Midweek Musings - September 25, 2024
Character & Campuses, Young Men & Religion, "New" Mozart, & Robert Caro
Earlier this week, I was asked by a researcher and friend to reflect on the place of character in higher education. His current research project is one that has great promise and takes a fascinating historical approach. But I’ll leave it at that and you’ll just have to wait for the culmination of all that research in his eventual book.
However, during our conversation he asked me what top three character traits I would identify as most essential for university students to be successful, not only during their studies, but also in their careers. We’d already covered a lot of ground, reflecting together on the ways in which higher education held a central role for moral formation in its mission for most of its history. And, of course, we should note that even in the most nakedly secular of educational contexts, there is always some kind of moral formation (or, in many cases, deformation). It’s just masked as something else.
That said, here were the three I quickly enumerated: courage, honesty, and kindness. I’ll admit each of those emerged from my mind rather quickly and perhaps even instinctively. But as a couple days have passed, I’ve been reflecting more on it and still think the list holds up. Sure, we could debate whether they are in your top three. But here’s why they’re in mine.
Let’s talk about courage. It’s in rather short supply these days, not only on campuses, but throughout our culture. Sure, there’s a counterfeit form of courage that gets valorized, but is nothing more than bravado, narcissism, or untethered outrage. Courage is only courage if it is rooted in the good, the true, and the beautiful. For example, we might say that a murderer was especially bold in his plotting and eventual action. But an evil act by definition can never be courageous. Our social fabric is in dire need of a recovery of courage, which demands virtue. Courage calls on students, and all of us, to take risks, to perform our duty, to be brave, to stand for what is indeed good. And yes, courage can show up in big ways on a college campus. But show me an institution marked by cowardice and I’ll show you a collection of students who are being shaped in a very different way, one that ultimately will never lead to their flourishing.
What about honesty? We live in an age of half-truths and so-called “alternative facts.” Indeed, the trench warfare of our politics seems to have warped much of our own conscience. When confronted with the lies and dishonesty of those on our side, our common response seems to simply be, “Well, look at the other side. They do it to.” And somehow that seems to end the conversation. Of course, it cannot because God designed and formed us to bear His image. And he is the God of truth, the one whose words are without error, falsehood, or deceit. His truthfulness, his honesty, is inseparable from his holiness, majesty, and glory. We should expect a Christian university, of all places, to be the kind of institutional context in which this is not only understood and celebrated, but lived out in terms of policies and expectations. But even in non-religious contexts, we can thank God for His common grace and surely agree that it’s reasonable and prudent to expect basic honesty from one another, to remind our students that their lives and professional careers will ultimately be undermined by patterns of deceit and lies. So we expect students to do their own work and to do so with honor. But calling students to lives of truth is about a lot more than avoiding plagiarism. It’s about living an integrated life, where who they are in God’s good design, what they believe to be true, and who they are in their inner life is all consistent.
And kindness? If our students are going to flourish, if they’re going to impact the world, it won’t be enough simply to be courageous and honest jerks. This is one of the many things I love about Biola, where our President routinely calls all of us to practice “winsome conviction” and to remember that the way of Jesus is the way of grace and truth. I can’t help but think of Paul’s portrait of love, which includes the description that “love is patient and kind” (1 Corinthians 13:4). In our current climate, kindness seems to often be relegated to the optional bin of characteristics as if it is incumbent upon us when convenient or when the stakes aren’t quite so high. That’s ludicrous, of course. Followers of Jesus have experienced far greater suffering, opposition, and persecution throughout history and understood that those seasons are precisely when kindness is all the more urgently needed, because its display is all the more dramatic and powerful. The bad news is that college students come to our campuses already formed and shaped by the culture(s) they’ve lived in. Far too many of them have seen a different way, one that suggests or insinuates that kindness is a form of weakness or compromise. But kindness is the way because meekness is the way of Jesus.
What about you? What would you put on the list? And for all of our obsession with higher education rankings, maybe it’s time for thoughtful Christians to be especially mindful of the place of moral formation!
Young Men and Religion
Ruth Graham is always one of the more interesting religion news writers out there and her recent feature in the New York Times shows why.
“For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.”
Graham elaborates further:
“Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.
Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.”
There’s a lot to highlight in this story and you really should read it for yourself. In particular, it should prompt some good discussion within churches and Christian college campuses about how we engage with young men. And, it’s also worth noting that our churches will suffer if we see a sustained decline in participation by women.
