While I cannot imagine the University's leadership would allow the explicit Christian wording to be attenuated, it has left me pushing a little deeper into the entire question of just what it means to be a Christian university at all and whether we will be committed to the Christian reality which birthed this college as we move into the future.

May I offer a brief, frail witness here and then lift up two observations? A Place Where God Stood at the Door and Knocked Sewanee was the place and time when God stood at the door of a young man who only knew God by rumor and knocked with a strike of my own name.

I'm sure hundreds of past students have wound up in the fi nal canto of the Paradiso and yearned for that love which moves the sun and the other stars. I began to intuit while at Sewanee that nothing the world has to offer would ever take me to that face which I desperately wanted to see. Professor Ralston planted an unsettling yearning to know the Lord through the Bible; and there was a late night ramble through Isaiah at his home in which the knocking came again.

And there was Mr. Lytle scolding me out of love at a time I was nothing but rude. The poems of Donne, the struggle of Hardy to believe anything at all; a conversation with Hugh Caldwell about Jesus Christ marked me; and I never took a class under him. Sewanee is no Wheaton College Sewanee is no Wheaton College; and I don't want to romanticize my memories. But unspoken and spoken, in veiled intimations and in plain witness the Christian gospel touched my life. Knowing Christ as the way, truth and the life began with that knocking. Might I offer two observations?

One. As I ruminate on my years at Sewanee, Christian presence most profoundly broke through to me in specifi c Christian faculty. While the Anglican ethos and the architecture and chapel life were important for me, I wonder if any of you agree that it was and is in the living, intense Christian commitment of teachers who most marked you? When I trace it all back to the source of the stream, it is specific people- Ralston, Reishman, Caldwell, and many others-- sometimes to delight, sometimes to confront, always to allure, who believed that in Christ the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

I am aware of the sensitivity of hiring faculty in an unbiased way; and yet, if we are a Christian university, is it possible that we at least feel the importance of having Christian faith expressed in a solid number of professors who might have infinite impact on students?

Can we have enough clear and winsome Christian teachers such that some sort of spontaneous combustion occurs?

Two. In Proverbs we read: Do not move the ancient boundary stones set up by your forefathers. (Proverbs 22:28). An intriguing verse. I think the concern here is the danger of having something precious imperceptibly fade or diminish.

The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches by James Burtchaell is a magisterial (hugely expensive as well) treatment of how the boundary stones have shifted and faded in the life of some great universities which began enfl amed with Christian heart but where that explicit witness is now silent.

I am not suggesting Sewanee is on that trail; but, nevertheless, might we now ask, among ourselves and faculty and with the Vice-Chancellor and Chaplain, might we now ask with renewed intensity: Just what does it mean to be a Christian university? Are we willing to be so-not merely having the words in a Statement; and, if so, how do we strengthen the presence of the grace of God in Jesus Christ in this place?

In good faith:

John MacReadie Barr III
College '71
South Carolina Trustee

http://www.dioceseofsc.org/December06_January07_Jubilate_Deo.pdf