review how the Egyptian people succeeded in bringing down the entrenched Mubarak dictatorship, distill lessons from the revolution and pose questions about the philosophy and practice of nonviolent struggle for the future.

In addition to his Oct. 30 lecture, Cortright will also present “Clean Hearts and Dirty Hands: Why Christians Should Be Involved in Politics” during Goshen College’s convocation on Monday, Oct. 29 at 10 a.m. in the Church-Chapel. He will also hold an interdisciplinary forum, “Sharing Personal Stories of Connection to the Arab Spring from the GC Community,” on Oct. 29 at 4 p.m. in Newcomer Center room 17.

In addition to his work at Notre Dame, Cortright is also the Chair of the Board of the Fourth Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan, nonprofit operating foundation that is a trusted source for providing realistic solutions to today’s most urgent global security threats. The author or editor of 17 books, Cortright has written widely on nonviolent social change, nuclear disarmament and the use of multilateral sanctions and incentives as tools of international peacemaking. His most recent books include “Ending Obama’s War” (Paradigm, 2011) and “Towards Nuclear Zero” (Routledge, IISS, 2010).

Cortright has provided research services to the foreign ministries of Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands. He has served as consultant or adviser to agencies of the United Nations, the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the International Peace Academy and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree in history from New York University. He completed doctoral studies in political science at the Union Institute in residence at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.

The Frank and Betty Jo Yoder Public Affairs Lecture Series is an endowed lectureship that was created for Goshen College in 1978 by Frank (1917-1996) and Betty Jo Yoder of Goshen. The goal of the series is to enable faculty, students and community to hear well-known speakers address current issues.

Luis Urrea.

Mexican-American poet, essayist and novelist Luis Urrea will present Goshen College’s annual S.A. Yoder Lecture on Monday, Oct. 15 at 10 a.m. The lecture, titled “The Border, Immigration and the Devil’s Highway: A Journey with the Author Luis Urrea,” will take place in the college’s Church-Chapel and is free and open to the public.

Urrea is a prolific and award-winning writer. He is a master of language and a gifted storyteller who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore themes of love, loss and triumph. Born in Tijuana, Mexico to a Mexican father and an American mother, Urrea grew up in San Diego, Calif.

The author of 14 books, Urrea has published extensively in many genres and has received many prestigious awards. In 2009 he wrote his first-ever mystery short story, “Amapola,” and won an Edgar Award. “The Devil’s Highway”, his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Urrea attended the University of California at San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in writing, and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. In addition to receiving a teaching fellowship at Harvard University, he has also taught at Massachusetts Bay Community College, the University of Colorado and the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Urrea is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

As a young man, Urrea served as a relief worker amongst people living in the slums in Tijuana. Issues relating to the U.S.-Mexican border have defined his life and colored much of his writing. Regarding this point he once said, “The border is simply a metaphor that makes it easier for me to write about the things that separate people all over the world, even when they think there is no fence.”

The S.A. Yoder Lecture Series, begun in 1972, honors Dr. Samuel A. Yoder, a professor at Goshen College from 1930 to 1935 and again from 1946 until his death in 1970. The lecture is sponsored by the Goshen College English Department and the Center for Intercultural and International Education.

Goshen College President James E. Brenneman spoke during the opening convocation on Wednesday, Sept. 5.
Photo by Jodi H. Beyeler.

Related links:

• View photos from the 2012-13 opening convocation and Applause Tunnel.
• Read a full transcript of President Brenneman’s speech “On Becoming a Passionate Learner” (as prepared for delivery).

GOSHEN, Ind. — Goshen College President James E. Brenneman opened the new school year with an impassioned call to action – that all Goshen students fulfill their God-given potential by becoming life-long passionate learners.

“As you enter Goshen College for the first time or as you get ready to graduate this year or if you are anywhere in between, I implore you, while you are here, catch the contagion of passionate learning. Become the passionate lovers of learning that God invites each of us to be. If you do, you will never be the same for the rest of your days,” he said.

Speaking on Wednesday, Sept. 5 at the first all-campus convocation of the 2012-2013 academic year, the president offered faith, academic and career advice during an address titled “On Becoming a Passionate Learner.”

Brenneman, a 1977 graduate of Goshen College who is starting his seventh year as president, began by welcoming students, faculty and staff to a new school year. He led the crowd in cheering for seniors, juniors and sophomores, first-year and transfer students, fans of technology and those who love books, newspapers and learning.

The president’s primary message focused on passionate learning, one of the college’s core values, and a subject for in-depth discussion and reflection during the coming school year. The college’s other core values are Christ-centeredness, servant leadership, global citizenship and compassionate peacemaking.

In introducing the topic, Brenneman recalled the colorful life of Professor Emeritus Merle E. Jacobs, an avid researcher of dragonflies, fruit flies, fish and birds. Jacobs, who taught at Goshen from 1953-54 and 1964-85, died in April 2008.

Brenneman said that when Jacobs was a boy, growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of southwest Pennsylvania, he loved all birds but was most passionate about yellow canaries. From a pair of birds, Jacobs developed a flock of 67 canaries – all living inside his family’s home. Fifty years later, Professor Jacobs was Brenneman’s genetics professor at Goshen College.

“Professor Jacobs was still obsessed with canaries and other birds, but he had branched out making quite a name for himself studying the genetics of aging in fruit flies. He loved his fruit flies almost as much as his canaries and almost as much as current Assistant Professor of Biology Andy Ammons loves his honeybees,” Brenneman said.

“If any of you haven’t yet stood in the midst of thousands of honey bees swarming all around you, while Dr. Ammons gives a lecture on the sex lives of honey bees, you haven’t yet lived on the edge of learning,” he said. “Professor Jacobs embodied, as Assistant Professor Ammons still embodies, the core value of passionate learning.”

Besides helping to develop greater expertise in one’s chosen vocation, Brenneman said that a passion for learning would have practical career implications for graduates.

“I can almost guarantee, that when you go to your first post-graduation job interview, one of the top questions you will be asked is this: ‘What are you passionate about?’” Brenneman said. “In his best-selling book, Corner Office, Adam Bryant interviewed over 700 leading CEOs in America and asked them: ‘What qualities do you see most often in those who succeed?’ Their overwhelming response was ‘passionate curiosity.’”

Although many people may believe a passion for learning is commonplace, Brenneman said in fact it is a “revolutionary” idea: “In the western philosophical tradition, the juxtaposition of passion with learning was damnable. The word passion, or pathos, was associated at one extreme with intense suffering, as in ‘the passion of Christ.’ Indeed, for nearly 2,400 years or so in learning circles, the idea of passion or pathos was considered a counterpoint to thinking or learning, like two magnetic learning poles repelling each other.”

Brenneman said the western tradition idealized thinking and belittled feelings, because it was believed that ideas were best accessed through reason, whereas passions were dangerous and misleading and operated on the lower level of human nature.

“God, by contrast, was considered ‘Pure Thought’ whose divine essence was thinking. God was above joy and sorrow and passion,” Brenneman said. “So it was that for nearly 2,000 years, Christian and Jewish theologians were embarrassed by the God portrayed in Scripture – a God full of passion; sometimes angry, sometimes elated, sometimes jealous, sometimes forgiving, at times weeping, showing compassion, intimate, personal.”

Given those longstanding biases, Brenneman said that Goshen College’s decision to claim passionate learning as a core value, “goes against the grain of the old story of western learning tradition and reclaims a missing piece – supported by Scripture – of a truly comprehensive liberal arts education.”

Brenneman pointed out that Albert Einstein had many passions outside physics, including sailing, playing his violin and building elaborate houses of cards. Einstein stated that his varied experiences sparked his creative imagination. In fact, Einstein credited the musical perception he developed as a child as the creative force behind his greatest insight, the Theory of Relativity.

“I find it rather ironic, then, that in our quest these days to strengthen science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs in our schools, we are more and more inclined to cut budgets for the arts and music, somehow imagining that those programs should be extracurricular and play second fiddle to the hard sciences,” Brenneman said. “So to our shame and to the long-term learning deficit at the highest levels of learning, students are getting more math without music, more science without images, more engineering without poetry, more technology without intuition and knowledge without imagination.”

Fortunately, Brenneman said, passionate learning is celebrated at Goshen College among students and faculty. He described a number of faculty members who are living out their passions for learning by exploring the physics of sound and shapes of bells, connecting with God and others through art, discovering a gene that causes blindness in homing pigeons and much more.

