Waldo Beach - "Moral Problems of College Students after 1961" (April 15-18, 1963)
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
(laughs) | 0:04 | |
- | Thank you. | 0:05 |
It's really ridiculous for me in the presence of these pros | 0:10 | |
to try to say anything about | 0:14 | |
the moral quandaries of college students. | 0:17 | |
The only thing appropriate | 0:21 | |
that I can think of is my two Vermont stories, | 0:22 | |
both of which might be relevant to the situation. | 0:26 | |
One of the Vermont farmer | 0:30 | |
who was with a companion at a rally, | 0:31 | |
political rally at which a very slick politician | 0:42 | |
from the big city came up to harangue the Vermont farmers, | 0:47 | |
and both of the Vermont farmers listened very carefully | 0:53 | |
to what was going on. | 0:57 | |
And then after a while, one of them who was deaf turned | 1:00 | |
to the other and said, "I can't hear him very well. | 1:04 | |
What's he talking about?" | 1:09 | |
The other one turned and said, "He don't seem to say." | 1:10 | |
(audience laughing) | 1:16 | |
This is your situation listening to me, I'm afraid. | 1:20 | |
The other one is of the Vermont farmer of the city slicker, | 1:25 | |
who arrived in the Vermont community | 1:30 | |
and made the very best he could of the situation | 1:32 | |
of initial contact and conversation | 1:35 | |
and we got nowhere and the very loconic replies | 1:41 | |
were made from all sides to every overture he made | 1:44 | |
when making conversation. | 1:47 | |
And he finally got a little fed up and exploded and said, | 1:50 | |
"What's the matter with you with people? | 1:54 | |
Don't you clintate, don't you ever talk, | 1:54 | |
don't you ever say anything up here? | 1:58 | |
And the reply was up here we don't say anything unless | 2:00 | |
we can improve on silence. | 2:06 | |
(audience laughing) | 2:09 | |
It would be appropriate for me only to be silent | 2:12 | |
in the presence of you who are seasoned veterans in dealing | 2:16 | |
with the problems of... | 2:21 | |
the moral problems of college students. | 2:23 | |
This trains compound of winsomeness and orneriness, | 2:25 | |
such attractive and aggravating citizens | 2:32 | |
of daily reviewers who come into our office | 2:37 | |
and we talk with on the campus and counsel. | 2:40 | |
But there's no way to study | 2:45 | |
the moral complex of the college students | 2:47 | |
in a way I'm sure that an IBM machine can catch. | 2:49 | |
So the social statistician boys over there, | 2:54 | |
all is trying to describe with great accuracy | 2:58 | |
to the college student. | 3:03 | |
Statistics are generally useless in describing his soul. | 3:06 | |
With the finest amount of precision | 3:13 | |
to get him down onto a punch card | 3:16 | |
with the holes in the right place still hold will miss | 3:20 | |
the essence of the matter of what's wrong with it. | 3:24 | |
What I want to try to do today in a very quick way, | 3:29 | |
in an impressionistic fashion | 3:31 | |
is Jamaican analysis in depth. | 3:36 | |
The college student, I see him around. | 3:40 | |
And, again, I must say I apologize for my role here | 3:43 | |
because what I have to say has the smell of books about it, | 3:46 | |
much too much and a kind of Gothic immunity | 3:52 | |
from the hard realities of the students if you know him. | 3:55 | |
But I want to try to make | 4:03 | |
a kind of psychoanalytic impressionistic picture of him, | 4:04 | |
the college students using Augustinian categories | 4:10 | |
of thought coming at the whole matter | 4:13 | |
of the character structure of the college student | 4:16 | |
with unashamedly Augustinian presupposition. | 4:19 | |
That is to say, speaking from the Augustinians side, | 4:25 | |
a man does as he is and he is as he loves | 4:32 | |
his moral behavior is a reflection of his centers of value. | 4:38 | |
What he prizes, whatever is God's, | 4:45 | |
but most of the behavior of the college student, | 4:50 | |
whether it's good or bad. | 4:52 | |
And, of course, it's a mixture of both | 4:55 | |
is a reflection of his real theology. | 4:57 | |
It's never a much sense, I suppose, | 5:04 | |
to try to picture the college student | 5:09 | |
as being some of the moral and some of them immoral, | 5:11 | |
the good boys and the bad boys or the good guys | 5:18 | |
and the bad guys on campus | 5:20 | |
nor really doesn't make much sense | 5:25 | |
to describe him within himself in terms of the good side | 5:27 | |
and the bad side. | 5:32 | |
Because even what he seems to do is bad | 5:34 | |
is his allegiance, his affiliations, | 5:38 | |
and what he takes to be good | 5:42 | |
and never consciously do what they feel to be bad, I think. | 5:45 | |
They do the ostensible good. | 5:51 | |
What appears to them to be good, his moral disorders. | 5:53 | |
Then our teams objectively speaking right or wrong | 6:00 | |
to find meaning in his existence | 6:06 | |
to find points in his life. | 6:08 | |
Today, and what I want to say very briefly, | 6:12 | |
I want to try to stay entirely in the descriptive here | 6:15 | |
to analyze without prescribing and perhaps on Thursday | 6:19 | |
to try to say something prescriptively | 6:24 | |
and normatively about what our responsibility | 6:27 | |
is in confronting these issues. | 6:32 | |
And it's important to keep | 6:38 | |
our gears clear between descriptive and the normative vein. | 6:39 | |
So easy to slip quickly over into quick prescription | 6:45 | |
without fully diagnosing or answering the problems | 6:49 | |
of analyzing the problems of our situation. | 6:53 | |
Speaking then descriptively, the first thing to be said | 7:01 | |
I suppose is that the college student | 7:03 | |
is a crazy mixed up kid. | 7:05 | |
His patterns of irresponsibility, | 7:12 | |
which are playing up in the realm of sexual behavior | 7:16 | |
are all reflections of his confusion of values | 7:23 | |
and his search for meaning and search for belonging. | 7:29 | |
We take him on the surface, | 7:33 | |
his sexual behavior leaves a good deal to be desired | 7:36 | |
if we measure him by any kind of puritan standard. | 7:42 | |
It's certainly a great deal of promiscuity going on | 7:46 | |
that disappearance of the puritan ethic. | 7:53 | |
That the lack of any inner monitors are more controlled. | 7:59 | |
The absence of a sense of obligation, | 8:05 | |
so that most readily and most disturbingly | 8:10 | |
in the widespread degree of social promiscuity, | 8:13 | |
president branding produced quite a ruckus comment | 8:18 | |
and thought in a very excellent article incidentally | 8:24 | |
in yesterday's New York Times. | 8:26 | |
No, Sunday's New York Times magazine section | 8:28 | |
on this discusses the new moral anomie normalist man | 8:32 | |
in the realm of sexual behavior | 8:40 | |
is the students destruction of property | 8:44 | |
whether it's Fort Lauderdale or other far places in Florida | 8:50 | |
or in the new dormitory. | 8:56 | |
It seems to be a function of the new affluence | 8:58 | |
of the university. | 9:00 | |
Now the university provides all the equipment it's around. | 9:03 | |
We're used to having a block of stuffed things. | 9:07 | |
So the college students seem | 9:12 | |
to enjoy particularly ripping payphones out | 9:14 | |
of telephone booth, breaking windows, | 9:19 | |
smashing things up in general. | 9:22 | |
The excessive drinking on campus | 9:25 | |
is an index of moral confusion and uncertainty. | 9:27 | |
And constantly despite my unpuritanical nature shocked by | 9:35 | |
what I overhear on campus. | 9:39 | |
Yesterday I saw two very respectful looking college... | 9:41 | |
Respectable looking college students talking to each other | 9:46 | |
and just unwittingly eavesdropped on the conversation | 9:49 | |
and the exchange was simply on the one side. | 9:54 | |
"Did you recognize him?" | 9:58 | |
"No," said the other boy. | 10:01 | |
"I was drunk." | 10:02 | |
