Tag: Houghton

Categories
Sports

New Tennis Coach Selected

Next fall, yet another sport will be introduced to the athletic department at Houghton: tennis. Coach Charlie Ellis will lead both the men’s and women’s teams.

Courtesy of atheletics.houghton.edu
Courtesy of atheletics.houghton.edu

Ellis has over 30 years of experience within the tennis world. He began learning what he could at a young age until he joined the tennis program at the University of Georgia. Ellis was ranked eighth in college tennis and then went on to be first in the state of Georgia, earning a World ATP top-300 ranking. From there Ellis went on to coach and then settled into the field of club management, where he has stayed for over 20 years.

The nationwide search to find Houghton’s first tennis coach was extensive and competitive, in hopes of finding a near perfect fit to Houghton’s athletic program. Athletic Director, Harold Lord, said that Ellis was ideal for this position. Lord believes that Ellis will be a “quality member to the department, campus, and community”.

Up to this point Ellis has developed numerous tennis programs for all ages and skill levels ranging anywhere from toddlers to elite adult players. He also spent time as the general manager for Sportime Fitness in Schenectady, NY where he taught lessons to over 100 players. In addition, Ellis founded Fair Play Tennis, a company dedicated to helping young athletes create individual plans to enjoy and succeed at playing the game of tennis.

Ellis approaches this new opportunity with three principles in mind. He begins with the foundation of a faith based team with players who “show a godly respect for one another.” His next principle is that each athlete will have a particular group of people who will be devoted to promoting and maintaining his or her academics. Lastly, Ellis wants the team to “enjoy the journey of getting better at tennis.”

As Ellis looks forward to the upcoming season, he is eager to be working at a college level again. He said he wants to “get as many people involved and interested as possible in embracing the game of tennis.”

Lord said that the addition of tennis will hopefully create a different atmosphere on campus, spurring students to play recreationally. He said that, “tennis is an intercollegiate sport that will last a lifetime.”

As a result of the integration of NCAA tennis into the athletic program at Houghton, the first season will have an abbreviated schedule. The season is also split, with the women’s team beginning with their Empire 8 conference meets in the fall while the men’s team participates in non-conference events. The teams will then switch in the spring.

Each team will consist of approximately 12 to 15 individuals who will play both singles and doubles matches. The season will conclude in the spring with the NCAA National Championship.

Bethany Chesebro, freshman, began playing tennis sophomore year in high school. She chose Houghton knowing that there were plans to form a tennis team. Chesebro said she is excited “about being part of a team and being challenged at a more competitive level.”

Categories
Opinions

Ambiguity and Confusion in the Imitation of God

As a kid, my parents bravely took me on a trip to the geysers at Yellowstone National Park. This was daring because they were taking me out on a wooden walkway, surrounded by boiling water mixed with sulfur. I remember being terrified that the wooden structure would break, and my entire family would plummet to our boiling doom. I thought it much better to remain on the dry land, away from the scary wooden walkway, where nothing bad could possibly happen.

Courtesy of travel.nationalgeographic.com
Courtesy of travel.nationalgeographic.com

My mother would have none of this. She had dragged two squawling toddlers across the continent, and had no intention of remaining on the boring, dry land when she could be walking six inches above a boiling geyser. As I loudly denounced her, she dragged me by my skinny wrist out to the observation platform. Every time I tried to bolt, she would bring me back, until it finally dawned on me that the wooden walkway was not in fact going to plunge us into Nature’s cauldron.

As a senior in high school, I was pulled aside by a well-meaning, but very conservative, friend. He was afraid that “those professors” with their theories would undermine my pure, simple, uncritical faith. He was afraid I would wander off the walkway of faith, and boil to death in the sulfurous world of academics. Little did he know how correct he would prove to be.

At Houghton, I have learned to doubt. I have learned to doubt simple answers, quick replies and the reduction of life to the formulaic. There are very few parts of my pre-college life that I haven’t learned to doubt. Morality? Check. Faith? Check. Political affiliation? Check. Social views? Check. Star Wars vs. Star Trek? Check. The list goes on and on, until at last I realize that I have, at some point or another throughout my college years, held every single opinion on almost every issue Out There in the world. I have waffled between the isms like a sail in a crosswind.

I also doubt whether this is a bad thing.