He also paid tribute to Rocio Díaz, the community outreach coordinator for the Center for Intercultural and International Education (CIIE), who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree at Goshen College despite great odds. “Here is a Latina first-generation immigrant to the United States, a mother who first helped put her own two daughters through college, and then, while working full-time, taking classes in her second language, has managed to go to GC and keep her GPA up to 3.7. Wow! That’s a passion for learning.”

Brenneman encouraged students to pursue passionate learning with all of their senses — a quest, he said, that was grounded in the teachings of Jesus Christ.

“When Jesus claimed that all of Scripture could be summed up in two phrases, the first of the two, pretty much defines, theologically, the meaning of being passionate: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your might.’

“Jesus uses the word love and adds intensity to it. Love combines with passion to multiply endurance, discipline and self-sacrifice – all the ingredients you need to succeed over time,” Brenneman said. “So Jesus says, to love, desire, with all your senses. Love with every ounce of your mental powers. Love with every tensile of every muscle. Love passionately, love intensely, love with all you got.”

Brenneman’s remarks were preceded and followed by music. Assistant Professor of Music Christopher Fashun performed a percussion solo on a marimba. Afterward, Department Chair and Professor of Music Beverly Lapp and a string quartet led the campus community in singing the Alma Mater.

Afterward, and in what has become an 11-year tradition, the Goshen College “Tunnel of Welcome” or “Applause Avenue” was formed — two lines departed the sanctuary led by faculty and staff, who applauded the seniors, juniors, sophomores and finally the first-year students. Normally, the line progresses outside the building, but rainfall prompted a change in destination and all were treated to popsicles in the church Fellowship Hall.

–Written by Richard R. Aguirre

Goshen College President James E. Brenneman spoke during the opening convocation on Wednesday, Sept. 5.
Photo by Jodi H. Beyeler.

Related links:

• View photos from the 2012-13 opening convocation and Applause Tunnel.
• Read the press release about the convocation

Fall Opening Convocation message, delivered by Dr. James E. Brenneman, President of Goshen College, on Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2012, in the Goshen College Church-Chapel (as prepared for delivery)

Little Merle Jacobs was absolutely passionate about canaries. He loved all birds really.  For example, he loved chickens, even hypnotizing one once. He built his own telescope, not so much to watch stars, but to watch birds. And there were plenty bird species to watch in the Appalachian Mountains of southwest Pennsylvania, where he was born into a family of 11 children.

Merle loved birds, but was obsessed with yellow canaries. His aunt gave him a male and a female canary once and it wasn’t long until he had 67 canaries – all living in their house. Yep. His mom and dad aided and abetted his passion, giving up a closed in back porch that opened into his bedroom. The canaries were free to fly in and out of his bedroom at leisure. He also kept mice in the room as the scavengers cleaning up the fallen seeds, which the canaries dropped. I wonder who cleaned up what the mice dropped? (See his autobiography, Mr. Darwin Misread Miss Peacock’s Mind).

Some 50 years later, I had the privilege of having Professor Merle Jacobs as my genetics professor here at Goshen College. Professor Jacobs was still obsessed with canaries and other birds, but he had branched out making quite a name for himself studying the genetics of aging in fruit flies. He loved his fruit flies almost as much as his canaries and almost as much as current Assistant Professor of Biology Andy Ammons, loves his honeybees.

If any of you haven’t yet stood in the midst of thousands of honey bees swarming all around you, while Dr. Ammons gives a lecture on the sex lives of honey bees, you haven’t yet lived on the edge of learning. Let me just say, if humans were more like honey bees, look out men. And long live women, especially the queen bee. Professor Jacobs embodied, as Assistant Professor Ammons still embodies, the core value of passionate learning.

In our last convocation at the end of the last school year, I announced that the core value we would focus on together this school year was Christ-centered passionate learning. I can almost guarantee, that when you go to your first post-graduation job interview, one of the top questions you will be asked is this: “What are you passionate about?” If asked that question today, would you have answer?

In his best-selling book, Corner Office, Adam Bryant interviewed over 700 leading CEOs in America and asked them: “What qualities do you see most often in those who succeed?” Their overwhelming response was: “passionate curiosity.”

So, what are you passionate about? I won’t ask you to respond to that question today, but I would recommend that by the end of this year, and certainly by the time you go for your first job interview, you might have a ready response.

Let me tell you how revolutionary the core value of passionate learning truly is! In the Western philosophical tradition, the juxtaposition of passion with learning was damnable. The word passion or pathos was associated at one extreme with intense suffering, as in “the passion of Christ.” Indeed, for nearly 2,400 years or so in learning circles, the idea of passion or pathos was considered a counterpoint to thinking or learning (a-pathos/ without passion), like two magnetic learning poles repelling each other.

Literally, since the time of Plato in 400 BC, on through Philo, Aristotle, the Stoics, Maimonides, Aquinas, Descarte, and Kant, the standard story of learning in the whole Western tradition idealized thinking and belittled feeling. It was thought that ideas were best accessed only through reason, whereas passions were dangerous and misleading and operated on the lower level of human nature. God, by contrast, was considered “Pure Thought” whose divine essence was thinking. God was above joy and sorrow and passion. God was the Unmoved Mover. Apathy –  not sympathy or empathy – was said by Maimonides (Spinoza/Kant) to be the supreme core value. Impassionate learning and the capacity for impersonal objectivity became the norm for learning, especially in the sciences.

So it was that for nearly 2,000 years, Christian and Jewish theologians were embarrassed by the God portrayed in Scripture – a God full of passion; sometimes angry, sometimes elated, sometimes jealous, sometimes forgiving, at times weeping, showing compassion, intimate, personal, sympathetic was a crudity. Even more intolerable to such a world-view, was a God who came into this world of passions in human form: God-in-Christ. Given the standard philosophical assumptions of what by then had become the whole scientific world view, and given the bad insertions of theology into science from time to time, it became pretty easy to separate such a pathetic (pathos-filled) God from the rational enterprise of learning.

So when Goshen College goes on record saying a core value of ours is passionate learning, it is a wonderful, amazing confession that goes “against the grain” of the old story of Western learning tradition and reclaims a missing piece (supported by Scripture) of a truly comprehensive liberal arts education. Fortunately, over the past 50-60 years, a new story is being told of amazing new learning styles and methods that include the whole range of human experience.

If we would have asked Albert Einstein what his passions were, he probably would have answered, sailing, playing his violin, smoking his pipe and building houses of cards (he once built a house of cards fourteen stories high). All of these experiences, he said, sparked his creative imagination. Einstein once told the great music educator, Shinichi Suzuki, that the theory of relativity came to him by intuition and only because his parents had him play the violin since he was 6. It was his musical perception, Einstein said, that provided the venue and the creative force behind his greatest insight, theory of relativity.

Since music has both a spatial dimension (hearing in space) and a time dimension (meter), it may have been this relative connection between time/space that would aid him in creating his famous time/space equation – after the fact as it were. Einstein once claimed that language (including the mathematical equations he came up with) were only secondary explanations (second order learning) of what he intuited or subconsciously felt or discovered to be true.

I find it rather ironic, then, that in our quest these days to strengthen science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs in our schools, we are more and more inclined to cut budgets for the arts and music somehow imagining that those programs should be extracurricular and play second fiddle to the hard sciences. So to our shame and to the long-term learning deficit at the highest levels of learning, students are getting more math without music, more science without images, more engineering without poetry, more technology without intuition and knowledge without imagination (something Einstein said was an oxymoron). Let me underscore why then, here at Goshen College, we celebrate the core value of passionate learning as the best form of learning available to us. (See, “Imagine That! Einstein on Creative Thinking” by Michelle and Robert Root-Berstein, Psychology Today, 03.31.10).

I marvel at the fact that Goshen College Professor of Physics John Buschert is so very passionate about the connection between the physics of sound and shapes of bells. I love that Chad Coleman, our director of residence life, also known as ‘iChad,’ is so passionate about technology that he can make luddites like me and you get goose bumps when he talks about the amazing gift technology is to the world of learning.

I stand in awe at how Rocio Diaz, Community Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Intercultural and International Education (CIIE), embodies passionate learning viscerally.  Her enthusiasm and dogged determination to pursue her very own B.A. at Goshen College is truly amazing and against all odds. Here is a Latina first generation immigrant to the United States, a mother who her first helped put her own two daughters through college, and then, while working full-time, taking classes in her second language, has managed to go to GC and keep her GPA up to 3.7. Wow! That’s a passion for learning!