Cheating on examinations is a symptom again | 10:07 | |
of a widespread difficulty on moral standards. | 10:14 | |
These are fairly superficial symptoms | 10:20 | |
of deeper moral difficulties, | 10:25 | |
and they can't be remedied without | 10:28 | |
I think looking deeper into their roots. | 10:30 | |
What are the roots of the crazy mixed up moral confusion | 10:35 | |
of college students whereby they seem to engage | 10:39 | |
in blatant irresponsibility. | 10:43 | |
But one thing, this is a reflection | 10:49 | |
of the morally anomic culture in which we live. | 10:51 | |
The loss of a moral consensus, | 10:59 | |
the commonly acknowledged frame of meaning | 11:02 | |
and value of moral sense. | 11:05 | |
The Christian Conscience, | 11:12 | |
which passed into the Puritan Conscience, | 11:13 | |
which passed in turn and perhaps in a truncated form | 11:16 | |
into the Yankee Conscience. | 11:21 | |
How about at least the sense of obedience | 11:25 | |
to the unenforceable, the inner moral monitor. | 11:28 | |
But this has been supplanted by the new character structure, | 11:37 | |
favorite item of analysis by social scientists. | 11:41 | |
The new character structure of the exterior man, | 11:49 | |
appearances are everything. | 11:54 | |
Packaging, how one is packaged | 11:57 | |
is the most important thing about them. | 12:01 | |
Situation is that of thin man in a flat universe | 12:05 | |
who has no sense of accountability | 12:11 | |
to anything beyond the self or the crowd, | 12:15 | |
no transcendent reference of morality. | 12:20 | |
What accountability he does have is to the gang, | 12:25 | |
the crowd, just the immediate group, | 12:29 | |
so that if the crowd is not looking | 12:33 | |
or if the crowd approves a certain thing | 12:35 | |
then he will cut corners across the lawns of honesty until | 12:38 | |
he gets caught or unless he gets caught. | 12:44 | |
The boy in the very eminent | 12:52 | |
and respectable New England College | 12:57 | |
who got gonorrhea got cured readily | 13:00 | |
by medical attention of the school | 13:08 | |
was asked by the dean to report home on the incident | 13:14 | |
and what transpired and the response of his family | 13:18 | |
was, "Next time be more careful." | 13:23 | |
This indicates that his moral irresponsibility | 13:30 | |
is a reflection of a lack of moral nurture | 13:34 | |
from his own family background. | 13:38 | |
Cultural moral anomie, a lack of moral consensus | 13:45 | |
of what is right and wrong. | 13:51 | |
The second thing to say, I think in general, underlying... | 13:55 | |
A factor underlying these symptomatic patterns of behavior | 13:59 | |
is that the college student is kind of a wish will rebel | 14:06 | |
in search of a cause. | 14:11 | |
His disillusioned from the progressive era | 14:16 | |
of pauses and idealism no crusade will appeal | 14:20 | |
to him nor will appeals made to him to be moral, to be good. | 14:26 | |
Yeah, I think he does respond to positive goods and goals | 14:37 | |
when they are sufficiently compelling. | 14:43 | |
He's a rebel from old courses, | 14:48 | |
but he's rebel searching for a new course. | 14:51 | |
And it seems to me we've turned some kind of corner | 14:57 | |
from the beat generation, the silent generation | 14:59 | |
or the cautious generation into a positive affirmation, | 15:05 | |
a reaffirmation of search for new loyalties | 15:13 | |
that will command moral allegiance. | 15:18 | |
I happened this year to be involved | 15:23 | |
in a fascinating experience of sitting | 15:25 | |
in on a Woodrow Wilson Committee, | 15:28 | |
regional committee, talking to the top kids, | 15:30 | |
the top students. | 15:35 | |
And what struck me very forcibly among | 15:38 | |
these select group was on the one hand | 15:41 | |
their positive affirmation of commitment | 15:45 | |
to religious values coupled | 15:48 | |
with their almost complete disdain for the church. | 15:51 | |
A strange combination, pro theology and the church | 15:57 | |
as much here to reflect on how come? | 16:05 | |
Why do students seem to be feeling | 16:09 | |
for a positive affirmation of religious faith move beyond | 16:12 | |
the popular skepticism same time react | 16:15 | |
so violently against the churches, | 16:26 | |
perhaps this is a failure of the churches | 16:30 | |
to provide guidance on issues of moral significance. | 16:33 | |
Perhaps this is tied up closely with the drop-off | 16:39 | |
of students, of men who are going into the ministry. | 16:43 | |
But on the positive side, on which I am a much impressed | 16:52 | |
that the other college student is no starry-eyed idealist. | 16:58 | |
He will go hard for certain causes | 17:04 | |
when the moral issue is barely clear cut. | 17:09 | |
When the right and wrong of the thing is, | 17:13 | |
stands out vividly. | 17:16 | |
The most impressive testimony to this | 17:20 | |
is the support of the racial revolution that's taking place | 17:23 | |
and all of the activity of students in freedom riding | 17:28 | |
and sitting and the boycotts. | 17:31 | |
This seems to be the great issue. | 17:35 | |
North and South, students, Negro and white, | 17:40 | |
any kind of militant ardor, | 17:45 | |
a militant ardor which (indistinct) them, | 17:49 | |
and you as there chaplains sometimes in the trouble. | 17:52 | |
The militant crusading assumes that the segregation | 17:56 | |
this is in pursuit of the devil | 18:00 | |
and the integration it is by definition of God, | 18:02 | |
the moderate is a hypocrite and this kind of rides roughshod | 18:07 | |
over some of the finer moral sensibility | 18:11 | |
of the mixed feature and of the administration. | 18:15 | |
Some of us in this room can remember the situation | 18:22 | |
and how differently it was in the '30s | 18:25 | |
when we were in school in the late '30. | 18:27 | |
The great burning issue was the pacifist remember? | 18:30 | |
Pro and con intervention or non-intervention. | 18:35 | |
I can remember vividly walking in a parade | 18:40 | |
at Yale through the streets of new Haven | 18:43 | |
with a whole bunch of Yale divinity students carrying | 18:46 | |
a banner which said a battleship costs more | 18:51 | |
than Yale University. | 18:53 | |
(audience laughing) | 18:55 | |
We thought of war. | 18:57 | |
Perhaps this now has all seemed to disappear | 19:02 | |
and the favor is now edit in | 19:07 | |
a completely different direction towards racial integration. | 19:12 | |
Among many college students, | 19:18 | |
this is the meaningful focus of moral concern, | 19:19 | |
the gray issue on which they're willing to give up much. | 19:25 | |
Something of the same moral idealism appears | 19:33 | |
in the initial enthusiasm for the peace corps, | 19:36 | |
where there seem to be a clear call | 19:43 | |
to an unambiguous good eliciting sacrifice and devotion. | 19:49 | |
And you remember the tremendous wave | 19:54 | |
that took place when the announcements were first made about | 19:56 | |
the peace corps and fields made for personnel. | 20:00 | |
This is the bay hit with somewhat... | 20:04 | |
With second thoughts of realism, | 20:08 | |
but there's still, I think among the few | 20:10 | |
and this is the minority that I'm mentioning. | 20:16 | |
It appears the kind of response of students | 20:24 | |
to a moral idealistic course. | 20:28 | |
Something somewhat less widespread is the student support | 20:33 | |
for 'cause this like nuclear pacifism | 20:38 | |
and ban the bomb among the liberal schools. | 20:43 | |
Well, the issue has now become so much more ambiguous | 20:52 | |
and much on one side and much on the other | 20:56 | |
that on this question of confronting the bomb | 21:00 | |
and the threat of nuclear war, | 21:05 | |
here the record is not impressive. | 21:08 | |
There's a widespread resignation and moral trooper. | 21:12 | |
The war, the bomb, it's all very, very far off | 21:17 | |