There must be a space for ambiguity in this world. Back on that wooden walkway in Yellowstone, I was convinced we were about to topple into the geyser. My four year old brain knew nothing about structural integrity or about the fact that wood floats on water. I didn’t know that the government sent out inspectors to make sure that no one plunged to their doom in the geyser. The entire regulatory and building structure of modern society was almost entirely unknown to me. I hadn’t learned to trust the world.

Nor would I have learned about the trustworthiness of modern carpentry if I hadn’t eventually wandered out onto that wooden walkway. The only way to learn to trust is to nearly fall into boiling water. I could hardly have known, later in life, that airport terminal arms, skyscrapers, bridges, or the infamous road climbing into the Dalmatian hillside called “The Stairway to Heaven” were reliable if I hadn’t learned to trust that walkway.

Similarly, I could hardly learn to trust modern society and its multitude of intellectual, spiritual and moral developments without going through a period of complete bewilderment and ambiguity. As human beings, we can’t learn without experiencing confusion, and we can’t love without feeling pain. Houghton’s official religion, Christianity, contains this belief at its core.  God entered the particularity and confusion of human existence, and felt pain, in order that we might understand love.

Here’s to ambiguity and confusion in imitation of God. Here’s to inching out slowly, ever so slowly, onto the wooden walkway. Here’s to continuing to study and analyze and synthesize. May you never wander off the walkway, but please don’t remain back on the land looking anxious. If I try to bolt to the land, make sure I don’t succeed, and when you try to bolt I’ll drag you back to the observation deck. The confusion and the uncertainty is good, and ambiguity is actually healthy, for this is the only way to learn to love. May God protect us all from the denial of confusion, and the elimination of ambiguity.

 

Categories
News

Buffalo City Semester: Diversity Close to Home

While scrolling through the course offerings, one may easily skim over the bold print: “HOUGHTON COLLEGE CITY SEMESTER (Buffalo)”. In fact, many Houghton students are alien to the course.

Courtesy of city-data.com
Courtesy of city-data.com

One student replied to the question “Do you know what the Buffalo City Semester is?” with “I heard of it, but I don’t know exactly what you do.” Another student said, “It’s not advertised as well as it should be. I have no idea what it is.”

So what exactly is the City Semester? Located only an hour and a half away, students have the opportunity to live, learn, and explore the historical and culturally diverse city of Buffalo. While in Buffalo, students have the opportunity to engage in an academic environment where development, politics, sociology, and culture come to life. Experience becomes concrete, as professors take students across the West side of Buffalo, providing visual aids for students to stimulate ideas and connect the dots.

The city semester offers a environment drastically different than Houghton’s campus. Students can spend days roaming the streets of Buffalo, experiment with various cuisines, talk politics or philosophy over coffee, or share a home-cooked meal at the Houghton Rectory while listening to stories from Professor Massey.

City semester students also have the opportunity to intern as they take courses from professors Chuck Massey, education, and Cameron Airhart, history. Several students have taken advantage of this diverse option.

Internships are becoming more desirable in the 21st century as jobs become scarce. David Boyes, owner of a technology consultant firm, expresses his concern about students graduating today with a lack of experience as most of their time is spent behind a textbook. To combat this fad, Boyes emphasizes, “[do] an internship.”

Houghton Senior and alumni of the Buffalo City-Semester, Hannah Vardy, said, “The ability to do an internship was an amazing opportunity. Growing skills and learning about your field is a great way to begin looking towards your career or even to see if it’s not for you.” Many internships are available and include Wesley Service Corps, Jericho Road Ministries, Journey’s End, Habitat for Humanity, and numerous other local firms and institutions.

Though the city semester does not compare to the semester in Tanzania in traveling distance, it can be an equally influential experience. It is a way to connect a little place called Houghton with a big city that has its own identity. Embarking on a cultural excursion does not necessarily have to take students halfway across the world.

After being canceled this past spring, Houghton students and faculty are doing all that they can to restart the city-semester program. Professor Airhart is looking for interest in the fall 2013, as well as spring 2014. If interested, please email him at Cameron.Airhart@houghton.edu.

Categories
Arts

Student Juried Exhibition

Courtesy of Andrea Pacheco
Courtesy of Andrea Pacheco

Saturday, March 16 was the opening reception of the Student Juried Exhibition, a collection of artwork submitted by Houghton students and selected by visiting artist Kevin Shook.  Shook is an Associate Professor of Art & Art History at Birmingham-Southern College, and specializes in printmaking and digital media.  In addition to selecting which of the submitted artworks would be displayed in the show, Shook also chose at least ten pieces to be awarded with between $25 and $200.  Additional awards were given by President Mullen, the First Gentleman, and various art faculty members.

