The Overview (Tuesday, March 8)
One father's hope for his son after a terminal cancer diagnosis, recovering an imaginative Christian political engagement, and more.
Before arriving at John Brown University in 2016 I spent two years teaching at Eastern Kentucky University. Caitlyn and I had moved to Richmond—a town about 30 minutes south of Lexington—with a new baby, growing toddler, and zero connections to the community. Like so much of our married lives to that point, we were again embarking on a new adventure.
Kentucky was the third state in which we had lived since getting married in 2009: First, Illinois, where we earned our graduate degrees; second, Washington, where I got a temporary teaching position; and finally, Kentucky, where I started my first permanent position. We started attending a local church almost immediately. Caitlyn met someone who would become a good friend at a farmer’s market. I enjoyed the ability to teach classes with (mostly) invested students. We even bought a house after renting for less than a year. Things were going great.
At the same time, I had always wanted to teach at a Christian university. Caitlyn and I had graduated from George Fox University, where both of us first experienced Christian education. I had fallen in love with how the university emphasized the integration of faith and learning,1 and how faculty would seamlessly connect their faith with their respective disciplines. After feeling called to go into higher education, teaching at this kind of a university was definitely a goal.
After arriving at EKU, I decided to take a bit of a break from the exhaustion of the job market and enjoy living in the moment, professionally, for the first time in, well, ever. I decided to occasionally check job openings with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, but nothing more.
Then, in September 2015, I saw a position announcement from a university I had heard of but knew next to nothing about: John Brown University. And over the course of the next few months—which culminated with a job offer in February 2016—it became clear that JBU was where we were supposed to be.
Which brings me to the above photo. Last week Siloam Springs was blessed with the first spring weather of the year, with temperatures reaching the mid-70s. I typically don’t teach classes outdoors, as I find students aren’t always as locked in as they would be in the classroom. But given the size and dynamics of my afternoon class on political philosophy, I decided to take a chance and head outside.
The result was one of the better discussions we’d had all semester. We discussed the 16th century political commentator Niccolo Machiavelli and his most famous work, The Prince. We discussed his approach to politics and whether it is (or isn’t) relevant to today’s American political system. We talked about Machiavelli’s amoral vision of politics and how Christians should respond to it. We made more than a couple references to The Office. It was fantastic.
Some days at JBU are certainly challenging. Not all days can be like the one above. But more often than not I am reminded of how blessed I am to do this kind of work. And looking back, it’s remarkable to see how God has orchestrated our lives over the years to bring us exactly where we’re supposed to be. What a blessing.
With that, here’s the Tuesday, March 8 edition of The Overview:
1. I’ve been a fan of Bill Simmons since college. Back then he was a writer for ESPN.com, where his regular entries on his “Sports Guy” blog mixed sports and culture in a way that was both entertaining and thoughtful. After leaving ESPN on less than friendly terms he founded The Ringer, which quickly expanded to dozens of podcasts and some of the best sports and culture writers around.2
One of these writers is Jonathan Tjarks, who has written on basketball for The Ringer for years. Recently, Tjarks was diagnosed with stage IV Ewing’s sarcomas, an aggressive and almost certainly fatal cancer. Last week, Tjarks shared a column that can only really be described as sermonic. A Christian, Tjarks shares the deepest doubts and struggles that accompanied his diagnosis:
I want to believe in a miracle. There have been people with stage IV sarcomas whose tumors never came back. No one knows why. Some things are still beyond the knowledge of medical science. I asked my doctor if I could be one of those people. He replied, “I am not the one who decides those things.”
I believe in a God who does. But I also know that He has chosen not to heal me. At least not yet. And that hurts.
Tjarks spends most of the time in the column considering the effects of his impending death on his young son. He writes about attending his own father’s funeral when he was 21, and recognizing the people’s names who were there, but not the people themselves. Tjarks wants his son to have different memories of the people now in Tjarks’s life:
I want him to wonder why his dad’s friends always come over and shoot hoops with him. Why they always invite him to their houses. Why there are so many of them at his games. I hope that he gets sick of them.
Tjarks cites verse after verse of scripture, especially those instructing Christians to care for the fatherless. And he closes with his motivation for spending however long he has left:
One thing I have learned from this experience is that you can’t worry about things that you can’t control. I can’t control what will happen to me. I don’t know how long I will be there for my son. All I can do is make the most of the time that I have left. That means investing in other people so they can be there for him.
I dare you to make it through Tjarks’ piece without tearing up. And to think it came from Simmons’ platform, who got his start writing columns like this one from 20 years ago, applying quotes from A Few Good Men to NBA teams and players. What a world we live in.
2. Pastor Ben Marsh observed how the Russian invasion of Ukraine sparked an important question: In a culture’s darkest moments, what should Christian political engagement look like? Alluding to one answer, Marsh tweeted,
Marsh’s article, memorably titled “Making Molotovs with the Small Group,” considers how Christian political engagement in the United States has the potential to become unimaginative. This is largely due to the relatively comfortable position Christians have been in for centuries. This is a real blessing, of course, but comfort has the potential to lead to apathy and even atrophy. In some sense, Christians in America have had no reason to consider what our engagement should look like beyond the occasional election. We’ve—especially white Christians, Marsh and myself—been otherwise safe and secure.
Marsh’s call is for American Christians to be more imaginative in our political and cultural engagement. Toward the end of his article, which is packed with references to scripture and includes tangible advice for believers seeking to make a difference—in Ukraine, and beyond—Marsh writes:
Where might your imagination lead, if you let it? Where might it go when you think of Ukraine? You can’t make molotovs with your small group, but you might still be a part of history in your personal efforts at relief. What about with other hot issues — abortion, gender issues, homelessness, parenting, etc. etc. What wild dream has the Lord set in your heart that you might just need to chase for a while? It might something [sic] with greater impact than you think possible.
It’s a long article, but worth a read.
3. The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis reported on a troubling phenomenon: young teens (especially girls) developing tics and twitches after prolonged social media use. Lewis chronicles how researchers have started to believe that these tics can be traced to social media influencers who claim to suffer from Tourette’s. In explaining how this is possible, Lewis writes,
Robert Bartholomew told me that the pandemic—and the lockdown and homeschooling measures used to contain it—had created a “perfect storm” for an illness spread through social media. Teenagers were isolated from their friends, stuck at home with their families, spending hours alone with their screens, with their usual routines knocked out.
Other experts noted that the pandemic didn’t cause the new tic disorder … although lockdown measures may have exacerbated it. One hypothesis is that some of us are “tic prone,” but display tics only when triggered by stress or another illness. This fits with existing research showing that many members of Generation Z are anxious, isolated, and depressed, with body-image troubles worsened by the perfect bodies and aspirational lives they see on TikTok and Instagram. They are part of a grand social experiment, the first cohort to grow up with the internet on smartphones, the first generation whose entire lives have been shaped by the demands of social-media algorithms. Tics and twitches may be their unconscious method of saying: I want out.
In case you were looking for another reason to be vigilant regarding social media, Lewis’ article offers a pretty good one.
This term has become sort of a cliche over the years in Christian higher education, and even though I’m tempted to roll my eyes when hearing it, it still captures the experience I had as a college student at George Fox and what we do daily at John Brown.
While some were skeptical of Simmons’ decision to leave ESPN the way he did, in 2020 Spotify purchased The Ringer (while leaving Simmons in control of his new empire) for almost $200 million.