Final Thoughts on DC

The semester is now over, and I have been home for two weeks. It seems strange to think that all of the hustle and bustle of DC is in the past, and I am once more back home in the desert. These last three months in DC have equipped me with a greater ability to defend what I believe in, and I am already seeing issues that I can and should involve myself in. I am looking forward to seeing where and how God will use me in this world, and I know that as I go you all will be there to pray for me as I follow the path God has laid out for me. I will be leaving updates for time to time, (hopefully with some degree of frequency) but for now, I will leave you with a speech that I was asked to give to several hundred of FRC's top financial supporters, (and yes, most of them will still continue to give, even after hearing me speak). This speech was given at the annual Faith and Family Summit in April and gave an overview of the Witherspoon Fellowship.

Good Morning, and thank you all so much for your time today and allowing me to speak to you.

The Witherspoon Fellowship offers a dynamic learning environment in Washington, D.C. to qualified students. It is a civic and cultural leadership development program for college juniors, seniors, or recent graduates. Our educational philosophy and pedagogy are modeled on the traditional academic fraternity. The program combines personally directed interdisciplinary studies with practical professional experience in public policy research and advocacy. Students are thus able to apply their readings, classroom lectures, and discussions to a wide range of public issues.

That is a nutshell is the Witherspoon Fellowship, but after all that rhetoric the question still remains, what is the Witherspoon Fellowship? Even after being a part of this program for almost three months, I am still hard-put to find words for everything that I have experienced. Simply because there has been too much to process.

This semester has had myriad of incredible things packed into it. So many great experiences that I am still reeling from it all. The Fellowship has thrashed me, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Getting to my actual description of the Fellowship, the program is comprised of four main parts.

1. Our studies: as fellows, we are expected to read about 200-300 pages a week with 4-5 pages of reflection essays. The work load varies from week to week as do the topics; typical readings can include everything from the Magna Carta to the Virginia statute for religious freedom. The life of Fredrick Douglass to the life of Solzhenitsyn, from the Party of Death by Ramesh Ponuru to The Call by Os Guinness. Every Monday, we have a time to discuss our readings for the week, both on the topic and on the meaning of the author. As one would expect, we don’t always come to the same conclusion on the topics, and the discussions can go on for some time. Along with the reading assignments, we are able to attend numerous lectures during the course of the semester. So far, we have listened to Dr. Pat Fagan talk about “Marriage: What the Research Shows Us,” (a preview of the mapping America program), Chuck Donovan on “Planned Parenthood: The Empire of Emptiness” (a lecture on the impacts of Planned Parenthood on our society.), Dr. David Prentice’s, “Stem Cells and Embryonic Humans” (my favorite lecture), and an overview on Crafting Party Platforms by Bill Gribbens. These are only a few of the speakers and topics that we have had. Along with the speakers that we have on a weekly basis during our class time, the DC area is full of opportunities to hear other great speakers. With organizations like The Heritage Foundation, The Ethics and Public Policy Center, The De Tocqueville Forum, and others, a fellow can attend 1 or more lectures a week in addition to scheduled Witherspoon speakers.
2. The second part of the fellowship is our internships. As interns each fellow is assigned a supervisor and a section of FRC to intern with. the Fellows are often asked to assist on different research projects, and attend different lectures and Senate briefings. Some of the Fellows were even asked to travel with there supervisors to different conferences as part of their responsibilities. I particularly found my job as Mr. Morrison’s go-to gofer to be a lot of fun. My job description was rather simple; I was to help make Mr. Morrison’s life easier. The description may have been simple, but that didn’t mean that my daily tasks were. But truth be told, I rather enjoyed helping Mr. Morrison plan our different events, correspond with speakers, and accomplishing whatever else might need doing.
3. Outdoor Ed: in the school of life there is a great university without walls in the world around us, and in this university, the US history department is centered in DC. One of the focuses of the Witherspoon Fellowship is to take advantage of being centered in DC. To this end, every Friday, (and sometimes other days as well) are spent visiting the different monuments, memorials, Battlefields, and historic building in and around Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington. These trips are especially fun because Mr. Morrison is a walking history textbook. Everywhere we went Mr. Morrison had some strange fact or story about what we had just seen. The Field Studies give us a time to see the abundance of history around us while at the same time allowing us to hang out together, which brings me to the fourth part of the Fellowship.
4. The Fellowship of the Fellows. As part of the program, the Fellows are in constant interaction together, we live on the same floor, next door and across the hall from each other, we work in the same room at FRC, and often we even eat together. Being around so many like minded yet different people is a great experience, and one that I have enjoyed very much. In our current semester we have so much diversity in both our theology and our upbringing that it could almost make your head spin. We have fellows from the north (Charity and Aleks), south (Mary, Kiana, and Jessica), Midwest (Andrew, and Elizabeth), and left coast (yours truly). And every semester there is always one fellow from Slovakia (Martin). As for theology, we have 3 Catholics, an Anglican, 3 Baptists, and Presbyterian. The theology debates are always fun and help to pass the hours to and from our Field studies. (the one on Papal infallibility was particularly fun). But no matter what our differences are, we have had a blast this semester and I count all of the fellows as good friends.

