Enjoying and Expanding Liberty

Liberty is the fourth of “the 4-Ls,” and this post is the last of the five-part series that I started on March 9—and it is not completely coincidental that I have written this article in Liberty (Mo.) where my wife and I have lived since 2005.**

The school song of Seinan Gakuin, the large school system in Fukuoka City, Japan, where I served for 36 years (1968~2004) as a university professor and the last eight of those years as Chancellor, contains the Japanese words for Life, Love, and Light, the first three of the 4-Ls.

But I thought/think Liberty needed/needs to be emphasized also. 

In my May 10 post on Light, I linked light to truth—and then truth is linked to Jesus’ words about freedom/liberty in John 8:32: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (CEV). And there are other important words about freedom/liberty in the New Testament.

According to Luke 4:18, in the synagogue of Nazareth, Jesus read these words from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me…To proclaim liberty to the captives…To set at liberty those who are oppressed.” Then Galatians 5:1 says, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free” (NKJV).

Since I was emphasizing the 4-Ls at Seinan Gakuin where about 98% of the students and more than half of the faculty and staff were not Christians, I didn’t talk/write a lot about these Bible verses. But I did regularly emphasize the close connection of liberty to the light of truth.

Also, I always talked about liberty being accompanied by responsibility, emphasizing that true liberty doesn’t mean freedom to do as one pleases; it is not a license for self-centeredness. Liberty means we are not enslaved by another person or by the power of any ideology (“ism”).

There is both negative and positive liberty, and both are important. Negative liberty means freedom from, but positive liberty means freedom for—and emphasis on the former should include stress on the importance of the latter.

Serious problems arise when only negative liberty is emphasized and liberty is used in inappropriate ways. For example, liberty is misused when it means “free speech for me but not for thee.”*¹ In this connection, consider these limited and inferior uses of liberty/freedom in the U.S. now.

◈ The “Freedom Caucus” in the U.S. Congress. According to Wikipedia, this U.S. House caucus was formed by Republican Representatives in January 2015 and “is generally considered to be the most conservative and furthest-right Congressional bloc.”

◈ “Freedom Summer” in Florida. As part of what Florida Governor DeSantis calls by that name, his Transportation Department has declared that only the colors red, white and blue can be used to light up bridges across the state. (For what that implies, see this May 23 Washington Post article.)

◈ Liberty University in Virginia. Jerry Falwell’s university changed its name to Liberty Baptist College in 1976 and to Liberty University in 1985. A Washington Post March 2015 article was titled, “Virginia’s Liberty University: A mega-college and Republican presidential stage.”

Liberty, nonetheless, is an important traditional value of the USA. The Declaration of Independence speaks of the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And since 1831 Americans have sung about their nation being the “sweet land of liberty.”  

Even though the scope of those thought to have the unalienable right of liberty in 1776 or 1831—or even in 1942 when the Pledge of Allegiance was officially adopted—was much too narrow, it has increasingly been recognized as meaning liberty and justice for all.*²

On January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt delivered what is known as the Four Freedoms speech, declaring that people "everywhere in the world" ought to have freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

These are freedoms that we all should be able to enjoy and seek to expand. And the liberty expressed in those four freedoms is still badly needed in the world today.

Further, we citizens of the USA must work energetically to preserve those (and other) freedoms in the light of the Christian nationalists who are seeking theocracy and of the Republican candidate for President, whose speeches (past and present) evidence racism, xenophobia, and a trend toward authoritarianism (fascism?).

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*¹ My wife and I moved to Liberty about three months after our marriage in 1957 and enrolled as students in William Jewell College, from which we graduated 65 years ago this month. We lived in Liberty again during the 1976-77 academic year. Then we bought our retirement home in Liberty and have never regretted our choice in the least. Somewhat tongue in cheek, I have sometimes said, slightly altering Paul Revere’s famous words, Give me Liberty until my death.

*² These words, harking back to 1798, are the title of the editorial in the March/April 2022 issue of Liberty magazine, a Seventh-day Adventist publication established in 1906. Please take a look at this article if you want to learn more about the context and meaning of those words.

*³ The U.S. Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892. The original version was later expanded, but from the beginning, it ended with the words “with Liberty and Justice for all.” For more about this, see my August 30, 2021, blog post about Bellamy (here).

Note: It is also problematic when liberty is conflated with libertarianism. That political philosophy, which over-emphasizes negative liberty, strongly values individual freedom and is skeptical about the justified scope of government, especially the federal government. 