I am deeply moved by Assistant Professor of Art Kristi Glick’s passion for beauty in the particular enables her to connect with others and to God in amazingly profound ways as a maker and creator; or Professor of Bible, Religion & Philosophy Jo Ann Brandt, whose love of drama and movies led her to an amazing new way of reading St. John’s gospel impressing the scholarly world.

And then there is Professor of Chemistry Dan Smith, the “Bird Man,” a Chemist excited by homing pigeons, who, in the process of his pursuing his passion for the color of pigeons (not a chemical quest), discovered a gene for blindness in homing pigeons with possible historic implications for blindness more generally. Of course, the list of passionate professors and administrators and students could go on endlessly as it should be here at Goshen College.

So, what are you passionate about? What is it that invites your whole self to get all your senses involved in the joy of learning? In his book, Teaching that Transforms, Professor of History John D. Roth rightly argues that the outcomes of a good Christ-centered education must involve all our senses: sight or perception, touch or embodiment, taste or discernment, hearing or listening, finding one’s voice or vocation, and smell or attending the unseen presence around us. Such embodied learning must never be simply about student learning outcomes, but also must ring true to the way of learning and teaching all along the way.

When Jesus claimed that all of Scripture could be summed up in two phrases, the first of the two, pretty much defines, theologically, the meaning of being passionate: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your might.”

Jesus uses the word love and adds intensity to it. Love combines with passion to multiply endurance, discipline, and self-sacrifice – all the ingredients you need to succeed over time. The passion hormone, dopamine, isn’t enough to sustain such a rigorous commitment to learning. The love hormone oxytocin, sometimes called the trust hormone, the empathy hormone, the sympathy hormone, helps us truly learn during those times the passion ebbs and flows, as it must.

So Jesus says, love (desire) with all your senses; love with every ounce of your mental powers; love with every tensile of every muscle; love passionately, love intensely, love with all you got.

As you enter Goshen College for the first time or as you get ready to graduate this year or if you are anywhere in between, I implore you, while you are here, catch the contagion of passionate learning. Become the passionate lovers of learning that God invites each of us to be. If you do, you will never be the same for the rest of your days.”

President Jim Brenneman

Baccalaureate sermon, delivered by Dr. James E. Brenneman, President of Goshen College on Sunday, April 22, 2012 at the Goshen College Church-Chapel

Scripture Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:16-20

What a delight to be present together in God’s House with family and friends of our graduates from all around the world. I am reminded that the canopy of God’s grace is wide and broad, ancient and ever new creating at Goshen College that sacred space of learning, transformation and hope. Thank you for being here to celebrate with us the joy of a great commencement day.

2008, the year when many of you graduating today first came to Goshen College, was the year of Joe the Plumber, Barak Obama’s election, the year Puppycam went viral, the buzzword “Tweet” came into its own, 7” high heels were cool in Hollywood, and High School Musical 3 came out. Now, high heels lost an inch, maybe; texting has become the lingua franca; we’re in the middle of another Presidential campaign and Zac Efron has come of age in a new movie – thankfully, not HSM4. How time flies.

Don’t be surprised, however, if, someday, when you are a grandmother or grandfather and after your grandchild figures out when you came to Goshen College, they exclaim, “Wow, grandma, you mean you lived through the Great Recession of 2008? You probably don’t need reminding that just two months after most of you arrived on campus, the second biggest stock market crash in history shook our world, which quite literally made the usual first year stressors of college (new roommates, time management, relationships, grades, homesickness) seem like a whole lot of piling on.

To top it off, you began and endured throughout most of your college years two wars, non-stop political campaigning, and a near total loss in our national and civil discourse. And bookending your experience in this your last year, we experienced the unprecedented tragic death of our esteemed Professor of Biology, Jim Miller.

Wendell Berry, in his essay, “The Purpose of a Coherent Community,” [in The Way of Ignorance, 76-77]. reminds us that “there is no escape from the issue of context.” If it is true, as he says, that “the context of everything is everything else,” then the context and times of your college experience have meant that all the usual debates that happen on every college campus almost every year – conversations about the meaning and practice of faith, justice, patriotism, decision-making, identity, inclusion, politics — took on the zeitgeist (the spirit) of the times in which we live. Even though we sometimes like to see ourselves as not being swept up by cultural norms (i.e., being counter-cultural), it seems we have not been immune from the cultural influence of our fragmented times.

In times like these, various fears and paranoias are nourished in the extreme by prophets on all sides of the ideological spectrum, exacerbated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh on one side and Bill Maher on the other. Today, even our churches, while less segregated by race (at least ideologically speaking) than in the past, are more segregated by political ideology and political party than ever before. We are quite literally, “Divided by God” as a recent NY Times article declared [Ross Douthat, The New York Times, Sunday Review, April, 8, 2012, 1 & 6.]. Christ seems less and less the center of our common faith, than whether we are Democrat or Republican or a Tea Partier or Occupy Wall-Streeter. Into this milieu, your college careers unfolded.

So, I find it wonderfully refreshing that the Baccalaureate Committee of your peers chose for our sending message, the wonderful, powerful, liberating call of the Apostle Paul writing to the Corinthian church and so also writing to us. St. Paul calls us to become Ambassadors/Diplomats: “Ambassadors of Christ!” Ambassadors of hope. Diplomats of Reconciliation!

In a world where everyone on all sides of every issue in whatever profession considers himself or herself a prophet, do we really need more prophets running around? In a world where everyone on all sides of every issue considers himself or herself to be “rightly dividing the Word of Truth,” do we really need more clever exegetes and historical deconstructionists? In a world gone wild with moral ambiguity and indulgence, do we simply need ever more rigid legal and ethical guidelines, judicial decisions, and coercive moral arbiters? In a world of ever more selective identity politics, do we really need more excommunications by the right or left, the red or blue, the purple or other-than-purple? I sincerely doubt it.

In the closing days of our lives together here on this campus, our sending scripture reminds us that we part having been called to be God’s representatives on earth as in heaven: Ambassadors for Christ; Diplomats of Reconciliation. We are called to bring former enemies together, to unite friend and foe alike. How radical is that? In a world fraught with ideological conflict, being an ambassador, a diplomat, may just be the most radically counter-cultural calling one could ever hope to have. To be a diplomat of reconciliation is more radical than that of an apostle, a prophet, a priest; more so than a preacher, a teacher, a nurse; beyond that of an artist, an engineer, or judge. Whatever one’s major or profession, there is no greater vocation on earth. No more timely calling. None. Than the call to be an Ambassador, a Diplomat. An ambassador of Christ. A Diplomat of Reconciliation.

Jesus said in his great Sermon on the Mount, which underlies the mission of Goshen College, “if we are only friends with friends, how are we different from anyone else? Anyone can do that. Rather, it is when we are able to befriend foes that the true miracle of our faith is made plain for all to see.” It is that ‘second-mile’ love that demonstrates whether or not we are truly Christ-followers.

Here’s how it works – as simple and as difficult as this. God came to us in Christ, while we were still enemies of God, in order to re-establish a right relationship with God. And now, God has given each and every one of us this same “ministry of reconciliation.” Our greatest challenge going forward, especially in the day and age in which we live, may simply be to deeply befriend someone with whom we have profound disagreements.

The late great ethicist and theologian, Dr. James McClendon, a long-time friend, and sometime attender of our congregation in Pasadena, wrote a three volume systematic theology from an Anabaptist perspective. This work was his “last will and testament,” his magnum opus, the crown jewel of his life’s work. In his dying days, he literally thought he might not be able to finish the third and most significant volume of this trilogy. And so he turned to someone he trusted who knew him so well as to be able to complete his work for him. Someone who would write with the same voice, the same feeling, who would defend and reason with the same force and sense as he himself would were he to do so. The great irony of this relationship was that he and his friend disagreed on some of the most profound issues of life and faith. You see, his friend was an atheist. And at Dr. McClendon’s memorial service, his atheist friend eulogized Dr. McClendon by saying he knew of no other person who so profoundly showed him the meaning of the Christian call to be an Ambassadors of Reconciliation, a Diplomat for Christ.

I just returned from leading a group to one of the most conflict-riddled places on planet earth, Palestine/Israel. While there, we visited one of the great Christian leaders of that region, Rev. Zoughbi Zoughbi, founder and director of Wi’am, the Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center. He also happens to be the father of GC Junior, Marcelle Zoughbi. [I know some of you students here this morning spent last summer helping with Wi’am’s summer programs for kids. Zoughbi asked me to bring you greetings and heartfelt appreciation for your labor of love in this troubled land]. Wi’amin Arabic simply means, “cordial relationships” – developing relationships across profound differences. That is exactly what Zoughbi Zoughbi and his team do, day in and day out, year after year.

