After heightened interest following the centennial of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and publication of the American Scientific Affiliation’s Evolution and Christian Thought Today, edited by Russell Mixter, on February 16, 1961 Wheaton hosted a science symposium, titled Origins and Christian Thought, that eventually stirred up significant controversy for the college. Attendees from the community, particularly a local pastor, spread word that Wheaton was “countenancing evolution and theistic evolution.” Once this was published in conservative journals president V. Raymond Edman received a deluge of concerned mail. Each letter was answered with several documents being sent as enclosures. All this led to a footnote being added to Wheaton’s Statement of Faith that read: “Wheaton College is committed to the Biblical teaching that man was created by a direct act of God and not from previously existing forms of life; and that all men are descended from the historical Adam and Eve, first parents of the entire human race.”
Category Archives: Wheaton College Archives
On My Mind – Roger Lundin
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. Blanchard Professor of English Roger Lundin was featured in the April/May 1991 issue.
This spring I taught The Brothers Karamazov for the fifteenth time; I imagine that over the years I have reread it at least ten times. What is striking is that my experience is as fresh today as it was when I first stood trembling before a class in 1979 trying to unravel some of that great book’s many mysteries. Teaching a novel as rich as The Brothers Karamazov does not involve straining to find something new to say about an all too familiar subject; instead, each time I work through that book, I simply try to remain alert to what it is saying afresh to me and my students about the world in which God has placed us.
When I read The Brothers Karamazov for the first time as a freshman at Wheaton in 1968, Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov addressed my deepest anxieties about faith and doubt. I first taught the novel more than a decade later, only a few months after the Jonestown Massacre I was haunted by the uncanny parallels between the world of the Grand Inquisitor and the totalitarian rule of Jim Jones over his sect. And as I taught the book this past semester, the Persian Gulf War brought home the power of Ivan Karamazov’s struggles with questions of suffering, especially the suffering of innocent children. I teach in full confidence that a decade from now this old book will still illuminate the dark and baffling events of that new day.
Several years ago, the Christian critic Edmund Fuller wrote in his valedictory column for the Wall Street Journal that he was unimpressed by the saying, “You are what you eat.” To Fuller, the far more interesting generalization is, “You are what you read.” The “printed word gives us the extraordinary freedom to choose the intellectual company we will keep, to select those with whom, in spirit, we will walk.” That freedom is a privilege, and “in the highest sense it is a duty, in at least a due proportion of our reading time, Paraphrasing Joshua, ‘Choose you this day whom you will read.'”
As an undergraduate, I came to Wheaton as a new Christian in search of the intellectual and spiritual company of which Fuller spoke. When Beatrice Batson, Arthur Holmes, Morris Inch, and others introduced me to the likes of Augustine, Luther, Dostoevsky, and Karl Barth, I prized the opportunity of entering into dialogues with powerful minds struggling with issues of life and death, of justice and forgiveness. I especially appreciated the fearlessness of my teachers in making me confront the most difficult matters of the human spirit. I profited from encountering the negations of Nietzsche as well as the affirmations of Luther; I needed to hear Emily Dickinson’s questioning of God as much I needed to be strengthened by the poetry of George Herbert; and as a Christian trying to comprehend his world, I needed to understand the secularity of Harvey Cox as well as hear modern words of promise from Helmut Thielicke. Whether being challenged or comforted by works from the distant or recent past, I was learning how to live as a Christian by listening to voices from that past.
As I have taught at Wheaton over the last decade, my sense of the power of the past has become coupled with an awareness of the fragility of what Robert Bellah, in Habits of the Heart, calls “communities of memory.” A genuine community, a “community of memory does not forget its past. In order not to forget that past, a community is involved in retelling its story.” This is one service that a Christian liberal arts education can perform for Christ and the Church in a fractured and forgetful world. By bringing to life the history of human thought and suffering, and by doing so in dialogue with the biblical witness, the Christian teacher is helping to hand down what the Apostle Paul calls the “treasure” we carry in our “earthen vessels.”
Teaching at Wheaton, then, involves storytelling of a special kind. In a remarkable recent book, After Virtue, the moral philosopher Alasdair Maclntyre argues that “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'” A liberal arts education enables students to see the relationship between their individual stories and the broader cultural story they have been born into and the special history they have become a part of in Christ. The prophet Micah asks, “What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Whatever its flaws, a liberal arts education at Wheaton is a remarkable thing because of the challenge it sets for students and teachers alike to learn afresh what it means to obey such a command.