Does Renaming Help Anything?

In last Sunday’s issue of Kansas City Star, the editorial board published an opinion piece titled “Relics of racism belong in museums, not on Kansas City street signs.” That provocative piece called for renaming some of the major streets in Kansas City—but would renaming those streets help anything?

“Kansas City leaders must develop a plan to rid the city once and for all of street names, monuments and other public symbols that honor slaveholders and others who participated in the oppression of Black Kansas Citians and other minorities,” the editors declared.

There has already been some movement in that direction. As the editors wrote that three years ago “Kansas City took the bold step of stripping the name of prominent real estate developer J.C. Nichols from a parkway and fountain near the Country Club Plaza.”*

Now the target is historic—and infamous—Troost Ave., a major north-south street that has long been the dividing line between the affluent part of Kansas City to the west and the economically deprived and racially segregated part of the city to the east.**

The avenue is named after Dr. Benoist Troost (1786~1859), the first physician to reside in Kansas City and an outstanding civic leader. But according to the 1850 Federal Census Slave Schedule, Troost owned six enslaved men and women.

But is that sufficient reason to remove Troost’s name from the historic street?

It is rather ingenious that Truth is the proposed new name—but that reminds me of the rather untruthful social media platform known as Truth Social, so I don’t know if much would be gained by renaming.

June and I are graduates of William Jewell College (class of ’59), and most of our college classes were in Jewell Hall. Dr. William Jewell (1789~1852) was a physician in Columbia, Mo., and provided the bulk of the funds for the founding of WJC in 1849.

Construction on the first classroom building of WJC was begun in 1850, and it was named Jewell Hall. The first major remodeling was completed in 1948, and that is where June and I had most of our college classes. Recently, though, there have been strong suggestions for the name to be changed.

According to an April 28 article in The Kansas City Beacon, “A commission created to study William Jewell College’s historical ties to slavery recommends renaming Jewell Hall, its oldest building, to honor the enslaved people who built it.”

What would it help to rename Troost Avenue or Jewell Hall? I didn’t know when I was a student that Dr. Jewell had been a slave owner or that enslaved people had helped build stately Jewell Hall—and I don’t know that I would have been particularly upset if I had known that.

After all, that was more than 100 years earlier, before the Civil War. What I should have been more concerned about was the fact that there were no African American students at Jewell when we were students. (June and I were friends, though, with Gladstone Fairweather, a very black Jamaican.)

The first African American students at Jewell were not admitted until the early 1960s, and one of those was A.J. Byrd, who has become a prominent citizen of Liberty and was recently elected to a second term on the Board of Liberty Public Schools.

For decades, though, WJC was primarily a White school with just a few Black students. In recent years, however, the percentage of BIPOC students at Jewell has increased dramatically.

June and I are encouraging enrollment of Black students in Jewell with the establishment of the Leroy and June Seat Family Scholarship, which awards $2,500 each year to an incoming student who self-identifies as a person of color and an active follower of Jesus Christ.

Whether it is an avenue in Kansas City or the college here in Liberty, rather than renaming, seeking to change the past, it seems wiser to make changes in the present which will create a better future for those who belong to segments of society that have been unfairly treated in the past.

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* My 3/20/19 and 6/30/20 blog articles were partly about Nichols. You can access those articles here and here.

** The Wikipedia article gives helpful (and correct) information about Troost Avenue, including “points of interest.” One of those is Rockhurst University, located between 52nd and 55th Streets along Troost. For years I drove down part of Troost Ave. going to teach my weekly class at Rockhurst U. 

A Critical Thinking Jewell

For more than 60 years now I have had an affectionate relationship with Jewell. No, this Jewell is not a woman; rather it is how William Jewell College (in Liberty, Mo.) is often referred to.

The Campus of Achievement

William Jewell College was founded in 1849 and named for the Columbia, Mo., medical doctor who was a major donor of the needed funds for building a college on top of a large hill in the small town of Liberty.

June and I graduated from Jewell 110 years after its founding, transferring there after graduating from junior college and getting married in May 1957. In time, all of our four children would also graduate from Jewell.

Through the years I had the opportunity of teaching some courses at Jewell when on missionary furlough from Japan and after retirement.

While the college motto was, and remains, Deo Fisus Labora (Trust in God and Work), Jewell was long touted as the Campus of Achievement, and for 75 years selected graduates have been awarded citations at Achievement Day ceremonies each year.