Each student was allowed to submit up to five works, and many took full advantage.  In the days preceding the show, canvases and prints could be seen through the windows of the gallery piled against walls and pedestals, awaiting Shook’s judgment and the skilled hands of Gallery Director Renee Roberts and her assistants to arrange the show.  Submission was not limited to art majors; any students on campus interested in art could submit their pieces.  The tremendous response from students, as well as the open submission policy, resulted in a full, vibrant, and incredibly diverse show.

Unlike Ortlip Gallery exhibitions in the past, including previous Student Juried Exhibitions, this year’s show possesses very few common threads throughout the pieces.  The color schemes are varied and disconnected.  The mediums range from woodworking and ceramics to painting and drawing, and from book-making and textile art to printmaking and graphic design.  And the pieces vary in size; they are sketch-pad sized and teapot-sized, they are teeny tiny and they are monumental.  So perhaps it is fitting that the central focus of the room—the movable wall containing the title of the show—is painted in flashy fuchsia, a color not found in any other piece in the room.  And that hanging upon that wall is a lovely abstract oil painting by Lindsay Burgher, which is made up of greens, yellows, blues, pinks, and oranges—representing in one work the splashes of color seen in different works throughout the room.

The medley of submissions is also accurately represented by the array of awards presented.  The Presidential Purchase Award and the First Gentleman’s Purchase Award went to pieces of two different media, Katelyn Kloos’ woodblock print Misty Morning in County Cork and Megan Loghry’s ceramics piece Great Balls of Fire, respectively.  The Moss Award for 3rd Place went to a colorful oil painting entitled Bad Company by Kelly Ormsby.  Rebecca Dygert’s sweet and wistful litho The

First Dance took home the Alumni Award for 2nd Place.  Art Gallery, the witty watercolor by Megan Tennant, received the Paul Maxwell Memorial Award for 1st Place.  And the Ortlip Award for Best in Show was presented to Alexandra Hood’s beautiful and elegiac litho, In Time.  Several other awards were given, representing a small percentage of the assortment of submissions from package design all the way to photography.

The Student Juried Exhibition will be on display in the Ortlip Gallery until April 18.  All students are encouraged to take the time to swing by and check it out.  Find out which other submissions won awards, take in the beauty of all the pieces of art, and appreciate the talent and hard work of fellow Houghton students.

 

Categories
News

Houghton Fire Hall’s Lack of Funding Leads to Ambulance Fees

The Houghton Volunteer Fire Department has recently begun charging a fee for ambulance rides to the hospital.

The fee comes as a result of decreasing financial support from the community and increasing cost burden on the department.

Courtesy of houghtonvfd.org
Courtesy of houghtonvfd.org

Over the past several years, the executive board of the department has been looking for ways to mitigate the costs involved with keeping an ambulance service up and running. The President and Ambulance Captain of the department, Mae Stadelmaier, said,“In order to provide the community with the proper standard of care, some form of billing needed to be implemented in order to cover the costs of the ambulance.” This is a move that reflects trends seen in other rural emergency service providers throughout the country. The board views this step as the only realistic and viable option to keep the ambulance service running in Houghton.

Beyond community donations, the department supports itself by holding fundraisers. These include a community yard sale, biannually, on Memorial and Labor Day weekends where the department charges $8 to vendors coming to sell their old things and hosts a community barbecue. It also holds an annual community dinner in the Houghton Wesleyan Church and sells Study Buddy Packs to Houghton students during finals week.

In spite of these fundraising efforts, there is still a deficit of income for the department. In the words of Captain Stadelmaier,“The costs of running an ambulance are a lot higher than many realize. The basic supplies needed to stock the ambulance are ridiculously expensive, not to mention the cost of the ambulance itself, as well as the maintenance, insurance, fuel, certifications, etc. The money we receive from donations and fundraisers has been decreasing over the years. We also don’t receive money from the tax payers for the ambulance as the ambulance is self-supported.”

