Faculty Conversations

What Are Our Faculty Members Reading and Studying?

In this installment: Dr. Donald Guthrie reflects on Christian Education trends--with thoughts on ways to strengthen the various models employed to reach, engage, and retain Sunday School attendees.



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And Library Director Jim Pakala shares these reflections on a number of books which--while not directly related to Christian Education--are worth reading and reflecting upon during the Advent season, and into the winter months beyond:

The Loss of a Loved One - People who have lost loved ones feel that loss most acutely during the Christmas and Holiday seasons. Jane Brody’s Guide to the Great Beyond: A Practical Primer to Help You and Your Loved Ones Prepare Medically, Legally, and Emotionally for the End of Life, by Jane Brody (Random House, 2009) is an excellent book on this topic. The book also covers helpful things to say and do—as well as much, much more—for the dying, the family, and all concerned--especially as even ministers and medical personnel can say or do things that are very unhelpful amid both the facing of death and during bereavement.

Before Google Organized the World of Information, Samuel Johnson organized, and standardized, the English language. In this new book, Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), Henry Hitchings looks at the life and lifestyle of Johnson. 

For 150 years (until the massive Oxford English Dictionary), “the dictionary” meant Samuel Johnson’s famous work. It was all the more astounding because one person rather than a team of capable people produced it. (Johnson had merely clerical help.) The Samuel Johnson that people are familiar with is the post-dictionary ubiquitous man of fame, being painted as he sat in Lord Chesterfield’s ante-room and meeting in the Literary Club with Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds and other notables. But he suffered poverty, failures, and problems from birth or childhood including an unsightly appearance, lack of sight in one eye, partial deafness, and scrofula—a disease resulting from his wet-nurse’s milk being infected with tuberculosis.
 
“Popular wisdom held that an infant could be cured of its ailments if touched by the monarch.” Johnson was only two when taken to London for this, but he had vague "recollection of meeting a lady in diamonds wearing a long black hood. This was Queen Anne, and Johnson wore for the rest of his life the ‘touchpiece’ she gave him—a thin gold amulet bearing on one side an image of the archangel Michael, and on the other that of a ship in full sail” (p. 13f).

Here are a couple of other things that struck me as I skimmed all the way through this book one evening. Having inherited only 20 pounds sterling from his father, Johnson unsuccessfully tried to revive the ailing family business. He next worked for a school whose patron was "Sir Wolston Dixie, an irascible man who liked to settle arguments with his fists, and Johnson was expected to serve as his chaplain.... We may infer the true harshness of Dixie’s character from his reaction, in later life, to the discovery that his daughter Ann was enjoying secret assignations with a young man in Bosworth Park. Instead of speaking to his daughter or her suitor, Dixie set mantraps throughout the surrounding area. One of these traps was activated soon afterwards—by Ann, who died of her wounds."

Eventually Johnson went to the capital. "London was a thrillingly busy commercial centre, undergoing extraordinary flux.... By mid-century [1750] its population had climbed to 700,000. Yet even then it was cluttered with remnants of medieval life, and when Johnson arrived in the 1730s, the city was quite primitive. For instance, there was just one bridge across the Thames. Only in 1761 was the process of pulling down the city’s medieval gates begun. Traitors’ heads were displayed at Temple Bar.... Soldiers were ritually flogged in St James’s Park.... The city’s green spaces, rather than being its ‘lungs’ as they are today, proved hospitable to sewage, robbers and cattle."

I’ve always loved Samuel Johnson, and as on September 18 we observed the tercentenary of his birth in 1709, I’ve come to appreciate him more as one who coped with depression through his life and one who took in many indigent people even in the years he labored on his dictionary, a first of its kind in English and one which tended to stabilize the language at the time and has influenced it ever since.

Rev. Jim Pakala currently serves as the Library Director.

Listen to last month's faculty interview with Dr. Jimmy Agan on John Calvin.