In the greatest of ironies, in the birthplace of Jesus, the little town of Bethlehem – where this Center is following Apostle Paul’s call to break down the walls of separation between enemies – a 30 foot high dividing wall between Israel and Palestine literally passes right along the property line of the Center. There in the garden, with a machine-gun laden watch-tower looking down on us, we gathered to have coffee with Zoughbi and his staff. You see Wi’am believes peacemaking and reconciliation often happens over coffee – sip by sip – in what Zoughbi calls ‘citizen-diplomacy.’ Zoughbi and his team have worked a lifetime to break down walls of separation between people – especially between Jews, Christians and Muslims — people who claim a common God through their common ancestor, Abraham – now locked in and traumatized by years of violent confrontation. In our parting, he presented me with the stole I am wearing today (red stole with Jerusalem crosses). I told him I would wear it at this service as a visual reminder of our common bond in Christ, our common call to be “Ambassadors of Reconciliation” and our solidarity with him in his holy work.

In a world of division, demonization, and polarization without end, as Wendell Berry reminds us, “the ground of our reconciliation will have to be larger than the ground of our divisions” going forward. The role of prophet may just have to give way a bit to that of diplomat, ambassador, and reconciler.

I know many of you. I have watched many of you work hard to befriend and get to know others who are very different than yourselves. Keep up the good work. You are an inspiration to me and others who see such gracious love on display and in action. I hope all of us leave GC with friendships of a lifetime, not just with those who are a lot like us, but also, those with whom we still have significant differences.

Being Ambassadors of Reconciliation isn’t about being the perfect diplomat. Rather, it’s a calling to live the kind of life that models what it means to be forgiven by and reconciled to God so that we can do the same for those around us, foe and friend alike.

As you depart, may you leave as diplomats, ambassadors of a life-changing story – hopefully learned and reinforced throughout your years here – a story shaped by the five core values of which you are now so familiar: to be compassionate peacemakers, passionate learners, servant leaders, global citizens, centered in the life and teachings of Christ (Christ-centered).

Would that you find that friend or better, make a friend, who is so different from you that the opportunity to be an Ambassador of Reconciliation, a Diplomat of Hope, is truly an opportunity of a lifetime. Would that you make a friend – someone you trust or trusts you no matter your profound differences. In so doing, your lives will truly manifest the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. In so doing, healing and hope will be born anew in this broken world little by little, peace by peace.

Not so long ago, I watched with my son the latest of a series of movies called “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” based on a toy line of varying humanoid or robot creatures able to transform into everyday vehicles, electronic gadgets or space crafts and back again: the Autobots versus the Deceptions. No doubt some of you when you were kids had a transformer or two in your toy box.

It only dawned on me recently that some of the fascination with these identity shape shifters might have something to do with our deepest longings, the desire to be transformed in spirit, mind, and, perhaps, even in bodily.

In our Martin Luther King, Jr. convo this year, Dr. Vincent Harding tapped into this deep longing of ours when he responded to Yolo Lopez-Perez’s question about the relationship between our identity as a college (or as individuals) and our relationships with each other. He recommended that whoever we are, we should not grasp too tightly to our identity as if it were a stone pillar that needs to be preserved at all costs. Instead, he said we should see our identities more like that of caterpillars for whom change, radical structural change, is destiny.

This past weekend, I sat through three showings of the Goshen High School musical, The Wizard of Oz, and was reminded again of the possibility and power of identity transformation: The cowardly lion who gains courage; the witless scarecrow who discovers he has a brain, after all; the tin man who learns he, indeed, has a heart; and runaway Dorothy, realizes that there really is “no place like home.” A powerful story of identity transformation times four.

Sandwiched between these several experiences, two of you (students) came to my office and wondered aloud whether we at Goshen College really truly believe in the transforming power Christ to change for the world for the better or to transform us, each one of us, personally into becoming the people God wants us to become. I left that meeting — we left that meeting — determined to renew our commitment to speak about the power of God through Christ’s Spirit to transform us and others, to transform our individual lives and our campus life — body, soul, spirit — in order to experience God’s best intentions for each and every one of us.

I believe that one of the hallmarks of a good college education, and, certainly, the value added dimension of a Christian college education, is the possibility that each one of us might undergo a changeover, an identity transformation, a conversion should be, at least one good outcome of a good education.

The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, says it this way, “be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2). Be transformed! (Greek, “be metamorphosized”). That is, be morphed into something greater than you presently are. Be “transfigured” (same Greek word, Matthew).

Transformation of our minds, transformation of our knowledge base, our professional skills, our social conscience and our spiritual lives must be the rule – not the exception – here at GC.

What I love about the analogy of the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a beautiful monarch butterfly is that both bodily forms have the same exact DNA structure. The DNA structure of the organism encodes for both body forms. During metamorphosis, some new genes are turned on that modify the body shape of the organism and produce the final butterfly body shape. In addition, many of the same genes are expressed exactly the same in both body forms. In other words, the core or essence of the organism is the same even while the bodily form morphs into something far more spectacular than ever before and that offers a whole new life experience. The difference between a caterpillar and butterfly is simultaneously of little consequence genetically and of immense consequence experientially.

In terms of our identity as a college or as individuals, the analogy of metamorphosis, of being transformed or transfigured means it’s possible to be essentially and deeply connected with our past, to our history and spiritual DNA, and to also be radically transfigured — transformed into something far greater than we have yet imagined ourselves to be.

The kind of metamorphosis or transformation or transfiguration the Bible speaks of – isn’t simply a matter of lining up our highest ideals or restating our common confessions or making sure the rules or boundaries of our various identities are drawn ever more clearly and then setting out to achieve those goals, perfect our self-image, guard our boundaries. Such a life may at first glance seem admirable or ‘noble’ or safe, but it may also simply be a caterpillar life well lived.

By contrast, Parker Palmer, the great Quaker educator, suggests that true transformation happens best when you, “Let Your Life Speak” (the title of his book after an old Quaker adage). Metamorphosis happens when, in his words, “you live the life that wants to live in you.” You live the life that wants to live in you!

Metamorphosis happens when the Spirit turns on the spiritual genes that already lie in each one of us, while we are still in our caterpillar selves. In order for that kind of liberating metamorphosis to happen, Palmer invites us to create the kind of quiet, trusting conditions that allows our soul to speak its truth to us, that allows the Spirit to awaken our true selves to us. Such an awakening may involve identifying natural talents and limitations within us and helping them break free, instead of trying to live the life someone else wishes you to live or the life you are trying desperately to live and falling short.

Metamorphosis cannot transform caterpillars into Monarchs if caterpillars are absolutely secure in their status, safe in self-assumption, and sealed off from the challenge of others and the Spirit. If transformation happens by the renewing of our minds, then education that transforms or transfigures our minds and liberates our souls must not become a tool of indoctrination that fails to challenge our perfections or identity markers,- however noble or good or sincere.

Metamorphosis may be one of the hardest experiences we ever undertake as ordinary folk. The morphing of caterpillars into Monarch butterflies can feel heart and soul wrenching. The shape shifting that happens between crawl inching on a leaf and flying into the sun might be as terrifying as it is liberating. And yet, such a miracle lies dormant in each one of us at some time or another, maybe today, or again and again in the various cycles of our lives. Metamorphosis need not, must not, be a once in a lifetime experience. We should always be ready for the Holy Spirit to transform us from who we are to whom we are called to be.

Such transformation, if and when it happens, can be a reinvention of life, as we know it. Metamorphosis is a version of spiritual muscle pulling. Transformation requires a rewriting of our individual story into a whole new story: God’s story. Someone once described such a rewritten life as being like “yanking cruel drunken abusive foul-mouthed Pap out of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and putting him in a whole new story as the loving gentle dad who Huck always dreamed of.”

Metamorphosis can turn a cowardly vacillating Christ-denying fisherman into a great preacher, the rock upon which the church is built. Metamorphosis can change self-doubt into confidence; bitterness and anger and cynicism into forgiveness, joy and hopefulness.

Metamorphosis can transform a Christian young man, hooked on cigarettes with low self-esteem in order to shape-shift him someday into becoming President of Goshen College. And that feels to me as miraculous as a caterpillar turned Monarch! Or caterpillar turned President.