for the fraternity man. | 21:22 | |
He's not inclined to want to do much about it, | 21:26 | |
but I'm speaking here so far of saving remnant. | 21:31 | |
The minority group who moved beyond | 21:37 | |
the cautious and silent generation. | 21:41 | |
Among the majority, among the run of the mill, | 21:45 | |
among the lounge lizards and the supremely average guy, | 21:48 | |
the next man you meet, the most striking thing seems | 21:55 | |
to me is his passion for security, which is no doubt | 21:59 | |
a reflection of his drive for reflection | 22:06 | |
of his cosmic insecurity. | 22:09 | |
He feels knowing at his soul. | 22:13 | |
His future is very uncertain and hazardous. | 22:16 | |
Much of his behavior, kind of a motor reflex action | 22:24 | |
to find islands of belonging and acceptance | 22:28 | |
and a sea of anonymity and uncertainty. | 22:35 | |
To overcome (indistinct) hit cosmic homesickness, | 22:42 | |
fraternity shenanigans, all the rituals, | 22:51 | |
the rushing and fledging | 22:53 | |
and who's in and who's out passion for belonging. | 22:55 | |
All elaborate time wasted in hazing serves | 23:02 | |
the plain need of the student to belong. | 23:10 | |
It serves a good, what he takes to be the good, | 23:13 | |
all the more necessary for his soul | 23:18 | |
as the university enrolled 20,000 in its student body | 23:20 | |
and it self becomes a number. | 23:27 | |
It's imperative for any student or any person | 23:33 | |
to find a circle wherever he has a name | 23:38 | |
or he's accepted as unique as different | 23:45 | |
though in fact in the circles to which he mostly belong, | 23:52 | |
he's accepted in terms of being only one of the boys. | 23:56 | |
The gang sets the terms of moral behavior. | 24:02 | |
And if acceptance prescribes getting drunk | 24:08 | |
or sexual conquests to be reported back | 24:14 | |
to the fraternity house or smashing light bulbs | 24:20 | |
then that becomes for him look good. | 24:25 | |
The overwhelming good and whatever minor qualms | 24:29 | |
of conscience you may have remembered | 24:34 | |
from home or church are submerged or sacrificed | 24:37 | |
at the altar of the warm feeling of security | 24:44 | |
at being one of the boys. | 24:48 | |
The drive for security is certainly seen | 24:54 | |
in the rapidly changing moral patterns shift | 24:56 | |
toward early marriages. | 25:00 | |
A ratio of undergraduates who are married, upperclassmen | 25:06 | |
who are married and now I have one more, underclassmen | 25:09 | |
is longing for an island of purity | 25:13 | |
in the larger ocean of the chopping waves of insecurity. | 25:20 | |
Frankly, I don't know how to read | 25:30 | |
the new political conservatism, | 25:31 | |
which is mounting in strength on many campuses. | 25:35 | |
The roles here are reversed since our day on campus | 25:40 | |
even we have her back bar. | 25:47 | |
As students, the political action boys, | 25:50 | |
the vital movements where the radical, | 25:56 | |
the socialist, the pro labor, the new deal democrats. | 26:01 | |
Now the role are the kind of reversed. | 26:07 | |
The aggressive spirit shows up in the young conservative. | 26:09 | |
We even use the label of being the Paul Revere Club | 26:15 | |
or something like that. | 26:21 | |
It's somehow ironically if you reflect back | 26:24 | |
at who Paul Revere was in the revolution. | 26:27 | |
Now, the talk among the young conservative, | 26:34 | |
the young political conservatives, | 26:36 | |
young conservative is of the perils | 26:38 | |
of statism and creeping socialism and the return... | 26:42 | |
The necessity of return to risk and freedom | 26:48 | |
and individual initiative. | 26:54 | |
This talk is on the part of very well | 26:57 | |
to do boys of very well healed parents | 27:02 | |
and their economic individualism | 27:07 | |
is like that of the phrase of... | 27:09 | |
You remember how deacons, | 27:13 | |
each one for himself and God for us all | 27:17 | |
as the elephant said as he danced among the chicken. | 27:21 | |
(audience laughing) | 27:24 | |
This suggests perhaps that political conservatism | 27:35 | |
is a function of economic affluence judging it morally | 27:40 | |
and economic security looms very large | 27:48 | |
in the constellation of goods in the soul of Joe Collins. | 27:53 | |
We are here I submit and within... | 28:00 | |
In the middle of a very profound shift | 28:04 | |
in the view of what college is for | 28:06 | |
the whole attitude of the student | 28:10 | |
is to what he's here about. | 28:14 | |
For in the 19th century, the small liberal arts college | 28:18 | |
was there to equip one for a life of service | 28:25 | |
in one of the profession, law, ministry, medicine. | 28:30 | |
But now here are millions in college | 28:39 | |
with the general attitude that the world owes them a living. | 28:44 | |
Everybody goes to college and the college experience taken | 28:50 | |
for granted is a kind of dress rehearsal | 28:56 | |
for life in suburbia, | 29:00 | |
whereby we're tasting ahead of time | 29:03 | |
the fringe benefits they enjoy. | 29:05 | |
The college degree, is a necessary ticket | 29:11 | |
that kind of thing, but it takes a four year waiting period | 29:15 | |
to go through to some kind of life of economic comfort. | 29:21 | |
It's a dress rehearsal with pretty fancy dress. | 29:27 | |
Really, the economic affluence | 29:34 | |
of the American college students is alarming. | 29:36 | |
We are too wealthy. | 29:41 | |
We are too well off. | 29:43 | |
Tell it not in gap and perhaps I should not mention | 29:50 | |
this in the circle of those who are responsible | 29:53 | |
for public relations, but I've heard rumors about | 29:58 | |
that there are a few Duke students | 30:00 | |
who have two cars on campus. | 30:04 | |
One, a little sports run around | 30:09 | |
and the other one, the big station Wagon | 30:11 | |
for the fraternity men view. | 30:13 | |
Well, the student union is the shining symbol | 30:17 | |
of this new affluence and attendance | 30:23 | |
at student union between classes | 30:27 | |
to see the new queen with her new hairdo | 30:31 | |
is the new required chapel | 30:34 | |
of the American college dude's life. | 30:36 | |
(audience laughing) | 30:39 | |
And he is required by social compulsion | 30:41 | |
to make his appearance there. | 30:45 | |
I make no plea for a return to Horatio Alger mythology | 30:49 | |
of working your way through college, | 30:56 | |
but it is evident enough that the college culture | 30:59 | |
is a PIDO centric culture | 31:02 | |
and that everything is done for the children | 31:06 | |
and they're almost spoiled brats. | 31:09 | |
They see their education as a right before | 31:14 | |
they see it as an obligation. | 31:18 | |
And here's where I think the Christian faith, | 31:22 | |
Christian ethics needs to speak to that point | 31:25 | |
and the springs of motivation. | 31:31 | |
The passion for economics security | 31:37 | |
and the expectation of economic security | 31:40 | |
always hold their moral decisions. | 31:44 | |
How about this business of cheating on exam? | 31:49 | |
Well, it is done as an accepted good. | 31:55 | |
You asked with some misgivings and qualms, | 32:05 | |
but it's an accepted good and ostensible good since one | 32:09 | |
has to pass the course to get the average, | 32:14 | |
to get the job, or to get into graduate school. | 32:18 | |
The problem of cheating either on exams | 32:24 | |
or in general campus traffic. | 32:28 | |
It becomes not so strange phenomenon morally to analyze. | 32:34 | |
If one sees how the character type has shifted | 32:37 | |
from the pure accent to the operator. | 32:44 | |
The operator has the marketing orientation | 32:51 | |
of his personality there across their girl speaks of it. | 32:58 | |
He markets himself on the campus. | 33:01 | |
He is well tutored in social contacts and interviewing | 33:08 | |