(I was probably the most undeserving recipient of one of the Citation for Achievement awards in 1982.)

The Critical Thinking College

While William Jewell College will commemorate the 75^th anniversary of the Celebration of Achievement from Feb. 27 to March 1, 2019, a new registered trademark, “The Critical Thinking College,” is now regularly used. 

I have mixed feelings about Jewell’s new slogan. It’s not that I am against critical thinking. Far from it. But I am not sure it is distinctive enough. Colleges and universities all over the country seek to foster critical thinking, as they should.

But if Jewell can actually achieve nurturing a high percentage of her students to become critical thinkers, that would be an achievement of major importance.

What is Critical Thinking?

Recently I read Steven Schuster’s 2018 bookThe Critical Thinker. The first chapter of that helpful book is “What is Critical Thinking?” In response to this basic question, Schuster writes,

Critical thinking occurs when we ask ourselves (and others) questions like “How do you know that?” or “How did you reach that conclusion?” or “What evidence supports this theory?” or “Are there any other possible explanations or alternatives that haven’t been considered yet?”  

Critical thinkers rarely follow a gut feeling. [What does this say about DJT?] They use logic and reasoning to reach their conclusions, rather than letting themselves be guided by their emotions (p. 11).

Back when I was a student at Jewell, there was no use of the term “critical thinking.” But I am confident I learned much about thinking critically then, especially in the Philosophy of Religion class, about which I have written previously (see here).

Further, I am happy to say that my four children are, by and large, critical thinkers. That is not solely because they are Jewell graduates, but the education they got there surely helped them hone the important skills of critical thinking.

Wednesday evening, we attended a meeting at which Dr. Elizabeth MacLeod Walls, who has been the president of Jewell since 2016, spoke about the college as it is now and as she hopes it will become in the near future.

“The Critical Thinking College” has been a primary emphasis of Dr. MacLeod Walls, and that emphasis, among others, is being credited with the recovery of the college from several years of some decline.

The picture below is one I took of June with Dr. MacLeod Walls on Wednesday evening. We are happy to be supporters of Jewell, her president, and the emphasis on critical thinking as the college celebrates its 170^th anniversary next year.   

Happy Birthday, Ed!

Ed Chasteen is a friend I first met over 40 years ago, and tomorrow (Nov. 16) he is celebrating his 83^rd birthday. This article was written to wish Ed a happy birthday. But even more, I have written it to introduce a remarkable man to those who do not know him.

Becoming a Prof

Edgar R. Chasteen was born in Texas and lived in Huntsville from 1948 to 1958. He was baptized in a Baptist church there when he was 13. In 1954 he enrolled in Sam Houston State Teacher’s College and majored in sociology. When he was 21 he married his wife, Bobbie, and they celebrated their 60^th wedding anniversary last year.

After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, Ed was employed by William Jewell College (in Liberty, Mo.) where he taught sociology, and especially a course in race relations, from 1965 to 1995.

Two matters of great importance occurred during those years when Ed was a prof at William Jewell: he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) and a few years later he founded HateBusters.

The “Peddlin’ Prof”

In 1981 Ed received the terrible news that he had MS. The doctors said he could no longer be active. But after two or three years, and against his doctor’s orders, Ed began to fight his illness by riding a bicycle.

And ride he did! In 1987 he rode over 5,100 miles in 105 days, peddling from Disney World to Disneyland. He rode alone and without any money on him—and with great success. Disney dubbed him “the pedalin’ prof from William Jewell College.”

And he has continued to ride his bicycle since then: in 2003 he rode 10,000 miles to raise funds for MS and HateBusters.

In 2004 the National Multiple Sclerosis Society named Ed an MS Achievement Award winner.

It has now been 37 years since he was first diagnosed with MS—and Ed is still active and still rides his bicycle—but earlier this year he had to give up riding outside. He now rides about 50 miles a week inside on his stationary bike.

The HateBusting Prof

About 30 years ago—soon after David Duke, the former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, won a seat in the Louisiana legislature—Ed and his sociology students at William Jewell College started a group, or perhaps it is better considered a movement, called HateBusters.

The name, and the logo found on their tee shirts, was taken from the popular 1984 film "Ghostbusters." The picture is several years old (taken when he was about 75), but here is a picture of Ed in a HateBuster tee shirt and his personalized bicycle: 

HateBusters has primarily worked in opposition to hate directed toward people because of their race/ethnicity or because of their religion and in support of those who have been victims of hate.

