Nearly twenty years ago, President Jimmy Carter delivered the LeRoy H. Pfund Lecture on February 24, 1992. The following article “President Carter urges Christians to compassion and action on behalf of others” by Margaret Irish documented the event and was featured in the April/May 1992 issue of the Wheaton Alumni magazine.

As a young person, Jimmy Carter had two ambitions. The first he accomplished when he attended the U.S. Naval Academy, becoming an officer in the Navy.

The second was to teach at a college or university. “Thanks to Ronald Reagan, I reached that ambition four years earlier than I’d anticipated,” Carter quipped, speaking to the packed house gathered in Edman Memorial Chapel for the LeRoy H. Pfund Lecture. His defeat in the 1980 election spelled the end of his presidency, but it gave him opportunities to serve that he would never have had if he had remained in office. And service, for Jimmy Carter, is more significant than his job title.

“The essence of Christianity, as described by Christ himself, is not preaching which is important hut is action on behalf of others,” Carter said. “Jesus reached out to the outcast, the despised, the people who were different. How do we translate that compassion into our own culture?” Carter emphasized that Christians must serve others and minister to their needs, rather than associating only with people like themselves.

He emphasized that much of the nation’s and the world’s suffering could be alleviated if its affluent citizens would more willingly share with those who had little or nothing. “The greatest discrimination today is that of rich people against poor people.”

The Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta is one example of an institution whose purpose is to address the needs of the poor, the homeless, the illiterate, the sick, and the outcast both in the United States and abroad. Carter challenged his audience to find ways to make a difference in the lives of others, one at a time. He cited the Atlanta Project, which is coordinating efforts between private enterprise, businesses, churches and government agencies in the city of Atlanta to react to disadvantaged people. Individuals can make a difference, “adopting” those in need, getting to know them, taking them to the doctor, teaching them to read, or taking time to be available for a child at risk.

Carter also expressed his conviction that the United States, in its role as a superpower, should he addressing problems such as hunger, disease, war, and human rights abuses in the world, “Our country should he totally committed to peace, not war … we have a direct responsibility to use our influence, whatever it might he.” He mentioned the Carter Center’s work in these areas, monitoring world conflict, working to improve the health of children in the Third World, finding ways to alleviate hunger. He warned, “When we think we’ve got it made, and that we are particularly blessed because we deserve to be blessed, then we have abandoned a major part of the faith in Christ that we claim is a driving force in our lives.”

At a press conference preceding the lecture, President Carter responded to questions from both journalists and students. He said he is encouraged that the United States is urging new Middle East peace talks, but felt that final settlement at this time is unlikely. Carter considers the Democratic presidential candidates to be capable leaders who should not be characterized as political “lightweights.” He had no strong preference among them, he said, “but once we choose one, I will give him my support.” He also felt that the contenders are “fair game” for the press, which “has an obligation and a right to scrutinize their past actions and let the American people make a judgment.”

The key theme of this year’s Pfund Lecture became Carter’s message of action on behalf of others. Listeners heard it stressed repeatedly by a man intent on meeting the challenges of a needy world with hope, enthusiasm, and Christian commitment.

“Something can be done,” Carter said. “We can prove that hopelessness can be overcome. We can do it with justice, humility, service, compassion, love, and peace.”

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The Leroy H. Pfund Lectureship was established in 1987 by Mr. Fred Bostrom, Sr., in memory of his wife, Ragnhild; it was named for Coach Lee Pfund ’49, who served the College for more than 38 years, first as a coach and then as director of the alumni association. The lectureship brings to Wheaton College’s campus leaders of American political and public life to enhance the students’ awareness of public Policies, issues, and views, and offer them a broad range of perspectives. The 1992 Pfund Lecture brought former President Jimmy Carter to Wheaton.

The Wesley G. Pippert Papers in the Wheaton College Buswell Library Special Collections has a wealth of information about the former president. Wes Pippert came to Washington, D.C. in 1976 in order to cover Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign as the principal UPI reporter. Pippert followed Carter to the White House and was assigned there from 1977 to 1981. He also wrote “The Spiritual Journey of Jimmy Carter: In His Own Words” (1978).