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Dr. Roger Lundin ’71, Blanchard Professor of English, returned to Wheaton in 1978 to teach literature after earning a master of theological studies at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, and his master’s and doctorate in English at the University of Connecticut. He was named junior teacher of the year in 1984 and senior teacher of the year in 1995. Some of Lundin’s published works include: Literature through the Eyes of Faith, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, and Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age.
To the Moon!
On this 40th anniversary year of the Apollo 14 space mission it is appropriate to consider Wheaton’s relationship to space.
For nearly 70 years a domed observatory, resembling a derelict space capsule fallen to Earth, stood conspicuously on the front lawn of Blanchard Hall. With its telescopic eye poised to the stars, the “Lemon,” as it was nicknamed, informed generations of students about the graceful syncopations of celestial bodies. 
Since its 1972 relocation to Camp Honey Rock, the Lemon has been replaced by two successive observatories, both situated atop Wheaton’s science buildings. Since its inception Wheaton College has studied the metaphysical Heaven of the Bible, but the observatory symbolizes its engagement with the physical heavens – and those who’ve set their gaze on that boundless expanse.
Harold Lee Alden, born in Chicago, graduated from Wheaton College in 1912. He acquired his master’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1913. After that he earned his doctorate in astronomy in 1917 from the University of Virginia, where he researched at the McCormick Observatory, using its 26-inch telescope, one of the largest in the world. In 1925 Yale developed a new telescope and shipped it to Johannesburg, South Africa, to observe the clear southern skies. Alden, sent to direct the program, lived there with his family for nearly 20 years, returning to the University of Virginia in 1945, where he served as professor of astronomy and director of the Observatory until retiring in 1960. He died at age 74. As one of 500 deceased men and women of science, including luminaries like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Alden was honored to have a crater on the dark side of the Moon named after him.
As a youngster Paul W. Gast, also from Chicago, suffered poor health. Often staying home he read books and magazines like Moody Monthly, from which he learned about Wheaton College. “My ambition has always been research and experimentation,” he wrote on his application. “…And I felt if I was to go into this field it was necessary to go to college.” While at Wheaton, where he was recognized as a top student in chemistry, Gast met his future wife, Joyce, with whom he would parent three children. Graduating in 1952 he pursued advanced education and taught at several universities, notably as Professor of Geology at the University of Minnesota. In 1970 he was hired by NASA as Chief of the Planetary and Earth Sciences Division at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas. As a member of the Lunar Sample Analysis Planning Team, he advised NASA on the disposition of lunar samples brought to Earth by the Apollo missions. For his exemplary service Dr. Gast was awarded NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal, the Geochemical Society’s V.M. Goldschmidt Medal and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Space Science Award. He was president of the Volcanology, Geochemistry and Petrology Section of the American Geochemistry Union, in addition to publishing numerous articles detailing the origin of volcanic rocks, the chemistry of Earth’s upper mantle and geochronology. In 1973 Wheaton College recognized him with its Alumni Service to Society Award. Sadly, Gast had been earlier diagnosed with cancer and died at age 43 in March of that year. “His death,” eulogized geochemist Dr. J. Lawrence Kulp, “is a loss to the nation, to science, to NASA, to his many friends and colleagues, but most deeply to those he loved – his family. May his memory strengthen us, may it enrich our lives and may it turn us to God. That was his desire.”
Grote Reber did not attend Wheaton College, though many of his relatives did. In 1937 Reber, using parts from the University of Chicago and elsewhere, built in his parents’ back yard in downtown Wheaton a radar dish for cosmic radio reception. For ten years he was the only active radio astronomer in the world, listening to the weak but constant static of the solar system. In 1944 he published his discoveries on radio wave transmissions in the Astrophysical Journal. His research paved the way for satellite communications, AM and FM radio bands and cell phones. Reber’s radar dish is now displayed in Green Bank, West Virginia, on the grounds of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Reber’s mother, a school teacher, stimulated her son’s interest in science with articles written by her former pupil, Edwin Hubble, another explorer of interstellar mysteries. Born in Missouri, Hubble lived for several years in the city of Wheaton, though he did not attend Wheaton College. Graduating from Wheaton High School, he entered the University of Chicago; then, as a Rhodes Scholar, Oxford University. In 1923 he published his paper, “Island Universes,” revealing his discoveries regarding redshifts, the increased wavelengths of radiation emitted by a celestial object. The nebulae farther away, he observed, were receding at the fastest rate, indicating an expanding universe. His seminal work placed him on the cover of Time magazine in 1930. National Geographic cited him as possibly the most important astronomer since Galileo, and Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time stated that “Hubble’s discovery that the Universe is expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the 20th Century.” Not only is a middle school in Wheaton named after Hubble, but so is an orbiting telescope, known for its occasional malfunctions as much as for its spectacularly successful functionality. Edwin Hubble died in 1953.