According to their website (see here), HateBusters’ first objective is “To oppose hate wherever we find it and in whatever form it takes.” And when an act of hate occurs, they seek to go “help redeem the situation.”

On Monday of this week, I had breakfast and a delightful conversation with Ed. I was impressed, again, with his mental vitality in spite of his debilitating physical illness and with his deep-seated desire to combat hate and prejudice and to create a world filled with people who live in harmony and practice mutual respect.

Happy Birthday, Ed! The world badly needs more people like you.

For further information:

** Here is the link to a May 2017 VOA article and video about Ed and HateBusters.

** Most of Ed’s books are available for downloading at the website linked to above. Some books are directly related to MS and some to HateBusters, including a 1996 book with 42 issues of “HateBusters Bulletin.”

In Memory of David O. Moore

Yesterday’s wonderful memorial service was a fitting tribute to an outstanding man. Dr. David O. Moore passed away on October 28 and a large number of family and friends gathered for the service yesterday (Nov. 12, 2016) at the Second Baptist Church in Liberty (Mo.) where he had been a member for more than 60 years.

The homily was given by Dr. Gordon Kingsley, the inimitable past-president of William Jewell College, where Dr. Moore had taught from 1956 until his retirement in 1986. 

I first met Dr. Moore in 1957 when I transferred to Jewell as a junior and he was one of my Bible professors there. He was an impressive teacher, but my greatest debt of gratitude to him is for what he did for me outside the classroom.

On June’s and my graduation day from William Jewell College in 1959, Dr. Moore approached me soon after the ceremonies were over. I had just been awarded the centennial scholarship to The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, which was a surprise to me but not to Dr. Moore. He had been on the selection committee.

Dr. Moore asked me if I was going to accept the scholarship. I told him that I would like to if I could see any way we could financially make the move to Kentucky. At that point, June and I had not only been married nearly two years, we also had a nine-month-old baby. I was pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, a small church in Windsor, Mo., and was planning to commute from there to the new seminary in Kansas City, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

I was dumbfounded when Dr. Moore told me that he had just been to Louisville for the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. While he was there he visited the church where he had been a student pastor when he was in seminary. That church, Ekron Baptist Church about fifty miles southwest of Louisville, was looking for a new pastor and Dr. Moore had recommended me.

Dr. Moore said all I needed to do was to give him a date on which I could go preach a trial sermon at Ekron and he would call to tell them I was coming. So arrangements were made, June and I drove to Ekron and I preached at the morning and evening services on that Sunday in the middle of June. The church had a business meeting following the evening service-- and they extended the call for me to be their new pastor.

Thus, on the first of July in 1959 I became pastor of the Ekron Baptist Church and remained in that pastorate until September of 1963. To this day I remain grateful to Dr. Moore for being the one who made that significant time of service and learning possible.

On our second and third furloughs from our mission work in Japan, Dr. Moore was the chair of the Religion Department at William Jewell College, and he asked me to teach part-time at Jewell during the academic years of 1976-77 and 1981-82. That first time was especially meaningful because my son Keith and his fiancee Brenda were first year students at Jewell and took one (or maybe two) of the classes I taught that year.

Michael Willett Newheart, who has for many years been a New Testament professor at Howard Divinity School in D.C., was one of the outstanding upperclassmen I had in one of my classes that year—and we have been friends ever since. He flew to Kansas City late Friday and spent two nights with us in order to attend Dr. Moore’s memorial service.

Michael’s roommate at Jewell was Steve Hemphill, who was listed in the bulletin as Dr. Moore’s “former student & life friend.” As a part of the service he gave a touching talk titled “Requiem for a Fellow Pilgrim.”

Dr. Moore was on sabbatical in 1981-82. He invited me once again to teach at Jewell that year, and I had the privilege of using his faculty office (and library) during that wonderful year. On the wall of his office was a horseshoe with the accompanying words, “God loves a happy workhorse.” Those words were an appropriate reminder for me as well as for him.

Dr. Moore, who was born on March 11, 1921, was an excellent preacher and much in demand as a supply preacher in churches in a wide circle around Liberty—and he knew how to communicate with the “common” people in the pews. My home church was about a hundred miles north of Liberty and he preached there on more than one occasion—and my parents, who were north Missouri farmers, were highly impressed with and appreciative of him.

As you see from the picture of bulletin, yesterday's memorial service was “in praise of God and in memory of Dr. David O. Moore”—and it lived up to its billing. 

When Did "Christian" Become a Dirty Word?