Metamorphosis can wrench sin from sinful people and feel like hell. But it can also convert hell into heaven, transform what is meant for evil into good, and transfigure sinners into saints.

If there are going to be among us now or in the future, Sojourner Truths or Dietrich Bonhoeffers or Fannie Lou Hammers or Albert Schweitzers or Severo Ochoas or Leymah Gebowees or Zoughbi Zoughbis — Spirit-led Monarchs, all — who each in his or her own way helped or are helping still transform the world for the good – then let us hope and pray and believe that such a transformation of our minds, such a transfiguration of our hearts, such a metamorphosis of our souls is among the primary outcomes of our education here at GC.

My prayer is that we will be such a community where the Spirit of God stirs up and turns on those spiritual genes within each one of us, no matter our need or lack thereof.  Would that Goshen College be that community that inspires such a vision of transformation. Let us be those sisters and brothers, that family of faith, that provides for each other the “transforming space” we all need to shape shift from caterpillars to Monarchs!

(Note: Related hymns that were sung in between sections during the presentation are also noted.)

The wonder is that the United States Army even wanted four young Hutterite farmers from the Rockport Colony in South Dakota. Soldiering was most assuredly not in their DNA. The communal church to which they belonged had been resolutely set against all warfare for 400 years. Their grandparents had immigrated to the United States decades earlier, leaving their farms in Russia to travel thousands of miles, all to avoid having their men drafted into a newly expanded Russian military.

At the time of immigration, the United States was eager for settlers, especially skillful farmers. President Ulysses S. Grant personally wooed representatives for the Hutterites at his summer home on Long Island. While the president said that he couldn’t promise that they would be free of military service in the United States, he made the prospect of a draft sound highly unlikely–they could count on at least fifty untroubled years, he assured them.

And yet here these young farmers were on the morning of May 25, 1918, well short of the fifty-year mark, summoned by the U.S. Army for service in World War I. Three of the men were brothers: David, Michael, and Joseph Hofer. As might be expected in their closed community, the fourth man, Jacob Wipf, was a relative; he was Joseph’s brother-in-law.

All four were leaving wives and young children at home on the colony, where the main work was farming and where all members held all property in common, wanting to follow in the footsteps of the early believers in Acts. The 4,000 acres of colony land belonged to the community of Hutterites. The 500 head of cattle belonged to the community. The identical fieldstone houses belonged to the community.

On this day the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf were boarding a special military train for Camp Lewis, Washington, where tens of thousands of recruits from the Western states were already learning to salute, drill, and handle a bayonet. The Hutterites were determined not to participate in the military, but they had been drafted and wanted to cooperate as long as they could, hoping for an assignment they could accept.

In the eyes of the military, every man who boarded the train was already a soldier in the U.S. Army – even if some, like the Hutterites, required more shaping than others. Things had been tense between the Hutterites and their neighbors since the U.S. entered the war a year ago. The Hutterites had refused to buy war bonds.

And they kept to themselves and dressed oddly. The men wore black and grew beards, symbolic of their commitment to God. At a glance the Hutterites might be mistaken for their cousins, the Amish; but where the Amish carved out separate homesteads and farmed with horses, the Hutterites shared all property and used modern machinery.

They also spoke German, the language of the enemy on the battlefield. On the very day that the men left for Camp Lewis, South Dakota had banned the speaking of German in schools and churches, one of many efforts to ensure loyalty to the United States.

The Hutterites looked and spoke as if they had just been transported from a European village in the Old World. When they worshiped, as they did each day, they used an archaic form of High German, the language of their sacred hymns and sermons, written centuries earlier by Anabaptist martyrs and those close to them. The Hutterites saw themselves as a pure remnant of believers, ever watchful, knowing that persecution could return at any moment.

The tension between the Hutterites and their neighbors was apparent as soon as the four men boarded the train. A conductor took them from one Pullman coach to another, trying to find a place where they would be left in peace. To most of the 1,200 young men on the train, the Hutterites were “Russian cloonies,” slackers of the worst kind. Finally, the conductor found a compartment for them. As a safeguard, the Hutterites wedged a two-by-four across the door so that no one could enter.

All was quiet through the first night and into the next day. Then at midafternoon a group of young soldiers came to the door. They knocked. The Hutterites kept quiet. The soldiers knocked again. They told the Hutterites they only wanted to talk. Eventually, the Hutterites relented and cracked the door open. The men stormed in. They hauled the Hutterites away, one by one, to cut off their beards and cut their hair close to the scalp. For the men with shears, it was a harmless and patriotic way to get the Hutterites to look the part of soldiers – “free barbering” they called it. For the Hutterites, it was a frightening introduction to the Army.

Dear Maria,

Our savior has indeed said that they will come to us in sheep’s clothing, but in truth they are ravenous wolves. . .  When we arrived in Judith Basin in Montana they came to us . . .they cut my beard and hair off completely.  . . . Our savior has gone before us as an example that we should follow after him in his footsteps, for we have come into such a great suffering. . . It’s now 11:30 and time to go to sleep. We are going here so fast through the mountains and beside the mountains. If one thinks back how we have come here from our dear community, one could cry bitterly. Especially if one reflects on where we are being taken. It is deplorable. But God has promised us that he will stand and go before us if we only will trust in him.

Your never-forgetting spouse, Michael Hofer

Rockport Colony to Camp Lewis (May 1918)

“Heart with loving heart united” (Hymnal: Worship Book, #420)

The best way to picture the importance of Camp Lewis to the nation during World War I, according to a magazine writer, was to stand in the Texas Panhandle and face north, drawing an imaginary line through the middle of the country–through Oklahoma, then Kansas, and Nebraska and the Dakotas, right up to the Canadian border.

If you looked east from that line, you would have seen fifteen national army training camps. If you looked west, you would have seen one: Camp Lewis, at American Lake, Washington. The recruits from Alaska, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, and many more from Minnesota and the Dakotas, all headed to Camp Lewis, some, like the Hutterites, traveling as far as 2,000 miles.

Stretching across about 70,000 acres, Camp Lewis was the largest of the army’s camps. It was, in many respects, an ideal place in which to train for battle. The average summer temperature climbed to a comfortable seventy-one degrees and dipped down to a refreshing fifty-two degrees at night. Few of the other training sites could compete with the vista at Camp Lewis. The barracks were arrayed in two curving arcs, which opened southeastward toward Mount Rainier, “the Great Sentinel of the Camp,” capped in white.

The camp was bursting at the seams, with tens of thousands of men shoehorned into the officially designated company barracks. To accommodate the overflow, hay sheds were turned into barracks for at least 1,000 others. Some men slept outdoors in tents.

Meals were served at six in the morning, twelve noon, and six in the evening each day in the mess hall. For breakfast, the cooks piled metal plates with steak, potatoes, and rice, and filled cups with coffee, as the men filed by. The other meals were even larger, ending with pie. The army’s daily ration was an impressive 4,761 calories.

Of course, the men had to work off the food. The recruits were being readied to ship out as infantrymen to the front lines in France. You can hear the excitement in their letters home and later memoirs. A young  Mennonite from California, David Janzen, was eager to put on a uniform as a noncombatant: “After thirty days of such drilling it was easily seen how a fat pouch began to slide off a roly-poly man or how the spindly bank teller set his feet down firm and solid and a swing came to the men as they marched to and from the drillground.”

But less than 24 hours after their arrival, the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf found themselves not on the parade ground, but instead in Guardhouse No. 54. The officers had pressed the men to line up in formation and to fill out the enlistment and assignment cards, but the men were steadfast in their refusal. The card required each recruit to list his hometown, age, and basic information – but on top of the card it said “Statement of Soldier.” The Hutterites insisted that they were not soldiers, and so could not complete the card. They said they could not line up with other men as soldiers. They could not head to the parade ground to drill.

In sending all drafted men to military camps (with no option for civilian service), President Woodrow Wilson and Newton Baker, the secretary of war, were confident that they could persuade everyone, including members of the historic peace churches, like the Hutterites, to do their part for the army and the nation. Men who didn’t want to carry a gun might, as soldiers, drive an ambulance or cook in the kitchen. The army needed everyone. Wilson and Baker also envisioned the army as a melting pot. At the time of the war, one third of Americans were born overseas or were the children of immigrants.

Secretary Baker spoke about how men of every religious group and every immigrant stream and every political view would be welded into one body: “For when, on some moonlight night, on the fields of France, some American boy’s face is upturned, some boy who has made the grand and final sacrifice in this cause, no passerby nor no imagination that reaches him will be able to discern whether he came from a blacksmith’s forge or a merchant’s counter or a banker’s counting room. He will simply be an American.”

