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news BT COULD BEGIN SERVICE IN CHRISTIANSBURG

Norris Hall to reopen today

A Blacksburg Transit bus survey of 3,777 people revealed that 60 percent of respondents would use BT service if it provided further access to Christiansburg.

The survey was administered by the Virginia Tech Center for Survey Research, and was sent to every home in Christiansburg.

Several routes were proposed at Tuesday night’s Christiansburg Town Council meeting, including a Christiansburg Downtown Loop to replace the Two Town Trolley and a Mall Commercial Circulator connecting shopping centers near the mall. The town of Christiansburg will make a decision in May, and if affirmed, could see service begin in October.

sports VASSALLO KEY IN OPENING ROUND TOURNEY WIN A.D. Vassallo led all scorers with 21 points for the Portsmouth Partnership team in a 90-80 first round victory over the Tidewater Sealants at the Portsmouth Partnership Invitational Tournament. In Wednesday night’s win, Vassallo was 9-of-17 from the field and had five rebounds.

tomorrow’s weather AM SHOWERS

MATT BOONE/SPPS

The Center of Peace Studies of Violence Prevention will reopen in Norris Hall today with a ceremony and tour. An open house will take place on April 16 between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.

PHILIPP KOTLABA

ct news staff writer After over half a year of extensive renovations, Norris Hall’s front wing will hold a reopening ceremony April 10 and an open house for the public on the second anniversary of the April 16 shootings.

“The space has been really transformed. It’s hard for me to even recognize the way the original classrooms were,” said Jerzy Nowak, director of the Center of Peace Studies of Violence Prevention and widower of Jocelyn CoutureNowak, a French instructor killed on April 16.

The center will share the 4,300-square feet of space with the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics.

“It still will be emotional for many of us to move there, but I think the center to fulfill its role as a healing process has to be located in Norris; it’s a symbolic place,” Nowak said.

Friday’s reopening ceremony will include opening remarks by Charles Steger, president, Mark McNamee, provost, Ishwar Puri, ESM department head, and Nowak, who will then

lead a tour of the floor. On April 16, the public will have a chance to visit Norris Hall for an open house from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.

The interior has been completely rearranged, with partitioning walls being either shifted or completely removed. Classrooms have been eliminated to make way for more specialized areas such as small conference rooms and laboratories.

“It was very swift, actually. I have to admit that I thought it would take more, a year-and-a-half, and it’s been only six months,” Nowak said.

“I’m really pleased how it turned out,” said Mark McNamee, university provost. “It’s beautifully designed, (and) the peace center and the engineering department program are going to create a great place for students to do their work.”

The Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention will relocate from 101 Wallace Hall to Norris Hall by the end of the month.

“There’s a certain level of expectation from the victims, injured students, victim families, and the community, that there would be some sort of a long-term commemoration of this, not just

once a year ... but an official memorial,” Nowak said.

The upcoming move to Norris Hall will close the chapter on a long process, said Nowak. “The location at Norris Hall was our target ... One of our objectives is now to help the community in the healing process.”

One of the center’s major projects has been the development of a “Global Technology Hub,” a state-of-the-art videoconferencing center financed by a grant from the Department of Education. It will be based in the new space.

“The idea is to create cross-disciplinary opportunities for students to interact,” Nowak said.

“We have to reach students and faculty and create sort of a global community against violence ... and potentially share resources, communicate.”

The center was established in the aftermath of the April 16 shootings and focuses on violence prevention programs as well as several peace studies initiatives.

A new Students for Non-Violence Club tries to draw in direct student involvement in the center’s stated missions and goals. “We believe

that to really make change, it has to come from students,” said Leah Wickham, club vice president. “Students have to want to change the atmosphere on their campus.”

This semester, the club is focusing on raising awareness though “Pennies for Peace” campaign that aims to raise $50,000 to build, staff, and operate a new school in Afghanistan or Pakistan for five years. Greg Mortenson, who started the project, will visit Tech on April 15 to share his experience with the campus.

“It seems like a huge goal,” Wickham said, “but ... it would only take $1.77 per person to raise $50,000” if every student participated.

Greg Mortenson will visit Tech on April 15 to share the project on campus.

Violence prevention also means outreach to diverse areas. “We’re working to educate ... as an indirect approach to violence prevention in areas that are experiencing some hard times,” said Jill Casten, a graduate assistant at the center.

In a Halifax County juvenile detention center, for example, the center teaches individuals professional skills as a way to obtaina job and cut down on future violence.

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Farmer’s market ponders parking changes corrections If you see something in today’s paper that needs to be corrected, please e-mail our public editor at publiceditor@collegiatetimes.com, or call 540.231.9865.

index News.....................2 Features................3 0pinions................5

Classifieds..............6 Sports....................7 Sudoku..................6

An independent, student-run newspaper serving the Virginia Tech community since 1903 106th year • issue 44

DEBRA HOUCHINS

ct news staff writer Plans are in the works for an improved Farmer’s Market with a mini-park for the community that will be known as Market Square Park.

The Housing and Community Development Advisory Board of the Blacksburg Town Council has proposed that $500, 000 of community development block grant funds to be used for the Farmer’s Market Proposal.

It is planned for the market to be moved from its current location on the corner of Roanoke Street and Draper Road to the parking lot behind the UPS store on Main Street in order to accommodate more customers as well as the now-cramped vendors, said Susan Anderson, a town council member on the advisory board.

The move is also a safety measure.

Currently, the Farmer’s Market shoppers fill the sidewalks. “When the sidewalk gets crowded, people will step out into the street to get around,” Anderson said. She also notes that with the new design, there will be greater shading for costumers and produce, which will keep the foods fresher.

The intention is also that the market will provide an area for recreation, with

BRIAN CLAY/SPPS

The Blacksburg Farmer’s market operates Wednesdays and Saturdays on Roanoke Street. trees and grasses, a far cry from the barren concrete there is now.

“It’ll be much greener and will be a great space to hang out, to read a book, to eat,” Anderson said.

However, some local businesses are wary of losing the parking on Main Street. The park’s creation requires the removal of 22 of the 39 parking spaces.

During the construction, parking will be even more limited.

Susan Murphy, owner of the UPS store on Main Street, is afraid that she will lose costumers during the already difficult economic times.

“I could lose possibly up to 50 percent because people are not going to come down and hassle with parking,” Murphy said.

According to a survey she performed from January through February, 83 percent of her customers drive to her

location.

Hargewinn Bekele, owner of Excellent Table, an Ethiopian take-out restaurant, fears for her business during times of construction as her door is located right in front of the parking lot.

She is also concerned about dust and debris from the construction entering her restaurant and violating health codes.

“When they start tearing down the parking, I’ll have no place to go,” Bekele said.

Murphy suggested for the city to use the parking lot of the old Dock Roberts building, which is also on Main Street and is cityowned.

However, Anderson explained that vendors at the Farmer’s Market board and most of the downtown merchants want it downtown. She also argues that the mini-park will draw more customers to the shops.

“The vendors, the Farmer’s Market board and town staff have put a lot of hours on this project and have received a tremendous amount of citizen input. It’s really going to be an asset to Blacksburg and downtown in particular.”

The Blacksburg Town Council and town staff intends to help businesses as much as possible during the construc-

tion process by planning construction timing and possible signs to show costumers where parking is available One major focus will be to educate citizens on already existing parking around Main Street, including the public parking lot behind the post office off Church Street which has a direct walk way to Main Street, as well as adding 10-minute parking spaces on top of the two already existing ones. They also want to encourage citizens to take advantage of public transportation, ride bikes or walk to their destinations.

Anderson says that parking is not an apprehension for most downtown business owners.

“Very few people have I heard anything negative from. Most people are excited about turning that parking lot into a mini-park. They are looking forward to it.”

Still Murphy and Bekele are worried about their businesses during the construction, which they fear could last up to a year.

“This is my personal money that I invested in downtown Blacksburg,” explains Murphy.

Citizens are invited to hear the council members speak about the budget April 14 at 7:30 p.m. in the Municipal building before it goes to vote April 28.

have a news tip? want to see something in the CT? e-mail newstips@collegiatetimes.com

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april 10, 2009

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ndering what's going on around the 'burg?

Check out the events of the upcoming week.

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Where: Squires Colonial What: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button When: 8:00pm Cost: $2.00 with Hokie Passport, $3.00 for non-VT students Where: The Lantern, 211 Draper Rd. What: Graham Wilkinson and the Underground Township- Unique band from Austin, Texas combining roots music, soul, and French pop When: Doors open at 5:00, show starts at 9:30

Where: Veterinary College, Duck Pond Drive What: Easter Egg Hunt- Omega Tau Sigma hosts an Easter Egg Hunt on the lawn of the Veterinary school, with an appearance from the Easter Bunny Cost: free Where: Graduate Life Center Auditorium What: Chinabration 2009- Chinese American Society hosts its annual showcase of Chinese culture through traditional and modern performances When: 6:30pm Cost: Free

Where: The Lantern, 211 Draper Rd. What: Battle of the Bands round 2 When: Doors open at 8:30, show starts at 9:30 Cost: Free

Where: Gillie's, 153 College Avenue What: Old-Time Jam- open blue-grass jam , every Tuesday When: 8:00-11:00pm Cost: free

Wed edd l 5

Where: Zeppoli's Italian Restaurant, 810 University City Boulevard What: Wine Tasting- This week, sampling wines from around the world with an emphasis on Spain; price includes hors d'oeuvres When: 7:00pm Cost: $15.00, call for reservations- (540) 953-2000 Where: Haymarket Theater What: “Platanos and Collard Greens”- hit romantic-comedy play that highlighting stereotypes and prejudices with humor, satire, and hip-hop When: 7:00pm Cost: free Where: Burruss Auditorium What: Nobel prize nominee and co-author of “Three Cups of Tea”” speaks about his international peace efforts with a book signing following the event When: 7:00-9:00pm Cost: free

hur uur l 16

Where: The Lantern, 211 Draper Rd. What: Prolyphic, Bobby White, Relik- Enjoy the stylings of these three unique hip-hp artists When: Doors open at 7:00, show starts at 9:00pm Cost: TBA

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editor: sara mitchell email: universitynews@collegiatetimes.com phone: 540.231.9865 office hours: mw 1:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

editor: caleb fleming email: nrvnews@collegiatetimes.com phone: 540.231.9865 office hours: tth 2 p.m. - 4 p.m.

Prepaid tuition plans flat, despite economy JUSTIN GRAVES

ct news reporter New prepaid tuition contracts in Virginia are very in tune with what previous years have shown, despite the downturn in the economy.

Virginia has a three-month enrollment period, which opened on Dec. 1 and closed at the end of February. This year it was extended to March 15 because of several programs and a large amount of interest in the programs. There are 13 states with prepaid programs and most have a more limited enrollment period.

Mary Morris, executive director of the Virginia College Savings Plan program is not surprised about the steady application flow.

“We’ve been fielding questions on whether or not programs like this will remain available. Our prepaid programs have a statutory guarantee, but as an independent state agency we are open and we intend to stay open,” Morris said. “For education, from 2002 to 2004 there was a similar economic downturn, and we managed through that, and we think we’re managing through this one the same way. While there are no guarantees in life, other than us covering the tuition and fees, brighter days are ahead.”

“There are several different plans we offer, but they are mainly separated into two different sections, one being prepaid and the other being a savings,” Morris said.

VPEP lets Virginia families lock in the cost of tomorrow’s college tuition and mandatory fees.

Contract payments cover future in-state undergraduate tuition and mandatory fees for the normal fulltime course load at Virginia public colleges and universities.

Evelyn Ratcliffe is the University Bursar.

“For the VPEP they pay the same amount of tuition, but the other plans don’t fluctuate. It depends on what the program is that they are enrolled in, and it also depends on how much the tuition increases over the years,” Ratcliffe said.

The other savings plan, which falls under the acronym VEST, or Virginia Education Savings Trust, is a savings plan where there are no age limits, as there are with the

Virginia Prepaid Education Plan: 1,560 students Virginia Education Savings Trust: 248 students College America: 109 students

CA VEST VPEP

KELLY HARRIGAN/COLLEGIATE TIMES

VPEP, or state residency requirements. A donor can open one any time.

VEST is an individual savings account, invested in the donor’s choice of portfolios of stocks and bonds, intended specifically for the payment of qualified higher education expenses for the designated beneficiary.

“The VEST plan covers things like the cost of computer, books, and room and board, rather than only tuition and fees. The payer can request how much they would like to donate,” said Nina Wilburn, the accounts receivable supervisor in the Office of the University Bursar here at Tech. “This provides for much more flexibility.”

The VPEP plan touts its ability to account for fluctuations in enrollment costs.

“If tuition and fees increases dramatically between what they’re paying to enroll in the program and what’s is paid out at the end, then of course it’s a benefit in that case,” Wilburn said. “It’s like investing in the stock market, you don’t know what will happen between the time you enroll.”

“The VPEP was the very first savings program that we had when states started to try and make college

more affordable and accessible for more students. Congress finally decided that this was a good idea and it was a good thing to help families save for college,” Morris said.

The program isn’t unique to Tech, however. Areas where a student population is more concentrated or higher education is greater in cost gives VCSP a lot of business.

UVa, William & Mary and Tech are where the majority of VPEP contracts go.

There are donors from all over the state, but a lot are concentrated in Northern Virginia, Richmond and the Tidewater area, because that’s where the population is concentrated,” Morris said. “We try to get the word out all the time as we do more and different things as far as letting people know about our programs all over the state.”

During the enrollment period, however, colleges and universities often pick up the promotion concerning the Virginia College Savings Plan and other similar programs.

“It’s put out in the media about 529 plans, tax benefits, and there are a lot of commercials on television; during the enrollment period, I even saw it in the Roanoke Times,” Wilburn said.

......radio for

everyone

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editor: bethany buchanan email: features@collegiatetimes.com phone: 540.231.9865 office hours: w 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m., f 1:30 - 2:30 p.m.

april 10, 2009

Tech beatboxer hopes to hone skill though competition JONATHAN YI

ct features reporter We’ve all have heard or heard of campus legend and beatboxing guru Justin Stein. Some of us seem to see him in a particular spot at the same time every Tuesday and Thursday, encountering his proverbial soundtrack that surely enhances the daily campus routine.

But as Stein may have been receiving the publicity, brewing on the other side of campus lies a challenger, ready and willing.

Hailing from Roanoke is Peter “Petebox” Shin, a D2 employee hoping to challenge his first opponent, Justin Stein. Apparently, the town isn’t big enough for the both of them. Shin, who has been beatboxing on and off for eight years since his sophomore year of high school, cites beatboxing pioneer and former Roots member Rahzel as a primary influence.

“One of my friends from church came to a Friday meeting and showed us a beatbox done by Rahzel, called ‘If Your Mother Only Knew,’” recalled Shin. “When I first heard it, I was astounded to hear someone speak and beatbox at the same time.”

Since, Shin has been encompassed in the multiplicities of hip-hop. As

famous beatboxers like Biz Markie and Doug E. Fresh, a good beatboxer can demonstrate a wide range of vocal skills and the imitation of a sound to a tee. Using Rahzel as an outlet for development, Shin began to harness the airwaves and garner response.

Much of his progress has come from closely following the footsteps of his influences.

“I found out (Rahzel) had learned it from listening to the song, so I checked it out myself,” Shin said. “It took me a couple weeks to get into the groove of it, but eventually I began to get there.”

But the essentials were already in place.

“I love music, and hip-hop is my primary beatbox style,” Shin said. “I’ll copy and imitate song melodies and mostly beatbox whenever there would be a freestyle session — like 106-nPark, a capella style. I lost my ambition to continue after one of my best friends had passed away, but lately I’ve been coming across a lot that has changed my mindset about beatboxing and I want to grab hold again.”

Shin performed at his high-school pep-rally his junior and senior years of high school and claims to be have been the best in his area (noting there wasn’t much competition). As with any talent, public performance is usually a

good indicator of success — but so is a nickname.

“Later on, I eventually got the name ‘Petebox,’ not to be confused with THePETEBOX from the UK,” Shin said.

However, Shin doesn’t seem to garner such public response, nor have such immediate reactions. And while that unquestionably doesn’t bother Shin, he sure wouldn’t mind testing his tires at any velocity.

“In my perspective, the world of beatboxing is still in a small area waiting to be explored,” Shin said. “Although it’s not something you hear every day, it attracts ears, as Stein does walking to his next class.”

Shin first heard about Stein after beatboxing at a party upon first arriving to Blacksburg.

“They asked me if I had heard of the ‘campus beatboxer,’ explaining to me how he’s always got a pair of headphones on, walking to his next class beatboxing,” Shin said. “I was intrigued to meet him, but was later told that he rarely ever encounters anyone publicly. Finding it an opportunity to test out my beats with his, I want to challenge and work with this campus beatboxer.”

The two have never met, but there are those out there who have heard

both Shin and Stein. In terms of talent, nothing is concrete.

“I’ve heard mixed opinions about the difference in our skills so if it happens, it’ll be exciting,” Shin said.

“I am trying to showcase a beatboxing supreme being,” said senior De’Von Coleman. Coleman, an Aerospace Engineering major, is eager for Stein and Shin to go face-to-face for a beatboxing challenge. “Shin is ready to offer a challenge for the number one beatboxer here at Virginia Tech,” Coleman said.

Surely this battle isn’t unwarranted.

Shin is hopeful to gain knowledge and absorb some methods from the opposition. As they say, keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. But even more transcendental Ralph Waldo Emerson would note that men are respectable only as they respect — these gentlemen demonstrate the latter.

“I’m on a search to find other beatboxers and challenge them for the sake of experience,” Shin said. “It’s great for finding new influences and learning new techniques. I hope we can learn a lot from each other.”

As Stein and Shin hope to exemplify their talents under D2 in the near future, both Justin “the beatbox guy” Stein and Peter “Petebox” Shin hope to

COURTESY OF PETER SHIN

Peter “Petebox” Shin, a D2 employee, has spent time working on his vocal skills and is ready to challenge Blacksburg’s best beatbox talent. be rank supreme. Perhaps it will have the rest of us asking, “Which beatboxing guy are you talking about again?”

“I feel like I can do a lot, but at the same time I still have a drive to learn

more,” Shin said. “I want to meet another experienced beatboxer, challenge and exchange techniques by listening and learning from each other.

Now all I can do is hope he accepts it.”

Luncheon generates resources for Kenyan women JONATHAN YI

ct features reporter Program Coordinator Kathleen Lokale at the Virginia Tech Women’s Center couldn’t have been more pleased with the response to IWiN’s Kenyan Lunch event, which took place yesterday.

“The Kenyan Lunch event had a very successful turnout of about 115 people,” Lokale said. “We ended up running out of food.”

International Women in Need is a non-profit student organization that strives to alert the Virginia Tech community about ethnic crises internationally. The Kenyan Lunch put on by IWiN between College Avenue and Draper Road presented authentic Kenyan food and raised

donations and support for the Corn Mill for Kenya Project.

The Corn Mill for Kenya Project hopes to raise awareness of Kenyan lifestyle, but primarily to raise money to provide power mills to women in Kenya to create ugali, which is finely ground corn similar to grits.

These coordinated efforts attempt to free women from the drudgery of grinding corn, giving them more time with their families and simultaneously provide income, quality of life, and increase self-reliance.

The menu included rice, collards, cabbage, lentils, somosas and chai tea, which strived to resemble authentic Kenyan cuisine.

“We’re celebrating international week and our menu consisted of a vegetarian celebratory cuisine like ‘naan’ bread, which is always served

during such celebratory occasions,” Lokale said. “People really enjoyed the chai tea.”

Donations are sent to the Koriko Moyie Women’s Group, which began in Ngeta Village in 2004 and officially registered with the government in 2006.

This self-help organization was formed to improve life for women and families in the community.

There are currently 25 members, most 65 or older, who are actively working on grassroots outreach initiatives to generate income and educate the community.

“We really wanted to empower women to positively contribute to their community,” Lokale said.

“Power mills are desperately needed in these communities, and they enable women to start their

own business and give back. Many women in these groups are in their 50s with their villages hit so hard by HIV, they need the income.”