LISTEN to President Carter’s 1992 Pfund lecture (mp3 – 01:04:09)

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Twenty years ago, the Wheaton Alumni magazine began a series of articles in which Wheaton faculty told about their thinking, their research, or their favorite books and people. Professor of English and Dean of Humanities and Theological Studies Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner was featured in the Spring 1994 issue.

In 1980, after many years of “sanctified cool,” balancing tenuously the professional requirements of my degree program with my faith interests and questions, I found myself teaching at Wheaton in an environment that actually required me to make the connections between faith and learning which had been considered irrelevant in graduate school. Much to my surprise, in those early years at Wheaton, I discovered that in spite of my hard work at attempting to bring these portions of my life and thought together, Athens and Jerusalem did not unite spontaneously. The result was often a defensive posture about the spiritual integrity of my individual discipline.

I taught at Wheaton ten years before I began to integrate faith and learning in a way which was neither reductionistic nor so abstract as finally not to be integration at all. My eyes were opened in a seminar funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities at the University of Chicago. The professor leading the seminar, a Jewish man attracted to the writings of Luther, was the first person outside of the Wheaton community to challenge me to take my doctrinal beliefs seriously enough to allow them to direct my literary questions. What was different about his approach? What I learned from him was that true integration might seem on the surface to be merely the integration of beliefs with biblical, doctrinal, and literary texts, but it is also, for the Christian scholar, a slippery and dislocating spiritual experience, leading often to questions that propositional language cannot answer.

Only when I began to study the complex network of relationships between and within the academic disciplines and the arts did I discover the way to begin to combine my thinking and my believing. To put it simply, the integration of faith and learning is, finally, a profoundly interdisciplinary task. College professors are primarily specialists; few are trained across disciplines. Thus I began to understand my earlier frustrations as symptoms of a problem that plagues the entire academic world, not just Wheaton. We have all been locked into our narrow areas, and we have been living under the illusion that these small spaces are complete microcosms. The fact is that the imagination of the scholar has not been exercised in a wide enough arena.

Many of us who attended college as English majors in the 1960s have spent our literary lives trying to crawl out of the hole into which we were pushed– the hole that separated literary texts from historical, psychological, biographical, political, and theological contexts. Now that I have been freed, I am also wary of being sold into the slavery of current thinking that obliterates texts entirely. But that is another essay and material for future conversation.

My current interests put me in the general vicinity of, if not entirely within, the group of scholars called the New Historicists, primarily literary scholars who have rediscovered history and who are redefining the discipline of English studies. The New Historicists view literature as an arena for the play of political power, and their task is to reconstruct and rediscover the political subtexts of classic literary works and introduce other cultural artifacts as competing texts.

I will never be a true New Historicist because I believe that imaginative literature has a special place in the humanities. I believe, for example, that poetry contains truth in a way that philosophy or history or theology cannot. But I must admit that the exposure to the methods and approaches of New Historicism has changed my teaching. My Renaissance literature class, for example, now contains, in addition to poetry, stories, and plays by Spenser, More, Shakespeare, Sydney, Wyatt, and Kyd, readings from Luther’s letters and essays, Margaret More Roper’s letters and translations of Erasmus, Elizabeth I’s speeches, selections from Calvin’s Institutes, and a treatise on education written by Ascham. I am now much more concerned about teaching literature in the context of the cultures that created it. I believe that this is the future direction of literary studies.

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Jill Baumgaertner received a bachelor’s degree from Emory in 1968, a master’s from Drake in 1969, and a doctorate from Emory in 1980. She previously taught at Valparaiso University and joined the Wheaton faculty in 1980. She is the author of Finding Cuba (Chimney Hill Press, 2001), a collection of poems that explores her Cuban ancestry, and three poetry chapbooks:Leaving Eden (White Eagle Coffee Store Press, 1995), Namings (Franciscan University Press, 1999), and My Father’s Bones (Finishing Line Press, 2006). She has also written a textbook/anthology, Poetry (Harcourt Brace, 1990); and Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring (Cornerstone Press, 1998). She was a Fulbright fellow to Spain, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the winner of the White Eagle Coffee Store Press’s poetry chapbook contest, the Goodman Award in Poetry, an Illinois Arts Council Award, the Illinois Prize of the Rock River Poetry Contest, and the CCL Midwest Poetry Contest. She serves as poetry editor of The Christian Century and is past president of the Conference on Christianity and Literature.