But the Hutterites were committed to their own worldview in which two kingdoms, one of God and one of the world, stood in conflict. They believed they could not contribute to the nation if it meant having to wear a uniform and serve in the army. The Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf had the misfortune of arriving at Camp Lewis just as commanders across the country appeared intent on using trials to send a message to conscientious objectors like them and just before the Secretary Baker opened the way for farm furloughs.

Before putting men on trial though, the military had to declare that they were insincere or defiant. The reasoning often seemed to be that anyone of sound mind who refused the military’s fair offer of noncombatant service must be insincere. By that logic, the Hutterites stood no chance in securing a different outcome. They saw themselves as Christians, not soldiers; and as Christians their refusal to obey military orders was a sure sign of sincerity. The Hutterites and military officials were talking to one another across kingdom walls.

So the men went on trial, accused of disobeying orders. Lieutenant Robert Shertzer and Sergeant R.B. Hilt were among those who testified.  Shertzer recalled confronting the men.

Shertzer: “What is the matter with those four men?”
Hilt: “They won’t fall in.”
Shertzer: “They will fall in.”
To the Hutterites, Shertzer said: “Here, you men fall in that last squad there.”
Hutterites: “We can’t do anything like that.”
Shertzer: “I explained to you men about this. This has nothing to do with fighting. I read the orders to you, and you will have to obey orders or else you will have to go to the guardhouse.”
Hutterites: “We can’t.”
Shertzer: “Sergeant, take them over to the office. We will have to put them in the guardhouse.”

Then the Hutterites were called to the witness stand.

Q: Are you willing to take part in any noncombatant branch of the service of the army?
A: No; we can’t.
Q: What are your reasons?
A: Well, it is all for war. The only thing we can do is work on a farm for the poor and needy ones of the United States.
Q: What do you mean by poor and needy ones?
A: Well those that can’t help themselves.
Q: Does your religion believe in fighting of any kind?
A: No.
Q: You would not fight with your fists?
A: Well, we ain’t no angels. Little boys will scrap sometimes, and we are punished; but our religion don’t allow it.
Q: To put the case like this: If a man was attacking or assaulting your sister, would you fight?
A: No.
Q: Would you kill him?
A: No.

All four men were found guilty of all charges. They were sentenced to twenty years of hard labor, to be served at Alcatraz.

Dear Maria,

We must hold firmly to God and plead to him with prayers for the strength of his Holy Spirit, so that we might win the battle and remain firm unto the end, and fight for truth as so many of our forefathers did who came out of the fight with bloodied heads. And now they are yonder and have received their reward. And, dear spouse, if we want to go there where they are now, then we must also follow in their footsteps and give heed to their faith. For the children of God are called to nothing else than to affliction, cross, tribulation, persecution, and hatred from the world.

Joseph Hofer

Camp Lewis to Alcatraz  (July 1918)

“I sing with exultation” (Hymnal: Worship Book, #438)

At the end of July 1918, the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf, chained together in pairs and escorted by four armed lieutenants, traveled down the coast by train to Alcatraz. The island was formally designated the United States Disciplinary Barracks, Pacific Branch, but it was better known as Alcatraz, or simply “The Rock.” From the San Francisco mainland, the ride to Alcatraz on a prison launch took roughly twenty minutes, heading into the wind that blew through the strait known as the Golden Gate.

From the dock they climbed a steep path, with one switchback after another, to reach the massive cellhouse at the top of island. Gnarled trees marked the way, bending and twisting in the wind.

On arrival, each prisoner was instructed to take a bath and put on prison dress. When the men refused to put on the army clothing, they were led down a flight of fourteen stairs to the basement of the prison, a place of solitary confinement known as “the hole.”

In this dungeon, each man entered a cell under a sloping brick arch, 6 feet high at the uppermost point; the cell itself measured 6.5 feet wide by 8 feet deep. Guards left a uniform on the floor for each man. Before they left, a guard warned, “If you don’t conform, you’ll stay here ‘till you give up the ghost like the four we carried out yesterday.”

Alcatraz, which after the war would become a federal prison known for its high-profile inmates like “Machine Gun” Kelly and Al Capone, was always a fearsome place, windswept and cut off by cold currents. In the dungeon, all was pitch black and quiet. For the first four and a half days the Hutterites received half a glass of water each day, but no food.

At night the men slept without blankets on the cement floor that was wet from water that oozed through the walls–there were no beds in the dungeons. There were also no toilet facilities beyond a pail assigned to each man. On the floor beside them were soldiers’ uniforms, promising some warmth if they gave up their resistance. Wipf would later recall: “But, we had decided, to wear the uniform was not what God would have us do. It was a question of doing our religious duty, not one of living or dying–and we never wore the uniform.”

The prison officials were determined to break the resistance of the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf  during their first week in the dungeon. During the last 36-hour period underground, each man’s hands were crossed one over the other and chained to bars in the door. The chains were drawn up so that only their toes touched the floor, a technique known as “high cuffing.” When guards led the men up the narrow steps and into the outside yard after nearly five days underground, other prisoners gathered around them. The four men tried to put on their jackets, but their arms were too swollen.

When the men wrote home, they said nothing of the conditions at Alcatraz. So other inmates, including Philip Grosser, who wrote a memoir, can speak for them: “The things hardest to endure in the dungeon were the complete darkness, the sitting and sleeping on the damp concrete floor, and the lack of sight or sound of any human being. The eighteen ounces of bread was quite sufficient for the first few days, and towards the last I had some of the bread left over. The rats were quite peaceful and friendly.”

By military law, the convicts could not be kept down in the dungeon longer than fourteen days at a time. The Hutterites rotated into and out of the dungeon during the four months that they spent at Alcatraz, first two weeks in the dungeon, then two weeks in a regular cell, and so forth.

Wilbert Rideau, an award-winning journalist who served forty-four years in Louisiana prisons for killing a woman, described the panic that often overtook him in solitary: “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . turn. Walk back. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .  five . . . stop. Suddenly, adrenaline is coursing through me. I freeze, like a feral cat who spots a stray dog. It’s the walls! They’re closer! They’re moving in on me, closing up the tomb.”

The United States Supreme Court nearly declared the punishment unconstitutional in a case in 1890 in which a Colorado murderer had been held in isolation for a month, awaiting his execution. World War I provided more evidence that solitary confinement was a cruel practice. The authorities closed the isolation cells at Alcatraz. For the better part of the twentieth century, in keeping with the court’s outlook, the United States used solitary confinement relatively sparingly, and only rarely for long term.

What happens to someone in solitary? Two psychologists who have researched the growing use of solitary confinement in the U.S., Craig Haney and Mona Lynch, said that every study has documented psychological damage among the inmates who were held for longer than ten days. The damages includes chronic anxiety, insomnia, panic, impulsive anger, memory lapses, hallucinations, self-mutilation, and suicide.As members of a communal group, the Hutterites must have felt the isolation with an extra burden, but the men are silent in their letters, except to suggest that death is in the offing.

Dear Anna,

My dear spouse and children, I’m sure you’ll be anxious to hear how things are going during these dark days. We’re all quite well, temporally and spiritually, and wish you the same. . . .  It seems that we’re supposed to stay here in this misery. But we have to pray to God that he will lead us on the right path. We all do not expect to see each other in this world anymore, the way it seems now, but we should not despair, with God’s strength we hope to overcome, as we have promised God, we trust in him. He’s the only one who can help us, as he did in olden days.

David Hofer

Alcatraz to Fort Leavenworth (November 1918)

“Who now would follow Christ” (Hymnal: Worship Book, #535)

San Francisco celebrated the armistice with a human chain of 5,000 people, who gathered at the Civic Center, still wearing flu masks as a precaution. Like so much of the rest of the country, the city was just emerging from the worst of an influenza epidemic when war, at least on paper, came to end on November 11, 1918.

Three days after the armistice the Hutterites left Alcatraz, still in chains. Under overcast skies that threatened a chilly rain, they boarded a train for the Army’s main disciplinary barracks, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, guarded by six sergeants.

Joseph wrote what would be his final letter:

My dear wife, since we will no longer see each other in this troubled world, then we will see each other yonder through the power of God. With this we must be satisified with that which God allows to happen. And he will not lay upon us more than what we, with his strength, can endure. . . .

And when you look at our scrawling you can well imagine how low our spirits are, for we are where the waves are roaring and in that time when the seas throw up the dead–if you can only see this in the right way.