on and any campus election | 33:17 | |
or choice between the puritan and the operator. | 33:19 | |
The operator always wins hands down. | 33:25 | |
He's the smooth apple. | 33:29 | |
One operator I know climb very successfully | 33:32 | |
and quickly the ladder of campus success | 33:35 | |
with this bewitching gambit when he met new people, | 33:38 | |
"I'm so glad to meet you at last." | 33:43 | |
(audience laughing) | 33:46 | |
No one could fail to fall for this guy. | 33:49 | |
Finally, the frantic passion for security is heightened | 33:53 | |
by the enemy of the students' intellectual experience. | 34:03 | |
His four year run is a fragmented one | 34:12 | |
in the intellectuals sphere. | 34:17 | |
He has no intellectual center of reference | 34:20 | |
or frame of meaning into which the parts of knowledge | 34:24 | |
can be fitted. | 34:29 | |
The curriculum of the college is absolute anarchy. | 34:32 | |
Student take courses and at some kind... | 34:40 | |
Rigged to some kind of co-curriculum | 34:45 | |
or general liberal arts or distribution requirements | 34:48 | |
as a ballot poll. | 34:53 | |
But if the truth be told, this is sheer fragmented anarchy. | 34:56 | |
You may find some intellectual center | 35:04 | |
in his major, junior, or senior year, | 35:06 | |
but generally his intellectual experience is detached | 35:11 | |
from whatever purpose he has in life. | 35:15 | |
His vocation is separated from his profession | 35:20 | |
who is detective of the lingo. | 35:24 | |
He's congenitally in the football of making connections | 35:26 | |
one field with another. | 35:31 | |
So field is he in the compartmentalization | 35:34 | |
of his intellectual experience. | 35:38 | |
This is on the mental, the intellectual side, | 35:44 | |
but it permeates his whole being | 35:47 | |
and it accentuates this fragmentation certainly. | 35:51 | |
Accentuates is yearning for wholeness and oneness. | 35:54 | |
Finding a frame of meaning | 36:02 | |
by which the parts of his intellectual growth can be... | 36:05 | |
In which it can be incorporated. | 36:10 | |
And at this point, I think that very strong need | 36:13 | |
is evident for the kind of thing that is gradually coming | 36:17 | |
to the pore religious centers of intellectual experience | 36:21 | |
to provide a way in the scattered and anonymously finding | 36:29 | |
how to look at reality and how to come again | 36:38 | |
to be able to see life in some integrated fashion | 36:43 | |
both steadily and whole. | 36:48 | |
Now, as I said at the beginning, this is very quick sketch | 36:56 | |
this profile is quite too impressionistic | 36:59 | |
and needs sharp correction | 37:05 | |
from the kind of firsthand experience | 37:07 | |
that you all are having to show up | 37:09 | |
the errors of such impressions as I've tried to make. | 37:16 | |
I think Mr. Chairman if maybe we could have | 37:23 | |
a bit of time or are we gonna have a... | 37:28 | |
Is the plan for a respondent at this point to- | 37:31 | |
- | Well, they have to respond this. | 37:33 |
- | To slash this down? | 37:35 |
- | We do have to (indistinct) | 37:36 |
- | All right, yeah, thanks. | 37:43 |
- | Thank you very much. | 37:44 |
(audience clapping) | 37:45 | |
- | All right, we have the respondent (indistinct) | 37:58 |
- | Perhaps a certain irony in my standing here | 38:10 |
in this capacity this morning. | 38:12 | |
The summer of 1951, I had a course | 38:15 | |
with Professor Peter here at Duke. | 38:17 | |
When he at times analyzed some presentations of mine. | 38:20 | |
Now I find myself at positions reversing the role. | 38:25 | |
And each of you has had the experience | 38:32 | |
I'm sure having students either report verbally | 38:34 | |
on what you allegedly said in class | 38:39 | |
or read with growing her | 38:42 | |
and this may what they write on examination papers. | 38:46 | |
A few weeks ago in a course in the New Testament | 38:51 | |
I had asked a question about continuity's | 38:55 | |
and tensions between Judaism and Christianity | 38:59 | |
at the beginning of the Christian movement, | 39:01 | |
and one of the girls wrote somewhat as follows. | 39:03 | |
Also Jesus Christ taught the Jews to abandon | 39:08 | |
some of the traditional practices, | 39:12 | |
which they had observed for many years, such as castration. | 39:14 | |
(audience laughing) | 39:18 | |
I don't want to emasculate what Professor Peter just said | 39:31 | |
or get it down to the bed rock | 39:39 | |
the church cold place has been talking about. | 39:41 | |
There are one or two reflections, | 39:44 | |
which I have on hearing this paper | 39:46 | |
or this presentation rather. | 39:49 | |
In terms of your basic Augustinian categories | 39:52 | |
of which I personally do not quarrel | 39:55 | |
having also studied the profound here at Yale. | 39:59 | |
I find that many students resist this analysis, | 40:04 | |
even on a descriptive face. | 40:10 | |
Now this may be a reflection of the anomie | 40:13 | |
you were talking about, I don't know. | 40:15 | |
But they regard this as an attempt illegitimately | 40:17 | |
to smuggle religion into discussions | 40:21 | |
that otherwise seem quite sane | 40:26 | |
and rational to them or by some legerdemain | 40:27 | |
to make everyone religious. | 40:32 | |
And the student who has a thorough dose of objectivity | 40:37 | |
as the norm for scientific approach | 40:43 | |
will often defend the attempt to find an objective reference | 40:46 | |
for moral decisions or if this student has many are | 40:51 | |
in our time thoroughly familiar | 40:56 | |
with logical positivism AJ Air Slick and Company. | 40:59 | |
They will argue that moral decisions | 41:05 | |
are simply emotive preferences | 41:07 | |
that there is no way of empirically verifying | 41:13 | |
any kind of moral choice. | 41:16 | |
Therefore one makes his own decisions | 41:19 | |
in terms of the mental way of his own passions | 41:22 | |
to quote their review. | 41:25 | |
I don't know what this kind of analysis says | 41:27 | |
to some of these streams of thought within | 41:30 | |
the life of the college and university, | 41:34 | |
but it occurs to me that when we try to extend something | 41:36 | |
like the notion of love that man is what he prizes, | 41:41 | |
what he cherished seen as misdirected love | 41:45 | |
or that we take an approach in terms of say | 41:48 | |
(indistinct) familiar category that we meet | 41:55 | |
a certain amount of resistance here | 41:59 | |
and not simply in terms of the resistance we meet, | 42:00 | |
but the fact that there is a feeling | 42:04 | |
that something illegitimate is smuggling the argument. | 42:06 | |
The other response which I want to make concerns | 42:10 | |
the creative minority about what you thought. | 42:14 | |
If I understand you correctly | 42:18 | |
and this is certainly confirmed in my own experience. | 42:20 | |
What you're saying is that | 42:22 | |
the ethically creative small group of students | 42:24 | |
when we find on our campus today | 42:27 | |
are those who will respond only | 42:30 | |
when they find unambiguous moral situations of choice, | 42:34 | |
but lack of any ambiguity is the criteria | 42:41 | |
for our moral decision. | 42:45 | |
This troubles me as I think you were troubled | 42:49 | |
by it in certain passing references, | 42:52 | |
but what is our role then as chaplains as those who profess | 42:56 | |
to understand something about the Christian ethic | 43:04 | |
and interpreting these situations of moral decision | 43:06 | |
is our tendency to applaud these students | 43:10 | |
because they at least are concerned | 43:13 | |
and are willing to do something without pointing out | 43:16 | |
the dangers in here and in this kind of moral judgment. | 43:18 | |
For example, I'm sure most of us are very sympathetic | 43:24 | |
with the freedom riders with citizens in the line, | 43:27 | |
but I grow more and more restive when I hear the technique | 43:31 | |
