Spotlight: Fall 2005

True Myth Shows Reality
In his writings and in his life, J.R.R. Tolkien believed that true myth allows us to see things as they were meant to be . . . So says Bradley Birzer, assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College and author of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth.

“Tolkien wrote in an oft-quoted letter to a close friend in 1953 that The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. . . .

“Indeed, Tolkien was very public about his faith. He once told an audience of Oxford dons, when it was rather unpopular to be open about one’s religious beliefs, that as much as he loved his academic specialty, philology, it was unnecessary for salvation. Tolkien, though, was much more cautious in his expression of his faith than was his closest friend, C.S. Lewis.

“Tolkien believed that the true Christian should be an artist, not a propagandist. In other words, Tolkien rather strongly argued in his academic as well as mythological works that one should use what T.S. Eliot called the ‘moral imagination.’ He should seek the higher, timeless truths, but put them in a new light.

“The artist becomes a ‘sub-creator,’ made in the image of God, the Creator. But, the human idea of sub-creation is to glorify Creation, never to mock or pervert it.

“Tolkien rejected the idea of art for art’s sake, or innovation for innovation’s sake. There was a truth, and the artist was especially gifted to tap into that truth. To abuse the gift of artistry for one’s own glorification is to turn enchantment to power and domination.”

—From an interview with ZENIT, an international Catholic news agency.

Where’s the Important Stuff?
News items of global importance such as the rapid shrinkage of the polar ice terrain or developments in the supply of oil are apt to be buried in obscure paragraphs on inner pages whilst the front page banner headlines are devoted to the personal foibles of some prominent person who happens to be prominent because he or she is prominent.

John Papworth, Anglican minister and political analyst, Fourth World Review #132, quoted in Utne, September-October 2005.

A Meaningful Life
My world is made meaningful not by what I can evaluate and define, but by what I can appreciate and adore. I find there is a profound difference between what I find interesting and what I find important.

—Ann E. Hossler, organist, in Sacred Journey, June 2004.

Prof Turns Student
Rebekah Nathan, a cultural anthropologist, often could not understand students’ behavior and lamented the malaise she saw among her pupils. So she decided to learn about them from a unique point of view. She became a student herself, going undercover to live in a dorm community, take classes, and find out what campus life is really like. In My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned about Becoming a Student, she writes: “A lot of the assumptions that professors and administrators make about student life are just wrong.”

According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, even though she had been an ethnographer in a remote village overseas, life on campus seemed foreign. “She struggled to understand the dialect of students, who spoke fast, lacing their conversation with the words like and totally. . . . At night, Ms. Nathan listened for clues that might help her understand her neighbors. Amid the thump of speakers and beeping of video games, the sounds of skateboards zipping down the hallways and drunk students vomiting in the bathrooms, she discovered the most ubiquitous word in student life: fun.

“. . . More surprising are Ms. Nathan’s observations of the way students’ demand for choice complicated the elusive ideal of community. Although students claimed to like the notion of a close-knit community, their own particular interests led them in too many different directions to make such a campus possible.

“. . . Although the project gave Ms. Nathan more compassion for her pupils, she does not let them off the hook completely. ‘I wish students knew how tough it is to get up here in front of a class and lecture,’ she says.”

—Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, July 29, 2005.

Population Clock

• Every eight seconds in the United States, there is a birth.
• Every 12 seconds, there is a death.
• Every 24 seconds, there is a new immigrant.
• Net, we gain a new person every 11 seconds.

—from American Demographics, July/August 2004.

The New SAT/ACT Toys
The iPod generation has a new set of toys. But these gizmos are designed to improve standardized-test scores.

Princeton Review, the test-preparation company, and Franklin Electric Publishers have started selling the Pocket Prep, a portable electronic device that helps students prepare for the SAT. . . . A generation that grew up on Pop-Tarts seems hungry for on-the-go tutoring as well.

Pocket Prep carries tutorials, practice tests, and a 5,000-word vocabulary list. Like a geeky cousin of handheld video game players, the slim plastic rectangle is about the size of a Palm Pilot. . . .

Students who have blown up thousands of animated starships on tiny screens will find Pocket Prep a tad sober (for one thing, it makes no noise). . . .

Princeton Review’s rival, Kaplan Inc., has introduced it’s own high-tech materials, including $19.95 test-preparation software for cell phones and PDAs that allows students to take ACT or SAT practice quizzes, play educational games, and interact with other test preppers.

Kaplan also sells the “Vocabulary Accelerator,” a compact disc of original pop songs packed with 50-cent words, including “flagrant” and “resplendent.” Sample lyric: “At this proximity you are deleterious to my tranquility.”

—Eric Hoover in the Chronicle of Higher Education, August 12, 2003.