IWiN has also completed projects in Sudan and Mexico. As the students at Tech seek international outreach to empower women, they formulated IWiN with the Women’s Center on board. The organization has worked with non-profits in countries that are specifically tailored to helping women. Although IWiN has previously worked with non-profits, the recent Kenya project involved working directly with women from Kenya.

“This is the first time IWiN is doing a grassroots project and working directly with the community,” Lokale said. “While we usually coordinate our efforts

with non-profits, we’re working directly with the women — including a woman that is directly part of the community we’re trying to help and getting her PhD here at Virginia Tech.”

The Women’s Center’s mission is to promote a Tech community that is safe, equitable, and supportive for women and that celebrates their experiences, achievements and diversity. IWiN was started by students who approached the Women’s Center. With their support, IWiN can address community needs.

“IWiN is completely student run,” Lokale said. “At the Women’s Center, we provide volunteer teams and leaders that cater to different student organizations that hope to address a need.”

IWiN has recently thrown two big events, the Kenyan lunch and the International Street Fair.

IWiN has conducted African benefit dinners, sold African fabric buttons or candy corn, exemplifying educational and fundraising aspects in their projects. IWiN also has awareness presentations around campus, including showcases at Gillie’s of different women from Kenya.

With meetings every other Thursday, the agenda is limitless, bringing in speakers and developing educational presentations.

However, there is a strong correlation between this organization’s success and the community support.

“We’ve had the luxury of having an open and willing Kenyan community,” Lokale said.

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friday, april 10, 2009

He said, she said dishes on dealing with crushes Crushes are nice because they are probably the most idealistic stage in any relationship.

They are generally composed of a mixture of delirTOPHER ium, ignorance and facts based off FORHECZ observations. One features need not look any reporter further than one’s own feelings on the outset of a crush to this concoction of emotions: You don’t even need to really know the person and they make you happy.

Where does that kind of thoughtgenerated euphoria ever exist again in the relationship and to that level?

During the crush stage, you really don’t have to worry about anything that might tarnish your interpretation of your target — including your actual target. They still have that mystery that can be easily molded to tickle whatever curiosity the crushee might have. For girls, it’s that point where the guy still has it all. Before you find out about the unpaid credit card bills, the still very present ex-girlfriend, and whatever other hidden baggage might be lurking behind “happily ever after.” And for guys, well, guys are

just funny about crushes because the more attracted they are to their crush, the more willing they are to overlook such petty details.

There really is no downside to just having a crush. Of course, if you’re like most girls out there, you enjoy making life unnecessarily difficult for yourself. Which is why girls with about 77 percent of their crushes (Google “crush statistics” and keep looking for those numbers) will go after targets they can’t have.

Maybe it’s the thrill of being challenged with smashing a current, healthy relationship like a set of glass pins in a bowling alley, or maybe it’s lusting after someone old enough to give you a play-by-play of the Ford administration, but girls pine after some pretty weird candidates.

Neglected in such instances are the all-too-easy and obvious choices that would probably make you happy, but offer no challenge, no possibility of rejection. I will not go any further in honoring the atypical “good guy” as he’s apparently not worth your time anyway. Instead, it’s ol’ Gerald for the win.

I think, and there’s no way for me to be certain of this, that women choose these incredibly odd selections to become infatuated with

because they enjoy the distance. They figure it will actually never transpire, and if their crush does evolve into something more, it will be a total surprise. This seemingly unobtainable task works well for a lot of girls in crushes as it creates a distance between the actual feelings that could potentially be in jeopardy and reality. So the girl may run the risk of never actually being hurt; dually there is a lack of satisfaction and pretty much no sense of progression. To fill this new void that has been created by the satisfied old void, girls will use the infatuation as an unending source of material for discussion. Initial personal jokes about the subject will be made, followed by putting the personal jokes in some other scenario, from that crappy scenario will come a whole new set of personal jokes and so forth and so on until either the subject dies or the girl gets amnesia. Here’s a terrible example and also how I apparently think women talk: Girl1: Oh my god, have you ever seen Gerald dance?

Girl2: Yes! Imagine if he lived in the ’70s.

Girl1: He’d be like disco Gerald.

Enter the phrase “disco Gerald” which will be used until another, bet-

Having a crush is kind of like strolling by a pet shop when some adorable, stupid puppy catches your eye from BETHANY the pet boutique BUCHANAN window. You fall features into the trap when your eyes lock editor and he starts to drool. You, against your better judg ment, go in, play with him for a little bit, he licks your face and wags his tail so fast it defies physics.

Thinking that you’ve made a connection, you become attached, see the price tag, and formulate ways to skip out on a month’s rent just to take him home with you.

Eventually you have to reluctantly give him back to the shop attendant but tell everyone and anyone who will listen — or not, it doesn’t matter so long as you get to verbalize your plan of action — about how you really want this puppy and have to figure out a way to be able to buy his presence in your life. In your

spare time, you daydream about how happy you both will be as you go on walks, feed him and give him a bone.

It’s exactly like that. When you have a crush on some lucky guy, your thoughts are racing so fast your thoughts become a run-on sentence of possibilities, dreams and what color to dress your bridesmaids in.

And such deluded dialogue — although when your friends stop

just jealous since they haven’t found their soul mates yet.

But your girlfriends are very crucial resources and are not to be unappreciated. They are going to help you determine whether said gentleman reciprocates your feelings, and, consequently, decide whether there’s enough evidence to warrant you to stalk his every move or “forget” your pencil every day in class just to find an excuse to talk to him.

It’s a fact of nature that women are much more of an observant and analytical species compared to their (oblivious) counterparts, and what they notice — or don’t notice — between you and your b eau-to-b e is crucial information. Think of your girlfriends

You get the nerve to friend him on facebook, go through all his information there and start a spreadsheet of his likes and his dislikes, befriend all of his buddies so they can cast a favorable vote for you ... listening, it becomes a monologue of “Romeo-oh-Romeo” proportions — drives them crazy to the point of studying to escape your “we’ll-betogether-forever” tirade. Darling, that’s OK because, to you, they’re

ter suiting phrase comes to pass. Give it a few hours.

A girl’s crush is s e eming ly m o r e complic at e d than that of a man and h i s crush.

Maybe men have really j u s t become t h a t physically unattractive to women to the point that they are forced to find new and different characteristics to value in guys. If that’s true then that’s unfortunate to say the least. The situation sounds pretty difficult. Good thing I don’t have to worry about it. as a much nicer and not as frightening form of otherwise perfect-zombie-movie-candidate Dick Cheney: They have become the gatekeeper of your budding relationship. What she knows can make or break your decision to pursue your future husband, or invade Iran. She can either shoot the bird or shoot you down — metaphorically speaking, I hope.

And, for girls, it’s important to have some sort of idea because our time and our youth areprecious.Whywasteourvaluable lack-of-wrinkle-and-muffin-top time chasing after some Apollo if there’s no inkling of potential? That time could be better spent finding and flirting with an even better relationship

candidate — that is, if our girlfriends agree.

And if there is even just the slightest dash of hope, that’s when the horses — and butterflies — are let out of the gate at full speed.

You get the nerve to friend him on Facebook, go through all of his information there and start a spreadsheet of his likes and dislikes, befriend all of his buddies so that they can cast a favorable vote for you as his significant other, find out where he lives and where he parties, trace out a map of his class schedule so you’ll happen to run into each other “randomly” — just like last Friday night downtown — and start scribbling your new signature with his last name in your biology notebook.

And, chances are that despite all of your efforts, he doesn’t even have the slightest clue that you’ve been obsessing over him like it’s your job.

Oh well. His oblivious nature will make planning the wedding a lot easier.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX FALLON

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editor: laurel colella, david mcilroy email: opinionseditor@collegiatetimes.com phone: 540.231.9865 office hours: mw 11 a.m. - 1 p.m.

march 4, 2009

The Hindu faith — what it holds for you and me Hinduism is easily the oldest existing organized form of religion on the face of the earth.

The Hindu faith has about a billion adherents around B. the world, migraBALASUNDAR tion from India having taken it to professor almost every counengineering try on the planet.

Hindus are known to be strongly attached to their native social culture and traditional faith; research by the Trinity College, Hartford, in 2008 indicated that a majority of Indian scientists are believers, even with their rocket science and atomic exploits.

The number of Hindu gods and men of piety, and the volume of Hindu religious texts would possibly far outnumber the corresponding numbers of all other religions put together, at times even seeming comical. But the numbers are a reflection of the toler-

ance, accommodation and acceptance of plurality of lines of thought among its believers. It is the recognition that no two men or women are the same and that every human can follow his or her own ways to explore his or her place in the universal scheme of things, if so desired.

The cornerstone of the Hindu belief system is that multiple paths lead to the same goal of truth and self-realization.

Or simply put, do your stuff right, live and let live and you’re good; maybe not good enough but you’re definitely on the right track. And the “let live” principle holds not only to other humans, but to every piece of matter around you. The plants, the animals, the unsightly worm, the barking stray dog and even the flowing river have the right to do their stuff and as long as the dog doesn’t bite anyone, leave it alone. Harmony within you, with others and with the environment is one of the basic underlying tenets of existence of the Hindu faith. Hinduism has no typical founders, no tell-it-all

single sacred text and no religionbacked “become-a-Hindu” initiation rites. In fact, even the word Hindu is a comic British colonial holdover; no Hindu religious text in its hundreds of thousands of pages ever assigns the word Hindu to a follower. You, the man on the street, are a Hindu if you follow the Hindu way of responsible and dutiful life, no questions asked, very few conditions apply.

Hinduism is often called “sanatan dharma,” which roughly translates into “the eternal laws and ways of life.” It is a 100 percent “how-to-livelife” survival kit. The Hindu Vedas, or revelations, tell you how to attain salvation, but also tell you how to solve mathematical equations, how to build a strong house, and the cure to your stomachache. Even for an atheist, it is nothing short of mindboggling to read about the speed of light, the Pythagorean theorem and artificial rain-cloud precipitation neatly packed into religious hymns and abstract poetry. And we are talk-

ing, at the very least, 2,000 years back.

Hinduism is often questioned for its polytheistic beliefs, social hierarchies and theories of reincarnation, but begin probing, and answers you will have. Even from whatever’s still left of ancient Indian manuscripts, intricate concepts in cosmology, philosophy, evolution, medicine and mathematics are seen to be well-woven into one, big all-explaining theory of life, with almost no contradictions, internal or to current-day scientific truths. And this is what keeps the flame alive in millions of Hindus around the world, and the couple of hundreds in Virginia Tech. Not every Hindu is aware of his massive, enormous cultural and civilizational inheritance, but deep down, there is this conviction that what grandma passed on to his mama is probably right.

Religion, faith and human life seem to be inextricably knotted together; they probably came out of the womb together. Many believe that far from being a unifying force, religion seems

to have only promoted strife and violence and continues to cause destruction in its various manifestations. I vehemently protest such half-truths.

Show me one system of faith that does not preach love, affection and generosity. Show me one religion that asks you to bomb and butcher innocent men, women and children to promote your “holy” causes. On the contrary, religion is that last piece of straw we cling to when we are drowning in debt, sinking in depression or mourning in pain. For billions, it offers the last shreds of hope when all is lost; it gives the weak and the powerful alike the optimism that there is this invisible force that helps you recover. To believe or not to believe is your own choice, but it is only when you force your own dubious interpretation of a piece of human writing on dupable people that you create hatred and revenge where there should be love and compassion. Tolerance is key to co-existence, and now more than ever, to existence itself.

Religion provides foundation for life experience SEDKI RIAD professor engineering

Religion is a topic that can bring people close to form unusually strong bonds and could, as well, result in hatred and animosity beyond limits. So, writing this column is like stepping into a minefield… With that in mind, let

me “step in.”

Looking at the greatness of the universe around us and the precision in which it functions as well as the magnificence of the human machine and brilliance of its unique functionalities and skills is a sign for me that this vast system is not an accident or a fairytale story. It is much more serious than we can ever imagine.

I believe I am here on this earth for a serious function. This universe did not just “happen” and my role as a human is not a trivial one. To me, this is where religion comes in, providing

a base to relate to “the purpose of life and our purpose in life.”

So, what can I tell you about religion that you don’t already know? Isn’t it amazing that when it comes to religion, we are all scholars? Even those who make the claim that they don’t have a religion or are not religious have a religion and are religious. The fact is that each one of us believes in a system of “values” that influences his or her own life.

In searching published definitions of religion, I came across “a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor (vigor/zeal) and faith,” and “a pursuit or interest followed with devotion.” The term comes from the Latin word for religion, which means obligation or reverence. Searching my mother tongue of Arabic, the word is “deen” with the root word of “dana” which means, (guess what?) debt and obligation and commitment.

Hence religion implies obligations — call it worship, call it belief, call it commitment — it is an obligation where we commit ourselves to some-

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Marriage has come to be more than merely a religious institution I would like to respond to Rod Dreher’s column, “Secular Liberalism As Consensus Threatens Traditionalist Values,” (CT, April 7).

The idea that marriage is a religious institution and therefore not subject to the public’s notions of equality becomes revocable when we examine the social and legal benefits that arrive with marriage. The Constitution offers even greater clarity as to legislation in support of religious institutions.

There is no denying the insurance and tax benefits that come attached to this “religious” institution and the very exclusive group it is granted to.

In short, marriage has become a social privilege and if Traditionalists were being consistent then they would note that the argument made against gay marriage not only prohibits gay couples from marrying but also and not limited to, interracial couples, agnostics and atheists.

It has long been argued that marriage is a Christian Institution stemming from the Bible, which some interpret as saying homosexuality is wrong. The Bible also never extends the institution of marriage to people of other faiths or no faith at all which mean that Biblically, agnostics and atheists should not be able to marry under this very rigid exhortation.

Agnostics are not part of organized religion and thus have no institution of marriage and atheists do not believe in God, which means they cannot have a relationship ordained by one.

What is more, these same individuals against gay marriage for Biblical reasons will often say that “traditional” relationships have always been heterosexual despite the overwhelming number of societies that practiced and embraced homosexuality before the extension of Christiandom.

One might also argue that if you wanted to be real traditional, American style, then you would be forced to revert to honoring laws of miscegenation which were functional well into the 20th century and regarded interracial marriage as illegal and “immoral.” Sound familiar? The arm of this Traditionalist argument extends far beyond gay couples.

The real issue here is that if

marriage were merely a religious institution, then married couples would receive nothing more than a certificate of marriage at their ceremony and nothing else.

There would be no extension of the battery of legal and social benefits that come with it today.

This brings me to my final point which elucidates on the concept of the separation of church and state.

The First Amendment of our Bill of Rights makes an express point to congress and our governments in state that it cannot make laws respecting an establishment of religion.

Marriage is an establishment of religion which means state Congresses cannot actually legislate in favor for or against it.

These things being said, it is made clear that the appropriate argument for gay marriage and rights stipulate that either marriage be made purely religious without legal and social benefits to which then it can be made exclusive, or if it is going to remain a social privilege in the United States then it is illegal on the part of the state governments to show support for or against marriage as an institution, which includes legislating against marriage for gay couples.

John L. Driess sophomore, biological sciences

Obama’s invitation to speak at Notre Dame should be revoked

thing, someone, some entity, some ideology, that we end up enslaved to, driven by, or overwhelmed with. It is what we choose to submit to and follow “religiously.”

Thus, we all have religions and we are all religious, and each one of us has his or her own custom or customized religion. Some of us claim that they did not customize their religions but rather have the original equipment manufacturer (as in parts for your car built by the original dealer, not generics) religion. However, the majority can’t deny that they deviate to some extent from the brand they label themselves with.

So, it looks like religion is an inseparable component of our lives. It influences how we live our lives and how we conduct ourselves — 24/7 you are who you are and you are your religion, customized, or custom made; and there is no way we can ignore the role our religions play in our relationships with each other, with other creations, and with the environment around us.

Now, back to “the purpose of life

and our purpose in life.” I believe these two related questions are (or should be) the biggest challenge for us humans. Trivializing this investigation is escaping reality and burying one’s head in the sand. Those among us who take this question seriously are in constant search for the truth. With our finite, yet “infinitesimal” knowledge, we are but a tiny product that will never comprehend its grand and majestic maker. However, we continue the search, some more diligently than others. Some would suffice with popular answers and some would dig deeper than others.

Back to me again — the greatness of the universe around us and the magnificence of the human machine are signs for me that there is a creator or maker who has made everything with built-in features that would enable it to function according to specs (designer’s specifications). A creator who is unlimited in wisdom and unlimited in power and has the complete knowledge, who has perfected his creation and loves every

part of it, and who is in charge and is constantly maintaining and caring of his universe. A creator who has entrusted us humans with uniqueness in our ability to choose, to think, to love, to enjoy life, and to be able to balance all that. A creator to whom I am accountable for what I was entrusted with. A creator who deserves for me to constantly recognize and seek.

Only through this creator would I be able to relate to “the purpose of life and my purpose in life.”

For me as human being, I was born with a basic nature/instinct (my original OEM) that was influenced by the parents who raised me, the society I lived in and the many experiences I have gone through. That is how we get customized. Some would reach a point in their lives where they go through a major overhaul (not necessarily positive) and change all or most of the OEM parts, ignore the manufacturer, the manufacturer specs and all the warning labels, and replace it with custom parts. That is not me, I hope.

On faith in school, ‘He will always be watching over me’ In college, a student’s faith is often challenged.

Students cope with schedule adjustments, family independence, social interactions, and life after GABRIELLE graduation. The WILLIS sometimes-stresssenior ful school schedHNFE ules, job searches, unexpected life circumstances and uncertainty about the future can cause anxiety and worry. During difficult periods like this, faith can be either strengthened or weakened. For me, these periods are where I cling to God more because I know He is watching over and providing for me even when my life is crazy and uncertain. This is especially true now in light of the current economic crisis.

As a graduating senior, it is frightening and frustrating to watch the job market plummet day after day, and see opportunities of receiving employment after graduation diminish. I know many other seniors have the same concerns. Not only because we have worked so hard the past four years to earn a degree, but also because there is no way to gauge when the economy will rebound.

This is when I am especially reminded of God’s provision and rest in the hope and security that even though I

have no control over current events, He will guide and provide for me. It is not the first time He has provided me with employment.

I am unable to work during the school year, so summer employment is essential for me to earn money for school and living expenses during the year. The summer before my sophomore year of college, I was privileged to work for the Army’s Department of Defense as a summer intern. I worked with diverse, professional clientele and earned a good salary. Budget cuts in the company the following year prevented me from being rehired with the DOD. I was disappointed, but confident that God would help me find another job.

I sought employment elsewhere, but my ideal was to work at the Olive Garden so that I could gain food service experience for my dietetics degree. Several weeks went by and I received no offers. I applied to Olive Garden twice during general job interviews hours, but was unable to speak with a manager either time. I left my applications, but received no reply. I continued filling out applications only discover to that most restaurants did not accept summer hires.

I was very discouraged and did not know what else to do. My mother, however, encouraged me to try Olive Garden one more time. Admittedly I was slightly embarrassed, however I went back a third time. This time, not

only did I meet with a manager, but I was offered a job on the spot, and I began working two days later. Not only that, but they offered to pay me $3 more than the current minimum wage. I was unbelievably thankful and excited. The event was made even more special because I was hired on my birthday. I felt like God gave me that job on my birthday on purpose. A month later, I overheard from another employee that Olive Garden does not accept summer hires. My manager was standing nearby and I asked him about it. “Yes, it’s true,” he said. “I was desperate.

Guess it worked out for you, huh?” he said laughing. I realized that I was hired because of the Lord’s favor. I also had favor with the managers and was invited to return during the winter, spring and summer breaks.

Although my jobs were not fulltime, they demonstrated to me that God cares about something as seemingly mundane as summer employment. Despite the current economic hardships, God still provides. I have learned that God is God regardless of what is happening in the world. That does not change faith. Otherwise, faith would not be faith, hope would be meaningless, and God would not be God. I have faith, I have security in my God’s promises, and I have hope that whatever life may bring — good or bad — He will always be by my side watching over me.