of so-called non-violent resistance described | 43:35 | |
as deep Christian efforts in this area. | 43:38 | |
Now this may be a very pragmatic kind of press view | 43:42 | |
but I think it roots back to the fundamental norms | 43:47 | |
with which we will be dealing on Thursday. | 43:50 | |
What are we to do to foster creativity? | 43:52 | |
Are we to also foster illusions about | 43:56 | |
the Christian ethic itself? | 43:59 | |
(audience clapping) | 44:05 | |
- | (indistinct) I don't have an excess amount | 44:14 |
of adrenaline at the moment. | 44:23 | |
You'll be glad to wait until after we have coffee | 44:24 | |
and go into our discussion segment | 44:27 | |
so we'll adjourn for coffee. | 44:29 | |
(unintelligible chatting) | 44:31 |
- | Of the follow-up, if not follow-through | 0:03 |
on his introductory remarks, | 0:07 | |
having had to disappear after his opening address | 0:09 | |
and having also to do the same thing this morning, | 0:14 | |
we're gonna revise the schedule a bit, | 0:17 | |
so that immediately after his address this morning, | 0:19 | |
we will be able to have some time for questions | 0:22 | |
or discussion with him. | 0:25 | |
One can't help but think | 0:30 | |
on the basis of what's been happening since we began, | 0:31 | |
whether this conference has been dealing so much | 0:34 | |
with the moral quandaries of students | 0:36 | |
as with the moral quandaries of chaplains. | 0:37 | |
(audience laughs) | 0:40 | |
We have sweat, I think, as much as any student sweats, | 0:41 | |
some of the problems by which we're confronted, | 0:47 | |
we have sweat the ambiguity in which we live as chaplains. | 0:51 | |
Perhaps the only way by which we can survive | 0:57 | |
is suggested by the story of the | 1:02 | |
famous opera singer | 1:05 | |
Gigli who, on one occasion, | 1:07 | |
went up to Boston for the first time | 1:09 | |
in their opera house to sing in "Faust". | 1:11 | |
And on the occasion, | 1:15 | |
when Mephistopheles descends into hell with Faust, | 1:16 | |
they had set up the stage | 1:19 | |
so that at the appropriate time | 1:20 | |
they could get there, | 1:22 | |
and then a button would be pushed | 1:23 | |
and this would go down | 1:25 | |
and symbolize for everybody watching | 1:26 | |
that they were going down into Hell. | 1:28 | |
Well it so happened | 1:31 | |
that the mechanical contrivance didn't quite work | 1:31 | |
and about halfway down, it stopped. | 1:35 | |
And they tried like mad | 1:38 | |
to sort of crawl down out of sight, | 1:40 | |
but this even didn't come off | 1:43 | |
and they were suspended on their descent into hell, | 1:45 | |
right there in the, you know, view of all the audience. | 1:48 | |
It's reported that an Irishman, | 1:53 | |
way up in the balcony who had one too many before he came, | 1:55 | |
saw this and jumped to his feet | 1:59 | |
and shouted out, "Thank God, I'm safe, Hell's full." | 2:02 | |
(audience laughs) | 2:05 | |
And after our discussions, | 2:07 | |
I think the only reprieve we may feel | 2:08 | |
is that hell is getting fairly well filled up | 2:12 | |
by the contemporary college students, | 2:15 | |
and maybe the chaplains can't get in | 2:17 | |
Waldo Beach is going to bring his address, | 2:19 | |
and then we will move immediately into our discussion. | 2:23 | |
Dr. Beach. | 2:27 | |
You know, I don't know, since I'm among friends here, | 2:33 | |
in order to assure you | 2:36 | |
that this is not gonna be a lecture and address, | 2:38 | |
I don't know whether it be more easy for you, | 2:44 | |
and for me, if I just sat down and chatted, | 2:46 | |
maybe I can operate this way standing up, | 2:49 | |
but I hate the informality of | 2:54 | |
both giving a lecture, | 2:56 | |
and being incarcerated on tape. | 2:58 | |
There's a sort of a irremediable | 3:00 | |
finality about this taping business | 3:04 | |
that makes one feel one is supposed to utter | 3:06 | |
prose of the style of a papal and cyclical. | 3:10 | |
And what I have to deal, | 3:13 | |
what I have to say is good deal less memorable | 3:15 | |
than the | 3:18 | |
utterances of John 23rd. | 3:20 | |
I apologize, too, for having the other day to duck out | 3:26 | |
after our discussion, | 3:29 | |
after my | 3:30 | |
presentation, | 3:32 | |
I was not able to take part in the discussion | 3:34 | |
'cause I had a class | 3:37 | |
and a hit-and-run procedure isn't very ethical. | 3:38 | |
I would like today to have a few minutes to talk, | 3:42 | |
and for discussion after what I have to say through. | 3:47 | |
I have about 30 minutes to | 3:52 | |
provide redemption from Hell | 3:56 | |
for the college students who are now there, | 3:58 | |
waiting. | 4:03 | |
I don't think I can do any better than to | 4:04 | |
move them up to a kind of limbo, or Purgatory, | 4:09 | |
but at least I want to try to say something positive about | 4:14 | |
tasks of a college chaplain | 4:19 | |
in meeting the moral quandaries of the college student. | 4:23 | |
On Tuesday, I tried to make a kind of descriptive profile | 4:32 | |
of Joe College. | 4:35 | |
His anomie, | 4:37 | |
supposedly his immorality, | 4:40 | |
which on closer look appears to be | 4:44 | |
a function of his false | 4:46 | |
and abortive attempts to realize himself | 4:47 | |
and find his identity. | 4:51 | |
The things that are so troublesome about his behavior, | 4:54 | |
his excessive drinking, | 4:58 | |
his destruction of property, | 5:01 | |
his leching, if we can use a nice verb | 5:04 | |
from the 17th century, | 5:11 | |
which has a different connotation now, | 5:13 | |
all represent a kind of passion for security | 5:18 | |
to belong in his fraternity. | 5:22 | |
In his utilitarian view, | 5:27 | |
in his passion for economic security, | 5:29 | |
in his utilitarian view of his college education. | 5:33 | |
Now today, perhaps I can provide some normative guidance, | 5:38 | |
derived from the Christian faith, | 5:42 | |
which we as teachers, | 5:45 | |
as chaplains, as counselors, | 5:47 | |
may be able to provide. | 5:49 | |
Where does the Christian faith now become relevant | 5:53 | |
to illumine these moral quandaries, | 5:58 | |
to lead the student to some kind of self understanding, | 6:04 | |
some identity, | 6:08 | |
some inner sense of moral control | 6:11 | |
without providing just | 6:16 | |
nostrums and palliatives | 6:19 | |
and quick remedies, | 6:25 | |
quick pills that really don't solve the problem at all, | 6:26 | |
and without providing the kind of tight legalisms, | 6:31 | |
rules of saying, "Now, this is what you should do," | 6:35 | |
which have course he at his stage of life resists. | 6:38 | |
I think we are, at this juncture, | 6:45 | |
well advised to follow a kind of double movement. | 6:50 | |
One is a movement back to the Christian faith, | 6:56 | |
to a clear understanding of the frame of reference, | 7:01 | |
provided by Christian theology, | 7:05 | |
from which the student can draw his own moral answers. | 7:08 | |
The other direction, | 7:15 | |
is to get the student | 7:19 | |
out of his tight circle of moral self concern | 7:21 | |
and get 'em across the tracks, | 7:26 | |
so to speak, out into the world. | 7:29 | |
This double movement, | 7:32 | |
I want to try to develop a little bit | 7:33 | |
like to show you what I mean, | 7:34 | |
the first is the movement back | 7:38 | |
to the recovery of theology. | 7:41 | |
My claim here is based on the thinking of, | 7:45 | |
again of Augustine, | 7:48 | |
and more precisely and immediately | 7:50 | |
of Richard Niebuhr, | 7:52 | |
that the recovery of a sense of ethical responsibility | 7:55 | |
is the fruit of a recovered theological faith. | 8:00 | |
What's called for, what's presumed here, | 8:08 | |
is the ethics of response. | 8:10 | |
We do what we do out of what we respond to, | 8:14 | |
to what we take to be so. | 8:17 | |
Our moral norms are always a | 8:19 | |