Shannon Lucid was born in Shanghai, China, of parents working with China Inland Mission. When China closed to missionaries, the family moved to Bethany, Oklahoma. From 1960-62 Shannon attended Wheaton College, but departed before completing due to tuition increases, finishing her advanced education at the University of Oklahoma. In 1978 NASA selected her as an astronaut for its Space Shuttle flight crew. Flying multiple missions, Lucid held the record for most hours in orbit of any woman in the world; her record was broken in 2002. She also held the United States single mission flight endurance record on the Russian Space Station Mir. She was been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Russian Order of Friendship Medal. When asked by reporters if she found God in space, Dr. Lucid replies: “No. God found me years ago. That is your story.”
Some information for this entry is derived from Mary Anne Phemister’s 32 Wheaton Notables, their stories and where they lived.
Hamming it up
In March 1937 a group of radio enthusiasts formed the Tower Radio Club. Using its own funds the club built a 1/2 kiloWatt transmitter that could reach forty states. Under the direction of physics professor Paul E. Stanley the club trained students in radio communication. The club was also able to meet some of the communication needs of the college. The club would also broadcast football games from DeKalb, as well as the North Central College basketball classic.
Former member Clayton Howard ’39 used the skills he picked up in those early years as he later would serve as a technician at HCJB (Heralding Christ Jesus’ Blessings) radio station in Quito, Ecuador. He worked at HCJB for over forty years and was well known as the host of the DX Partyline show. Upon his retirement Radio Moscow broadcast “The living legend of the Andes has retired!” The club continued on for several more decades after Howard’s time.
But when Rich Boyd ’74 arrived at Wheaton College in 1970 he was an DXer (distancer) and wanted to join up with Wheaton’s club ham station, because, as he saw it, every college certainly must have one. He asked around and had no success in making contact. Until, that is, when he spotted the radio antennae perched atop Blanchard Tower. Tracing the cable from the “tribander” he saw them loop into a window in the tower. Some snooping and detective work helped him locate the hamshack on the fourth floor tower room (renamed the Arthur Holmes Seminar room after the 1990 remodeling).
Once he made his way inside Boyd found a copy of the club’s ham license and found that the station hadn’t been used since the fifties. The radio gear was in mint condition underneath the dusty tarps. Boyd soon got the club back up and running with a dozen or so other guys.
Just as the radio club continued on for several decades after Clayton Howard’s years, so too did the club go on after Boyd’s time. The Tower Radio Club was operating in the early 1990s when the Internet was mainly for academic use and the World Wide Web was yet the rage. However, today, in the 2010s ham radio operation may be less visible to the average person, but its usefulness is significant, particularly during times of natural disaster as was seen during Hurricane Katrina.
Our Survival in the Nuclear Age – Robert McNamara
February 4 marks the anniversary of the first U.S. helicopter being shot down over Viet Nam in 1962, just two months after helicopters arriving in Viet Nam to provide assistance to the South Vietnamese troops. There are few names associated with the entry into and the escalation of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam than Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He had overseen the growth of U.S. military non-combatant “advisers” from 900 to 16,00. There were well over one-half million troops in Viet Nam by the middle of 1968. McNamara’s legacy is tied to the Viet Nam era and the military strategies employed. Despite the negative assocations his defense expertise and intellect were still sought after. On February 4, 1988 McNamara delivered the the annual Tiffany Lecture on Foreign Affairs at Wheaton College. Mr. McNamara spoke on “Our Survival in the Nuclear Age.”
The Tiffany Memorial Lecture on Foreign Affairs aims to foster interest in and understanding of international affairs at Wheaton. The Tiffany fund was established to honor the memory of Orin Tiffany, a long-time Wheaton history professor who had a passion for foreign affairs. Prof. Tiffany had the honor of attending the 1945 San Francisco Conference that established the United Nations. Past speakers include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mark Hatfield, John Lewis Gaddis, Robert Pastor, Anthony Lake, Robert Seiple, and James Turner Johnson.