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In regard to the editorial, “Notre Dame should embrace Obama at commencement” (CT, April 3), you are correct that pro-life issues are the source of the controversy surrounding President Barack Obama’s commencement invitation to Notre Dame University.

Obama can be respected for the office that he holds. However, I do not respect a person who has, in part, made money and a political career preying on the most helpless and defenseless amongst us: unborn children.

Obama’s position is not an ideal.

It is wickedness.

Obama’s invitation should be withdrawn, and Notre Dame’s leadership ought to resign for making such a foolish decision.

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april 10, 2009

Clayton sets sights on backup role Kickers again have ED LUPIEN

ct sports reporter Right now, Ju-Ju Clayton is getting a crash course of what it’s like to be an active quarterback for a major Division I-A football program.

After redshirting his first year on the Tech squad and hardly practicing at all, it is now time for Clayton to step in after the departure of two senior quarterbacks — Sean Glennon and Cory Holt.

“He doesn’t exactly have to be ready to play, but you’ve got to feel good about your No. 2 understanding what the team’s trying to do,” said Mike O’Cain, the Hokies’ quarterbacks coach. “You want to feel good about his abilities both physically and mentally.”

But as of now it’s not certain what role Clayton — soon-to-be a redshirt freshman — will play on this team in 2009. While he’ll likely be the primary backup to the projected starter, junior Tyrod Taylor, fellow redshirt freshman Marcus Davis has impressed during the spring and has made it a battle for the No. 2 position.

“Right now it’s a competition between Marcus and I, but it’s a friendly competition,” Clayton said. “We both know that we’re competing for a very important spot on this team.”

Clayton, however, has also been impressive and given his coaches a starting point. He’s not ready yet, but there’s certainly potential.

During his senior season at Richmond’s Hermitage High School in 2007, Clayton threw for 2,117 yards and 22 touchdowns while rushing for 27 yards and five more trips to the end zone.

“He’s got to get a real good understanding of what we are doing,” O’Cain said. “That starts with call plays in the huddle then goes to snap count, then it moves to all the little parts of actually executing the play and knowing what’s going on on the other side of the ball. He’s pretty far along at this point, but he still got a long way to go.”

Much like Taylor, Clayton’s mobility is something to behold, specifically.

“I’ve been pleased with the way he’s moved around, found secondary receivers, and his release which was pretty quick and accurate,” O’Cain said.

But Clayton insists that he’s a quarterback first and a runner second.

“I’ve always been a passer first, but I also have the ability to run when I have to,” Clayton said. “I always look to pass first, though. I’m just working on making my reads and going through my throwing progressions.”

Coincidentally, mobility is why Clayton will likely have to remain on-call at all times during the upcoming season.

“He’s especially important on this team because you have a mobile quarterback as your No. 1 who puts himself in the position to take a few more hits than a pocket QB would,” O’Cain said.

Coaches need to see what Clayton can produce at this point and, therefore, the 6-foot-2, 205-pounder has seen a lot of time on the practice field this spring.

“It’s hard to learn in the classroom,” O’Cain said.

“When you actually get out in the field and do it, it’s a totally different experience.”

“It’s definitely different when you’re on the field,” added Clayton. “You can look down at your notes in the classroom, but out on the field there’s no paper.”

Taylor remembers not long ago when he was in Clayton’s shoes, overwhelmed by the first couple of weeks of practice.

“I know the first day was a little rough with the cadence,” Taylor said. “I remember my first day. I just thought I was going to watch practice. But I was thrown into the fire. I had to go out and show what I had.”

Taylor has thus begun to play an unfamiliar role for him this spring: the role of mentor. He has developed strong relationships with both Clayton and Davis.

“I’m very good friends with those guys,” Taylor said.

“We’ve always been close. It’s still a competition. We

come out here and compete and try to make each other better.”

Taylor knows that good things are to come of the two new quarterbacks, including Clayton.

“He’s making very good progression,” Taylor said.

“Just going out there and staying focused — that’s the main thing. He just needs to go out there and play football. Just stay relaxed. Don’t put any pressure on yourself.”

Clayton has progressed because he has remained focused, constantly concentrating on his weaknesses more than showcasing his strengths.

“I got to work on footwork at this point,” Clayton said. “Just the drop back passing and going through my reads quickly and making sure I follow through on all of my throws.”

Coaches can sense that Clayton is going to get to the point of being a top-caliber quarterback; it’s only a matter of time until he’s ready.

MATT BOONE/SPPS

Redshirt freshman Ju-Ju Clayton sets up under center during a mini-scrimmage on Wednesday.

big shoes to fill ALEX JACKSON

ct sports staff writer As Frank Beamer and the Virginia Tech football team prepare for a promising 2009 campaign, they won’t miss the controversy surrounding a position battle at quarterback.

They will, however, be keeping their eyes on another familiar battle for the job of starting kicker.

For the third straight year, Tech entered spring practices unsure of who will line up on fourth down inside the opponents territory to put three on the board.

Five feet will compete through August to inherit the starting kicker job, held last year by Dustin Keys.

“I think we’ve got some good candidates,” Beamer said. “I think that’s one thing we’ve found here at Virginia Tech.

A lot of people send tapes in here, and we usually have good kickers in our program.”

This will be the third in as many seasons that the Hokies begin the season with a new starting kicker. In 2007, Jud Dunlevy replaced the reliable Brandon Pace. Dunlevy finished his senior season hitting 21 of 26 field goals and scoring 108 points.

This year’s job candidates will compete to replace Dustin Keys, who contributed 101 points to the Hokies’ 2008 campaign and was an impressive 17 of 19 on field goals from inside 40 yards.

“I think these kids are good kickers. The one that’s most consistent — that’s the one that’s going to end up being our guy,” Beamer said.

Beamer has been holding a kicking competition every practice in order to see which one of the candidate’s stands out when it comes to getting the job done every day.

“Bad weather, great weather, if it’s snowing, if it’s raining, if you’re not feeling good that day — No matter what is, you’ve got to be consistent,” redshirt senior Waldron said.

Waldron transferred from Penn State, where he traveled with the Nittany Lions as the No. 2 kicking option in his freshman year of 2006. Prior to playing on the collegiate ranks, he was an all-state kicker at Oakfield-Alabama High in Oakfield, N.Y. Justin Myer, a sophomore competing for the starting spot, understands that it’s all about focus.

A three-time letterman in soccer and

two-time all-star kicker in high school in Manheim, Pa., Myer said, “The most important thing is keeping it in the middle of the uprights every time and being able to hit it over and over again very consistent.”

Waldron described kicking as a “science.”

“Every kick has got to be the same in order to be consistent, because that’s what Coach Beamer preaches — consistency,” Waldron said. “He likes you to kick the ball high and be very consistent, so that’s what we try and work on, on a daily basis.”

“Being able to get the same flight, getting to the ball early and getting a quick get-off time. Getting it right down the middle every time so it’s not even a question if it’s going to be in or out,” Myer said.

With five guys competing for one starting spot, the competition will be intense and every kick important on a daily basis.

“The good thing is that we’ve got kickers to work with,” Beamer said. “I think one of these guys — maybe a couple of them — are going to step up. But, I think they all have the ability to. That’s the good part.”

Along with Waldron and Myer, sophomore Tim Pisano, who battled for kickoff duties the previous year; junior Chris Hazley, who joined the team last season; and freshman Scott Demler round out the competition.

“It’s kind of a special thing,” Waldron said. “We’re all just kind of battling it out right now.”

“It’s fun to go out there and compete every day,” Myer said,” knowing that you’re going to have good competition out there with you every day.”

Every day, despite the fact that they know it is a battle and only one will triumph, the candidates are even growing to like each other, too.

“I think we’re all friends,” Waldron said.

“When we get on the field, it’s business and sometimes when people say things to each other, you get a little angry or heated up, but it’s more a brother heated type of thing.”

But Waldron said that’s different when practice ends.

“When we’re off the field, you’ll find the five of us kind of in a huddle, hanging out or joking and stuff like that,” he said. “I think we’re pretty close.”

Myer agreed, “It’s pretty much our own little specialist group.”

“Just look for the little guys,” Waldron said.

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friday, april 10, 2009

This year, Tech pitching well-armed Freshman Rauscher overcoming ailments RAY NIMMO

ct sports staff writer

Atlantic Coast Conference baseball is stockpiled with talent on both sides of the ball. But if Virginia Tech wants to turn the baseball program into a contender, they have to start with pitching.

So far this year, in-conference games have been extremely tight due to the vast improvement of the Hokies’ pitching staff. Younger players gained valuable experience last year and are putting it to use this year. Veterans are continuing to hone their craft and become invaluable weekend starters.

To get an idea of improvement, it’s important to take a look back to the forgetful 2008 season.

Hokie pitching had an earned run average of 5.76 and allowed 572 hits, 310 earned runs, 236 walks and 55 home runs, as well as striking out 374 batters.

As inflated as the numbers sound, opponents did not crack a .300 batting average — they batted .295.

“We were young,” said pitching coach Dave Turgeon. “The transition from high school to college is one thing, but to make the transition to the ACC is a whole other level.”

Current weekend starters Rhett Ballard and Josh Wymer struggled. Ballard only mustered a 3-8 record with a 4.66 ERA, and Wymer went 5-5 with a 5.94 ERA. This year, Ballard, a redshirt senior and the ace of the starting staff, has brought his ERA down to 4.35 and has a 3-2 record against some stiff ACC competition.

Wymer, a junior, has brought his ERA down by three runs to 2.77 in three starts. His record is currently 1-0.

“We put a lot of demands on them with workload in the weight room and conditioning on the field,” said Turgeon. “After they get a year under their belt, they get stronger, wiser, and they’re competing better.”

With these veterans getting better, younger pitchers have been recruited and asked to learn a lot in a short amount of time. It hasn’t been something they’ve turned away from, either.

Take sophomore Sean McDermott, for example. As a freshman last year, he was thrown into the fire of ACC play. He struggled mightily, putting up a 1-5 record with a 6.32 ERA. He allowed as many runs as he did strikeouts (37).

“Just coming into this league (was tough),” McDermott said. “It’s some of the best competition in this league, and as a freshman being thrown out there was hard.”

Turgeon and head coach Pete Hughes worked with him on mechanics and his mentality to improve his ability. “(Coach Turgeon helped with) my command and throwing secondary stuff for strikes because pretty much everyone in this league can tee off on a fastball,” McDermott said.

McDermott stands now with a 3-1 record in seven appearances (four starts), with a 3.33 ERA. His strikeouts (24) more than double his earned runs (9).

“He can throw that breaking ball for a strike

and finish guys off hard and on the handle if he needs to,” Turgeon said. “Strike one, strike one, strike one, that’s McDermott.”

He has struggled with tendonitis in his elbow this year, but it has only been a minor setback.

He has been a valuable pitcher in weekday games as both a starter and reliever.

If he can stay healthy, he might become more of a mainstay for weekend appearances.

Another vastly improved pitcher is reliever and redshirt sophomore Brandon Fisher. Last season, he posted a 3.65 ERA in 12 appearances and struck out 18. Opponents only batting .174 against him, tops on the staff.

“I was still new,” Fisher said. “I just started pitching last year. I only had a fastball and a slider.”

Fisher has been asked to do a lot more this year and with an added pitch to his arsenal, his strikeouts have jumped. He has already matched last year’s total of 18, and with almost double the innings of work, opponents are still only batting .203 against him.

“This year coach Turgeon worked with me and I developed a changeup,” he said. “It has really helped me out. Last year I was mainly facing righties with a slider and fastball, and this year I’m facing lefties with a fastball and changeup.”

A former walk-on, Fisher hopes to be the closer, and as long as his stats continue to improve, the Hokies will have the good kind of tough decision — if he or sophomore Jesse

Hahn should close.

Both Turgeon and Hughes teach each member of their pitching staff the same approach.

“I think the mentality that we preach all the time is to be aggressive,” said Turgeon. “Don’t pitch to corners as much as pounding the zone.

Be on the offensive on the mound, and put the hitters on the defense. With that you can’t have a problem pitching to contact. You’re going to get ahead in counts, and hitters expand the zone once pitchers get ahead.”

McDermott and Fisher are not relaxing on the new skills they learned during the offseason. They still are trying to improve their game and help the team. “(I’m working on) throwing my breaking ball for a strike, being more consistent with offspeed pitches and pitching out of jams,” McDermott said. “(I need to) stay ahead in the count,” Fisher said. “Sometimes I fall behind in counts and that hurts me, but if I can stay ahead I’ll be fine.”

At the season’s midpoint, pitching will become more important, especially with a spot in the ACC tournament on the line. Mistakes made last year may no longer hamper the Hokies’ hopes for postseason play.

“We tell them (pitchers) every day,” Turgeon said. “You’re going to win some and lose some, but if you keep going after hitters and attacking the strike zone, you’re going to win a hell of a lot more than you’re going to lose.”

BRIAN CLAY/SPPS

Rhett Ballard, Tech’s No. 1 starter, delivers a pitch. In 2009, he has a record of 3-2.

HATTIE FRANCIS

ct sports staff writer It didn’t take long for freshman Courtney Rauscher to hit her tennis stride on the collegiate level. Despite a nagging wrist injury, the first-year starter posted an 11-2 record in singles play during the fall tennis season.

Rauscher would earn top performer honors at the Princeton Invitational and advance to the singles finals at both the Colorado and Hokie Fall Invitational events.

Still, the Georgia-native wouldn’t quite consider that RAUSCHER her “A” game.

“Actually, in the fall with my left wrist I wasn’t allowed to hit back hands, so I was slicing everything,” Rauscher said. “I had surgery on it in July and they took out some piece of tissue, and I rested it and it didn’t get better. …

“So they had me rest it the entire fall just only hitting forehands and then sliced back hands,” she said. “So the tournaments I did OK. (Coach) put me more on the bottom level so I didn’t get killed; it was an interesting fall.”

Unlike team play in the spring, the fall is exclusively for individual play. The tennis team competed at Colorado, Princeton, Old Dominion and its home court for the Hokie Fall Invitational.

Tech head coach Terry Ann Zawacki-Woods appreciates the phenom’s tenacious effort throughout this stretch. Rauscher is tied for the team lead in overall match wins.

“Courtney’s been doing a great job,” ZawackiWoods said. “She’s been really solid for us at any position she’s playing. As a freshman she’s really found tremendous success.”

The right-handed, 5-foot-4 Rauscher began playing tennis at the age of seven.

“My mom played some in high school,” she said. “She took all of us kids and we played for fun, and then I started liking it. So we went to clubs and played there. I have had a coach since I was like 10.”

Courtney was home schooled as a child and is the second oldest of seven children. In between learning math, science and English, she also practiced and participated in many tennis tournaments.

“It’s all tournament related,” Rauscher said. “You have different levels of state tournaments, which are not as strong. Then you go to southern, which is pretty strong. You have all the southern states together, and there are nationals, and those are really hard ones; you can go international.”

“I did play international at one point,” she said, “but most of us stay on the national level because there’s so much competition anyway. You really have to pay a lot of money to go international.”

In international play, one loss can be the end of the tournament for a player. In national tournaments it is more of a double-elimination process.

Tech started to recruit Rauscher the summer

before her senior year of high school.

“It’s called a recruiting summer,” Rauscher said.

“We have two big tournaments: one is a clay court tournament in July, and a lot of coaches from the big schools are there and you can meet with them one on one.”

“There’s another one, a hard court tournament in August which is another really big one, and they are there too to just see you play again,” Rauscher said. “After that tournament you usually set up your recruiting trip and decide from there.”

As she had already been contacted by Tech, Rauscher talked to them at the tournament in July. Courtney took four of five allowed recruiting trips after the final tournament in August.

She chose to visit the University of Colorado, the University of Illinois, NC State and Tech.

“I really liked Terry Ann and then the team,” Rauscher said. “I liked the team atmosphere; it was a little more team-oriented than some of the other teams.”

“I really liked the campus,” she said. “I thought it was really pretty.”

In her first year, Rauscher has added to the team atmosphere that attracted her to Tech.

“Courtney is a really easy-going, very nice person, and great friend,” said her roommate and teammate Katie Blow. “On the court she’s very supportive of everyone during practice.”

As for team play, Rauscher said that her spring season started a little shaky.

“I think I was a little nervous just because it was the team and it was the first time going out there,” she said. “You feel like you have to win but then you get in the groove and you feel more comfortable. …

“You know everyone is going for the same thing on the court,” Rauscher said. “We are all going toward the same goal, so I relaxed a little bit.”

Rauscher believes her play has gotten better overall, and the rest of the team seems to agree.

“She started off playing (as the No. 6 seed) at the beginning of the year,” Blow said. “She’s played steadily and moved her way up to five and (is) still doing really well.”

In her most recent performance at home against Marshall on Wednesday, Rauscher gave her team a 2-1 advantage when she won 7-6 and 7-6 (3) over her opponent, Deanna Bailey. The Hokies went on to edge the Thundering Herd by a score of 4-3.

“I think she’s just going to keep getting better,” Zawacki-Woods said. “Courtney’s a tough competitor out there. She’s been battling some wrist injuries right now, and she’s done a tremendous job for it even injury-wise.”

However, staying at the No. 5 spot and achieving wins could largely come down to the health of a single joint.

“I think in the future the stronger we can get her wrist and the more experience she gets under her belt I really think she’s got a great chance of moving up the line-up and racking up the wins for our team and herself,” Zawacki-Woods said.

THEGODISSUE

friday april 10, 2009

Finding religion in the Blacksburg community THE CAMPUS COMMUNITY IS HOME TO A WIDE VARIETY OF FAITH TRADITIONS. HERE’S AN INSIDE LOOK AT A FEW. stories by david grant

Freethinking

Christianity

the story of a Tech student as told by david grant

The story of Philip Jennings as told by david grant

I

grew up in a very conservative home, evangelical charismatic, my mother, father and sister. Growing up speaking in tongues was expected

I

’ve lived in Virginia Beach my entire life in a family where my parents were always together. I didn’t have a lot of responsibilities or do many

of me if I was a spiritually healthy practitioner

chores or anything, and we were always finan-

of our faith. We were also very politically con-

cially stable, but I was always asked to perform

servative — my parents taught me to not trust

well in school. Up to middle school I hung out

homosexuals. We voted Republican. I was in

with the guys in my neighborhood whom I

the pro-Life club in high school where we

had grown up with. I went to church maybe

took a public stance against the Gay-Straight

a couple of times when I was younger, but I

Alliance. That was me. I was Bible Boy.

have no knowledge as to why we went. I was

see BELIEF, page two

always fidgety on the hard, wooden benches, and I hated it. I remember vaguely saying that I was a Christian, but I wasn’t in any sense of the word.

Judaism

W

hen

see JENNINGS, page two

Islam

associate

professor of Judaic Studies Ben Sax

G

oma Makhlouf sits quietly at his computer, a tablet of Christian writing in Arabic

moved his wife and

script perched to his right. An Egyptian,

newborn child to Blacksburg from Chicago in the

Makhlouf received his religious education at

fall of 2008, he was a bit daunted about relocating

arguably the world’s greatest Islamic university,

from a thriving Jewish community to Southwest

Al-Azhar in Cairo, and is now completing his

Virginia. And then he went to the DMV.

Ph.D. in translation and comparative religion

“The woman who was working with me was a

at an Egyptian university. He’s a full-fledged

very sweet person, and you could tell that she was

Imam, a Muslim spiritual adviser and scholar.

genuinely trying to make conversation along the

Except, he’s not taking on his craft from the

way in this bureaucratic process, and she asked

crowded crush of Cairo. Rather, you can find

me what I did,” Sax said. “I told her I was an asso-

Imam Makhlouf right next to Kids’ Heaven:

ciate professor of Judaic studies.”

His new mosque, Masjid al-Hadaya (Mosque

“What’s that?” the woman asked.

of Guidance), is adjoined to a child daycare

“The study of Judaism,” Sax said.

center in Blacksburg.

“What’s that?”

“Debatably a religion that Jews do or do not

see ISLAM, page six

see JUDAISM, page three

practice,” Sax said.