The department worked to set the rates for the rides as low as they can be in order to lessen the impact on patients’ health insurances. The average price for a ride depends on the type of call and the level of care provided. Each ride to the hospital requires at least 3 volunteers, a driver and two EMTs, and 2 to 3 hours of work. Ultimately, the fee charged to the patient would include the costs of gas, medical equipment, and various other costs the department deals with, such as vehicle maintenance, which amounts to at least a few hundred dollars.

What complicates matters is that the cost of a ride to the hospital cannot be billed to an insurance company directly by the department. The bill that was formerly sent to the patient, from the medic, now gets included in the department’s bill. Then, the price that the patient pays is based on what their health insurance will cover.

There are also many costs that the department is preparing to pay for in the near future. “We need to be looking at replacing our ambulance in the next year or so, which is around $160,000 – $200,000, and with new state mandates will be getting a cardiac monitor, which can be up to $40,000. It is unlikely that donations and fundraisers alone will raise enough money to accomplish these tasks.”, says Captain Stadelmaier.

As the department faces such economic troubles, it is important to remember that it is part of a great community effort that goes beyond fees and bills. In the words of Kelsey Hancock, a Senior EMT volunteer, “We, the Houghton Volunteer Ambulance Service, are your classmates, your neighbors and your friends. We can’t do this alone; we need your support. We need more community members to join as EMTs to fill the gaps when students aren’t in Houghton. We need your participation in the fundraisers like the Spaghetti Dinner coming up on April 4th. And we need your encouragement and prayers. Our work can be tense, thankless and disheartening.”

Hancock concluded with gratitude toward the community of Houghton; she said “A simple word or note, or even praying when the siren sounds helps us to fight off exhaustion, discouragement and burn out. Thank you for caring about us and encouraging us. It makes a huge difference during our long hours of work.”

Categories
Sports

Athlete Profile: Mary Strand

Courtesy of athletics.houghton.edu
Courtesy of athletics.houghton.edu

Mary Strand was recently honored with the title of NCCAA Female Track and Field Athlete of the Week. Each week the NCCAA decides on one student athlete from a number of recognized schools to represent the accomplishments within that particular sport.  The recipient of the title exemplifies quality performances as well as Christian ideals.  

Strand set the new school record for the 200 meters, 4×200 meter relay, and qualified for NCCAA Nationals in the 400 meter during a competition at Brockport State Invitational.  At Nationals, held at Indiana Wesleyan University, Strand helped the relay team beat the school record again and placed individually with her best time of the season.   

Strand, a sophomore, has been participating in track and field since seventh grade.  Although she is mostly a sprinter, she has also trained in other areas and was even part of last year’s JV soccer team.  

While Strand is appreciative of this award, she said she will continue to stay focused.  Strand said that  while running, “you push yourself as far as you can go and then you push yourself further.”
Strand attributes her success to the support of her coach and team.  Her captain, Sarah Munkittrick, said there is a lot to learn from Strand, describing her as a hard worker and a perfectionist who still remains humble.  Munkittrick also said that Strand “not only pushes the team to work harder but also brings them together.”

Track and field coach, Matthew Dougherty, said those honored with the title of Athlete of the Week are great performers, tremendous athletes and talented individuals, with Mary Strand possessing all of these qualities.  Dougherty defined Strand as someone who has strong motivation paired with a ferocity most would not expect, allowing her to achieve anything she sets her mind to.  

Strand plans on practicing just as hard in order to continually get better and achieve more later on in meets both as an individual and as a team.  Dougherty said that Strand’s position on the team is “integral in terms of chemistry,” helping to inspire others through her talent and fun attitude.  

Strand is excited to begin the outdoor track and field season, having used these recent experiences as a preparation phase.  She expects to practice and compete with the same determination, progressively challenging herself.  Dougherty said that Strand’s disposition is one of a “driven and focused individual who is strong spiritually, academically, and athletically.”  

Categories
Sports

Baseball Season Preview

Along with the rest of the spring sports, the baseball team’s pre-season training will be put to the test in two weeks. Their season will officially begin Friday, March 1 when the men play against St. John Fisher at a neutral site in New Jersey.

As last year was their opening season, the team struggled in the wins and losses column. There will be new starters at center field, second base, and right field due to graduating and injured players, but essentially the rest of the team is returning. With a year more of experience under their belts, the men have different goals for this season.