As I consider this semester, there is much that I will remember and look back on with pleasant memories, sitting on the banks of the Potomac while watching fireworks with the fellows, walking through the DC Zoo (no not the Capitol). Standing on the top of Little Round Top, or freezing our ears off outside the Washington Monument. I will recollect listening to Tom McClusky’s wit or hearing Joseph Bottum talk about the need for cemeteries. Even the times spent trying to finish a writing assignment by Monday, or being stuck in the airport at Pittsburgh with Mr. Morrison. The birthday parties or even just drinking Bubble tea by the Navy memorial, this semester has been incredibly fun, and I will always be glad that I got a chance to participate in the Witherspoon Fellowship

More support for inteligent design

Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams two days before his 80th birthday:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of the centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms. We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in its course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos. So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed thro' all time, they have believed, in proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe. Surely this unanimous sentiment renders this more probably than that of a few of the other hypothesis.

On the Holocaust And A New Hope

Today, 5 of us went to the Holocaust Museum. I had never been to it before, and even though I had seen and read much on that event, I was completely unprepared for the impact that it would have on me. Words really cannot describe my emotions as I saw the images and faces that were there. The faces were especially moving, everywhere we went, there were faces of people who had simply just disappeared, they had been declared sub-human and were brutally murdered. As I walked through the Museum, my heart was crushed by what I was seeing. The room full of hundreds of pairs of shoes found at a Death camp, the photo of 18,000 lb of human hair to be used for making furniture, and the pathway of cobblestones from a ghetto in Warsaw seemed to darken the world around me.

But in the darkness and despair, I was rescued by the oddest of things. A young mother was walking though the museum pushing a stroller with her three year old daughter in it. The little one had a rag doll from the gift store, and as little girls are want to do, she was carrying on a animated discussion with the doll. Chatting and giggling, she was oblivious to what was around her, and having no reason to do otherwise, she was enjoying life. Her mother, trying to respect those in the museum, tried to quiet her, but the little girl, not having a care in the world, only laughed the louder thinking that this was just another game. The young mother, looking up, saw that I had noticed her and the girl, and apologizing for the noise, assured me that she was trying to keep her daughter quiet. "Let her laugh" I said, "there are worst things to hear, and besides, it reminds us that even in times like these, there is still hope". The mother seemed grateful and we talked for a short time, but mortified as she was, she soon left. As I continued to walk through the museum, I held on to the memory of her little girl's laughter. It was a reminder that life is indeed beautiful, and that while we should remember what has happened in the past, we should focus on the beauty around us.

In retrospect, today was the perfect day to go to the Holocaust Museum. As we left the building, the sun was shining, birds were singing, and trees were blooming. Spring is here, and it is a reminder that spring always follows winter, good conquers evil, and that God does ultimately prevail.

On the Fellows: Andrew "Al Qaeda" Pedersen:

As part of the Witherspoon Fellowship, I have entered into a brotherhood you might say, they call us the Fellows, and maybe one day they will view us like the Skull and Bones. (I sure hope not). Anyway, I thought that it would be good to tell you all a little bit about the the Fellows that I live and work with. this is the first installment and I will write about the others from time to time.

Andrew "Al Qaeda" Pedersen:
Andrew is my room mate, and he was introduced to me as a quiet farm boy from Nebraska. I should have known better, you see Andrew is really a gardening philosopher with latent terroristic tenancies. He hides himself so well under his quiet and studious demeanor, that I don't think that I would have ever found out about his dark side, if I hadn't been with on the night of The State of The Union Speech. Andrew, Martin (another Fellow), and I had gone to get groceries, and had just parked outside our apartment, when the Capitol Police swooped in. From their blockade at the corner of the street they had spied Andrew's rather ingenious toolbox in the back of his truck, and had declared it to be a bomb. No joke. Andrew's toolbox, for the record, did look rather weird, it is made out of some big aluminum milking tool (from the farm), and had a glass insulter (from a power pole) at the top. We didn't think that we would get in too much trouble, that was until they opened the box and found Andrew's chainsaw (I told you that he was a gardener)... eventually they decided that no intelligent terrorist would go out and buy a whole bunch of groceries right before an attack, (Why do you think that we bought all those groceries? It was a disguise) and they let us go. We all had a lot of fun with poor Andrew over that one. Mr. Morrison said that he would have been the first Fellow to go to jail.
Actually Andrew is a really neat guy, and we get along really well. Most nights we will stay up late discussing some point in philosophy or debating something that we have read recently. I always let him win when we debate, after all, he does have a chainsaw.