Hinduism by gabe mcvey

I

n any examination of American

Baha’i faith

O

n a quiet Sunday afternoon in Baha’i youth

religions writ large (or Virginia

education,

Tech’s religions writ small) it

retired

Tech professor Cosby

would be easy, though a serious

Rogers is calmly encouraging five-year-old

oversight, to look over the Eastern tradi-

Amelia Lester to offer her interpretation of the

tions that inform the worldviews of many day’s Baha’i prayer. After several false starts, international students.

Amelia sings: “Oh my Lord, oh my Lord,” and One of the largest of these student groups, then, with a broad smile, “I love everybody!” according to the Cranwell International Half a world away and six years prior, Center, comes from India.

Maziar Fahandezh Sadi arrived at his Iranian Hinduism is the predominant faith of college entrance examination. He simply left the Indian subcontinent, though defining the space on the form marked religion blank.

HOKIE BIRDS BY SARA SPANGLER/COLLEGIATE TIMES

what being a Hindu actually means can be He knew that filling in “Baha’i,” a faith outdifficult given the heterogeneous nature of lawed in Iran but founded by a Persian and the traditions informing the faith. still popular there, would ensure his inability “Religions are made by people, people are to attend Iranian higher education. not made by religions,” electrical engineering graduate student Manasa Valipa said.

see HINDU, page six

see BAHA’I, page seven

page

b2

april 10, 2009

Belief: Dealing with Jennings: Getting personal evangelical upbringing with Christianity, senior through research leaned on faith in tough times from page one

A

t the end of my sophomore yearbeginning of my junior year of high school, I got affiliated with a youth group, which was not where my parents had been going to church. I had a Christian girlfriend at the time, and what Christian couples did was go to youth group together, so I went with her, and when we broke up, she quit going and I stayed. My parents and my sister eventually joined that church with me.

It was definitely a step down from the church I grew up in. Speaking in tongues, for instance, wasn’t a common part of the religious service.

I got super-involved, working for the church in what was called the “Sound Ministry,” where I was mixing sound for religious performances and services four or five times a week, probably a thousand people per service. Life was good, I guess.

I had some disagreements with the main pastor there. He would make a lot of gay jokes. There was a student in our youth group who was “struggling with homosexuality,” as we called it, which I find terribly offensive now, and we would pray for him so he could get over his spiritual burden while at the same time our pastor was making all these gay jokes.

And I said, “You know, you’re humiliating him.” But most of my debates with church at that time were largely trivial, theological issues.

So my parents forced me to take this course on the comprehensive study of religion taught by the completely incompetent wife of one of the church’s main religious figures.

My parents were dead-set on it because they wanted me to have that education before I went off to college. The material was heinously ignorant. My dad was taking the class with me to be supportive, and he was a little insulted by the quality of some of the material, but he thought some of it was good and said he wanted his son to get that sort of knowledge.

He eventually sat down with the head pastor once we got through it and said, “You know, I think my son has gone through that class and decided that Christianity does not compete on the global marketplace of ideas.” And he was right. I had.

I was actually very against applying to schools like Liberty University, but Christian issues were important to me applying to college. I didn’t choose Cornell University because I didn’t find any Christians there. I went there and was looking for a youth group on campus and met up with this one kid who insisted that we pray in the middle of the coffee shop, and all these kids were just sneering and laughing at us, and I picked up this general hostility toward religion. I had no idea I would be the person doing that in a few years. But I wanted to be an engineer, and Liberty didn’t have an engineering school. I prayed a lot for God to give me direction, and I didn’t hear a lot back so I picked Tech out of several big state schools.

I came to college. I smoked pot. I lost my virginity. If my parents knew that today, I would be crucified. They would never speak to me again.

I got introduced to a lot of new ideas — that premarital sex isn’t the worst thing in the world, that homosexuals aren’t dangerous, that drugs aren’t terrible. In high school I was reading volumes of books about religion. I was reading non-stop. I continued that in college, but the difference was I had access to books my parents would have grounded me for possessing. I was into a lot of liberal Christian literature, and the more I read it, the more I agreed with it. I was raised on the 700 Club.

It was a very narrow paradigm. I wasn’t even supposed to watch CNN — I was supposed to watch Fox News or the 700 Club. I think anyone, if you really limit their access to information or ideas, you can get them to believe absolutely anything. I think that’s exactly what happens within a lot of Evangelical churches in the South in general. You go to church on Sunday, you go to Tuesday morning prayer group, Thursday evening bible study and Friday youth group, and Monday, Wednesday and Saturday you’re hanging out with your Christian friends, so you may interact with some atheists, say, in your classes, but you’re not really having serious exposure to new ideas. I see that with a lot of Christians that come to Tech their freshman year. A few of them will come in and find their Christian group and disappear for four years.

I’m hitting a different church every week.

I’m talking to the pastors and asking a ton of questions and reading tons of stuff. I’ve got shelves of religious literature back home in boxes from this time. So I went to the Unitarian church, and there was a guest speaker talking about pluralism. He was really pushing this ecumenical Christianity, which I was very unfamiliar with. And he bounced around all these ideas, and they were rattling around in my head, and I thought, “This makes sense.”

And he was certainly making a lot more sense than the Ravi Zacharias (an international evangelical Christian minister) shit that I had been reading when I was back at home.

I went home, and I was having a meal with my pastor, and I started bouncing all these words with him, and he was finishing up his theology Ph.D., and he had never heard of these concepts. He was working with this basic, basic assumption that the Bible was the inerrant word of God, but he couldn’t tell me the scholarly debates behind who wrote it and how it came to be as it is today.

I was already thinking that Christians couldn’t keep up with the intellectual order set by academia, and when he couldn’t handle a basic conversation that I picked up in a 30 minute sermon from a liberal church, I

thought, “This is it. This is over.”

At that point I started calling myself a liberal Christian. I didn’t want to leave it mostly because of my parents. I was bouncing all these new ideas off my parents, and we were constantly, constantly fighting about theological issues until things really came to a head when my dad came down to Blacksburg to pick me up before an academic break during my sophomore year. We were in the car heading back to Northern Virginia, and we’re arguing over the inerrancy of the Bible, and I said, “I have no reason to believe this is true,” and he said, “How often are you reading the Bible?” and I said, “I’m not. I don’t.”

I was reading little excerpts of the Quran at the time, and I told him that. He pulled over on the side of 81 and started screaming at me that if I wouldn’t even try to be Christian, why should he pay for me to leave home just to lose my faith. I realize now he was panicking. But ever since then, it has been a point of significant contention. That’s partially my fault because I make snide comments from time to time. My mom thinks Yoga is evil, that it’s something that people in cults do, and so one time I came home and found out she had been getting acupuncture. And I looked her right in the eye and said, “Isn’t that against your religion?

You think Yoga is evil. How are you getting acupuncture?” And we were in the middle of this nice Italian restaurant, and my parents just lost it.

After my dad backed off on the issue of tuition, I very slowly got them into the idea that their son wasn’t going to be a Christian.

I was dating a non-Christian girl during freshman year, and I didn’t tell my parents about it for nearly two months, and then I told them that I was dating her but trying to convert her. Then I had my sister back at home who was listening to the dinner conversation and knew what was going on, and she was advising me about whether it was safe or not to bring things up with my parents, and she would tell me things like, “Cool off a little, wait a week or two before you tell them anything else.”

“I was constructing these horrendous lies that I still, to some extent, live in. I was lying to them for three solid years about what I was doing on a daily basis. But they’ve gotten to the point where they don’t ask questions so a lot of those have abated.”

I was constructing these horrendous lies that I still, to some extent, live in. I was lying to them for three solid years about what I was doing on a daily basis. But they’ve gotten to the point where they don’t ask questions so a lot of those have abated. The problem is that religion is really the only thing that I’ve ever disagreed with my parents on, but it’s so encompassing that it touches everything.

I justified my agreeing with them as a child because I didn’t have access to other material. But they are full-grown adults, and I don’t know how they can still hold that the Bible should be taken 100 percent literally.

I’m deeply cynical of Christians. I wouldn’t say that this is justified all the time, but if someone says they are a Christian, I roll my eyes. I don’t trust Christians. I’m not skeptical in the same way of Buddhists or Muslims, for example, in the same way that I am of Christians because I haven’t been hurt by them in the same way. I don’t agree with them. All religions can take really good forms and really hideous forms. When someone says they are religious, I try to find out where they are on the spectrum, but there is a strong prejudice in my mind about what it means to be a Christian and the attitudes that Christians have that is seared into me from my upbringing. I have a natural aversion toward Christians that I realize is unjustified. I should really figure out what type of Christian they are first.

I guess I always forget that evangelical Christianity is one small sliver of Christianity that is a phenomenon of the last 80 years, on the east coast of the United States.

I wrongly connect evangelical Christianity to all Christianity. I was in Munich, and all the beer gardens are run by monks, and I couldn’t believe it because in my Pentecostal background this was impossible.

One denomination that I have a lot of respect for is the Catholic Church. There are certainly hardliners, but the majority of Catholics I have met and a lot of Catholic literature I’ve read feel the need to justify their faith on an intellectual and spiritual basis, and I think that keeps them in check. It’s not just, “God spoke to me and told me to do this.” This justification keeps you from acting on the complex prejudices that we learn from growing up wherever we grow up.

Over Christmas break, I thought about going to church on Christmas Eve, and if I had been at home and not in a big city where I didn’t know the churches, I probably would have. So I wouldn’t say I’m Christian, but I’m certainly not an atheist. I don’t think atheism has logical grounds — you can’t disprove the existence of God. All you can prove is that he has no influence. By definition, I’m an agnostic.

The student interviewed for this article , a senior engineering major from Northern Virginia, was granted anonymity in order to speak freely about his faith background.

from page one

W

hen I hit high school, my parents kind of checked out. Both my sisters had gone to college, and they were a bit wilder, so I think my parents took it as an opportunity to rest and relax because they were gone. My best friend Eric got involved with the soccer team, and one of the other people I used to hang out with a lot transferred to another school, so I found myself in this new world of really trying to figure out who I was. And that freshman year of high school was rough.

My dad pushed a decent amount of money my way as his form of being able to relax his duties as a parent. So with some extra money and a lot of free time — I could stay out whenever I wanted, do whatever I wanted — I took advantage.

I settled on this group of kids who were much more crazy than I wanted to be, so to fit in I started drinking with them. But as time wore on, I didn’t really feel like I was part of that group, and so later on in the year they talked about wanting to talk about smoking pot, so I thought, “Well, you know, if I could get it for them, then I could be included among the group,” so I ended up finding a guy and started, in a very, very minor, lowkey setting, dealing to them.

At first it was cool. But there was still this inherent disconnect among us. My new “friends” didn’t care what was going on with me or how I thought about things. As time wore on, my parents had checked out — my dad got involved in a pool league and my mom went with him, and they stopped coming to my diving events. I maintained good grades, and that was all they really needed. So at the end of the year, the emptiness I felt had magnified over hurt relationships, parents who weren’t really around, and this increasing problem of dependence on drugs and drinking. It turned from something that was fun at first to something that was needed for me to check out of reality.

Thankfully, at the same time a group of guys involved in Young Life (a Christian high school ministry) got involved in my life. There were roughly 40 or 50 people from my high school who went to their meetings, and I started going originally because I could get high and just hang out. As the time progressed, I started to pay a little more attention to what they were talking about. Still, everything was surface-level. My depression was growing. Toward the end of my freshman year, my parents found out I had been dealing a little bit, and of course I lied to them, and only several years later did I come clean about it. I got drug tested and somehow I passed, but the rift remained. No one knew what was going on in my life. I was popping Adderall. I took a lot of Advil. I took Benadryl to sleep.

I started cutting my wrists, never really deep enough to do major damage, but enough to create another high.

So rolling into that summer, things were really, really intense at home. The guys of Young Life invited me to go to this weeklong Young Life camp at Lake Champion, N.Y. It was a blessing. I remember thinking to myself, “This is a great opportunity to get away from everything,” and I packed some alcohol and some drugs thinking that this would be a week where I could just get away and not think about home. When I arrived, the Young Life staff said if you’re caught with drugs or alcohol you’re sent home immediately, and I decided it was more important to be here without the drugs than to be home. It was my first sober week in months.

Always being a rational thinker, one of the things that contributed to my depression was the idea that if time is infinite, and we are finite, we can’t have a significance.

It’s just something I always thought — that comparing something finite to infinite, it’s not able to have significance. And at camp they addressed this issue, and the hurt I was feeling by saying that it’s true except there are eternal consequences, something after death, that’s not the case. They also talked about how the loneliness and the emptiness I had been feeling was not uncommon, and it’s actually almost inherent in everyone, and the things I was searching for — love, acceptance, compassion, encouragement — all of those could be found in a Creator who doesn’t fail.

I remember hearing for the first time about God’s perfection.

Because God is perfect, we could not communicate or be with God. It’s like a little bit of yeast goes through the entire dough. A little bit of sin kills the whole thing. To hear that is very upsetting. I couldn’t deny the fact that I had caused a lot of hurt and because of that I couldn’t get to God on my own. I pulled a lot of people into drugs who have gotten deeper even than when we were in high school.

The next night, we talked about how Christ’s death covers that sin, and it was at that point I started to believe. It wasn’t a “this-is-whatI’m-going-to-do-in-my-life” revolution. I was saying, “I believe, but show me.”

So that summer I said I’m committed to this. Over the next year, He really aided me.

I learned the value of prayer, of reading my Bible, of getting in a personal relationship with God. It is about a personal relationship, about me conversing with the God of the universe (even though still today I have no idea how to do that sometimes), and the first year was particularly hard because, being an academic, a lot of the things with Christianity were hard for me to reconcile to my own beliefs. There are certain passages or certain things that, taken by themselves, make you frustrated or angry. Romans 8 talks about

DANIEL LIN/SPPS

Senior Philip Jennings overcame significant depression and an addiction to drugs while in high school en route to a faith supported by personal inquiry. the idea of predestination and free will and the idea that God has to know because he is all-knowing, but does knowledge equate to influence? C.S. Lewis puts up a really interesting argument about the always-now God that time is a human quality and that God doesn’t see this event followed by this event followed by this event, but each event simultaneously happening. But that’s still one of those things that I don’t really understand.

I had victory over the drugs and the alcohol.

It took a little while, and with things like that it was never a permanent victory until more recently. It’s definitely a process of learning what it means. Issues are so much more complicated than we ever think we are. I thought the alcoholism was just, “stop doing it,” but there were emotional ties that contributed to it that made it take a while. But now it’s clearly and definitely gone and out of my life, and the things I struggle with now are much different, but by no means am I anywhere near where I want to be. I feel like that’s very common among Christians. When one evil or sinful thing is out of your life, you realize what the next thing you have to deal with is.

I was in a Christian relationship my senior year of high school, and it failed right in the first couple weeks of college. And that was a really tough year for me, and the anger with my dad for checking out was even more evident when I got to college. Freshman year, I got involved in Cru, but it was still a growing time for me. I think that’s the first time I learned to know God as Father and that I can rely on him, and I can depend on him for what I need. After that year, things really started to turn up between my dad and me. The first part was pretty rough, and I started to make an effort to get involved with my dad, to invest in him and to build a relationship. I always had this frustration and anger because I thought, “He’s the dad; I’m the son. He’s the one that’s responsible,” but then I said, “Why don’t I make the effort?” and I’ve seen a lot of really awesome things happen from that, and I see him more frequently. But he has other things to wrestle with.

Over the last two to three years, God has been teaching me some really crazy things about Himself. I feel like I never had a really good idea of who He was. Sometimes you have these friendships that have been going on for years, and then in a couple months period you find out who that person really is, and I feel like that what I’ve really been learning. I’ve learned about his faithfulness, his redemptive side, the importance and power of prayer, and making that intimate time for him to quiet my heart, to be still, and to just be in front of the God of the universe.

I was really involved with Cru until the end of last year when it started to fall off. I’m not involved in a Bible study this year, and it’s nothing against Cru, but I think what’s really happened is that my faith has become more personal. I relied a lot on the groups and a lot of my quest was an intellectual quest. You can read the Bible, and you can read it as a history book, and you can say I know this, this and this about God. But until you reflect on yourself and ask God to reveal — What does this say? What is this trying to tell me? — it doesn’t

mean anything except for that I can answer all the surface-level questions.

I’ve been asking myself tougher questions.

When I look at Moses, I say, “Wow, he stood up to Pharaoh,” but also “Could I do that?” A lot of times I would approach a pastor and ask him what I should do in a given situation but never asked God himself and asking him to guide me. So I think that a huge part of my growth in the last year has been through seeking God on my own instead of going to everyone who could tell me about God but not going directly to God. I’m going to graduate school at Tech for civil engineering. I always thought I would do civil engineering and go into the workforce, but now I’m at wherever He calls me to go. My heart was originally set on a career, but lately I’ve learned that’s probably not where I would enjoy myself the most, not where I would love to be. I hope maybe someday I can offer the same hope to someone who is in the same position I was.

For me, it would have been foolish to say, “Stop drinking. Stop smoking pot.” I think the loneliness and the brokenness is the issue.

I personally think that comes from separation from God. Dealing with that separation has a lot to do with faith. For me, faith has been a small part of what I believe in the sense that I looked into what I believe about Christianity, and I’ve seen scientific evidence and from other people and scholars and experts (especially that first year I became a Christian), but Christianity says without faith it’s impossible to praise God. It’s as if you have a friendship, but if you never tell that person anything important, it doesn’t really mean anything. You can spend a lot of time together, but without leaning on that relationship it doesn’t mean anything, and the same is true of God. If God is a chair, and I never sit it in it, but I say I believe in the chair’s ability to hold me, what does that matter?

God has blown me away. I have looked up to different people as I was growing up.

They originally were people who were so far beyond the person I could ever be. They were incredible guys. And now I see myself, not necessarily walk in their footsteps but approach them. I’ve been able to get involved with a couple of the freshmen that live in Hillcrest Hall, and it’s a joy to see how God is working in their lives.

A lot of people who meet me are surprised to hear my background. People know God when they see God work. And you only see God work when something is done that only God could do. Only God could do the things that He did. Only God could bridge the gap.

It’s really frustrating when I go home because I have to pick up my dad from the bar. I can see the hurt as he comes home. I don’t know what it is that drives him particularly, but it isn’t for the good time anymore. It’s consuming him. So being able to draw back on my own experience, I can love him more so in that state than I could before.

My joy comes from getting to know God and getting to share God with friends and not in a way that is about selling something, but in a way that has changed my life and revolutionized everything I’ve known.

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april 10, 2009

Judaism: For Blacksburg’s Jews, life is ‘Israel-ly good’ from page one

“I think I’ve heard of Jews,” she said.

“It was uncomfortable for both of us.

She knew that her cultural prejudices were shining through to a person she did not know. I was uncomfortable because my small talk was a window into something complex and uncomfortable,” Sax said.

Blacksburg’s Jewish community — whatever the local understanding of one of the world’s oldest religious traditions — is an eclectic mix of American Jewish students searching for a Jewish “niche” coupled with professors and community members that span the religious spectrum. In doing so, the Blacksburg Jewish community mirrors debates in Judaism both in Israel and in the Jewish community at large.

Finding their own way Only five years ago, the Jewish student community at Tech was largely invisible, said Sue Kurtz, Hillel executive director, because of a lack of public programming targeted at the broader university community. By partnering with groups such as the LGBTA and the Black Student Union, Kurtz said Hillel, a Jewish student organization, was able to expand the visibility of Judaism on campus and encourage the 1.5 percent to 2 percent of each class that is Jewish to attend activities.

In step with this process, two-time Hillel president and senior ACIS major Rochelle Low has worked with both multicultural programs and services and the vice president of student affairs to attempt to form a Jewish Student Union to solidify the voice of the Jewish community within the upper echelons of student governance.

Low said that one student group’s invitation of a comedian to speak on campus during Yom HaShoah, the day of Holocaust remembrance on April 21, would be something that could be more directly addressed through a formal Jewish Student Union.

Hillel students perform Friday night Shabbat services at the Blacksburg Jewish Cultural Center on East Roanoke Street and often serve as leaders of Sunday morning religious education programs at the center. While this ties the community together, many said, it also offers an insight into one of the local communities most controversial issues: the question of whether to attempt to secure a permanent Rabbi.