This is all for this time, my dear wife. For this is not a good letter at all, since the train shakes and bounces so much. Now to close. My best greetings to you and our dear children, father and mother and all the brothers and sisters in the faith.

The men arrived at Fort Leavenworth, on Tuesday, November 19, at 11 at night, fully spent. Chained together at the wrists, carrying their satchels in one hand and their Bibles and an extra pair of shoes under the arm, they were hurried on, up the hill toward the military prison. The men entered a massive prison that night, enclosed by a stone wall that varied from fourteen to forty-one feet high.

The three Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf, who had been confined together since their arrival at Camp Lewis in May, finally separated at Fort Leavenworth. Joseph and Michael Hofer turned gravely ill. While David Hofer and Jacob Wipf were placed in solitary confinement, standing in chains nine hours a day, Michael and Joseph Hofer were hospitalized. Prison authorities alerted family members back in South Dakota.

Their wives arrived at Leavenworth in the evening in time to see their husbands. Joseph was barely able to communicate. He died at 8:35 the following morning, November 29. The guards said that family members could not see him. But Joseph’s wife, Maria, was forceful. The head officer relented. With tears in her eyes, she approached the coffin, which was set on two chairs. When the lid was opened, she found Joseph in death dressed in a military uniform that he had steadfastly refused to wear in life. Michael Hofer died a few days later.

To the Hutterites, the men were martyrs, who died because of mistreatment at the hands of the state while remaining true to their religious beliefs. The army listed the official cause of death as pneumonia, brought on by influenza.

Dr. David M. Morens, an epidemiologist who has studied the history of pandemics, said various factors could have left the brothers vulnerable to influenza. For example, they might have had a vitamin deficiency linked to their diet. In the end, Dr. Morens said, “Why these two men died is a mystery not easily explained by the conditions under which they lived.” What’s also puzzling is that two brothers died. The mortality rate, even for soldiers living in cramped barracks, was under five percent. “Statistically,” he said, “the death of both brothers was not likely under any circumstances.”

The third brother, David Hofer, was immediately released, free to accompany the bodies of his brothers home to South Dakota. Jacob Wipf remained in solitary confinement.

But several days after Joseph and Michael Hofer died, Secretary of War Baker ordered that prisoners no longer be chained standing to the bars of cells.

Darius Rejali, an expert in the history of torture, concluded that the harshest punishments during the war fell on conscientious objectors like the Hutterites from Rockport, who refused all service or work in the military. The standard punishment for such men, standing handcuffs, is one of the many coercive physical techniques that Rejali refers to as “clean tortures”–that is, techniques that leave few marks.

Rejali argues that torture is not defined by its methods: “No particular practice is ‘torture’ in itself.” A doctor who pierces a patient’s ear may be responsible for pain, but not torture. Torture, he writes, occurs at that moment when public authorities use techniques of physical torment on restrained individuals for a public purpose (to intimidate, draw false confessions, or get information). By this definition, the Hutterites (restrained) indeed met with torture (standing handcuffs) during their imprisonment (by military officials) for failing to follow orders (in the public duty of going to war).

Jacob Wipf’s father and others were trying to win Jacob’s release, especially now that the war was over. Still, as winter changed to spring in 1919, he remained in solitary confinement.

Though relatively few in number, conscientious objectors were of research interest to the federal government. One question looming in the forefront was whether men who resisted service in the army were held back by their inferior intelligence, as government officials believed. Given the popular portrayal of objectors as lazy, dimwitted, and crazy, the scientific studies showed surprising results. Conscientious objectors were actually more intelligent than soldiers in general–at least according to Army mental tests. Tests showed that 46 percent of the conscientious objectors received a grade of A, B, or C+ , compared with 27 percent for soldiers as a whole.

Of the nearly 3,000,000 American men who entered the army, 3,989 were conscientious objectors, and of that number 504 were court-martialed.

Mark A. May, a researcher at Syracuse University, prepared a summary of the data. His report cast further doubts on the appropriateness of the court-martial of the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf. “The degree of sincerity of a conscientious objector is a thing almost impossible to determine.” May also challenged the Army’s fierce determination to redirect men like the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf into conformity. “So when creed, minister, parents and friends tell him that war is wrong and that he must not fight, what could be expected of him? For a man like this not to be a conscientious objector would violate all the laws of heredity and environment that operate to make men pursue certain courses of action.”

Fort Leavenworth to Rockport Colony (December 1918; April 1919)

“We are people of God’s peace” (Hymnal: Worship Book, #407)

On April 13, 1919, nearly eleven months after his arrest, Jacob Wipf reversed his walk through the iron gates of Leavenworth, free to return to South Dakota in time for spring planting.

Back in South Dakota, he found a Hutterite homeland transformed. Many of the colonies had abandoned their farms and moved to Canada, and the Rockport colonists would soon do the same. When they reunited that spring, Jacob Wipf and David Hofer may have taken a short walk up the Rockport hillside to the cemetery to pay their respects to Joseph and Michael. All the grave markers in the cemetery were the size of a shoebox and identical, save two. One pictures them bending low to read the grave markers for Joseph and Michael, where a single word had been added: martyr.

The experience of the four men contributes significantly to one of the darker chapters of this period of American history, when a wartime patriotic fever and a widespread suspicion of all things German fueled attacks on conscientious objectors and others who did not rally to the cause.

Their tale, distressing as it is, does not follow a simple script, neatly dividing the cast into heroes and villains. As the narrative unfolds, we can see why the Hutterites became absolutist objectors during the war and feel empathy for the men in the face of their sufferings. At the same time, we can appreciate the challenges set before military commanders and guards who followed a different set of orders and, by their worldview, could not understand why these men would not contribute to the national cause, if only by pushing a broom.

Even so, the government can be held to account these many years later. In Washington the highest officials in the land set in motion a series of actions, carried out by subordinates, that in isolation may have seemed measured and appropriate. The cumulative effect was a miscarriage of justice. Four men who sought to neither harm nor injure anyone at any turn ended up hanging in chains, a treatment President Wilson himself later described as “barbarous or mediaeval.”

The Hutterites were part of a stream of Americans in World War I who were punished for remaining true to their convictions. They could have fallen in line on the broad path. By insisting on taking the narrow path, the Hutterites and other dissenters forced the nation to confront the most essential of questions: Is this the meager freedom that we wish to share in the United States? That someone will be imprisoned for refusing to fight or for criticizing the war or for speaking ill of the nation’s leaders? And over time, the answer came back from lawmakers in Congress, from justices on the Supreme Court, and, most importantly, from neighbors, that we can do better.

Our constitutional compass, including the First Amendment, promising freedom of speech and freedom to practice religion, and the Eighth amendment, banning cruel and unusual punishment, now points us toward a higher ground. The Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf received one-sentence obits when they died, but they left expansive legacies. Their story of holding fast to religious beliefs in the face of persecution challenges Christians in their walk and reminds all Americans, nearly a century later, that we’re only as free as the Hutterites among us.

BIOGRAPHY OF PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION DUANE STOLTZFUS:
Stoltzfus, the chair of the Goshen College Communication Department, is the author of “Freedom From Advertising: E.W. Scripps’s Chicago Experiment.” He serves as copy editor of The Mennonite Quarterly Review. He holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University, earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Goshen College and has taught there since 2000. He previously worked as a reporter and editor with several newspapers in New York and New Jersey, including The New York Times.

ABOUT THE ANNUAL LECTURE:
The C. Henry Smith Peace Lecture, named for a former history professor at both Bluffton University and Goshen College, includes a research grant for the lecturer. The grant is awarded each year to a professor at a Mennonite college, who then presents the lecture at both Bluffton University and Goshen College.

Each year for the whole year, as a campus community, we focus our attention on one of our five core values within the context of being a Christ-centered liberal arts college. This year, we are considering the core value of “Servant Leadership.”

This particular image (slide showing two physicians) not only illustrates whom we might consider prototypical  “servant leaders.” It also illustrates the struggle of defining the meaning, itself. What we have here – don’t groan – is a “pair o’docs.”

As you know, a paradox is a statement or concept that is seemingly contradictory, inconsistent or opposed to common sense or logic, and yet is true. Some paradoxes, for example, are of an oxymoronic nature (images of plastic glasses and eyeglasses, the “Senate Intelligence” Committee and a self-described anarchist with the statement “Anarchists Rule!”).