function of our expression, | 8:24 | |
of what we feel to be ultimate reality. | 8:26 | |
The problem of goodness, then, | 8:30 | |
the problem of criteria of right and wrong | 8:31 | |
reverts back to the question, "Who is the Lord? | 8:36 | |
Who is the Lord of my life? | 8:39 | |
What is the ultimate good?" | 8:40 | |
Is a question that refers itself | 8:43 | |
down the hall to the ultimate question, | 8:44 | |
"What it is ultimately so?" | 8:48 | |
And there's no point in talking about being ethical, | 8:51 | |
or being good, | 8:56 | |
without an understanding of the ground of goodness. | 8:59 | |
The way to recover | 9:04 | |
inter-moral responsibility | 9:07 | |
is then by the articulation of the lines | 9:10 | |
of the Christian faith. | 9:13 | |
Procedurally, here we start from scratch | 9:16 | |
and worse than that, | 9:19 | |
from behind the line of scratch, | 9:20 | |
because what we encounter is | 9:23 | |
a theological illiteracy | 9:27 | |
on the part of a college student, | 9:29 | |
which is cosmic in its proportion. | 9:30 | |
He likely brings with him, | 9:35 | |
and may even acquire at school, | 9:37 | |
a bundle of misinformation and debris, | 9:40 | |
old wives tales and Bible verses, | 9:44 | |
which constitutes his body of theology, | 9:47 | |
his misinformation. | 9:50 | |
Seems to me the main job, | 9:54 | |
prior to ethical recovery, | 9:57 | |
underneath ethical recovery, | 9:59 | |
to recover in liberal arts education, | 10:00 | |
a basic theological literacy. | 10:04 | |
How is this done? | 10:08 | |
Well it's best done in the curriculum, | 10:11 | |
and with the same standards of intellectual integrity | 10:16 | |
as all the other subjects that the students taking. | 10:20 | |
But as many of you know, | 10:25 | |
who are working, maybe in a state university situation, | 10:26 | |
or in your own chaplain situation outside the curriculum, | 10:31 | |
it may be only possible to do this | 10:36 | |
in an extracurricular way, | 10:39 | |
in the Lay Scholar movement, | 10:41 | |
or a study group program. | 10:44 | |
And I know all of the working difficulties involved here. | 10:48 | |
The great difficulties of starting out bravely | 10:52 | |
with a study course program in Christian faith | 10:57 | |
and Christian ethics, | 10:59 | |
or church in the world, | 11:02 | |
strong start in October, | 11:06 | |
peters out by Christmas, | 11:08 | |
students have too much to do. | 11:11 | |
Materials of this particular course become expendable | 11:14 | |
in light of their curricular pressures. | 11:19 | |
But where carefully done, | 11:23 | |
well taught. | 11:26 | |
This can become an exciting experience, | 11:28 | |
and I think it's fair to say | 11:33 | |
that if you look at these | 11:36 | |
extracurricular study programs on some campuses, | 11:40 | |
the motivation for study is there, | 11:43 | |
and because it's intrinsic, | 11:47 | |
a student doesn't have to do this, | 11:49 | |
and for that very reason | 11:53 | |
may have an excitement about it for it. | 11:56 | |
Most important in this whole study area, | 12:01 | |
study of the recovery of the Christian faith, | 12:04 | |
is the necessity for critical intellectual analysis | 12:08 | |
of the problems of faith, | 12:12 | |
and belief. | 12:14 | |
In working on problems | 12:19 | |
of the nature of the Christian faith, | 12:21 | |
Christian theology, | 12:25 | |
Christian anthropology, | 12:26 | |
to overcome the dualism in the student's mind | 12:30 | |
between scientific thinking | 12:35 | |
and religious thinking. | 12:37 | |
He may acquire a great sense of excitement | 12:42 | |
and interest, | 12:45 | |
and curiosity, | 12:46 | |
when he recognizes that to think well | 12:49 | |
is to serve God in the interior court, | 12:52 | |
as Traherne phrases it. | 12:55 | |
The awareness of the necessities | 13:01 | |
of careful, radical, critical scrutiny | 13:04 | |
never occurs to him as appropriate | 13:09 | |
to the field of religion. | 13:11 | |
When he discovers that not only is this permissible, | 13:14 | |
but it's necessary, | 13:17 | |
when he gets out from under the Sunday school mentality | 13:19 | |
about the study of religion, | 13:22 | |
it then takes on appeal. | 13:24 | |
Perhaps his task here of the teacher, | 13:29 | |
of the counselor, | 13:33 | |
of the chaplain, | 13:34 | |
as teacher, is a double one. | 13:36 | |
One is the maieutic role, | 13:38 | |
of shaking up the pious, | 13:42 | |
the comfortable, | 13:47 | |
and the complacent, | 13:48 | |
whose prefatory word to all religious utterances is, | 13:50 | |
"I've always been taught that," | 13:53 | |
and so forth, | 13:56 | |
or, "What we learned at church was that," | 13:58 | |
and so on. | 14:02 | |
That maieutic role, on the one side, | 14:04 | |
against, or towards the pious lad | 14:08 | |
who runs to the safe copy-book answers, | 14:12 | |
is necessary to lead him out | 14:16 | |
from the escape answers. | 14:19 | |
It is in a very tight, pious, stuffy, | 14:25 | |
over-churched campus, | 14:29 | |
what's needed is Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. | 14:32 | |
Get 'em all shook up. | 14:37 | |
On the other hand, | 14:40 | |
toward the skeptic, | 14:42 | |
in the sophisticated, emancipated campus, | 14:45 | |
where kind of positivistic, | 14:50 | |
humanistic scientism is the established religion, | 14:55 | |
established church, | 15:01 | |
towards the student in this situation, | 15:03 | |
that searching skeptic, | 15:07 | |
who was always more entrancing, | 15:10 | |
and really more winsome, | 15:12 | |
than the pious complacent lad, | 15:13 | |
towards him, | 15:18 | |
the maieutic method is to indicate | 15:21 | |
that his very skepticism | 15:24 | |
is a way of affirming truth, | 15:27 | |
and his very doubt is meaningful | 15:30 | |
against the background of an order of truth, | 15:35 | |
that his skepticism is much closer | 15:39 | |
to the kingdom of God, | 15:42 | |
the kingdom of truth, | 15:44 | |
than the pious and proper church answer. | 15:45 | |
Give him Tillich. | 15:51 | |
Work towards the positive underpinning | 15:53 | |
of his skepticism | 15:57 | |
by showing him how doubt is an angel, not the Devil. | 15:59 | |
In the job of recovering theological literacy, | 16:08 | |
one of the main procedural problems | 16:15 | |
is how you go about it program-wise. | 16:17 | |
What do you set up for the conference on a campus? | 16:19 | |
What about this whole deal of "Religious Emphasis Week"? | 16:24 | |
As a battered grizzled veteran of many such | 16:30 | |
weeks, | 16:35 | |
I would testify in general | 16:37 | |
that it would be much better to retire the term | 16:39 | |
and the event entirely. | 16:44 | |
Seems to me, | 16:48 | |
this institution is kind of an artificial revivalism. | 16:49 | |
It presumes that religious faith | 16:53 | |
is taken for granted around | 16:55 | |
and needs only to be emphasized, | 16:58 | |
or recalled, | 17:00 | |
or revived, | 17:02 | |
When actually this is real artificial to the true situation. | 17:04 | |
A much better pattern, | 17:11 | |
which is a growing one on many campuses, | 17:12 | |
where growing successful is, | 17:16 | |
instead of the "Religious Emphasis Week", | 17:18 | |
is the symposium, | 17:20 | |
or conference, | 17:22 | |
or parley, | 17:25 | |
or whatever, | 17:26 | |
on some vital, current secular issue | 17:28 | |
that is of great moment, great urgency, | 17:35 | |
then planned to include in the panel of perspectives, | 17:43 | |
brought to bear upon that problem, | 17:47 | |
as one perspective on it, | 17:50 | |
the Christian theological approach. | 17:53 | |
What does the Christian faith | 17:57 | |
have to say to this particular issue, | 17:58 | |
along with what other points of view, | 18:02 | |
what other perspectives have to say | 18:06 | |
to this particular issue? | 18:08 | |
This is much more true to the realities | 18:11 | |
of the polytheism of the American campus. | 18:14 | |