Students typically lead their own Friday night services, a process which Low said draws the students closer to one another.

“When students lead the services, they feel more of an ownership,” over their faith, Low said.

While the absence of a Rabbi for college students may be assuaged by the presence of more learned adult members in the community, there are some who do miss Rabbinical guidance.

“Missing for me was a rabbi directly for the students who was young and would really work with the students to bring out spirituality and bring out the text of Judaism,” said Arielle Kohr, a freshman human development major who grew up an observant Conservative Jew. “Now, while we have the cultural aspect of it, if we have any, if we want to do Torah study there really is no person to lead it who has been trained officially.”

There are some in the roughly 40 families that pay the $700 annual dues to the BJCC that wonder what might be if the center were to attempt to secure a Rabbi, who, in the Reform and Conservative Jewish traditions serve less formal roles in typical Friday evening/Saturday morning, or Shabat, rituals than they do in community roles such as performing circumcisions and presiding over marriages.

Lili Lustig, a student at the Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine, said while she thinks that the services provided by lay members were excellent, community members who have been attending the BJCC for “20 or 30 years” are staunchly opposed to changing the center from its current format of alternating Reform and Conservative Jewish worship services from week to week, an opposition that while allowing maximum flexibility in worship may cause some Jewish families difficulty in raising their children.

“Though I am a physically older member, I have children who are 11 and 13, and I’ve had to look for alternate ways for teaching my children religious education, especially when my child was preparing for her Bat Mitzva (the Judaic right of passage into adulthood), and, luckily, there was an Israeli family here that taught her Hebrew. My husband’s nephew is a Rabbi in Atlanta, and he came and conducted the service for us here. We flew to Atlanta several times so they could work together. We had to find our own way,” Lustig said.

Sax agreed.

“On the one hand, it’s inspiring that it’s a community of lay people that has kept things up. On the other hand, it’s not our comfort zone. We are going to have to teach our daughter and son Jewish tradition, not just family-wise but I am going to have to sit down and teach them Hebrew,” Sax said. “That’s not something I expected I would do.”

Bernard Jortner, two-time president of the BJCC and a faculty member at Tech’s veterinary college since 1980, said that the community had largely decided against a Rabbi for two reasons. First,

NICK JEREMIAH/SPPS

Jewish students from around campus gathered for an ‘Israeli Shibbat’ at the Blacksburg Jewish Community Center hosted by Israeil Fellow Larissa Rozenblit and Hillel. Students said traditional Shabbat prayers and tucked into food similar to that available at a Shabbat dinner in Israel.

“we have an eclectic group. It’s hard to select one person to lead people of varying approaches,” Jortner said. Second, the cost of a Rabbi for a small community is prohibitive, and Roanoke, with both a Reform and Conservative Rabbi, could handle some of the more pressing needs.

The Chabad House In the aftermath of the April 16 shootings, the worlds of the professional community and the student community collided with the death of Liviu Librescu, an Israeli-American aerospace engineering professor. In the aftermath of the shootings, Jewish life in Blacksburg was bolstered by two new additions to the community: the creation of a Chabad House and the appointment by the Israeli government of an Israeli Fellow to the campus.

Librescu’s widow, who since emigrated to Israel, helped secure the purchase of a former bed and breakfast on Wall Street to house families of the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Judaism, a group of roughly 200,000 Orthodox Jews who, among other pursuits, staff centers the world over providing for Jewish education and fellowship. The group is identified with an Orthodox brand of Judaism rare in the United States outside of neighborhoods of major urban areas and is very conservative in its social teachings. While the first occupants of the house relocated to Charlotte because of medical problems stemming from a difficult pregnancy, the house has been recently restaffed with Zvi and Chanie Zwiebel and their daughter Rifka.

At a Shabat dinner held on a rainy Friday in March, Zvi, a Londoner by birth, and Chanie, a New Yorker, made themselves known to the roughly twodozen Jewish students in attendance not by their presence but by the rain of Facebook friend invitations to those with Jewish-sounding last names Zvi let loose from his PC earlier in the day.

“Some Orthodox Jews come from the opinion that technology and Judaism are conflicting. Whether Internet or TV. Well, the Chabad Rebbe (the spiritual leader of the religious group), said if God created it in this world, use it. It’s there for us to use. The Internet can be terrible if you use it the wrong way, but you can take a tool like Facebook and use it for the good. That’s what it’s all about. These are tools that God gave us to spread Judaism,” Zvi said.

While only arriving in Blacksburg during the last week in March and still

continuing a previous obligation to teach online courses in Jewish religion and culture to children all over the world from 9-to-5 each day, Zvi already has plans to help boost the amount of kosher food available in the area.

While saying he could get Kosher food flown in from Baltimore and Atlanta if need be, Zvi said he would be visiting local supermarkets to press them to obtain more ritually prepared foodstuffs. Currently, kosher turkey is the sole meat available in Blacksburg.

Although the Zwiebel’s maintain their task is to “help every Jew,” and Zvi’s Rabbinic training could allow him to fulfill many religious duties within the community, there are those who do not hew to Orthodox Jewish teaching and who are uncomfortable with allowing the Chabad into intimate religious experiences because of wariness regarding some of the group’s theological positions.

“We’re having a son, and I wouldn’t have to think about, for example, circumcision if I was still living in Chicago.

I would make a call to someone who would make a call, and the process would be taken care of. Here, whom do you ask? I am very wary of Orthodox or Chabad having to participate in an important part of my son’s life,” Sax said.

“Israel-ly good” Zvi was adamant that he was not interested in channeling American Jews to Israel.

“Our goal is not to make people do aliyah (literally, “to go up” or emigrate to Israel) or change their feeling. Our goal here is to help every Jew,” Zvi said.

At that juncture, he and Israeli Fellow Larissa Rozenblit stood at slightly crosspurposes. Where Zvi is concerned with spiritual development, Rozenblit sees her job in Blacksburg as not necessarily involved in convincing Jews to emigrate, but rather to increase awareness of and connection to Israel amongst them.

Initially, there was some rough going.

“It was hard for my students at the beginning – I was from Israel so they assumed I was supposed to be religious but I’m not. I do religious things but for me it’s more cultural. It was weird for me at the beginning to go to services but now I like it a lot because its time to bond with my students,” Rozenblit, 24, who came to Israel from Moldova after the fall of the Soviet Union, said.

Rozenblit’s disconnect was not uncommon for Israelis for whom being Jewish is a fact of walking the streets of

Tel Aviv or approaching the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Nahum Arav, an Israeli-American professor of astrophysics who came to Tech in January 2008 from Boulder, Colo., said that his American Jewish friends in Blacksburg are typically more observant than his Israeli friends.

“The age-old, known fact is when you live in Israel you don’t have to be anything special to be Jewish. You live and breath an interesting mix of Judaism and Zionism and all the concoction that goes with that. In the other countries, where Jews are a minority, these things are becoming more important,” Arav said.

Between the American Jewish experience of holding onto ritual and religious observance and the Israeli experience is the bridge of Tagleet, or Birthright, a trip funded by the Israeli government and several private groups to bring teenage and young adult Jews to Israel to increase their connection to the country.

Over winter break of 2008, Rozenblit organized the first all-Virginia Tech Birthright trip in history of Hillel at Virginia Tech, with 36 students packing an entire bus for a ten-day, all-expenses paid journey around Israel.

For many of the students who participated, the trip was nothing short of magical.

“We always learned about Israel in Hebrew school, and I thought it was important because of the historical background of Judaism. Now that I’ve been there and met people and have friends there and my friends’ families there, it’s a completely different connection — it’s the culture of Judaism rather than the religion,” said Amanda Herring, a freshman interdisciplinary studies major. “I want to go back and study abroad there — we had always talked about how it was our homeland, but I never really understood it until then.”

The program does have its critics, however.

“My perception of the program is that they’re run … to get American Jews interested in Israel if not in actually moving to Israel, which is the ultimate goal, but interested in being supporters of Israel in taking part in what they call the Hasbara, pro-Israeli propaganda,” said Israeli-American science and technology studies associate professor Daniel Breslau, who taught at Tel Aviv University from 1993 until 2000. “They should come back to the U.S. and be spokespeople for the public image of Israel. I know a lot of kids go on them to

have a good time, but they have to realize it has a particular political purpose.”

Political allegiance is never far from discussions of the state of Israel, whether in compelling students to visit or to join political clubs upon their return.

“Before I went on birthright, Israel was a very distant thing for me and, yeah, I supported Israel but I didn’t know why.

And that was completely different. As I grew up and went to Hebrew school and was bat mitzvahed and you learn a lot about Israel but it’s so different going there,” said Kori Brown, a sophomore international studies major and president of Friends of Israel. “You’re standing there at this place and thousands of years ago people were fighting so you could be here.”

Kohr, whose father is the president of the vaunted pro-Israel lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, said she was slightly “surprised” by American Jews who did not possess a strong connection to Israel.

“Jews have been persecuted for forever and without the state of Israel and before the United States there was really not refuge for them. If they would have been born another time I feel like they would be grateful to have a place to find refuge and practice Judaism. Living in the United States sometimes in the back of their mind they may not realize that in other places and at other times they might not have been able to practice because they’re being persecuted,” Kohr said.

Breslau said that living in Israel was akin to “living in history.”

One gets the sense “that there is a historical turning point every few weeks or so and the greater possibility of making a difference there. Socially, it’s a very intense place and you make very close relationships. There isn’t this separation between work life and personal life that there is in the U.S. If you work with people, you live with them, so to speak,” Breslau said.

In addition to the connection to Israel, the trip tied the participants tightly together back in Blacksburg.

“We all have cute little sayings — ‘Israel-ly good,’” Herring said. “And we run into each other around campus, and we get really excited to see one another.”

Aaron Fine, a junior business management major and treasurer for Hillel, said that he had seen a number of people who went on the trip get involved in many more Jewish-themed events back in Blacksburg.

“It’s building the Jewish community inside the school, and now they are

more comfortable saying, ‘Yes, we are Jewish,’” Rozenblit said.

But what announcing one’s Jewishness truly signifies opens another difficult package of ideas.

“People are not really noticing the fact that the mainstream in Judaism right now is a secular Judaism. It is mainstream and it is becoming quietly larger and larger and I think it’s about time for the Jewish people to acknowledge that and forge a cultural and spiritual path given the fact that the majority of the Jewish people in the world are becoming less and less religious,” Arav said.

While many agreed that Judaism was indeed trending toward a more secular approach to Judaism, Breslau points to a difference in the Israeli and American religious milieus that contains many of the differences.

Arav’s statement is, “something that makes sense from an Israeli perspective because there is a secular-religious rift in Israel that really wouldn’t occur to people in the U.S. Jews in the U.S. who don’t practice don’t feel like they’re in some kind of competition with the religious. They don’t feel like anyone is telling them that there is something not authentic about their Jewish identity.

I think that’s sort of reading a mostly internal Israeli discussion, maybe universalizing it when it’s really confined, I think, to issues of Judaism in Israel,” Breslau said. “Being Jewish in the U.S. is not insisting that you practice the religion in an Orthodox way. The stakes are so much higher in Israel. Because of the power of the organized faith in Israel, there aren’t the kinds of options for practicing Judaism. In the U.S., it’s pretty easy to tailor the faith to how flexible you want to be. In Israel, they don’t have those options. It’s very much all or nothing.”

The first Reform synagogue to receive state funding on par with Orthodox synagogues opened in May of 2008.

Israel has roughly two-dozen operating Reform congregations.

Yet for all of the debates about the position of Blacksburg’s Jews vis-àvis a Rabbinical presence or their place in world Judaism, the need to consider one’s identity and address one’s own position is perhaps never clearer and never more important than when considered in a geographically and culturally remote clime, Sax said.

“I don’t have a right to be ambivalent … I think more about my identity here than I have in my entire life … Now someone who has a Ph.D. in the history of Judaism now has a spot.”

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april 10, 2009

The CT offered members of varying faith traditions the opportunity to share their thoughts on faith and current events. See their responses here as well as on page 5.

Baha’i: Keeping the ‘oneness of mankind’ at the forefront of religious thought In our lives, we are constantly encountering people from different religious backgrounds. Some say that the confusion and conflict in the ELLIKA world stems from RASOOLY the differences freshman in religion. If we look at religion biology in a positive light, seeing that they all come from the same source, religion could have the opposite effect on the world, bringing unity and oneness to our planet. Unity is the fundamental AVA teaching of the ZIARI Baha’i Faith. We freshman believe that all the biology world’s religions come from one God and that the religions are spreading one common message. We seek to unite all the races and peoples in one universal cause, one common faith.

The Baha’i Faith is based on the concept of progressive revelation, which suggests that God reveals religious truth progressively throughout time.

Baha’is follow Baha’u’llah and believe that he is the promised one of our time whose teachings will enable humanity to build a new world.

Most Baha’is can agree with me when I say that we know the world will eventually be unified, but we do not know how or what the world will look like when it is unified. We have never experienced life where everyone is equal, where race, gender,

socioeconomic status and religion do not play a role in how we act toward each other. We are at a critical point in life where everything in the world seems to be going downhill, such as the physical condition of the Earth, the state of the U.S. economy, religious and cultural persecution, and war. Baha’is believe that love is the foundation of economics. Such a concept seems alien in our society, where success comes from backstabbing your friends to make profit and become wealthy. Since this concept of love being the basis of economics has never been portrayed in our society, it is hard for Baha’is to image what the future world would look like.

There are many world issues that need the attention of not only people who share my beliefs, but also every human being living on this planet.

First and foremost, the concept of the oneness of religion and mankind should always be kept at the front of our minds and should be the number one goal that we want to achieve. I personally do not know anyone who wants to see constant war over indifferences of religious beliefs or because of hatred toward someone who thinks differently. We are consumed with our own lives and we forget about what is really going on in the world. We have to remind ourselves that only by acting in a united manner can we resolve any of our problems.

The elimination of the extremes of wealth and poverty is another world issue that needs everyone’s attention.

The middle class is steadily shrinking, leaving a large amount of extremely wealthy people and a large amount of extremely poor people. Again, we live in a society where people relentlessly strive to get to the top of the

socioeconomic ladder. Oftentimes, when people become successful in reaching high enough on the ladder, they become so caught up in their own fortunes that they forget about the misfortunes of other people in the world. The elimination of the extremes of wealth and poverty is another principle of the Baha’i Faith that is necessary for the unity of mankind to bring about a new world.

Many students at Virginia Tech have an open view of faith, whether they follow a certain religion or not. They are raised with certain beliefs, but often do not feel obligated to follow them; college is the time when people are exposed to new ideas, concepts, and ideas that can be life-changing. Often, you find students that do not know whether God exists, but are willing to listen to what other religions have to say about God. For example, almost all of my friends have their own religions but are willing to attend Baha’i events, such as our biweekly interfaith devotionals. People come with various scriptures to share with each other. In the Baha’i Faith, every youth is encouraged to investigate other religions before deciding to become a Baha’i. It is a way for us to learn about other religions. We are accepting of all different types of people with any kind of religious background. As said in the Baha’i Faith, “if a religion is a cause of disunity, then it would be better if there were no religion at all.”

The next interfaith devotional we will host is at 2 p.m. on April 26 in the Jamestown Room in Squires Student Center. If you have any questions, you can contact us at vtbahai@vt.edu or you can visit www.bahai.org for information about the Baha’i Faith.

The outlook that is Freethinking “Truth springs from argument amongst friends.”

— David Hume The discourse between religious believers and atheists is JONATHAN once again publicly prominent, GRAF thanks to the guest “New Atheists” — columnist Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens — and their equally vocal religious counterparts. This discussion devolves too often into a rancorous exchange, and common ground seems hard to find when opinions are so diametrically opposed. However, I sincerely believe that this common ground can be found, leading to a new level of mutual respect between the debating parties.

I am a non-believer, but I grew up in an evangelical Christian home, participated actively in the Navigators and NLCF at Virginia Tech as an undergraduate, served as a missionary to Japan, Guatemala and Florida, and led music in several churches. Many among my friends and family are seminary-educated missionaries and clergy who are familiar with the best of Christian intellectual traditions. Although I left my faith through a long journey studying science, philosophy, history and religion, I maintain one of the principles I held as a sincere Christian: I will believe only what is true. The Apostle Paul described the value of truth to the Christian when he said that if hope in the afterlife is untrue, “we are of all men most to be pitied.” As a non-believer, I espouse the related concept that if an idea is intellectu-

ally vacuous, it should be discarded.

The religious and non-religious both believe that an idea is only as valuable as it is true.

Given this common ground, let me speak to the believers. (Forgive my generalizations; brevity extinguishes nuance.) I will momentarily ignore the fact that you believe that your God will torture me for all eternity in hell, and I request the same in return about my belief that your vision of God and a reward in the afterlife is mistaken. Let’s call the offenses even and move forward to determine what the truth might be. When we come into this life, we have nothing and know nothing. Yet as unprepared as we are, the mysteries of life immediately surround us.

Solutions are presented by the people closest to us: our parents, pastors, teachers and friends. To discern the best choice from among the varieties of opinion, we need to learn how to think correctly; only then can we know what to think. We must adopt the attitude Aristotle had toward his beloved teacher when he said, “Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.”

We want the fishing pole — and we want to know whether, why, and how well it works. We must not be satisfied simply by the fish given to us by others.

The differences between atheists and believers are rooted in our differing methods of discovering truth.

My truth-discovering mechanism is the application of reason to the evidence presented to us by the natural world. Believers augment their reason with faith — faith in ideas revealed through holy books and religious traditions.

Here begins the controversy. Freethinking non-believers assert that faith offers no means of evaluating the truth of any claim

about reality. Faith might offer answers, but it cannot tell you whether its answers are true.

If you have faith that the universe is young when others claim it is very old, we turn to the reason-based physical sciences to discern the answer. If a Christian’s faith says that Jesus died and was resurrected but a Muslim’s faith says that Jesus ascended to heaven before he could be crucified, they also turn to reason. Though neither can justify their position with direct evidence, both would point to reasons why their holy book is more reliable than the other’s. While I assert that reason supports neither miraculous account, the answer to the above debates is less important than the following question: what value does faith bring to either discussion if we all eventually turn to reason for justification? The initial faith does not provide a comment on the truth. Why, then, do we bother with the faith in the first place? A more intellectually tenable position is to believe only what is reasonable based on the evidence at hand. The remainder is a mystery yet to be solved.

Though we may diverge in methodology, let us discuss our differences while remembering our shared ideal of honesty in our search for truth, discarding the prejudice that either the religious or the non-believer is stupid, immoral, or dangerous. I have experienced this kind of friendly debate with my family and friends, and I sincerely believe it can take place on a larger scale in our society. Let us, like Thomas Jefferson, “question with boldness even the existence of a god,” while taking it upon ourselves at Virginia Tech to seek the answers with an attitude of mutual respect.

‘Invent the future’ through discussion of faith traditions on campus Virginia Tech, in its mission statement, values “discovery and dissemination of new knowledge” and emphasizes “teaching and learning, research and discovery.”

JANELLE Perhaps that’s what FRAZIER brought many of us here in the first place, guest the promise of a unicolumnist versity that fosters a sort of marketplace of CALEB DAVIDSON ideas among its stuguest columnist dents and faculty.

Tech does a commendable job encouraging us to “invent the future,” so please don’t take this as a critique of the university. But how much richer could our collegiate experience be if we included the exploration of faith in this process of shaping our future?

Often, there seems to be this invisible boundary that many are unwilling to cross concerning matters of faith, thinking the topic of religion too personal to approach.

Our society emphasizes this counterfeit

view of tolerance; we must err on the side of silence in order to forgo offending those around us.

But doesn’t tolerance actually mean having an interest and respect for the ideas, opinions and practices that are not our own?

This suggestion of interest and respect implies we know the ideas, opinions and practices that are foreign to us. It implies that we seek to comprehend what is unknown or contrary to our own beliefs, realizing the worth in a well-rounded understanding of the world. This understanding is gained through an active pursuit of new knowledge, which is why many of us are attending school in the first place.

So the question becomes this: can we, as students, include discussions of religion and faith in our manifestation of true tolerance and the pursuit of knowledge on our campus?