Books Without End
For various reasons books occasionally do not make it into a reader’s hands; and so the book that might-have-been acquires a sort of mystique. “A lost book,” writes Stuart Kelly in The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll Never Read (2005), “is susceptible to a degree of wish fulfillment. The lost book, like the person you never dared asked to the dance, becomes infinitely more alluring simply because it can be perfect only in the imagination.” The simplest form of loss, notes Kelly, is destruction. An infamous example is the legendary Library of Alexandria, supposedly holding all the wisdom of the ancient world, burning to ashes in a single night. Other books are sacrificed to carelessness, as when a certain publisher moved offices, absentmindedly leaving behind manuscripts in a building slated for immediate demolition. Some books never achieve completion because of the death of the author, as when Charles Dickens expired before solving The Mystery of Edwin Drood, or Geoffrey Chaucer reached his eternal destination before his storytelling pilgrims reached their earthly destination in The Canterbury Tales. Often writers simply lose interest in a project. Probably every archive holding printed matter contains unpublished manuscripts.
The Wheaton College Archives & Special Collections houses a few such documents, material undoubtedly meant to be edited, packaged and distributed to the public, but is now foldered neatly in acid-free boxes and shelved in a climate-controlled facility. A brief survey follows:
The second president of Wheaton College, Dr. Charles Blanchard, left for posterity Psychological Foundations, a book-length manuscript discovered as a worn, yellowed roll in the Blanchard home in 1949 by Dr. Clyde Kilby and Miss Julia Blanchard. It advances Blanchard’s observations regarding the development of the “soul life.”
The late Dr. Joe McClatchey (SC-45), professor of English at Wheaton College, wrote The Praise of God in Literature: From Homer to Hopkins, a 400-page study of worship in western literature as seen throughout the centuries.
Jeanne Murray Walker (SC-72), poet, playwright and Professor of English at the University of Delaware, penned a young adult novel entitled Stranger, dated 1989. Though her editors were favorable and encouraged revision, the book was not published.
Academic Arthur Christy (SC-82), recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Intellectual History and American Literature, committed several years to researching The Thoreau Fact Book, reflecting his interest in the New England transcendentalists. It remained unfinished upon his death in 1946.
The brilliant missionary and political professor, Dr. Kenneth Landon (SC-38), husband of Margaret Landon, author of Anna and the King of Siam, composed an unpublished history of Malaya, along with several uncollected short stories, some of which initially appeared in the Saturday Evening Post.
And, among the papers of Madeleine L’Engle (SC-03), author of A Wrinkle in Time, lay several unpublished manuscripts, including sermons, short stories, retreat addresses, a handwritten novel called The Feast of Stephen and a nearly completed novel called A Lost Innocent, featuring Camilla, who first appeared in Camilla Dickinson (1951) and later in A Live Coal in the Sea (1996). Also archived is the text for an illustrated children’s book titled Moses, Prince of Egypt, intended for release with the 1998 DreamWorks animated film.
Though “lost” to the general public, these works are fortunately still available for inspection in Wheaton’s Manuscript Reading Room.
Mary Bent Blanchard
This month marks the 120th anniversary of Mary Bent Blanchard’s death who died on January 11, 1890.
While traveling to California to visit her daughter Sonora Caroline, Mary died at age seventy-one in East Las Vegas, New Mexico. A fuller account is given in Four Hazardous Journeys of the Reverend Jonathan Blanchard by Raymond P. Fischer (grandson of Jonathan and Mary Blanchard).
Another account of Mary’s passing is recorded by Selima Blanchard Allen, Jonathan’s sister. In her diary on Saturday, January 4, 1890, she wrote: “Bro. Jonathan & sis. Mary preparing to go to California, they are very feeble.” On January 6, she noted that “The infirmed state of Bro. & Sister gives us anxiety, but it seemed to be the best they could do: So we have left it all with the Lord.” Her next entry is on January 14 where she wrote that they had received “telegrams & letters, giving account Sister Mary seemed to pass away quietly Pres. C.A. Blanchard started from Peoria to meet his Father.” In following days she provides small details of the wake and funeral.