It came as a bit of a shock when I read that Dr. Sallee, president of William Jewell College (WJC), said that WJC is no longer advertising itself as a Christian college. The Hilltop Monitor, the student newspaper, included that information in an article published in its September 24 edition. Dr. Sallee is quoted as saying that the expression “Christian college” has taken on a different meaning than it used to have.

He made no reference to it, but Dr. Sallee’s point is forcefully made in the title of a new book, Christians are Hate-Filled Hypocrites—and Other Lies You’ve been Told. The author is Bradley R. Entner Wright, a sociologist. Although Dr. Wright seeks to show that there is not sufficient evidence to indicate that the majority of Christians are, in fact, “hate-filled hypocrites,” it is nonetheless true that there are many people who do think that.

June and I transferred to WJC in August after we were married, following our graduation from Southwest Baptist College, which was then a junior college. In the years since, all four of our children graduated from WJC, each after having attended four years there. And I have taught several courses there through the years, the first in 1976 and the last in 2009.

June and I chose to attend WJC because it was a Christian college, and that was one of the main reasons that our children went there and that I have taught there from time to time. So, we naturally find it sad that WJC has concluded that it can no longer identify itself as a Christian college. When did Christian become a dirty word?

The change at WJC, and in the larger society, is largely linked to the move toward fundamentalism in this country and in the Southern Baptist Convention in particular. That was one of my main reasons for writing Fed Up with Fundamentalism (FuF). With the steady move to the right over the past thirty years, Southern Baptists and many other “evangelical” groups have come increasingly to be seen as obscurantists (as I wrote about in FuF), and, as another example, the anti-gay rhetoric of not only Fred Phelps but others who are much more "mainstream" has caused many people to think negatively about anything labeled Christian.

In his challenging new book, The Myth of a Christian Religion (2009), Gregory A. Boyd says that Jesus “was known for the scandalous way he loved.” By contrast, “instead of being known as outrageous lovers, Christians [today] are largely viewed as self-righteous judgers” (pp. 64-65).

[The last two paragraphs of the original posting have been removed.]

Founders Day at WJC

In 1821, Missouri became the twenty-fourth state in the United States, and twenty years later the University of Missouri opened as the first state university west of the Mississippi River. In 1849, with the discovery of gold in California, the Missouri towns of St. Louis, Independence, Westport, and St. Joseph became points of departure for emigrants bound for California, making Missouri the “Gateway to the West.” (The town of Kansas, which later became Kansas City, was not incorporated until the following year.) 

On February 27, 1849, the Missouri legislature granted a charter which created the first four-year men’s college west of the Mississippi. The college was begun with a significant financial contribution by Dr. William Jewell, a Columbia (Mo.) physician, legislator, and Baptist layman. Consequently, the new school named William Jewell College and located in Liberty (Mo.), at the edge of the American wilderness. 

Rev. Robert James, a nearby Baptist minister, was one of the members of the first Board of Trustees. According to the WJC website, his sons, Frank and Jesse, eventually made good on their father’s financial pledge to the college when Rev. James left the area to follow church members to the California Gold Rush. (Robert James died in California in 1850 when Frank was seven years old and before Jesse turned three.) 

Last week Dr. David Sallee, the current president William Jewell College, spoke at the first Founders Day chapel service, and it was a fine talk. He reminded the college community that “what we do now and must always do, is provide an experience that reminds us daily that our inspiration is grounded in the Christian faith of our beginning.” He also declared that the college “cannot allow its students to be intellectually lazy because of their religious beliefs.”

Dr. Sallee also emphasized that education “is supposed to open our minds, to make mirrors into windows (Sydney J. Harris), to help us see the possibilities, all influenced by one’s spirit. It is about integrating the intellectual and the spiritual to inform and guide our lives.” 

After the chapel address, those in attendance sang “God of Truth and Joy,” a hymn written by Dr. J. Gordon Kingsley, president of the college from 1980-1993. The words of the first verse are:

God of truth and joy,
Teach us how to learn.
Grant us strength of mind and will,
Thy glory to affirm.
Let us servants be,
To lead Thy world aright.
Guide us through our onward years,
Thy will our inner light.

At the close of the service, I felt a sense of pride that 110 years after its founding, I graduated from William Jewell College. And I am happy to be living now in Liberty where I can have constant contact with WJC and its intellectual and spiritual vitality.

Picture with Dr. Sallee last fall after I received the 50-year medallion from William Jewell College.