Yes, as the very mission statement of our university supports it. We are called to teach and learn from one another, researching and discovering new thoughts in community.

A college campus is the perfect environment to wrestle with hard issues, issues

of existence and death and meaning.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to promote open conversations about questions that extend beyond the academic realm: How did I get here? What is my purpose? What happens after death?

No matter if you are apathetic, atheistic or a committed disciple of one of the many faiths on campus, we can learn a lot from one other. College is the ideal time to take advantage of the opportunity to hear the various answers to the above questions from our peers and friends, to engage in respectful debate with those around us.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, a wellknown American educator and advocate of academic liberty, once said: “Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching — without these a university cannot exist.”

How true his words ring. We are privileged to attend a university where academic freedom is protected as well as encouraged. As students, we have the right to make our ideas and beliefs known, and equally to allow other individuals the chance to exercise their rights to do the same.

Matters of faith should be no exception to

this principle. Just as the First Amendment defends our rights to free speech, free press, freedom of assembly and the right to petition the government, it includes protection for our freedom of religion.

Therefore, under this protection, we can and should discuss religion and matters of faith. It is a constitutional liberty enjoyed by all American citizens and we, as students, are no exception. The last part of Tech’s mission statement includes the hope that our knowledge will be used to “expand personal growth and opportunity” and “advance social and community development.” Candid yet tolerant conversations about faith will reinforce all of the above; as we’re aligned with our university’s mission, the only chance at failure is to let our dialogue on faith stay mute.

So, as we develop academically during our collegiate years, it is equally important to strive to develop theologically.

Including and promoting conversations about spirituality can only help our university achieve its mission; recognizing and appreciating our religious differences can only strengthen our community by increasing awareness.

So we would like to encourage you,

the student body, to embrace this idea of open discussions of faith on campus. Let’s transform Virginia Tech into an environment where all religions feel they have an equal opportunity to share their views and beliefs.

As a community, let’s wrestle with spiritual ideas instead of dismissing them. Talk to your friends who have different religious views. See what they believe and reciprocally share what you believe. Reject silence and explore new ideas about faith.

And ultimately, through our pursuit of understanding and discussions of faith, the truth will be made clear. We will find answers to questions that have a deeper significance, questions of life and death and purpose. We will learn that there is more to college than just our academic performance or our resumes or our school spirit. We perhaps will discover that there is something greater than ourselves to live for, something worth giving our hearts and minds and souls to follow into a wonderful future.

Now, isn’t that a college education worth pursuing?

‘He plays by his own rules’: Belief in the face of uncertainty I think I can say I get it.

Christians seem bent on taking a happy marshmallow-Peeps-filled Sunday and instead making JIM it about some grisly execution PACE 2,000 years ago. head pastor I think I get the nlcf confusion of those outside the church because for the bulk of my life I was not a follower of Jesus and had no interest in it. To me it seemed like a bunch of angry and boring male chauvinists protesting things I had nothing against. Add to that the fact that they hung everything on this very old book that seemed like it had an awful lot of holes.

Let me tell you what changed my mind. Not that I think it will necessarily change yours — but then, that is the beauty of the op-ed, eh?

I started looking into my doubts and found there was much more evidence for the accuracy of the scriptures than I would have ever thought — a jarring amount. I started to look into the way it described God and what he has gone through for me.

A key teaching of the Bible is that God is not one person like we are, but a united being who is at once three and one. Not three gods, not one

with multiple personality disorder. It is called the Trinity.

The scriptures and Roman history point to the crucifixion of Jesus, who the Bible states clearly as the part of God that came to earth. He expressed the heart of God physically while he was here. He touched people who no one (in the Jewish culture or out of it) would ever touch. He healed people; he valued everyone.

Everyone.

But this week, Christians everywhere celebrate his death, so let’s get to that. Let’s skip to that horrid Friday (even though I get why we call it “Good Friday,” I still hate that name).

And let’s think about what God went through to give us a chance to reconnect with Him and to live the full life He would call us to live.

On that day, God experienced the worst suffering I could imagine in three simultaneous directions. God the Father watched his son be brutally killed for something he didn’t deserve — for something he didn’t do. As the father of three kids myself, I cannot fathom how painful it must have been for God to watch that. God the Son (Jesus) physically experienced that pain. He had whips embedded with bits of bone literally tear chunks of his skin off; he was beaten and then had nails driven into his hands and feet and was then raised on the cross to slowly and painfully suffocate.

Finally, God the Sprit had to stand

KYLE MAXEY/SPPS

NLCF head pastor Jim Pace, who has spent 13 years at Virginia Tech, delivers a sermon during NLCF’s weekly Sunday morning services. by and watch it happen and not intervene even though he had the power to do so. He had to let what had to happen, well, happen.

The combination of being slowly killed, watching your son be killed and having to not use the power available to you and let it happen is unimaginable. I wish it wasn’t necessary, but the scriptures make it clear that it was. God makes the rules. And while this was awfully

violent and grisly, the main point here is that God took it all on himself. He decided it was necessary because of what we had done. He diagnosed the problem, and took the medicine personally. Regardless of whether you ever decide that you agree with God’s assessment of the universe and humanity within it, you deserve to know that you are loved enough that God would do that for you.

Christ’s death and then resurrection

gives us life.

That is what John says in his famous quote, “For God loved the world so much that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will never taste spiritual death.”

Please know I don’t kid myself about this. I have only taken swipes at issues that are massive in this discussion, the accuracy of the scriptures, how/why does a God who claims to be good allow such suffer-

ing, even what are the implications for my life of all this … My book “Should We Fire God?” is 65,000 words and 275 pages and even that is not enough. This is just for me to jump into the conversation.

I still don’t like everything the Bible says all the time; I still wish God would stop more suffering than he does, but two things are clear. He loves us beyond what I can grasp.

And He plays by his own rules.

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friday, april 10, 2009

Religious studies professors strike balance JOSH SON/COLLEGIATE TIMES

S

ome of Blacksburg’s most notable religious scholars aren’t leading the faithful in prayer on Friday afternoons, reading from the Torah on Saturdays or standing at pulpits on Sundays. Their sacred space is the second floor of Major Williams, their crumbling cathedral, Newman Library. The six religious studies faculty members at Virginia Tech provide a particular service to the university community in maintaining the careful classroom balance necessary for contending with some of the day’s most heady questions.

Religious studies courses take an almost invariable tack in their first few lectures.

“I talk about my first lectures as ‘truthin-advertising lectures,’” said Elizabeth Malbon, a professor who teaches courses on the New Testament. “I say, ‘This is what I have to offer; if this isn’t what you’re looking for, goodbye, good luck.

Life is short — go get what you want.’”

What religious studies professors have to offer, they say, is the academic study of religion.

“We’re observing religion. We’re thinking of religion and respectful of religious practice, but that we’re also respectfully critical,” said Brian Britt, a professor specializing in the Hebrew Bible.

It’s a distinction that’s tough for many students from confessional faith backgrounds to grasp.

“This isn’t Sunday school. This isn’t CCD. Students think they know what they mean when I say, ‘Here’s the distinction,’ so there’s a lot of head nodding on day one,” said Grace Kao, an assistant professor who studies religious ethics.

“Then maybe on day 12, we’re talking about what scholars will say about flood counts in the Hebrew Bible, and it’s clear by the way some of the students respond that they’re not really ready to do the academic study.”

The struggle to explore a faith tradition at hand while students remain rooted in their own tradition is not aided by the fact that many students only take a single religious studies course over their time at Tech.

“You find yourself re-inventing the wheel, class after class, as opposed to being able to grab a bunch of students at the intro level and move them through your program,” Kao said, an issue that can make it difficult to allow students more room, paradoxically, to challenge the nature of religious studies inquiry.

“There are rigorous debates between theology and religious and whether it is really the case that religious studies is this neutral, academic thing. But you can’t destabilize something before you have the basic categories. You have to start with the distinction,” Kao said.

Even so, the battle needs to be fought.

“Most of the students that are taking our classes, this is the first and only class in religious studies … It’s unrealistic to expect students will have calculated that … but it clears the floor, it opens the space, it makes it possible for us to be there,” Malbon said.

The Challenge of Nuance While Kao noted that she found it puzzling that many students spent “significant energy” trying to figure out her personal faith beliefs, the professors’ ability to keep their own backgrounds out of the discussion was noted time and again in interviews with religious studies students. “(Malbon) never mentioned what her beliefs are. And I really like that way of learning and just perfect for the scholarly setting. That means that both Christians and non-Christians can relate and understand,” said Melanie French, a sophomore majoring in communication with a minor in religious studies, of Malbon’s New Testament course.

The drive to determine a professor’s beliefs belies another streak that religious studies faculty have noticed: the need to posit essential answers to religious questions. In one method of essentializing their religious studies education, students separate: their academic study is one thing, their personal faith understanding something else.

“Because a lot of the information that we cover is from what scholars and historians believe, I try to see the class as a history class. There are certain things that I will learn for the class but I will dismiss because I don’t think they are true or I haven’t researched enough,” said sophomore interdisciplinary studies major Carrie Lillard. “The Gospel of Thomas is not something I know much about and neither does one of the leaders of my church back home, so I set that aside.”

Another form is the attempt to concretize religious traditions into definitive categories.

“I’ve had some students tell me … what is difficult is the lack of definitive, unambiguous answers to questions,” Britt said. “I interpret that as partly as a typical Virginia Tech expectation perhaps because many of the dominant disciplines seek and get decisive and definitive answers to their questions. At other colleges and universities, students will shop — they are spiritually seeking alternative options for their religious lives. That’s something I encounter here but not much as at other places.”

This perceived need to find an answer to religious questions can be even more trying in subjects of political controversy.

“The challenge lies in getting students to give up thinking in terms of Islam is ‘x’ or the position of women in Islam is ‘x’ as if Islam is some kind of simplistic, unchangeable, monolithic entity. The challenge lies in encouraging students to take a nuanced view of Islam and

VIRGINIA TECH

VIRGINIA TECH

2008 4,804 respondents

2007 4,726 respondents men women

total

12.4

13.6

13

11.1

11.8

11.4

Buddhist

.7

.9

.8

.7

.7

.7

Church of Christ

1.9

1.5

1.7

2.5

2.1

2.4

Eastern Orthodox

.5

1.0

.7

.5

.6

.5

Episcopalian

2.7

3.7

3.2

3.2

4.3

3.7

Hindu

.8

.6

.7

.9

1.2

1

Islamic

.6

.4

.5

1.2

.6

.9

Jewish

1.5

1.6

1.6

1.9

1.8

1.8

LDS (Mormon)

.3

.2

.3

.2

.1

.1

Lutheran

3.5

3.6

3.6

3.1

2.9

3

Methodist

9.2

12.2

10.6

10.6

11.9

11.2

Presbyterian

7.8

8

7.9

6.8

7.3

7

Quaker

.2

.2

.2

.2

.2

.2

23.2

23.8

23.5

23.5

25.9

24.6

Seventh Day Adventist

.2

.2

.2

.2

.2

.2

United Church

.5

.3

.4

.3

.5

.4

Other Christian

10.9

10.8

10.9

9.3

9.1

9.2

Other Religion

1.5

1.1

1.4

2

1.9

1.9

None

21.2

16

18.9

21.9

17

19.7

no

76.2

77.8

76.9

yes

23.8

22.2

23.1

no

89.3

90.2

89.7

yes

10.7

9.8

10.3

CURRENT RELIGOUS PREFERENCE

Baptist

Roman Catholic

BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIAN? 4,395 respondents

EVANGELICAL? 4,165 respondents

to understand how Islamic beliefs and practices — with all their richness and multiplicity — are so rooted in a particular historical context,” Rachel Scott, an assistant professor who studies Islam, wrote in an e-mail.

Using clever teaching methods can go some distance in exposing students to this problem. In her course on Women, Ethics and Religion, Kao begins the course by exploring Buddhist texts and only later delves into the Abrahamic faiths.

“When you’re talking about feminist interpretations of Buddhist texts … The students, because it’s Buddhism and the vast majority of them don’t have a personal stake in what the Buddha did or did not say, they’re totally signed on,” Kao said. “And I say, ‘A lot of you seem to be having no problem with this article I’ve just assigned to you that makes that claim. Let me just preview for you. When we get to Judaism and Christianity and I start to say ‘scholars are not entirely sure if the Apostle Paul actually did write all the letters, my guess is that a lot of you are going to have a lot of resistance to that.’”

Attempting to unravel deep complexity is at the very heart of the religious studies experience.

“One of the things that our courses deal with directly is not necessarily the truth or falsity of any religious claim but the complexity of religious traditions and the numerous competing perspectives within traditions. That’s something that gets right at the heart of one of the central development challenges for adolescents for intellectual or cognitive development,” Britt said.

“One response is radical skepticism, to reject complexity; another is to struggle with complexity. The way I teach these traditions and the way most of us teach these courses is that a lot of people who choose to struggle with complexity in

men

women

total

INFORMATION NOT AVAILABLE

these courses, come out at them and of the struggle reaffirming commitments they had before. They may say they do it with more depth or more complexity, and maybe they see it in a new way.

(Affirming processes) aren’t the focus of our teaching but sometimes they are the most important outcomes. If students remember something about our courses in a year or two it’s probably not the list of terms they memorized, it’s whether or how they struggled with the complexity.”

Delving into this complexity, freshman economics major Mike LaHaye said the experience gives him the religious tools necessary to engage public questions concerning religion.

“It helps you see which aspects of the Bible should be focused on and what shouldn’t especially when the church today, politically, seems to have two or three big issues that are hardly discussed in the Bible,” LaHaye said. “They tend to ignore the more striking things that Jesus talked about like care for the poor, the sick and love one another, a lot more than don’t be gay and don’t allow abortions.”

Talking Heidigger after bedtime The powerful engagement with complexity doesn’t end in the classroom for the tight-knit group of religious studies faculty.

“I’ve had the opportunity to get be on the search committee for all of my colleagues, and we really think our best resource is our faculty. I don’t think all students realize how active in research they are,” Malbon said.

The small size of the program allows the faculty to both work more closely with their students as well as with their faculty colleagues.

“I get a lot of my ideas, and we develop a lot of our ideas through undergradu-

ate teaching. It’s very easy to ask research questions in undergraduate classes,” Britt said. “You could call it learning communities, you could call it the merger of teaching and research that happens in a small program like this.

The fruits of our research tend to be primarily single-authored papers and books … but if you read our footnotes, we often cite each other and thank each other and our students for ideas that we get.”

It’s a powerfully inviting environment for new faculty like assistant professor of Judaic studies Ben Sax, who arrived on campus in the fall of 2008.

“Just on this side of the hall I have three-world recognized scholars in their craft who are generous with their time and generous with their help. So while you’re dealing with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the university, there’s a home with the people that you may not find in other places where egos tend to lead the goals and aspirations of the department,” Sax said.

The close academic proximity helps to assuage some of the structural challenges of the university system. While a lack of support for faculty travel and the resources to hire new faculty members are irksome, the paucity of material at Newman Library is the subject of special vitriol.

“The library is our laboratory, it is the basis, the center for our research tools and at the moment it doesn’t really serve the needs of our undergraduate teaching much less our research,” Britt said.

Perhaps most wounding (and puzzling) to the group is the need to justify their craft in the eyes of the broader university.

“I’ve spent countless hours explaining to colleagues and administrators what it is we do. It seems counter-intuitive when we equally have Ph.D.s from fairly reputable places,” Sax, whose doctorate

HUSSEIN AHMED/SPPS

Elizabeth Malbon answers a question during her New Testament course. is from the University of Chicago, said.

Kao, a Harvard Ph.D., added that one needs only to pick up a newspaper to see the import of the religious studies craft.

“On the American stage, you can not understand our basic institutions or even everyday politics unless you know more about religion than what you know confessionally. If anything, I only mean to say I find the question that we would have to justify what we do to be, “Really? Really you have to justify the study of religion?” Kao said.

At a time when budget cuts will cause the dissolution of the department of interdisciplinary studies, the academic home of religious studies, the religious studies faculty do have one significant booster. College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Dean Sue Ott Rowlands has publicly stated her support for the program.

“She’s encouraged us to think big about our future,” Britt said.

It’s an assurance that comes close to the camaraderie that makes working as a religious studies faculty member at Virginia Tech a unique experience.

After putting his daughter to bed one weekday evening, Ben Sax was considering watching college basketball or heading to bed with a book when the phone rang. It was professor Ananda Abeysekara. And he was hopping mad.

Abeysekara had just encountered a particular reading of the German scholar Martin Heidigger he considered violently racist.

“It was entirely because he was so angry about something he was reading that he needed to vent. So by venting to me I got access to this interpretation and wisdom that I wouldn’t have otherwise that isn’t circumscribed to this place and time — I’ll call someone at home. The life of the mind doesn’t end at home. I love that,” Sax said. “It makes this place immeasurably wonderful.”

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april 10, 2009

Islam: Diversity, education hallmarks of local Muslims from page one

you’re by yourself, and eventually you get to meet people, and they understand your situation, but that takes some time.”

While the difficulties are real, there were no reports of and very little concern about prejudice from the non-Muslim community.

“With the Blacksburg community being as multi-ethnic and diverse as it is, it’s one of the most welcoming communities. We hear about much more issues in other communities, but we haven’t had anything that would even be close (to prejudice).

We have a good relationship with the town government and the town police as well as the FBI, who come to visit from time to time. They are reaching out to us, and we are reaching out to them,” Riad said.

But while he’s off the beaten path for the Islamic community, he’s not too far: Because the loosely-organized organization the Islamic Society of Blacksburg’s Web site, islamview.org, was one of the first American Islamic Web sites, it retains a small following.

The Islamic Center, led by professor of electrical engineering Sedki Riad, supports and maintains the mosque.

Makhlouf said he has fielded inquiries for religious guidance from as far afield as New York.

Makhlouf is but one part of the complex and robust Islamic community of Blacksburg although he is emblematic of a larger trend. While mainly hailing from abroad, the Islamic community is both highly educated and sees itself as an experiment, perhaps even a model, of the possibility of an Islamic way of life in a Western nation.

Muslim-American

Out of Egypt “Let’s say I have some connections,” Riad, who was born and bred in Egypt, said, leaning back in his chair in his office in the upper reaches of Durham Hall.

In Egypt, one could call Riad’s ability to requisition an Imam from the Egyptian government for the Blacksburg community an exercise of “wasta,” a mixture of gravitas and familial or personal prestige that lubricates all sorts of social and commercial transactions in the largest of Arab nations. While he is quick to point out that he is only a caretaker and doesn’t feel any sort of leadership over the Islamic community, Makhlouf’s presence in Blacksburg is clearly a coup.

“He doesn’t cost us a penny,” Riad said with a smile.

One of the longest tenured members of the Islamic community (he came to Blacksburg in 1979), Riad has watched the community grow from a handful of active participants to “a four-digit number” with several hundred active members and two mosques, al-Hadaya on South Main Street and Masjid al-Ihsan on North Main Street.

Comprising this community are a great number of students in the technical sciences, particularly engineering, many of whom hold or are pursuing advanced degrees.

“When I go to the masjid and there are two doctors on my right and two Ph.D. students on my left and two engineers in front of me, and the one who is leading the service is a 19year-old business student; it can only happen here,” said Amine Chigani, a Moroccan Ph.D. student in computer engineering.

The mosques serve as a meeting place and a shared community of understanding.

“The thing that brings people together is the mosque and the religion. In Christianity, you can find the American, the European, the Chinese, all together. The same thing in Islam,” Makhlouf said.

The mosques do operate a bit differently, however. While Makhlouf maintains al-Hedaya, al-Ihsan is layled, with a rotating group of students, faculty and community members filling the roll of khateeb, or the one who gives the Friday khutba, or sermon.

“In our case, we don’t have the luxury of having a knowledgeable Imam because that becomes very useful as someone who really knows and who can teach and guide and answer questions,” said Chigani, who frequents the al-Ihsan but also prays at al-Hadaya.