Some paradoxes have to do with reality not quite fitting our categories. For example, the  “platypus”  — mammal, reptile, bird? Its recently mapped genome has reptilian, mammal and bird genetic coding. A paradox.

The literary paradox includes verbal irony, where the speaker or writer communicates the opposite of what they mean. For example, when we say, something is “as clear as mud.”

Then there is the “buttered cat paradox” based upon the tongue-in-cheek combination of two adages: “Cats always land on their feet.” And, “Buttered toast always lands buttered side down.” Put the two together and, voila, you get a perpetual motion hovercraft.

The juxtaposition of “Servant” with “Leadership” creates a paradox, an odd coupling to be sure.   Servant suggests “vulnerability, one who serves, or performs duties for another person or master or employer.” “Leadership” suggests “king of the beasts” or a person who “takes charge” of a situation or workplace. A leader leads, directs, or has commanding authority or influence over others. A servant follows. A leader has followers. Servant-leadership is a paradox.

The paradox, “servant leadership” was introduced into the modern lexicon in 1970 by business leader Robert Greenleaf, who had worked for AT&T for 40 years in many different leadership capacities and believed that in the information age, where service and technology industries rule, the old styles of command and performance leadership were outdated, outmoded, and ultimately, unproductive.

By intertwining the word “servant” and “leadership,” Greenleaf believed, that together the words said something far more profound, and true than either word separately and alone.

Of course, Greenleaf acknowledged that his formulation was simply a borrowing of a much older paradoxical leadership style found in the life and teaching of Jesus. Jesus brought together the paradoxical nature of God as Creator and Creature, Transcendent and Immanent, Almighty and Vulnerable, Divine and Human. Jesus was king, but of an upside down kingdom where the last was to be first and the first, last. It was Jesus who said to his disciples when they were arguing over who would be top dog in the kingdom, “Here I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:27). Jesus, servant leader/God becoming convict, Author of Life, dying on a cross. Paradox!

Greenleaf said, “Servant leadership begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.” Emphasizing either half of the paradox, leader-first or servant-first, Greenleaf felt diminishes the infinite in-between varieties, blends, and shadings of strong and effective leadership. Context determines which side of the paradox to emphasize when.

Max Dupree, Chairman and CEO of Herman Miller, Inc., an innovative Fortune 500 furniture company, has authored a number of books on leadership (such as “Leadership Jazz”). He boils down servant leadership to one of responsibility and gratitude: “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say ‘thank you.’ In between, a leader is to be a servant.”

Both Greenleaf and Dupree speak about the “in between-ness” of the paradox of servant leadership. With those definitions as a backdrop, let me suggest several characteristics of the kind of Christ-centered Servant Leadership that I hope will become a core part of your lives as you study, learn, and later graduate from Goshen College.

First, a servant leader embraces vulnerability as strength. One of the great images of such “vulnerable strength,” is that of water. Water is paradoxically soft and strong; it yields, caresses, soothes, heals, bathes, quenches, and sustains, yet water can wear a solid, rigid immovable rock into sand and patiently chisel a loamy riverbank into the Grand Canyon. As Job says of God’s strength, “You’re like water that washes away stones, (14:18).”

Such a servant leader listens with willful patience to others whose opinions differ, whose perspectives may not be the same as hers, trusting in the power of the Spirit, or the imagination and creativity of new ideas, to emerge by being openly vulnerable.

Steve Jobs in a commencement address at Stanford University, said that Apple would not have happened the way it did, had he not almost incidentally taken a calligraphy class that by all outward signs had nothing to do with his interest in computer technology. Calligraphy lies at the heart of the Apple phenomenon. What a wonderful case for the importance of a liberal arts education. He credits his success to an openness to see, listen, observe, imagine new things, in new ways, new ideas from new perspectives, often as not insights gained from others.

Another sure sign of a servant leader who embraces vulnerability as strength, is laughter. And not just any old laugh, but mostly laughter at herself or himself or laughing at the absurdities of immovable opinions or intractable positions. “Laughter at oneself” or one’s predicament is a ready sign of a Christ-like servant leader. Nelson Mandela turned his own history into a humorous aside when he answered a reporter’s question with a quip: “In my country we go to prison first and then become President.” Mother Teresa said of her labor of love, “I know that a loving God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that God didn’t love me so much.”

Patient observation, listening, observing, and laughing – all signs of strong servant leaders.

Second. A servant leader shapes culture  —  “defines reality,” influences culture, for the common good. A servant leader promotes a vision that is expansive, contagious, and inviting.  When Neil Armstrong stepped from the lunar module onto the moon for the first time, he wasn’t thinking about himself or simply his own national identity or parochial perspective, he simply said, “One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for (hu)mankind.”

Servant leaders do not stand on the sidelines or harp from a distance. They work to implement their vision in real life situations and times and bear the responsibility of its burden. They do not simply deconstruct hegemonies or critique domination systems. They take up the harder challenges, like moon walking (both kinds), constructing new paradigms and practices always with a view for the common good.

Being “counter-cultural” is settling for second best. A servant leader must have the courage to become truly “inter-cultural,” to lead culture or cultures to the better place, the higher plain, the nobler calling. When Jesus said we are to “love our enemies,” he was defining reality and went to work to create it. His goal never was to be counter-cultural, so much as to pull culture forward to that place where former enemies become friends. Such an outcome requires profound “inter-cultural” leadership at all levels of society now more than ever before.

As a Goshen College student, as future graduates, you now have been given a calling to become Servant Leaders, across disciplines and intellectual and cultural silos, to become truly intercultural leaders in service — whatever major or profession or career path you take. I am calling on each one of you to become  “Culture for Service” leaders — leaders in service.

Here at Goshen College, we are well on our way. By my estimate, each year, Goshen College students, staff, faculty and administrators provide at least 30,000 hours of service in various ways nearby and all around the world through our Inquiry programs, Leaf Relief, Celebrate Service Day, internships, Study-Service Term and more. Amazing! And I believe we can do even better than that and will. I have instituted an Employee Community Service program that invites any employee who wishes to do up to two days of community service annually to do so with pay as a token of our blessing and sign of our commitment to Service Leadership.

Every one of you has been given a high-charge to become Servant Leaders, a calling that may take you to the highest leadership positions in the world, or to the hovels of a refugee camp, or many places in between. Servant leaders all. Martin Luther King, Jr., said of his calling, which is true of your own, my own, our own: “After (you have) discovered what (you are) called for, (you) should set about to do it with all the power that (you) have in (your) system.  Do it as if God Almighty ordained you at this particular moment in history to do it.”

So go for it, Servant Leaders. Lead as if God ordained you to do so at this particular moment in history, and so with all the power you can muster.

A servant leader, also, abounds in gratitude. I recently received a note from Fallon Will Nyce, a 2005 graduate, who is a technology architect for the Fortune 150 Company, Whirlpool. She wrote:  “I’m thankful for colleges like Goshen that are nurturing graduates to look beyond themselves as they step out into the world. It’s those graduates who are changing lives everywhere you look, and sometimes in unexpected, unconventional ways.”

She recently blogged on her web blog, ITMillennial, how the core value “servant leadership” has become so important to her in the corporate context of her life. She always thought that “servant leadership” was mostly for NGO and Peace Corp types, who went into service in poverty-stricken areas in the United States and developing countries. It wasn’t really meant for “an ‘evil’ business major like me… was I wrong, so very, very wrong.”

For Fallon, “servant-leadership” works in the corporate contexts like hers where her role is to remove barriers from those she leads so that they become freer, wiser, more likely themselves to become servants. She writes, “I finally get that… Servant Leadership applies to me as much as anyone else who graduated from Goshen College.” “Thank you.”

End of story. Fallon’s thanks, her gratitude, seals her fortune and destiny as a true Servant Leader, one we can all be proud of. I commend her to you to emulate, who like Christ before her, embraces a vulnerable strength, boldly shaping the culture around her, and doing so with a touch of humor and a heart full of gratitude.

As we close our time together, I want to remind us of one last quality of all great Christ-centered servant leaders. They take time away to pray. Bob Yoder, our campus minister, reminded us at the all-employee retreat how Jesus did a whole lot of praying. I would like to leave you, then, with two short prayers that I have been praying lately that I got from Anne Lamott. These are, by her own account, her favorite two prayers. In praying both, side-by-side, a paradox is created in the praying. Praying both together make them ideal for all would be servant leaders. Simply put, they are:

“O Lord,
“Help me, Help me, Help me.”
And, “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Thank you all for listening. Now, go out and lead the world.