“Where the Law of God is the Law of the Land…”
January 19 is the birthday of Jonathan Blanchard and 2011 marks the bicentennial of his birth. Blanchard had several careers of significance prior to his coming to the dreary open prairies of Wheaton Illinois in the late 1850s. He had taken great risks as one of “The Seventy” disciples of abolitionism. He was a very successful pastor in Cincinnati. He was active in getting the Liberty Party in Ohio off the ground and was friend of future members of Congress and the U. S. Supreme Court, even serving to introduce the two. He was offered a professorship of the fledgling Oberlin College and the presidency of a vibrant activist mission institute. In addition he represented his nation at the second World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London and served as one of its vice-presidents. He also publicly debated the sinfulness of slavery with a fellow minister over four days for hours each day (these were later published and can easily be found in bookshops and libraries worldwide). He also debated Stephen Douglass. Finally, before his trek from the prosperous Galesburg to Wheaton, Jonathan Blanchard served as the second president of Knox College. His able skills brought the school recognition and solid finances.
In this midst of this great career was an address that Jonathan Blanchard gave to the Society of Inquiry at Oberlin College in 1839. It was this address, A Perfect State of Society, that Jonathan Blanchard detailed his hopes and aspirations for a nation. It was these ideals that shaped his life and career as he sought to ameliorate the ills of society to usher in a state of society that would be ready for the reign of Jesus Christ. It was not that the world and society would have reached sinlessness but that things were in such order, where what needed restraint was restrained, that there was harmony. Like children need discipline, so too elements of society needed structure and restraint.
In The Perfect State of Society Blanchard sought to:
- Specify some things which we are not to expect; — and
- Some things we ARE to look for in a Perfect State of Society.
- Suggest some of the ways and means by which this desired condition of things is to come.
Blanchard didn’t want his listeners, and later his readers, to misunderstand. This perfect state of society was not a return to Edenic glory. It was a place where the Gospel had done for all what it could do for one. The Gospel’s function was to restore and reclaim. This society would “take up sinful mortals and fit them for heaven.” “Society is perfect where what is right in theory exists in fact; where practice coincides with principle and the law of God is the law of the land.”
If one wants to understand the life and mind of Jonathan Blanchard, particularly on this bicentennial, then one must understand and engage A Perfect State of Society. This address will not only help you understand this forgotten figure of 19th-century American history, but it will help you understand the time in which he lived–a time filled with Utopian ideals.
– Download A Perfect State of Society, 1839 (17 pages)
What a character…
In 1953 William Akin, generous rare book donor to Wheaton College, recounted in a Union League Club publication that while working for the Chicago Daily News he found himself in San Antonio, Texas and had a chance meeting with, what he called, using as he described it, the radio-parlance of the day, “a character.”
As he was making his way to his room in the Plaza Hotel he passed a room from which emanated singing accompanied by some guitar music. To Akin the music sound quite familiar so he knocked on the door. Being invited in Akin found Carl Sandburg sitting on the bed, in a crouching position with his shoes off. There Sandburg, who Akin always found to be unusual and unorthodox, was playing the guitar and singing to himself. Akin enjoyed the company and music for over an hour.
Sandburg was an avid guitar player and had the chance to meet Andres Segovia in 1938. Sanburg had followed Segovia since hearing his recordings twenty years earlier. The meeting with the father of modern classical guitar helped to reinvigorate Sandburg and his writing.
One can now purchase recordings, once long-unavailable, of Sandburg singing folk songs like “Cigarettes Will Spoil Yer Life” and “We’ll Roll Back The Prices.”
For Whom the Bell Tolls
This recollection by Dr. Wendell White ’05 of Los Angeles was submitted to the Wheaton College Alumni Magazine (Feb. 1958) for a feature called “We Asked for Good Old Stories.”
I had returned to Wheaton a week before the school semester commenced. I was downtown in the stores and a Western Union agent got the word and came across the street and told us the startling and tragic news that President McKinley had been assassinated. I jumped on my bicycle and rode up to the college building and over to the Tower as fast as I could make it. I climbed up to where I could reach the bell rope and rang the bell and kept on ringing it. Then to keep anyone from stopping me, I climbed up above the trap door pulling the rope with me and kept on ringing where no one could get to me.
First I saw professor Fischer coming over in his old one horse buggy with his gray horse. Then Professor Whipple came waddling over from the dormitory where they were staying. Soon Professor Straw and Professor Mullenix came. Many people came to the Tower and they tried to stop me from ringing the bell but I only climbed up farther where they couldn’t get through. The trap door was not only closed under my feet but I had to pull a big timber over it. After I had tolled the bell for a long time, I climbed down to where the crowd was waiting to get their hands on me. The moment I saw them I said, “Didn’t you know that the President of the United States has been shot?” And everyone left without a word.