Trinitas Blog

A Trinitas board member sent me an interesting article recently, entitled “When Knights Surrender Their Swords, Beasts Will Devour Maidens.” The author, Paul Bois, has written hundreds of articles expositing the Christian perspective on a host of political and social issues. I haven’t read them all, but this one had a solid message.

The subject of the article was this Weinstein fellow who is in so much hot water recently for taking advantage of young women in the movie business. I have little to add to that conversation, but I do want to comment on Bois’s theme. Reduced to its essence, his assertion is that this sort of thing is happening in our society because we allow it.

Last week during Morning Meeting our theme was “Direct My Steps According to Your Word.” All week we read passages that spoke of God’s great desire to see His people living according to His word. On Friday I told the students I used to know a preacher who had a habit of saying, “If you think all there is to the Christian life is getting saved and baptized, then as soon as you get saved and baptized we should take you out behind the church and shoot you.” This was his crude way of saying to the congregation that Jesus hadn’t saved them to sit around and wait for the rapture or the second coming or whatever comes next. They weren’t saved for death, but for life.

I loves poems.  The first poem I ever taught at Trinitas started like this:

Sing, goddesss, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict                                                              Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.

To do a thing well, you have to begin well—you have to start off on the right foot. At Trinitas we want every day to go well, so we begin every day with a short time of devotion and worship we call Morning Meeting.

At 7:50 each morning the entire student body gathers together in the Grand Hall where we start Morning Meeting by reading God’s word.

As varsity sports seasons get underway this weekend, I want to remind you what it means to represent Trinitas as a fan. You can find a thorough explanation of “The Ideal Trinitas Sports Fan” in the Family Handbook, but I want to give you a few quick reminders.

Last week I introduced the term father famine to this blog. The term I have only recently heard from my pastor; the idea the term denotes I have observed for years. The term fitly describes the absence of fathers and fathering in our culture. We have developed cultural amnesia, and one of the things we’ve forgotten, which is key to any culture, is fathering. By “we” I mean western culture generally, but to be more specific, I mean Christians seem to have forgotten the importance of fathering and, therefore, how to father. There is a dark irony in this Christian forgetfulness. The obvious irony is that fathering ought to be on our minds all the time because we speak of and look to God as our Heavenly Father; the subtler irony is that remembering is a predominant theme throughout Scripture.

On Father’s Day my pastor used the term “father famine” to describe the lack of fathers and fathering in our culture right now. Even though the truths bound up in this term are familiar to me as a watcher of culture, the term slapped me in the face—it was that shocking. Our culture is truly in the midst of a father famine. And it is not simply that we lack headship in families. No, the problem is much deeper: we don’t even understand what good headship is. We—all of us, the whole culture—have little vision for fathers or fathering.

The Trinitas seniors recently finished their senior thesis project. It was as if the weight of the world fell off them on that day. They have been living with their topics and all the research and writing and re-writing for a year now. It felt good for them to turn in those papers and defend them before a panel of board members and faculty. It felt good for them to look back on their work well done and know they had accomplished that massive and daunting project they set out to accomplish a year ago.