Courtesy of athletics.houghton.edu
Courtesy of athletics.houghton.edu

“I’ve seen tremendous improvement this year…Their camaraderie and brotherhood is just fantastic. I have coached baseball for 15 years and this is the most fun I’ve had coaching baseball,” said Coach Brian Reitnour. “I’m really pleased with the progress we’ve made and I just want to see them continue to strive for excellence in everything they do, not just baseball.”

“Goals, realistically, are definitely to do better than last year. We want to finish with a 500 record or greater,” said junior captain Ignacio Villalobos. “In preseason rankings we are last in our conference, so we want to prove that wrong. And at least be in the top four.”

“I want to make sure we aren’t going to be run over by teams, because we are good enough, we just have to finish, because that was a problem last year,” sophomore Michael Kerr said.

Not only has the team been practicing together for the past three weeks, but they have also been involved in service projects in the area. Last Friday night they volunteered at Houghton Wesleyan Church with the Valentine’s Dinner. They also help out with Little League in Fillmore.

Members of the team have highlighted the spiritual community they have built together. “Devotionals have helped us get closer knit as a team. Even the freshmen have been really involved, which has been really cool to see,” said Villalobos. “The guys [who] came back from last year have really found team chemistry from it; just focusing on the right thing: having the purpose of playing for Christ and the goal of being successful on the field.”

Kerr said, “We find joy in the hard work. Our team chemistry is better than it has ever been since we started the Bible study.”

“We are trying to be a team of grace and that is difficult within competitive athletics, because grace and competition in most people’s minds don’t mix. But I want to show them that they can; that it is not necessarily about reducing your opponent to an object, but allowing them to push you to become the best human being you can be,” said Reitnour. “It is about how can I make my brothers better, how can I be a witness, how can I use baseball as an act of worship?”

With all other athletic teams and intramurals sharing time in the gym, it is difficult for each team to get adequate training. The baseball team has made use of Burke Field when they can.
“Having the turf facility here is amazing,” said Reitnour. “Once we have the baseball field completed, that will be even better, because then we won’t have to compete with men’s and women’s lacrosse, or softball. But I’m pretty used to being in a gym at this time of year.”

The projection for the completion of the baseball field is sometime this summer, meaning the team will not be able to make use of it until preseason next fall. In the meantime, most of their home games will be played at Bolivar-Richford High School, a 45-minute drive south of Houghton. They will also have one game at Dwire Stadium in Batavia and play a four game series against Stevens Tech at St. Bonaventure.

“I know this year that will be tough with our games farther away, but I would really like this to be a place that people want to play because of the community,” said Reitnour. “I really hope we get some good support from the other teams and people [who] don’t even play on campus.”

 

Categories
News

Houghton Students Tackle Independent Film Project

Courtesy of kickstarter.com
Courtesy of kickstarter.com

As a group of artists aspiring to learn and grow from the experience of a challenging project, Aaron Fitzgerald, Jordan Meeder, Andrew McGinnis, Graeme Little, Aubrey Thorlakson, and Nicolas Quigley came together at the beginning of the fall semester to begin creating a short film, called Telemachus.

Fitzgerald, the team’s director, said concerning the origin of such a project, “Jordan and I kind of had an idea about it, and had talked about it sort of seriously, sort of jokingly over the summer… but we didn’t do anything about it then… Then I sent out an email to him and a couple other people I thought might be interested, and we met, and that was it.”

Telemachus acts as a group undertaking for an advanced projects class, supervised by Professor David Huth, Visual Communication and Media Arts.  The project’s production time spans the entire 2012-2013 academic year.

“We’re all doing the equivalent amount of work that would be involved in an individual project… most projects would encompass more aspects of the medium, but wouldn’t necessarily do as in-depth kind of stuff,” said Graeme Little, director of sound.

To explain the plot of Telemachus, Fitzgerald said, “I think the easiest way for someone to understand it, without revealing too much, is that it’s like a loose, modern adaptation of the first three or four books of the Odyssey, and then the last two books of the Odyssey… I wouldn’t say it’s a parallel story, but more of a character study.”

When asked whether the individuals in the group had ever attempted producing something like Telemachus before, Fitzgerald said, “Nothing like this. We’ve all done smaller, more independent projects.”

Meeder, director of photography, said of the project as a whole, “I think it was a challenge to learn to work creatively with other people because none of us had ever done that before… I think it’s a good experience, but it’s definitely something you can’t really plan for… It’s been more of a learning experience than we ever expected.”