On Religion and Public Debate

Unfortunately, I have once again lapsed and forgotten to write anything lately. That is on this blog, I have been writing profusely every week on our different reading assignments. This is some thoughts that I had after reading Paul Marshall's book God and The Constitution. Enjoy:)

As Locke would say, we are a slate, and what you see from us, has come from our experiences. While Locke was not entirely correct in his theorem, he is correct in the idea that every decision that we make in this life is based on some experience that we have had previously. We never make a conclusion without first having some idea on what is the right call to make, and if we are not sure, we attempt to defer, or at least ask for another opinion. The theory can then be postulated that we as humans use some “authority” to make decisions. We either use some occurrence in our past, the word of some one we respect, or our religious beliefs to set our path. In fact there is no one who could ever claim to have an original insight; everything that we do is inspired by something we believe. Beliefs dictate what we do and how we do everything in our lives. Granted, not everything that we believe is believed strongly, and some decisions are made tentatively, but when it comes to our moral and political beliefs, if we are willing to say anything, it is because we have a strong belief. With that said, let me move on to my next point.

When you believe something strongly enough to act on that conviction and to speak out, you have just made the declaration that your belief is causing you to do something. That declaration has made your conviction into something that you worship and by definition an idol. (for clarifications sake, I am using a Webster’s definition that states that an Idol is: 4: an object of extreme devotion idol>; also : ideal :2) In fact one could make the case that even atheism, the ultimate anti-religious belief, is also a religion and therefore an idol (an extreme devotion to the idea that there is no God) that shapes one’s thoughts and actions.

Why are some beliefs more valid then others? What makes a belief more suitable for a given situation then another? How can anyone accurately judge which belief is better suited for solving the current problem? Those questions come straight out of the agnostics playbook, yet strangely enough, they have a ring of truth to them. My point is not that all beliefs are equally valid, to believe that would be foolish. But my point is that you can never throw out someone’s beliefs as irrelevant because it shapes their thoughts. Just because you deem some notion to be true does not mean that an opposing view should not be listened to. We should have an open mind, or should we? The message that has been shouted out from the roof tops this election has been that if you are a Christian, you should keep a open mind to the views of others yet don’t divulge your mind to others. Everyone’s opinion is a valid attempt to ferret out the truth, except yours. For you see your opinion is guided by your Bible and your religion, and you might just force your beliefs on others. Don’t these people realize that they are forcing their religion and their idol on me by saying that I am wrong?

No matter what you say or what your convictions are, you will always be forcing your beliefs on each other anytime you have a difference of opinions. By stating that someone is wrong, you are forcing your belief on them. It is the epitome of hypocrisy to tell some one that their religion should not interfere with their political judgments. I have always been of the opinion that what is good for the goose is good for the gander, especially when it comes to eating snails. So why can’t Christians force their opinions on others? When you get down to it, the argument is not about forcing an idea on some one else, but the right to put forth an idea. Even forgetting the influence that God and Religion has had on the founding of our country, religion is irrevocably intertwined with the way that we think. And until you decide to remove public debate, you shouldn’t try to take religion out of the public square.

2-21-08 On Being Tased and Shot At

There seems to be this myth circulating around this great country that because there is a gun ban in DC, there is no shootings. This is a lie that I can refute, thanks to first hand experience. You see, to day I was tased and shot at outside my apartment door. For those of you that have never been affected by crime, there are no words that can describe the way you view life after surviving such an ordeal. To hear the high pitched whizz of bullets flying past your face, and to feel the intense numbing pain of a taser makes each new day so much sweeter. During this tragic occurrence, my life literally flashed before my eyes, and I wondered how I could have spent my life in a better way. But being made of stern stuff, I soon snapped out of it, and began to look for a way to survive. And when the villain began to tase me, I concentrated every last ounce of will power on not succumbing to his attack. Thankfully the weapons used were not enough to destroy me, and I will live to see another day.
Actually the "weapons" used by Randy (who lives down the hall) were an air soft pistol and a double A taser. My electric bug wand, (which I might add runs on two D batteries) packs a bigger wallop the Randy's taser. After touching my Bug Racket, it took almost three minutes to get the feeling back into my thumb, and when you use it on bugs, you can actually see them smoke. But being as this was the first time Randy had used his taser on someone, We were not sure how powerful it was. It really was scary, to not know if I would pass out... you never really know what a bunch of college guys will do to a person who is unconscious.

2-21-08 The Douglass Lincoln Debates

Today we had another one of our Witherspoon Lectures. (These lectures are hosted and promoted by the Fellowship) This one featured our own Mr Morrison as the speaker. As I have often mentioned, Mr. Morrison is a brillint historian. It is always fun to hear him speak, and this lecture was no exception. Unfortunatly, do to my responsibilities as the Academic Affairs Intern, I was in charge of signing and setting up the food, which meant that I only caught bits and pieces of the lecture. With that said I really can't comment on how good the lecture was. However, if you would like to watch it I do have a link for the web cast, http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=WT08B02. I also have a link for the last lecture, Darwin Day in America by Dr. John West, http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=WT08B01. This one I did watch, though only on the web cast, and it was very good. Dr. West has a very interesting take on how Darwin has negatively affected our society through his racist beliefs and statements. If you thought that evolution was all about removing Christ, you need to watch this lecture.