“There is a lot of advantages (to lay leadership), which is the diversity of thought, the openness of thought,

MARK UMANSKY/SPPS

Imam Goma Makhlouf, bottom right, delivers a khutba, or sermon, and leads prayers in Squires Student Center on Friday afternoons.

and the decentralized authority in terms of religious thinking, and that’s proven to be very, very useful to our community. We lack consistency, but just having people like you reminding you of certain aspects of the religion, it really hits a good tone with you. A student like me is giving khutba, and the importance of prayer is really going to make sense to me because he’s a student and I’m a student.”

Again, the educated nature of the Islamic population makes both courses viable.

“They are all educated and open to new ideas. If you go back home where people are illiterate, they sometimes

follow what the imam says blindly,” said Javed Podakkudiyar, a junior industrial engineering major from India who grew up in Kuwait.

Still, there are some challenges. The sounds and feel of an Islamic lifestyle in an Islamic country are nowhere to be found.

“Not hearing the call to prayer every day, I do miss it. That said, anyone who leaves the Blacksburg Muslim community, they miss it, too,” said Heshan Rakha, an Egyptian professor of civil engineering.

Linguistically, the varying languages and Arabic dialects make it difficult for students to communicate in their

mother tongues, Riad said. Thus, the majority of the services as well as the social conversation are carried on in English.

Simply practicing the faith on the day-to-day basis can bring some stares.

Eddie Sues, a freshman engineering major from New Jersey, said that Islamic prayer preparation (which involves the washing of the feet, hands and face) can catch many off-guard.

“Usually I wash in my dorm room, but if I’m off campus like at McComas and I’m washing my foot in the sink or something, and I think people think it’s more strange because they

wouldn’t expect a white guy to be doing that,” Sues, who converted to Islam at 15, said.

Finding a niche within the community as an American-born Muslim can also be a challenge.

“When I first became Muslim, it was very difficult for me,” said Jeremiah Abiade, an assistant professor of engineering. “Not only because it’s a lifestyle change but because there are so many cultures in the Muslim community and the one that is seen the least is the one I was most used to — the American culture.

People are so hospitable, and they greet you, but you go home, and

When Nishadh Podakkudiyar was applying to universities in the United States, his friends wanted to know how he was going to continue to practice his faith.

“In India, people would ask us, ‘How do you pray in America?’ How do you maintain your religious views?’ But you can,” said the freshman mechanical engineering major.

With all of the cultural diversity within the Islamic community, the experience of shock resulting from entering a new place with new cultural mores binds those within the Islamic community.

“When I first came here, I wasn’t really paying much attention to the details of my religion until I was put into a situation where I had to speak about it. Like I tell my students, if you want to understand something try to relate it to someone else,” Riad said.

For Chigani, who did his undergraduate study at Radford University before coming to Tech for his master’s and Ph.D., the question of identity raged within him as he navigated a campus without a Muslim Student Association.

“First of all, I am labeled an international student, not an American resident student. So you accept that fact, and you either embrace the diversity you bring in or you want to hide it — your accent, the way you talk, you dress, you eat,” Chigani said. “Are you going to be a Moroccan or just an Arab? You are a Muslim whether you pray, whether you drink, whether you like it or not because your name is so-and-so, and you’re from so-and-so country. That is something we never had to go through back home. We have people back home: they drink, they smoke, they don’t pray, and they never had to question themselves, so when you come here, that doesn’t cut it anymore. If you are going to be a Muslim, you’re going to be clear about it, and if you’re not going to be, you’re going to be clear about it.”

This need for introspection has led Chigani to consider the Muslim communities in the United States as test communities for the interaction of Islamic peoples and Western cultural norms.

“My decision was, this is who I am: I am Muslim, I am international, I am Moroccan, and I bring the diversity that the United States really prides itself with and that I should never, ever give that up,” Chigani said. “One of the things I’m extremely passionate about and one of the things that people are discussing is the notion that Islam and Western culture are incompatible. I think it’s false, and I think it’s wrong, and more and more people need to be vocal about it. We’re bringing together our Muslim identity and the American dream.”

Hindu: Tradition points to tolerance for other faiths from page one

T

his attitude has led to a tolerant inclination toward others’ customs and beliefs within the Hindu tradition and Indian society.

“Hinduism is not dependent on a Church or a way of thinking — there’s no Hindu Pope,” mechanical engineering graduate student Naresh K.C. Selvarasu said. “It is a personal religion; being a personal religion, how you want to practice it depends on you.”

That lack of orthodoxy informs Hindus’ cosmopolitan and pluralist attitudes, Selvarasu said.

“I don’t know how to translate it, but there’s an old Sanskrit saying, ‘There are multiple ways to the same place’ — that’s what all religions are,” Selvarasu said.

Valipa explains that there are millions of gods in Hindu mythology, though none has supremacy over another.

“We accept every religion, every creed — that’s the basis of having that many gods in India, whatever sects came up, they were accepted,” Selvarasu said. “(Hinduism) says you should follow a righteous path, not harm another person, the same thing as any other

religion,” Valipa said.

“As such there’s nothing different about being a practicing Hindu than being a practicing Jew or Christian,” Selvarasu said.

The central tenets such as karma, dharma and samsara in Hindu belief as well as its scriptures such as the Vedas and Upanishads are fairly broad and open to interpretation, according to one Hindu student.

“It’s more related to thinking,” mining and mineral engineering graduate student Nikhil Gupta said.

“All these mythological stories teach something — at least about how to live your life.”

“Another way of putting it is any act you do, there’s no way of classifying it as good or bad, it’s just an act,” Selvarasu said.

“There’s actually a very famous saying from the Bhagavad-Gita that you never expect the consequences of an action,” Valipa said. “You don’t anticipate what’s actually going to come from an act; you can’t know it and you just do what you need to.”

Karma and destiny are very important to Hindus and inform their attitudes about life.

“Destiny is just a way of dealing with what happens and being happy

despite it,” Valipa said. “It’s a way of feeling that, at the end of the day, whatever happens is for the good.”

“Karma is more than just the result of your actions; it is the cause and the result as well as what’s happening right now,” Selvarasu said.

“What you’re doing right now is a result of the past, what you’re doing right now will influence the future.”

This acceptance demands a kind of passivity, Selvarasu said.

“You don’t fret over bad results and you shouldn’t rejoice over good results,” Selvarasu said.

Indian cultural institutions that support an inclusive attitude and tolerance toward others’ outlooks also inform that attitude.

“It’s more than Hinduism; it’s also about being an Indian, being from a nation,” Valipa said.

Selvarasu said this was a necessary condition for getting along in Indian society.

“It’s really a very classical debate about whether the country should be a melting pot or a salad bowl,” Selvarasu said. “India has always been a salad bowl.”

“If you are open to Indian culture, we welcome you with open arms,” Valipa said. “We take you as you

come, we don’t want you to change but to be who you are.”

Sometimes this pluralism can be difficult to communicate to outsiders.

“When my flatmates ask me, ‘How do you do this, how is a wedding performed in India or how is this script?’ I don’t have a definite answer because there are so many different kinds of scripts and so many different kinds of weddings based on cultures and traditions you follow,” industrial and systems engineering graduate student Navaneeta Dorbala said.

“Karma is more than just the result of your actions; it is the cause and the result as well as what’s happening right now.”

- NARESH K.C. SELVARASU ENGINEERING GRADUATE STUDENT This viewpoint has helped these recent American arrivals to make the sometimes-difficult transition as a minority in a very foreign land.

“It’s a totally different experience being here than in India where everyone’s the same as you,” Valipa

said. “Here we get to meet so many people from different nations and parts of nations.”

“I have no cousins here in the U.S.; I am the first from my family to be here,” Gupta said. “It’s only been two months and I’m really feeling good over here.”

The people of Blacksburg have also been very welcoming and made these students’ transitions very comfortable and friendly.

“People here are very warm and very nice — I say this specifically because when I came I had two fractures, I had to limp all around,” Valipa said. “The first week they transported me from my home to wherever I had to go at the college or my department for whatever formality or anything I needed to do.”

“People here, when you walk around, they smile at you.” Dorbala said. “Sometimes you’re not in a very great mood and someone just smiles at you and you feel good all the sudden.”

The only problems these new arrivals seemed to agree were at all painful or alienating were the weather and finding good and familiar food.

“We are not used to this very cold weather,” Valipa said. “The

place I stay, the temperature is usually around 90 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Most Hindus are vegetarians because of their religious beliefs.

“One school of thought says that you are a form of god and so is every form of living and nonliving thing,” Valipa said. “That’s why they say that you’re never supposed to hurt anything.”

Since God is omnipresent, it is wrong to kill and consume any living thing, Valipa said.

“You wouldn’t eat another human, would you?” Valipa said.

Food was something of an adjustment, given the nation’s low instance of vegetarianism — about 3 percent according to a recent article in USA Today — as well as differing tastes.

“I think vegetarians do have a problem,” Dorbala said. “It’s not a terrible transition but it is an adjustment.”

“With the food, yes I’m still getting used to the food here,” Valipa said. “I cannot appreciate food if it’s not very spicy.”

“If you go to Subway or Sub Station there’s only one number I can order,” Dorbala said. “After a while I’m fed up, I’m just waiting to go home and have good food.”

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Baha’i: Small group works for ‘unity of mankind’ from page one

When the administrator of the exam asked Sadi to fill in the line, he did.

The administrator ripped the paper up in his face. Now a junior computer science major at Tech, Sadi is one of roughly two dozen Baha’i in the New River Valley, 11 of whom are students at Tech. The expression of the world’s second-fastest growing religion (behind only Islam) in Blacksburg is an interesting fusion between Amelia and Maziar, between the religion’s Persian roots and its highly educated American converts.

It’s not much of a stretch to say that practitioners of the Baha’i faith do, in fact, “love everybody,” at least theologically, even when the majority of their presence in international news focuses on their persecution, specifically in Iran. While the second-fastest growing religion in the world owes much of its growth to explosive growth in India, the Baha’i of the New River Valley tell a story of cultural and religious fusion cloaked in the anonymity of its small size.

The Baha’i faith began in modernday Iran during the first half of the 19th century when the faith’s founding figure, known as the Bab, or gate, announced in Shiraz, Iran, that another messiah would come shortly after his passing. While the concept of a gate to higher spiritual knowledge was an established one in Shi’a Islam, the years following the execution of the Bab by the Shah of Iran saw the rise of the father of the Baha’I faith, Mirza Husayn Ali or Nur or, as his followers call him, Baha’u’allah.

Baha’u’allah proclaimed a religion that enfolded the world’s standing religious traditions, saying that throughout history God had sent manifestations of himself to the world in order to instruct different peoples at different times in a process known as progressive revelation. Baha’is count Buddha, Abraham, Krishna, Jesus and Muhammad, for example, as manifestations of a God who is inaccessible directly. Following a series of exiles and imprisonments, Baha’u’allah came to rest in prison in Akko of modern-day Israel, where he died. A shrine erected in Akko as well as the Shrine of the Bab (his remains were disinterred and brought to Israel) in Haifa, constitute the Baha’i faith’s most sacred places.

Persecution is rampant for roughly 300,000 Baha’i who still inhabit Iran.

Several of their religious leaders are currently imprisoned for allegedly spying on Iran for Israel. Being a vast minority isn’t new to Sadi, however, who said he was the only Baha’i in his middle school in Iran and who picked up his English through a job at a Whole Foods Market near his home in Northern Virginia when he emigrated to the United States shortly after his inability to attend Iranian higher education. Saied Mostaghimi, the head of the biological systems engineering department and a leading light in the Baha’i community, said that this persecution deals with the challenge that Baha’i theology poses to the Shi’a

SALLY BULL/SPPS

Suzanne Ament, a Radford University professor and convert to the Baha’i faith, sings at the YMCA in Blacksburg at one of the Baha’i communities weekly cultural events.

Iranian regime.

“Baha’is have always been persecuted in Iran and a lot of that is that the Baha’i faith is somewhat revolutionary in the beliefs we have and the principles we abide with such as dealing with the equality of men and women; we don’t have clergy. We say we’re the latest religion in Iran and Islam was the one before us, and if you look back in history, Jews persecuted Christians, and then Christians persecuted Muslims so this is not unprecedented,” Mostaghimi said.

Ironically, it may be more difficult for non-Persian Baha’is in the New River Valley to gain acceptance for their beliefs than for Persians or members of other races. When Blacksburg architect Bob Rogers and husband of Cosby Rogers told a coworker about his newfound faith, the man’s wife offered him a Christian book on cults. The most usual response, Cosby Rogers said, is simply, “What?” Both Sadi and Mostaghimi said they had encountered no negative reactions in their interaction with students, staff or community members.

“I don’t feel isolated at all. I very much feel a part of the community of Blacksburg, and I think a lot of it is how you take it and how much you want to get involved. Our religion says

you should support your community in any way you can … some religious groups cluster or get into a section of town and stay by themselves. That’s something Baha’is try not to do,” Mostaghimi said.

While Mostaghimi doesn’t feel isolated from the community, in 1984 when Mostaghimi came to Blacksburg, the Baha’i community in the New River Valley couldn’t muster the nine persons necessary to form a spiritual assembly capable of voting on delegates to the Baha’is National Spiritual Assembly, a body responsible for addressing issues with American Baha’is as well as voting on candidates to serve on the faith’s international governance body, the Universal House of Justice.

Those ranks have been swelled by converts like Suzanne Ament, a professor of Russian history at Radford University who declared her Baha’i faith before coming to the New River Valley, but who is now the group’s resident musician.

Ament hesitated before joining a faith first introduced to her by her stepfather because, “in some ways, I thought the standard was too high,” she said.

“Baha’i laws are like every religion. A lot of the laws are very similar (to other

religions) in terms of prayer and fasting and marriage. My stepfather said if this really is the energy of the day, if this really is the life-force that God has revealed for this period of time, if you need help fixing or improving yourself in any way, why wouldn’t you turn to that?’ Even if you don’t succeed, the point isn’t to succeed, the point is to try,” Ament said.

The consonance of Baha’i faith teachings and the generally more liberal opinions present within the academy offer a specific hook on university campuses. After his daughter Sarah declared her Baha’i faith in 1999, the seminary-educated Bob Rogers “was a little disturbed,” Sarah said. “He was thinking, ‘my daughter is joining a cult, what is she getting herself into?’”

But within a year, Bob “decided he was a Baha’i and just didn’t know it,” Cosby, a retired human development professor, said. Bob said that it was both a “curiosity” with his daughter’s new faith — of which he was at first very wary — and “dissatisfaction” with his local Christian congregation that led him to become a “second generation Baha’i,” referring to his daughter’s previous conversion. Within several years, Cosby had converted as well.

Yet teachings like the equality of men and women and the importance

of education aren’t just wooing those with Ph.D.s, members of the Baha’i community are quick to point out.

“While it’s liberal in some ways, it defies definition on a left-right scale ...

People who were illiterate are accepting Baha’u’allah. It encourages people to make something of themselves,” Ament said.

Moreover, the tradition does have very stark boundaries on some issues.

“There is a certain fundamentalism in a positive sense. It’s an embracing of all the world religions, but it also encourages and requires people to be faithful to the religious tradition, to practice the virtues,” Bob Rogers said.

Further still, the Baha’i beliefs fall on points across the left-right political spectrum.

“Baha’is are actually forbidden from participating in partisan politics. I think we know that there is truth in lots of things that people say. We don’t write people off because they listen to Rush Limbaugh,” Bob Rogers said.

This doesn’t mean the Baha’i are passive observers, however. Both Sarah Rogers and her husband Mehrtash Olsen underwent a customary service experience abroad (Sarah in Zambia, Mehrtash at the Baha’i holy site in Haifa) while Mostaghimi’s son both volunteered in a Guatemalan

orphanage and eventually went on to Teach for America in the Mississippi Delta.

“Universal peace and the unity of mankind is the great umbrella … and whatever you can do to bring about the unity of mankind is what happens at the local level with the service activities,” Mostaghimi said. “We think globally because we think of ourselves as world citizens. The world is but one country and mankind its citizens. That is really the thing that we live by on a daily basis and so it’s a lot easier on a daily basis as a result of that that Baha’i communities are ethnically and educationally diverse, for example.”

The struggle, then, for the Baha’i of Blacksburg is to maintain the humility that attracted many of them to the faith in the first place while sharing their message, Bob Rogers said.

“If everyone lived by their teachings, there would be no need for Baha’i.

Over time, religions splinter. In the Christian faith, you see it with 38,000 denominations. At what point do you say, ‘This one is correct?’ It becomes a question of ‘What is the truth anymore?’ and some of that is part of the idea that now and then religion needs to be refreshed. It’s not rejecting the older religions, but encompassing and honoring them.”

‘Detectors’ in hand, Freethinkers discuss tough issues J

onathan Graf is not afraid of complexity. A Ph.D. student in computer engineering, Graf works predominantly with IT security. But there’s a much simpler tool he’s honed during his time as a Freethinker.

He calls it the bullshit detector.

“By developing a sense of skeptical thinking, you’re able to sort the wheat from the chaff,” said Graf, a member of Virginia Tech’s Freethinkers Club.

“That’s why I say that so much of free thought is how you think and how you come to your conclusions, and if people practiced more free thought and skeptical thinking, it’s really an exercise of the skill that leads you to good knowledge in every endeavor.”

Freethinkers are typically agnostics, claiming “atheism with respect to any God that’s described in any religious literature and agnosticism in respect to God in general,” as Graf put it.

While they take pains to not close their doors to those with religious faith commitments, they see it as difficult to hold freethinking and confessional religion at the same time.

“By developing a sens of the skeptical you can sort the wheat from the chaff, - JONATHAN GRAF PhD STUDENT, COMPUTER ENGINEERING “You could apply Freethought to other areas of life and leave it out entirely of the religious question,” said Melissa Lauer, a senior architecture major and president of the Freethinkers. “But would you be a full freethinker at that point? I don’t think so.”

But those packing detectors are not the most publicly supportive of the Freethinkers, a small organization that usually finds only half a dozen students and faculty at its weekly

meetings. For the Freethinkers, however, there is one article of faith: They know you’re out there.

Even if, as Lauer put it, “organizing atheists is like herding cats.”

The organization was re-started in the fall semester of 2008 after then-senior microbiology major Jon Hughes came across the wrong Internet site.

“One of my guilty pleasures is surfing the net for anti-evolution/ creationist propaganda — it’s fun,” Hughes said. “In reading some of that stuff, I got into freethinking blogs online. I realized there was this whole network out there.”

When he hopped over to the Freethinkers at Virginia Tech site, he noticed the meeting times were three years old. After he contacted the faculty sponsor, the Freethinkers were reborn.

missionary himself to Japan and Guatemala, was home schooled until the age of 16, and when he arrived at Tech as a freshman at 18, was a firm, evangelical Christian.

In reading and engaging with both liberal Christian texts and scientific inquiry, Graf moved from “fundamental, Young Earth Christianity to more and more liberal Christianity until, in throwing out all the bathwater, I realized there was no baby there to be had,” Graf said.

In going through the process of a sort of conversion to Freethinking, Graf said there were a “lot of tears” in his house because of his parents’ concern “for the future of my soul.”

But it was through this process that Graf found a pattern for connecting to believers.

Talking the talk The science of freethinking At the base of the freethinking attitude is a direct connection to the modern scientific mindset. It’s hard to work one’s way through a single Freethinking sentence without running into the words “evidence,” “logic” and “rational” in quick succession.

“My father’s a scientist, and I was raised with that ideal, and that’s what freethinking is all about — questioning everything and approaching everything with a logical basis,” Hughes said.

But Hughes’ story is half the equation. Both Lauer and Graf said they made their way from confessional Christian homes into the company of freethinkers. For Lauer, her family is still hoping she’ll return to the fold.

“When I’m around my family, they do try to push on me a little, saying things like, ‘When are you going to come around?’” Lauer said.

Graf, the son of missionaries and a one-time collegiate

“I can sit down and talk to my Dad about religion, and we absolutely disagree, but we can have a cordial conversation,” Graf said. “My approach to free thought and to atheism is more about how we come to our beliefs rather than what we believe. I believe that is much more fruitful than the back-and-forth ping-pong match of an argument around belief. That is what free thought is all about. We focus on the method of coming to belief and the beliefs that we hold provisionally until new information comes along.”