Christianity is one faith system, | 18:18 | |
along with other major faith systems, | 18:22 | |
with positivism, | 18:24 | |
and scientism, | 18:26 | |
and suburbanity, | 18:27 | |
and Americanity, | 18:31 | |
and the other major religions of our day. | 18:32 | |
Still in the same direction, | 18:38 | |
toward the theological recovery, | 18:40 | |
once confronted with a whole problem | 18:46 | |
of the meaning of worship, | 18:48 | |
the recovery of authentic worship, | 18:50 | |
for the springs of ethical renewal lie here | 18:54 | |
in renewed worship at the altar, | 18:59 | |
where the total self is brought face-to-face | 19:04 | |
with the mystery and the awesome Holiness, | 19:07 | |
and the forgiving mercy of God. | 19:11 | |
Many chapel services, on many universities, | 19:17 | |
desecrate the function of worship | 19:21 | |
by being purely secular exercises | 19:25 | |
set within the college calendar | 19:28 | |
as convenient times to get the children together, | 19:31 | |
and give them some kind of sense | 19:38 | |
of togetherness, or loyalty. | 19:39 | |
And this is sprinkled with a little bit of holy water, | 19:43 | |
in the form of an invocation | 19:47 | |
and a benediction. | 19:50 | |
This isn't worship at all. | 19:54 | |
The need here to recover authentic worship, | 19:58 | |
I think is a very, very central one, | 20:03 | |
one in which we fumble a great deal, | 20:07 | |
which was great deal of need | 20:09 | |
for searching and rethinking. | 20:10 | |
Basically it's a dialectical need. | 20:13 | |
On the one side, | 20:16 | |
the conservative need | 20:17 | |
to recover the tradition of the classical forms | 20:20 | |
of worship in the richness of Christian liturgy. | 20:26 | |
And there's a great deal of that going on, | 20:33 | |
and it's very exciting, | 20:35 | |
and very valuable, | 20:36 | |
in the realm of music, for instance, | 20:38 | |
on American college campuses, | 20:40 | |
we have of at last gotten up, | 20:42 | |
I think, most of us, | 20:44 | |
except perhaps at some Southern schools, | 20:45 | |
from the horrors of the 19th century drivel | 20:49 | |
that passed for church music, | 20:51 | |
back into the richness of the Baroque, | 20:54 | |
and classical, | 20:58 | |
style. | 21:02 | |
But while we have done this, | 21:04 | |
and recovered objectivity of our authentic worship, | 21:06 | |
there is need at the same time | 21:08 | |
to recover the relevance of all of this; | 21:12 | |
the point of connection between this kind of worship | 21:15 | |
and the student where he is, | 21:18 | |
between the form of worship | 21:21 | |
and the existence of the worshiper. | 21:24 | |
I'm much impressed for instance, by the way, | 21:28 | |
in which college choirs nowadays | 21:30 | |
have been in Protestant schools, | 21:32 | |
recovering the mass form, | 21:35 | |
and with great feeling and power | 21:38 | |
sing the Kyrie Eleison. | 21:40 | |
"Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi" | 21:45 | |
Without the slightest notion of what Kyrie Eleison means. | 21:52 | |
(audience laughs) | 21:57 | |
I won't embarrass anybody here | 22:00 | |
by taking a nose count, | 22:01 | |
or a hand count, | 22:05 | |
as to what Kyrie Eleison means. | 22:05 | |
But, for many students, | 22:10 | |
it's really just about as meaningless | 22:11 | |
as for the boy who reported home after church, | 22:15 | |
that the closing hymn song was, "The Cross-eyed Bear." | 22:18 | |
This is about as much as it meant to him. | 22:25 | |
Great fervor singing about the cross-eyed bear | 22:28 | |
without knowing what theologically it really meant. | 22:34 | |
Well, this recovery of authentic worship | 22:38 | |
by | 22:42 | |
explaining, by working at the explanation | 22:46 | |
of the objective meaning of the mass | 22:49 | |
and what Kyrie Eleison | 22:53 | |
means for the | 22:56 | |
worshiper who stands in need | 23:00 | |
of the mercy of the Lord, | 23:02 | |
is much needed. | 23:08 | |
The other direction of worship is the experimental one. | 23:12 | |
One is the conservative direction, | 23:19 | |
the other is the experimental one, | 23:21 | |
of working with new worship forms, | 23:24 | |
the dance, | 23:27 | |
jazz mass, | 23:28 | |
the vernacular, | 23:33 | |
to indicate the way in which the sacred | 23:36 | |
appears in the secular. | 23:41 | |
You have to distinguish all this very carefully | 23:46 | |
between secularism and the secular, | 23:48 | |
and a Protestant motif of worship always | 23:51 | |
is the | 23:54 | |
appearance of grace in the secular, | 23:57 | |
just as Bach used German drinking songs | 24:01 | |
as the basis of his corral tunes. | 24:04 | |
So the sense of the judgment and grace of God | 24:08 | |
can be recovered in contemporary college students experience | 24:11 | |
through exciting secular forms. | 24:16 | |
You remember so vividly instances of this | 24:21 | |
in college chapels where, | 24:23 | |
well, one in particular comes to mind, | 24:28 | |
worship at Hollins College, | 24:30 | |
a magnificent chapel there, | 24:32 | |
where the chaplain, Al Beardsley, is a | 24:35 | |
master of the use of ritual | 24:40 | |
of the classical sort, | 24:44 | |
but he casts his prayers, | 24:46 | |
usually in the collect form, | 24:49 | |
often in striking vernacular. | 24:52 | |
One occasion, I remember there, chapel, | 24:55 | |
after a party weekend or something, | 25:00 | |
where his use of the vernacular | 25:01 | |
was real earthy, talking about how, | 25:04 | |
"Here we are, God, before thee, | 25:07 | |
with bellies distended, | 25:09 | |
with too much food." | 25:13 | |
And so on, | 25:15 | |
this was a little bit less elegant | 25:17 | |
than the King James, | 25:19 | |
or Elizabethan English style, | 25:23 | |
but it had a certain compelling vividness about it | 25:25 | |
that I feel strongly | 25:31 | |
involved the worshiper deeply in the worship, | 25:34 | |
in the experience, in the encounter. | 25:36 | |
Well, all that I've said thus far | 25:39 | |
is in the direction of the recovery, | 25:41 | |
through the study of the Christian faith, | 25:44 | |
and through the | 25:47 | |
recovery of objective and relevant worship | 25:50 | |
of the grounds for moral renewal. | 25:55 | |
But now the other direction, | 25:59 | |
the other movement, | 26:00 | |
this seems to me, | 26:02 | |
the movement to get the students across the tracks, | 26:03 | |
made aware of the social revolutions | 26:08 | |
that are going on, | 26:11 | |
the world's hunger, | 26:13 | |
the world's need. | 26:14 | |
This fraternity lounge lizard | 26:18 | |
and the sorority queen, | 26:21 | |
in their fantastic world of array of sports cars, | 26:25 | |
and beer cans, | 26:29 | |
and bouffant hairdos | 26:30 | |
of various delicate pastel shades, | 26:32 | |
these characters need to be shook loose | 26:37 | |
from their comfort | 26:42 | |
and their ease | 26:43 | |
by the awareness of how the other | 26:46 | |
nine tenths of the world lives. | 26:51 | |
Dumped into an awareness of the desperate poverty, | 26:54 | |
which prevails maybe not five blocks away, | 27:00 | |
more than five blocks away from the campus. | 27:03 | |
You're all aware of these needs | 27:07 | |
and the projects that lead, | 27:09 | |
that provide guidance in this direction. | 27:12 | |
Many of them, summer service projects, | 27:15 | |
American Friends Service Committee projects, | 27:17 | |
Operation Crossroads, | 27:19 | |
for summer youths, | 27:23 | |
but then during the school year | 27:25 | |
more immediately projects in town, | 27:27 | |
companion, | 27:33 | |
much impressed, can at Wesley, | 27:35 | |
with this companion program in the hospital, | 27:37 | |
where students go | 27:40 | |
and give regular time through the whole year | 27:42 | |
as companions for | 27:45 | |
people in the hospital | 27:49 | |
who are desperately lonesome | 27:50 | |
and have no contact with the outside world, | 27:52 | |