Fitzgerald went on to say, “I think one of my ideas for this project is to give people who I think are gifted or invested in a certain way a cooler platform to showcase their work on, the kind of thing a lot of other majors have, but the communication major doesn’t necessarily.”

Since Houghton lacks a specific film department, the group’s goal to complete Telemachus acts as an experience and essentially an experiment of their own.  As Fitzgerald said, “We didn’t do this because Houghton doesn’t have a film program; we just wanted to do something, and we thought that fact might be a good marketing platform.”

The team establishes its objective as principally gaining experience while deliberately challenging each of its members.

McGinnis, director of editing and effects, said, “I guess for me, the project is basically to get a large production under my belt, whether it turns out good or not.  I can just say I helped with a film that was over fifteen minutes long, and basically adding that to my portfolio and seeing what it’s like to work in a team atmosphere.”

Little’s hopes for Telemachus parallel those of McGinnis as well.  He said specifically, “I guess my goal for the project would be to best create something that… is not just my project anymore, but more like part of a larger project, which is like what any project is going to be in the real world.”
While the team hopes to eventually enter the film into film festivals in order to gain recognition, this aspiration comes second to the actual completion and experience of the entire project.

“I think our primary goal in this project is really just to learn and to try something that’s new and something that we’re not used to,” said Fitzgerald.  “I think a good way of thinking about is not in terms of, ‘We’re doing this so that we can be known,’ but rather something like, ‘A good goal for us would be trying to get into a festival,’ and that could help drive us to do something better than what we’ve done before, and do something new and different from what we’re comfortable with.”

Categories
News

Seven Professors Receive Tenure

Professor Susan Bruxvoort Lipscomb
Professor Susan Bruxvoort Lipscomb

This year, professors Jillian Sokso, Marlene Collins-Blair, Susan Bruxvoort Lipscomb, Ndunge Kiiti, Kristin Camenga, Brandon Hoffman, and David Huth reached tenured status.

The track to tenure begins in a professor’s second year of teaching, when they undergo a review within their department. Then, four years into their appointment, they undergo an intermediate review. Six years into their teaching, the professor is reviewed a final time by the chair of their department and a faculty member. Finally, in the seventh year, the professor is reviewed once more and also undergoes a hearing. In the spring, the Board of Tenure makes a final decision.

“Tenure itself something that is, ultimately, good for the institution because it ensures faculty stability and protects the freedom of scholars to pursue their disciplines”, said Professor Bruxvoort Lipscomb, English, of the process. Tenure can also be a stressful process, Bruxvoort Lipscomb points out. “The process itself, however, produces a lot of anxiety because the stakes are so high–professors who are not granted tenure must leave the institution.”

Professor Sokso, Art
Professor Sokso, Art

 

The tenure process helped Professor Sokso, Art, gain some insight into her work. She said, “Preparing for the reviews and hearing helped me to gain some clear insights about my teaching and research practices, and I feel that I am a better instructor and scholar because of that reflective process, paired with some intentional goal setting for the future.”

All of the tenured professors are great contributors to the communities within their academic disciplines. Sokso recently illustrated one of the criterions for tenure, “integration of faith and teaching/research” in a recent collaboration with Women of Hope International in Sierra Leone. She taught disabled women how to make paper from indigenous plant fibers. She said of the trip, “I saw that opportunity as an authentic extension of both my studio and teaching practices, an example of my commitment to care for God’s creation, and the chance to simply love people who have been abused and disadvantaged their entire lives.”

Professor Camenga, Mathematics, had the chance to attend the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Diego, California in January with a few of her students after they spent the summer participating in National Science Foundation-funded research. This conference is the premier national mathematics meeting and she said she gets “the greatest joy from the accomplishments of my students.” She said that she celebrates “the unique path that God is taking each of my students and hope that I had a small part in that.”

 

Professor Camenga, Mathematics
Professor Camenga, Mathematics

“With higher education in such a turbulent state right now, I think that many professors feel grateful just to have a job.  And it’s really a great job–one in which we get to pursue intellectual and artistic development and be involved in shaping the minds and vocations of students,” said Bruxvoort Lipscomb.

Achieving tenure is an honor, and all of the professors recognize this fact. Sokso said, “I’m very happy to be among the many established colleagues who have chosen to give of their time, talents and lives to this community.” Bruxvoort Lipscomb said, “I know that I’m grateful for my job at Houghton.  And I’m grateful that it’s more secure now because I successfully completed the tenure process.” Camenga echoed the sentiments of her colleagues saying, “I am honored to have been awarded tenure and promotion and look forward to continuing to serve the Houghton community.”