Not that this sort of dialogue is easy.

“I think overly zealous people on both sides of that divide can look on the other side and think, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can learn from you.’ I think that’s arrogance,” said Jim Pace, head pastor of New Life Christian Fellowship. “I like learning about where people are in their life. What motivates you?

KYLE MOIR/SPPS

Freethinkers president Melissa Lauer begins a presentation on skepticism about global warming.

What drives you? What makes you want to be a better person? What impact do you want to have on the world?”

For those Freethinkers without a religious background, engaging in these discussions can be their primary exposure to a given faith tradition.

“Those who were always raised in a sort of non-religious household, and we can get a perspective,” Hughes said.

At some points, Graf added, critical consumers of religion may actually approach Freethinking more than some professed atheists.

“For freethinkers, it doesn’t count

to say, ‘This is what my dogma says.’

Somebody can come to atheism from, ‘I don’t want to believe in a God, therefore I don’t.’ That’s not a good reason. So certainly, you can be an atheist and not a Freethinker,” Graf said.

Even with the opportunity for growth through conversation, Blacksburg’s Freethinkers feel pressure to obscure or tone down their beliefs.

“The weird thing about freethinkers is that they are typically shunned. On this campus, I’ve had people find out I’m not a believer and straightforwardly walk away from

me. Minorities have problems with acceptance everywhere and so they’d rather just not talk about it,” than stump for their beliefs,” Lauer said.

While not having encountered the same sort of responses as Lauer, Hughes said that “on a national basis, and the most distrusted demographic are the atheists. So I think that probably exists around the university.”

Of course, Hughes said his judgment remains to be evaluated.

“A freethinker questions everything, and you don’t accept anything without evidence, “Hughes said.

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SALLY BULL/SPPS

During a meeting of Campus Crusade for Christ, the Cru praise band performs a Christian hymn during the normal part of the evening service.

Christian groups ‘love people where they are’ IN INTERDENOMINATIONAL ENVIRONMENTS, CHRISTIAN GROUPS THRIVE ON DIFFERENCES

I

promise I’m not going to steal anything,” said the visitor, standing in the middle of a room of friends from Campus Crusade for Christ. “I promise.”

What had been a rather normal Friday night out with friends had just gotten a little more unique. This visitor — a Virginia Tech student who participates in a varsity Olympic sport — had been kicked out of the local club Attitudes for being underage and had, while running from police, ducked into this Cru, as the group is known, get-together to seek refuge.

“We were all thinking, ‘OK, which one of us knows this guy?’ and nobody did,” said Jon Newman, a senior electrical engineering major.

But a funny thing happened with this late night interlocutor. The Cru crew didn’t bodily eject him or dial 911. They sat down and talked.

“It was amazing to talk to him about his situation and just reach out and offer him our friendship,” Newman said.

Now this one-time trespasser has attended Cru’s Thursday night worship services and exchanges text messages with Newman.

Listening with a wry grin the story was retold at a Tuesday night Bible Study, Cru Campus Director and Bible study leader Jeff Highfield pauses for a moment.

“Aiding and abetting, huh? Way to go, fellas,” he says.

The group breaks up in laughter.

Guns blazing?

ABOVE: SALLY BULL/SPPS; BELOW: MARK UMANSKY/SPPS

Above: A Cru student raises his hand in emotional connection to a portion of the evening worship service. Below: Sophomore aerospace engineering major Scott Belcor, a Chi Alpha member, hands out roses on the Drillfield on the day before Valentine’s Day in order to show support for Hokie women.

Amidst the myriad Christian groups on campus, a brand of umbrella, campus Christian ministry groups like Cru provide a unique home for college students with ministries tailored to collegiate concerns and run primarily by students. What Newman’s story accentuates is the fine line that many of these groups — some of them with evangelical Christian backing, some of them without — feel they must walk on Tech’s campus: professing their faith while, in the parlance employed by many, “loving people where they are,” whether within their own group or in the university community at large.

“The reality is that Jesus is a divisive figure. People love him or they don’t think it’s really true,” Highfield, whose ministry is of evangelical bent, said.

“Honestly, Christians over time have not always presented the Gospel in a very loving, kind way. There are those out there who are very aggressive and mean and nasty when they talk about Jesus. That’s not us at all.

We talk about loving people first.

We think Jesus is the best and we want everyone to know him. But we need to love people where they are. We’re not coming in guns blazing.”

For junior international studies major and Cru Associate Student Director Lauren Flynn, keeping the religious guns holstered is about emulating Christ.

“Jesus was the perfect balance of grace and truth. He loved people and he was the hugest example of grace but he was also blunt when it needed to be said,” Flynn said.

This practical approach to sharing the Gospel doesn’t necessarily signify theological or ideological divergence, however, as the vast majority of groups do hold to rather conservative faith positions. ”But we might agree with everything that person believes but the way we would share it, we wouldn’t use the same method,” said Marilyn Clark, a staff member of Campus Bible Fellowship.

Dunking and splashing Because groups like Cru, Campus Bible Fellowship, Chi Alpha and New Life Christian Fellowship house students from wide-ranging faith backgrounds, the internal debates, while sometimes heated, allow for greater growth.

“The beauty of this interdenominational model is that obviously and inevitably there are going to be points of contention but that’s what we’re supposed to do is wrestle with these things together. It’s about engaging the mind and really grappling with the Bible,” said Jon Rice, the head pastor of Chi Alpha, a group of roughly 60 participants affiliated with the larger church, Assemblies of God. As many of the groups don’t need to carry out functions typical of churches such as marriages and baptisms, many points of fundamental concern between religious traditions are avoided altogether, Highfield said.

“The difference is, what, dunking or splashing for baptism?

(Interdenominational study has) opened me up to aspects of the church I never looked at before,” said Erik Ostergaard, a junior mechanical engineer and president of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship.

The model of a Christian religious “movement” rather than “church” also has implications for the type of education religious leaders like Highfield receive or feel they need to possess.

While Rice graduated from Central Bible College and NLCF head pastor Jim Pace was ordained through part-time coursework, Highfield and Intervarsity Christian Fellowship Campus Staffworker Wes Barts were primarily credentialed through participating in their respective organizations as college undergraduates.

“We’re trying to build very foundational level of what it means to be a disciple or follower of Jesus. So what someone in my position doesn’t have to have a seminary education to do that,” Highfield said.

Pace agreed that ordination was not a necessary step to good campus ministry and that he began his study only after sensing “the God card.”

“Sometimes God gives us free reign, there are times when he says, ‘Here are the scriptures,’ and there are times when he throws down the God card, and says, ‘This is the way it is.’ And you may obey or disobey but let’s be clear.

I feel sometimes in my life he’s thrown down the God card, and going to seminary was one of those times,” Pace said.

Pace said, Tech’s Christian organizations — no matter their constitution — have a much more cordial relationship compared to other universities.

“Probably about 10 or 12 years ago we put an agreement together that if you find that someone is from another group, then you just ask them to go back unless they’ve really dealt with the issue that caused them to want to leave because there is something in commitment,” Pace said. “We don’t officially have that agreement anymore but even just last week there was one of the members of our church who started attending another ministry and it really is a better fit for her and she handled it in a very mature way so it’s really easy when that happens. There’s minimal drama.”

For Highfield, an extremely valuable part of the campus experience happens through conversation not only within Cru but by engaging other groups.

“We really think that the college campus is the place of great learning and wrestling with the issues of life and philosophies of the world so let’s introduce Jesus into that and see what happens,” he said.

This willingness to begin conversations with other faith groups even penetrates some Bible studies.

“We have some Buddhists and we have some people who don’t talk about what they believe and we don’t pressure them to. I’ve been in small group settings that were raised as non Christians and are really just in the questioning stage and they’re really trying to find out what is what,” said Lauren Creasey, a member of Chi Alpha.

Standing up straight — dealing with stereotypes For students that take part in Christian activity, walking the walk is sometimes the easiest part. It’s calling their walk by the right name that presents a significant challenge.

Freshman management major Katie Newberger said she ran through a litany of “excuses” to go to Bible study, from telling friends she was going to places from the gym to the library.

“It took me a while to be able to say ‘I’m going to Bible study now,’” Newberger said.

In the testosterone-infused atmosphere of collegiate sports, standing up for one’s faith isn’t always the “cool” thing to do.

“I was the only guy on the lacrosse team that doesn’t drink, and guys are OK with that but to say, ‘My body is a temple’ is a reason that I don’t think, that takes a certain type of faith and a certain type of boldness,” said Brian Fletcher, a junior mechanical engineering major who played two seasons on Tech’s club lacrosse team.

Leaders of all stripes said that the question of feeling publicly comfortable with one’s faith was a common struggle.

“That’s understandable that people feel that way, if unfortunate …The problem is with labels. A label means anything anything that anyone wants it to mean.

That’s just unfortunate,” said Dave Clark, a graduate of Dallas Seminary and Campus Bible Fellowship staff.

Struggling with these issues belies pressures on the college Christian that Rice sees as inhibiting students’ potential for Christian leadership.

“There is enough potential on this campus to have a profound positive effect on the world. The students who are on this campus will be the leaders of tomorrow. This is the largest age group where people fall away from their faith.

Simply put, I want to change that,” Rice said.

To inculcate this type of leadership, nearly every Christian group maintains some sort of service activity, from Cru’s international mission projects to Chi Alpha’s spring break trip to work in inner city Atlanta.

“You have to give your life away to get it back. People are seeing that we argue against a ‘me focused culture.’ It’s not for me, it’s for them. That’s got to make things better,” in the community as well as in the spiritual life of students, Pace said.

All of these elements of the Christian community blend together in what Highfield called “becoming a self-feeder,” taking on the challenge of pursuing one’s faith with total commitment.

It is this personal journey that goes on within the hearts of the faithful that is so dear to the students who participate. “(Chi Alpha) is a place to ask questions, to be confused, to be even a little upset sometimes. It’s a support group, but it doesn’t want you to just blend in.

It wants you to experience God for yourself,” Newberger said.

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Evil, freedom and forgiveness A TECH PROFESSOR CHALLENGES PREVAILING NOTIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF EVIL — WITH INTRIGUING RESULTS

F

or Edward Weisband and Courtney Thomas, the journey began with a minor linguistic slippage. They had included a word on the tail end of a co-authored paper — a professor of political science and a Ph.D. student, respectively — they had presented at a conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, that their colleagues challenged with some force.

The word Weisband and Thomas had included to describe their system of understanding the relationship between anxiety, the human experience and mass violence was a familiar one. They called it evil. Fellow conference participants disagreed.

“They asked us, ‘Well, are you really talking about evil?’ It was a really flippant kind of question but we stepped back and decided, ‘Yeah, we are,’” Thomas said.

In setting off into the deepest of emotional, philosophical and theological thickets, Weisband and Thomas have treated what Weisband called the “greatest single political issue of the past and present century,” while raising deep questions about the nature of freedom and forgiveness at work in the minds of Virginia Tech’s religious community.

Into Evil There are smart people at Virginia Tech who take issue with the very attempt at pinning evil down as a methodological tool or a unit of analysis.

“I’m not convinced that the category of evil is very helpful in making a difference or being an analytical tool. It’s an object of analysis,” said Brian Britt, professor of religious studies. “How can you have a robust category of evil outside of a very parochial or sectarian worldview?”

Britt said that he sees great value in evil as an object of analysis but that the deep epistemological (the question of how man comes to know and create knowledge) and ontological (the nature of essential human existence) questions put the subject beyond utility — not that the discussion should be avoided altogether.

“Some people take this idea, the insider epistemology of, ‘It’s a Christian thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ That’s a luxury we can’t afford in this world.

It patronizes religious claims of being incapable of rationality and exempt from public scrutiny,” Britt said.

It’s the avoidance of the term in the discipline of political science that turned Weisband and Thomas onto evil’s trail to begin with. Beginning with the advent of the modern nation state, Weisband and Thomas aim to bring evil into the realm of the political by demonstrating that the function of nations “have been misappropriated in ways that perpetrate

intense, widespread, human suffering.

The metric of evil in the political is a metric that focuses on how intense and widespread human suffering is caused by not natural forces — not the Devil, not criminality, but by the politics of the nation state,” Weisband said.

Evil for Weisband and Thomas is a corporate activity done by nations against their own civilians resulting in “immense human suffering, caused systematically.” This evil has become distinguished from other categories of tragedy for the pair by spending serious time with the Oxford English Dictionary.

“Catastrophe is derived from a term that means change that occurs at the end of a process, it’s a dynamic. It’s akin to the notion of tragedy,” Weisband said.

“Calamity derives from a word meaning corn or grain and as close as you come to a calamity is the notion of famine.

It’s the absence; it’s scarcity. My point is that evil is all of it in different contexts.

Evil is calamitous, it’s catastrophic. But it encompasses it all.”

Weisband and Thomas are clear about what evil is not. The first category largely imagined as evil that is excluded from their framework is that of the sociopathological. Child molesters and serial killers don’t constitute evil because they reside squarely in the realm of language regarding psychological and sociological problems.

“If you have a language of pathology, why in the world do you need the language of evil? You have a separate language. And that language actually constitutes a defense against evil.

If you’re pathological, you can’t help it.

You have impulses, compulsions, you are “sick,” you are insane. You can’t do anything else,” Weisband said.

The second category encompasses the criminal. Sex traffickers, drug dealers and gunrunners reside within a language of, “crime and punishment.

You do things that are punishable in courts of law. In both the pathological and in the criminal, you pay your dues,” Weisband said. Criminals with certain motivations or practices can be pathological.

The language of criminality, Weisband and Thomas believe, has attempted to internalize their understanding of evil already, if implicitly.

“We have seen over and over that those who do evil aren’t psychopaths or sociopaths and a lot of times they are not criminals. We make them criminals under international law because we’ve codified that which we know anyway that governments should not be executing en masse their own citizens, that that is evil,” Thomas said. “But we don’t have that language of evil because that language has been appropriated and so we make it criminal. But criminality is a different set of issues and a different

set of meanings. In a lot of cases where evil is done, those who do it aren’t breaking the laws that are set by their governments. To the opposite, they are abiding by the laws. They are lawfully doing what their government has told them to do.”

Third is the “oldest of all.”

This argument goes, “Satan works his way through the internalized deformities of humankind. Evil is Satanic. The problem there is, for me, is that it is a reprehensible copout. It takes away human moral responsibility for human behavior. It lets a force external to humankind dominate human action,” Weisband said.

Once the socio-psychopathological, the criminal and the Satanic are eliminated, Weisband and Thomas believe they have cleared the space to begin to use evil as a tool in understanding human politics.

“Our goal is to make what is thus far inexplicable, amenable to analytical explanation. There may be those who may disagree with our explanation — no one has the last word. But to make the subject of evil defined in the political in this way is to bring it down to the human condition where it deserves to be,” Weisband said.

The freedom to do evil The mass violence that pressed Weisband and Thomas into their investigation of evil has also initiated the thinking of many local religious leaders.

Their responses to the problem of evil — the presence of death, destruction and violence in a world they understand to be governed by a just, all-knowing and all-powerful God — fell into two main camps.

The first wrestles powerfully with the question of freedom in God’s eyes.

Because God wants a “genuine relationship” with His children, he has to allow some degree of freedom — even when that freedom allows tremendous suffering.

“When we look at the question briefly, it really does seem like God is really not doing what he should do. I share this feeling. The challenge is from God’s standpoint,” said Jim Pace, head pastor for New Life Christian Fellowship. “He would have to answer the question of what evil do I stop and what evil do I allow. If I stop all evil, people have no free choice. Some evil that is done is unintentional and so God would have to limit any free flexibility of activity on our part to truly insulate us from evil. By definition of insulating us from some, we couldn’t see what he was preventing. Well then how far down that list does He go? So it gets more complicated from God’s side when he’s trying to interact with free thinking human beings and he’s not trying to force them

into a banal life.”

The challenge in this worldview becomes channeling one’s life in the proper direction.

“In Kabbala (Jewish mysticism), there’s a saying that there’s a lot of grain in the strength of an ox — a bull can plow fields and fields for you. Or you can let it out loose and it can destroy,” said Zvi Swiebel, head of the Livieu Librescu Chabad House.

The second camp argues that man is fundamentally unable to understand God’s will.

“Part of the problem is that (man’s) value system is different. We are physical beings and we value comfort on a physical level more than spiritual good.

God knows what’s best and he has different values, so God achieves spiritual values. But we’re just not in the position to do a one-to-one correspondence that, ‘Oh, well this is what came from that,’” said Dave Clark, campus staff for Campus Bible Fellowship and a former Christian missionary in Asia.

In this view, mankind pushes on without knowledge of the will of God because deep in one’s heart is an understanding that life has a mission and a meaning.

“Our knowledge is not there to compare to His knowledge. As a little child, how do you reconcile your parent who prevents you from watching a television program? You know from the depth of your heart that these are your parents who have taken care of you all these years. And at some time you say, ‘This is your way of caring for me.’ You don’t understand, but there it is,” said Sedki Riad, a Muslim and professor of electrical engineering.

Evil in both of these interpretations exists within the individual. Jon Rice, the campus pastor of Chi Alpha, said, “I don’t think evil is thrust upon us.

Every person has the inherent potential to turn away from God — and what I mean is not just the Christian religion but the idea of those things that God represents, to turn away from those toward a self-centered view. I think that manifests itself in evil actions. But at the same time I don’t think evil is all consuming. I think in every person there is that image of god that even no matter how far they’ve gone they can still be redeemed.”

Forgiveness Weisband and Thomas have several points of understanding with the campus religious community within their framework. But none are as total as their understanding of an individual’s ability to be, in one’s soul, evil.

“In history, there are people like Hitler, like Cho, who have done atrocious acts, and you look at the Scripture and you see people who have done heinous acts.

HUSSEIN AHMED/SPPS

Weisband discusses his framework for understanding evil.

Paul, in his history, murdered Christians before his surrender to God. No one would think he had hope, Christians would classify him as evil, but through his conversion he changed and became the greatest missionary that ever lived,” Rice said.

Weisband and Thomas specifically structured their inquiry to avoid the impossible task of assessing the souls of suspected evildoers.

“I hesitate to point to a person, to any person, and say that person is evil. To do that is to say there is something in their being, in their nature, in their personality, that is evil. I prefer to think of it to think that people do evil. People who do evil are normal. And to say that they are evil sets them apart and makes them less human, less like the rest of us, that’s inaccurate,” Thomas said.

An understanding that evil individuals are rare and, even if in existence, impossible to identify allows Weisband and Thomas to leverage their conception of evil powerfully in regard to forgiveness.

In the aftermath of an evil event like genocide, the international media focuses on the leaders of the different movements who, more often than not, Weisband said, escape justice or are simply confined to a cell in the Hague, the home of the Internatinal Criminal Court. The widespread, social participation needed to enact evil events like the Holocaust goes untreated.

“You’ll get one or two big fish. But for the most part, when evil is done, it is done by many. If you think in terms of

criminality or pathology, you can never, ever, ever, get to (the many),” Weisband said. “You can never have a true process of forgiving and transcendence because you can’t have historical transcendence.

You can’t get to forgiveness because cultures can’t build on denial. If you have criminality and criminality is sequestered — a couple of big fish go to prison and history can move on and its all forgotten — you can never develop beyond the original reifications, the original forms of objectification.

So the rise of anti-Semitism, the rise of hatreds between people, can never be transformed. That’s why evil is the other side of forgiveness. It’s not just analytical, theoretical or semantic. It’s about cultural development.”

Where their understanding of evil takes the thinker, Weisband and Thomas argue, is to a more creative space where new futures are possible.

“The imaginative capacities of individuals are trapped in this idea of criminality, of trial, of incarceration, of punishment, and not in the idea in that you have an entire culture that needs to find a way to forgive and move forward,” Thomas said.

Closer to home, there might be another upshot, Weisband said.

“In both the pathological and in the criminal, you pay your dues. You ought to be forgiven. If I say to you, ‘Seung Hui Cho did awful things but is clearly pathological.’ Well, at some point a stone should be laid for him.

If there were ever an attempt for forgiveness.”