or the tutoring programs for Negro students | 27:55 | |
in Southern communities, | 27:59 | |
as well as in Northern communities, | 28:00 | |
where kids, well, college students | 28:02 | |
will give hours of time to help, | 28:05 | |
tutoring with Negro students to high school level, | 28:08 | |
to bring them up to, | 28:11 | |
help to bring them up to levels of adequacy for | 28:14 | |
a college admission, | 28:19 | |
to newly integrated schools, | 28:22 | |
or boys' club work, | 28:25 | |
or social projects in the town. | 28:26 | |
This kind of activity | 28:31 | |
is a necessity. | 28:34 | |
It's not just an extracurricular luxury. | 28:34 | |
It's the redemption, | 28:39 | |
in reality of the student, | 28:42 | |
from the artificiality of a good deal | 28:46 | |
of his current, existential, Christian lingo. | 28:49 | |
It's the okay terms that | 28:54 | |
these students love to talk about are, | 28:56 | |
terms like the abyss, | 29:01 | |
or involvement, | 29:04 | |
or encounter, | 29:06 | |
or dread, | 29:09 | |
or dialogue. | 29:11 | |
But this talk's pretty | 29:15 | |
artificial and fancy. | 29:18 | |
I overheard one comment recently after both sessions | 29:20 | |
from a darling looking little campus cutie, | 29:24 | |
who said, "We had more fun talking about despair!" | 29:27 | |
(audience laughs) | 29:32 | |
Well, | 29:39 | |
image of a good deal of this lingo | 29:42 | |
is that of the | 29:44 | |
well-heeled boy | 29:46 | |
who was sitting in the sports car | 29:48 | |
with beer can in hand, | 29:49 | |
looking over this abyss of meaninglessness, | 29:51 | |
you know, | 29:55 | |
(audience chuckles) | ||
but all he does is artificially look over. | 29:56 | |
Another way, another moral imperative | 30:00 | |
to if one can't get the student | 30:03 | |
or himself across the tracks, | 30:05 | |
or to bring to the campus from across the tracks, | 30:07 | |
those young ministers who are working on the problems | 30:12 | |
of the inner city church, | 30:16 | |
for instance, | 30:19 | |
the east Harlem, | 30:20 | |
and similar projects, | 30:22 | |
or the new Negro leadership in the church. | 30:25 | |
I think people like Martin Luther King, | 30:28 | |
and Jim Robinson, | 30:31 | |
and many others, | 30:32 | |
who represent | 30:34 | |
in the place of the older campus evangelism visitors, | 30:39 | |
the new leadership emergent out of the church, | 30:45 | |
who have escaped the suburban captivity of the churches, | 30:51 | |
such | 30:55 | |
people | 30:58 | |
like | 31:02 | |
Kermit Meyers, | 31:07 | |
from New York, | 31:09 | |
represent a very compelling appeal of the strenuous, | 31:10 | |
the difficult, | 31:14 | |
the stringency, | 31:15 | |
the scandal of the gospel, | 31:17 | |
and students, I am persuaded, | 31:20 | |
respond morally with | 31:23 | |
honest, | 31:27 | |
honest support | 31:29 | |
and conviction, | 31:30 | |
to the scandal of the gospel. | 31:32 | |
They are, by and large, fed of course, | 31:36 | |
on the sweetness of the gospel, | 31:39 | |
in their own suburban backgrounds, | 31:41 | |
and where they can see, | 31:43 | |
and this is good reason why they are repulsed | 31:45 | |
by the usual church line, | 31:49 | |
and why, as I mentioned the other day, | 31:52 | |
they are strongly drawn toward theology | 31:55 | |
and strongly opposed to the church, | 31:58 | |
but they should be made aware | 32:02 | |
of the new churches that are appearing. | 32:03 | |
The moral point of all this shock treatment | 32:08 | |
and exposure is not just to shock, | 32:10 | |
for the gospel is scandal, | 32:15 | |
and redemption, | 32:19 | |
grace, | 32:22 | |
but it has to be bad news | 32:26 | |
before it becomes good news. | 32:27 | |
The point of this all is not just to remind students | 32:32 | |
how lucky they are that they don't have to live there, | 32:34 | |
where these other people live, | 32:39 | |
but to create in them a sense of guilt, | 32:41 | |
and moral responsibility, | 32:44 | |
an obligation, under the great commandment, | 32:46 | |
to make use of their education, | 32:50 | |
to serve the common wheel, | 32:52 | |
and to discover a Christian vocation | 32:54 | |
in the secular professions | 32:56 | |
of teaching and medicine | 32:58 | |
and government service, | 32:59 | |
in public life. | 33:00 | |
I hope that it's not wishful thinking | 33:04 | |
for me to say, | 33:06 | |
that I think there is emerging, | 33:09 | |
a kind of new character type, | 33:11 | |
beyond the operator, | 33:16 | |
and beyond the cautious, | 33:19 | |
smoothy, | 33:23 | |
and beyond the beatnik. | 33:25 | |
And I will call him the new Puritan, | 33:28 | |
not the old Puritan, | 33:33 | |
who's worried about moral trifles, | 33:34 | |
but the new Puritan, | 33:38 | |
Puritan in the sense | 33:40 | |
that he is one who lives obediently | 33:42 | |
to an inner moral principle, | 33:45 | |
that he is guided by | 33:50 | |
a sense of deep moral obligation. | 33:54 | |
He's not Riesman's other-directed man, | 34:02 | |
certainly, he's not even Reisman's inner-directed man. | 34:06 | |
He's the upper-directed man. | 34:09 | |
He's not Tillich's heteronomous man | 34:14 | |
or Tillich's autonomous man, | 34:16 | |
but he's Tillich's theonomous man. | 34:18 | |
He's morally serious about the Christian witness | 34:23 | |
to be made to public issues | 34:25 | |
in the realm of racial | 34:27 | |
and economic and political life. | 34:28 | |
And he's so involved in political affairs, | 34:30 | |
running, so to speak, with New York Times in one hand, | 34:35 | |
and the Bible in the other, | 34:39 | |
that he's taken out of his preoccupation | 34:42 | |
with matters of pietistic morality, | 34:45 | |
on matters of drinking | 34:48 | |
and smoking and sex. | 34:49 | |
In this realm of morality, | 34:51 | |
he has a mature, sort of take-it-or-leave-it attitude. | 34:53 | |
Take-it-or-leave-it, nonchalant about these matters | 35:00 | |
because he's more involved with prior matters, | 35:03 | |
weightier matters of the law: | 35:07 | |
justice, mercy, | 35:09 | |
and faith. | 35:11 | |
To somewhat to my embarrassment, | 35:16 | |
I noticed after I finished jotting down these scratches | 35:17 | |
about remarks I wanted to make, | 35:21 | |
that the theme for this conference | 35:23 | |
was the search for a new morality. | 35:25 | |
Well, this late stage of the game, | 35:30 | |
I'm afraid I have no wisdom to offer, | 35:33 | |
as to a new morality | 35:37 | |
to propose. | 35:43 | |
I suggest the search for a new morality | 35:44 | |
would take us back to an old morality, | 35:48 | |
biblical morality, if you like, | 35:53 | |
the morality of the love of God and neighbor, | 35:56 | |
transcendent of the | 36:01 | |
irrelevant, pietistic morality | 36:05 | |
of the churches, | 36:08 | |
transcendent of the | 36:13 | |
innovated, | 36:16 | |
liberal morality, | 36:18 | |
of the theological period | 36:21 | |
that nurtured most of us, | 36:23 | |
a morality grounded | 36:27 | |
on the | 36:30 | |
transcendent, | 36:32 | |
the morality obedient to the great commandment | 36:35 | |
whereby we can help as teachers, | 36:39 | |
as ministers of grace, | 36:42 | |
to recover in our own campuses, | 36:45 | |
campus communities, | 36:47 | |
something of the integrity of the Christian life, | 36:49 | |
in responsible obedience | 36:54 | |
to God's will. | 36:56 | |
(microphone scraping) | 37:00 | |
I don't know how to turn this jigger off. | 37:04 | |
Maybe you wanna leave it on for our discussion, | 37:06 | |
but let's take a few minutes | 37:09 | |
to talk some of this back and forth, maybe? | 37:11 | |
Can anyone turn this off? | 37:19 | |
Yeah. | 37:24 | |
- | You want to leave that on? | 37:25 |
- | Well you can't | 37:27 |
pick out the sound | 37:27 | |
- | Have to turn it off, so | |
- | I don't know whether you have really seen- | 37:33 |
Item Info
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