Categories
News

Lipscomb Seeks New Perspective on Chapel through Blog

Courtesy of thedoubleusee.wordpress.com
Courtesy of
thedoubleusee.wordpress.com

At the start of the spring semester, Professor Benjamin Lipscomb, philosophy, began a ritual of not only attempting to attend every chapel from now until the end of the school year, but also of  documenting each experience via online blogging.

When asked what he hopes to achieve from undertaking such an intentional challenge, Lipscomb said, “It’s several things; it’s wanting to be more gratefully receptive to the work of my colleagues who put the chapels on, the students, the chapel deacons… it’s partly just seeing what it’s like or what it might do for me; partly to get a better sense of the value or lack of value of it.”
Though the blog’s origin and ultimate subject is Houghton College, Lipscomb aims towards a broader audience by minimizing the use of names and allowing chapel lectures to lead him to more broadly relatable topics.

He said, “I try to keep it anonymous in some small ways.  I don’t use the name ‘Houghton’; I edit comments if they use the name ‘Houghton.’  I never use the name of anyone on campus.”
Lipscomb establishes his goal for such anonymity by saying, “It’s something that also maybe makes [the blog] more widely accessible, as something that someone might be interested in who’s not a Houghton person.  I try to make it about a certain kind of experience that’s recognizable in a number of evangelical communities or evangelical colleges.”

Courtesy of houghton.edui
Courtesy of houghton.edui

 

Professor David Huth, visual communication and media arts, and friend of Lipscomb, said, “The blog certainly isn’t ‘about’ the chapel events, or the chapel program, or even Houghton College. If you read his posts, you can see that all of these things are simply jumping-off places for reflections and questions in his mind. The structure and schedule of Houghton’s chapel programming (and general subject matter of religion and community) are providing prompts for Professor Lipscomb’s thinking.”

Lipscomb’s interest also resides in the exploration of the idea that a mandated chapel schedule serves as a shared, communal experience.

In the first entry of his blog, he wrote concerning this aspect of chapel, saying, “I think it’s supposed to contribute to the formation, both of the spirituality of individual community members and of a communal ethos.  And I’m not being formed in whatever way that is, or not much.  I wonder too what difference it might make in my interactions with students if we had this experience in common.  Would it become a topic with us, a point of connection?”
As the college requires regular chapel attendance of students, and faculty are encouraged to do the same, chapel acts as a point of intersection, which tends to elicit interaction or common conversation amongst chapel attendees.

When asked more about this idea of exploring the effects of such a shared experience, Lipscomb said, “What do I hope might come of it?  I hope more conversation about chapel – not only critical; not even principally critical… We’re a college; we’re a community of intellectual conversation. The more I can cultivate or provoke people to talk about what they’re experiencing, what they’re listening to… the happier I’ll be.”

Thus, Lipscomb views his goal of faithful chapel attendance as not exclusively an act of self-discipline, but rather an act of community.

While discussing such an idea, Lipscomb went on to say, “I’m joining in the community in a way that I haven’t been required to… It seems to me it heightens the sense of community, it makes some more community than there would be otherwise, between the students and myself.  It gives me a chance to see how chapel functions, or whether it functions in that way.”
Since Houghton College refrains from requiring faculty members to attend chapel lectures like it requires of its students, Lipscomb’s new habit also functions as a deliberate act of self-discipline.
Lipscomb plans to explore the students’ chapel requirement in light of the faculty’s lack of requirement.

He said, concerning Houghton’s current chapel practice, “It’s coerced.  Sometimes coercion ends up working for our own good; sometimes it’s just coercion… there are times when we are coerced to do things that are for our good and we’re glad in the end that we have been.  I almost wonder whether the choice should be, ‘We will coerce this of our students and of ourselves as the rest of the community, or we won’t do either.’”

By willingly placing himself in the position of Houghton students, who are required to attend two-thirds of all regular chapels offered, Lipscomb hopes to relate to such an experience while simultaneously analyzing its purpose.

As Lipscomb muses in his blog, “The students living under the requirement–they’re busy.  They make the time; they have to.  What would it be like for me, I wondered, if I did too?”

To read Lipscomb’s blog go to http://thedoubleusee.wordpress.com/