But I was especially happy to see mention made of a great nearby campus ministry and someone I admire:
“Religion is coded right, and coded more traditionalist” for young people, said Derek Rishmawy, who leads a ministry at the University of California, Irvine.
For some young men he counsels, Christianity is perceived as “one institution that isn’t initially and formally skeptical of them as a class,” especially in the campus setting, Mr. Rishmawy said. “We’re telling them, ‘you are meant to live a meaningful life.’”
Discovering Mozart
It’s not every day that news breaks of the discovery of a previously unknown composition of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but that’s precisely what happened in Germany. The Guardian has a full report:
“The piece dates to the mid to late 1760s and consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio lasting about 12 minutes, the Leipzig municipal libraries said in a statement on Thursday.
Born in 1756, Mozart was a child prodigy and began composing at a very early age under his father’s guidance.
Researchers discovered the work at the city’s music library while compiling the latest edition of the Köchel catalogue, the definitive archive of Mozart’s musical works.”
The composition was performed this past Saturday in Leipzig. And if you weren’t already question your own adolescent underperformance, give it a full watch and listen. It seems the piece was likely written by Mozart during his teenage years.
There’s plenty of bad news these days. But consider for a moment just how extraordinary it is that a piece like this was re-discovered, performed on a weekend in Germany, and is now full available to the world. What a time to be alive.
Robert Caro & The Power Broker
If you know me, you know I hold a level of admiration for Robert Caro I hold for few other authors or historians. For one, his biographical series on Lyndon Johnson is not only beautifully written, but his research methodology is the stuff of legend. What’s less familiar to many is his biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. This year marks 50 years since the book’s publication and the development of Caro’s devoted readership.
In this past weekend’s edition of the New York Times magazine, Sam Tanenhaus has something of a profile on Caro and the legacy of his work. Looming behind all of this celebration is also the eager expectation many of us have for the eventual release of the final volume of the LBJ series.
“The facts alone are remarkable. But what captivated Caro’s readers in 1974 and speaks to us now is his vivid account of how Moses did what he did, decade after decade, from the high-flying ’20s up through the “crisis of the city” in the ’60s and ’70s. Moses outmaneuvered governors and mayors, dictated policies to legislators and manipulated public opinion with the aid of a supine press. (The worst long-term offender, sad to say, was The New York Times.) He became, in sum, the prototype of a type we now know all too well, the mogul politician who operates with open contempt for “institutions and the law.”
And if you really want to geek out on Caro (and who wouldn’t?!), then also check out Christopher Bonanos’ feature in New York magazine this week. This one is especially rich. Consider how Bonanos’ describes Caro’s writing shack and dedication to his craft.
“He bought the prefab shack, he says, from a place in Riverhead for $2,300, after a contractor quoted him a comically overstuffed Hamptons price to build one. “Thirty years, and it’s never leaked,” he says. This particular shed was a floor sample, bought because he wanted it delivered right away. The business’s owner demurred. “So I said the following thing, which is always the magic words with people who work: ‘I can’t lose the days.’ She gets up, sort of pads back around the corner, and I hear her calling someone … and she comes back and she says, ‘You can have it tomorrow.’”
Does he write out here every day? “Pretty much every day.” Weekends too? “Yeah.” Does he go out much while he’s on the East End? “We have two friends who live south of the highway, and I said to Ina, aside from them, I’m not going this year.” There are other writer friends nearby in Sag Harbor, and they get together, but at this age, Caro admits a little sadly, they’re thinning out. He’ll be 89 this fall.”
Or note how Caro actually does his writing, without any apparent engagement with the digital world.
“That Caro’s work is still done on paper, with no digital backup to speak of, marks him as one of the last of his kind. (He had never seen a Google doc until I offered to show him one. He was mildly startled to discover that, in a shared document, the person on the other end can be seen typing in real time: “That’s amazing. What’s it called? A doc?”) The Society has his old Smith-Corona Electra 210 on display, but he’s hung on to a bunch of duplicate models and a large quantity of black cotton typewriter ribbons so he can continue to work the way he always has. He handwrites first, then types it up, triple-spacing in the old newspaper fashion, then pencil-edits and retypes, pencil-edits and retypes.”
If that doesn’t make you want to pick up all four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, then I suppose I can’t help you. But the rest of us are still eagerly waiting for that fifth and final volume, Mr. Caro.
What I’m Reading
Richard Burnett, Machen’s Hope: The Transformation of a Modernist in the New Princeton (Zondervan)