News from the Front #3 or "Why I Want to Stay."

This last week I went out with a few of the other graduate students. As we tend to do at this point in our life, we got to talking about our plans when we were done with our graduate degree. My hope and dream for the past few years has been to start/develop a true academic theater program at an Adventist College. I think its despicable that out of all of our universities, we do not have ONE theater program that goes beyond a minor.

As we talked I had to explain many of the politics about the Adventist Church, Adventist Education, and Adventism in general. After I finished, my friend Penny asked me a question, "Why do you want to stay? Why do you want to go back? Don't you want to just go someplace else where you wouldn't have to deal with any of that?"

I thought about it for a moment and then replied. "No."

See, the answer is really "Yes." I would love to just be able to go someplace else. To go to a school where the community is sportive, the music department would want to put on a musical with the theater department, and there was hundreds of students who want to be involved in the program would be great. That would be nice. It would be easy. But I can't. I just can't. It's that simple. I cannot bring myself to take the easy route in life. It's like the novel the Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. As you go through life you can choose to be a tourist or a traveler. The tourist takes the easy way through life, preferring to be where it is comfortable for him and seeing the world from his air conditioned hotel room. The traveler takes the harder route, but in the end has a better experience. Being a traveler is not easy, making that decision is difficult. But it's worth it.

Maybe its my stubborn German side coming out. I cannot run from the difficulty. That would be cowardly. To run and take the easy road simply because there might be some bumps on the other road is the life of the coward. Of the Tourist. I cannot and I will not.

And besides, I kind of enjoy the struggle sometimes. Out of the struggle comes passion, and therefore passionate art. The work created with passion is always the best work. In the end, it is worth it. I can appreciate it more because of the struggle it took to get to that point. For example, on Saturday afternoon I was at a church potluck out here. A older gentleman asked me what I was doing out here in VA going to school so far from my family. I told him theater. He asked what i wanted to do with it. I told him teach and build a program within Adventism and practically got laughed at. He told me that having a program was not needed, and these students who want to go into theater would be far better served going into some other major and using that knowledge to build their theater. Although I agree it is good to know other areas and to bring that knowledge to your art, you must first learn about the form of theater. It would be like giving somebody an empty music composition book and telling them to fill it, when they were trained in English literature. It might help them, but without the music theory they would be unable to truly apply it and their art would be hampered.

That is what I want to provide Adventist students. That is what I feel I need to give them. I need to give them the opportunity to learn this form. Better yet the opportunity to express themselves in this form. That is the most important thing. I have seen students drop out of PUC or struggle through it in a different major because they wanted to do Theater, but were unable to because there wasn't an academic level program. I'm sure this doesn't only happen at PUC. It must be the case at La Sierra, and Walla Walla. Let's give these artists the opportunity to learn how to do theater, and learn how to do it well.

That is why I want to stay. That is why I cannot run.

Constructed Masculinity and Gender Violence

From an early age, boys are fitted with emotional straight-jackets tailored by a restricted code of behavior that falsely defines masculinity. In the context of “stop crying,” “stop those emotions,” and “don’t be a sissy,” we define what it means to “Be a Man!” Adherence to this “boy code” leaves many men dissociated from their feelings and incapable of accessing, naming, sharing, or accepting many of their emotions. When men don’t understand their own emotions it becomes impossible to understand the feelings of another. This creates an “empathy-deficit disorder” that is foundational to America’s epidemic of bullying, dating abuse and gender violence. Boys are taught to be tough, independent, distrusting of other males, and at all cost to avoid anything considered feminine for fear of being associated with women. This leads many men to renounce their common humanity with women so as to experience an emotional disconnect from them. Women often become objects, used to either validate masculine insecurity or satisfy physical needs. When the validation and satisfaction ends, or is infused with anger, control or alcohol, gender violence is often the result.

- Joe Ehrmann, former NFL player, from “Men Can Stop Rape”



This could not be more true today. We have our genders constructed for us from birth. However in the postmodern cosmopolitan world we find ourselves with the ability to construct and preform our own genders daily. To take control of our lives and not resort to the expectations of how a "man" or a "woman" is supposed to act. The key reason we need to destroy these stereotype constructs is that they, " lead many men to renounce their common humanity with women as to experience an emotional disconnect from them. Women often become objects used to either validate masculine insecurity or satisfy physical needs. When the validation ends, or is infused with anger, control or alcohol, gender violence is often the result."

Powerful stuff.

Byyonn Bain @ PUC

“Freedom is a woman I want, a woman I need!” The refrain echoed from PUC’s Dauphnee Chapel on October the 4th as spoken word poet and prison activist Bryonn Bain rocked the microphone.  Resident Artist Mei Ann Teo directed his autobiographical play Lyrics from Lockdown.  His powerful mix of spoken word and hip-hop poetry drew the audience into his phenomenal story. The hour-long show tells the story of a Bain’s wrongful arrest and subsequent imprisonment.  Through a combination of his own lyrics and the words of his family, Bain quickly grabbed the attention of the packed house and proceeded to move many students who were in attendance.  Melissa Totton, a Junior English Major, “He delivers a powerful performance that touches everyone regardless of their racial or socioeconomic backgrounds.” Many teachers asked their students to write short reviews of the show for their class and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Junior Communication Major Sonia Moses said, “He found a way to represent all the different sides of one issue. It was brilliant.” Bryonn’s story stands as a personal testimony of one man who is standing up for what is right. The play’s openness and raw honestly shine through the Bain’s text and light the way forward. Bryonn sums it up nicely at the end of his play, “The fish that we got, and the bread some said is all that we got. That’s all we need. For us to get fed and for us to feed, a whole lot of folks in need.” I know that this campus will be fed for the rest of the year.

Adventism and Higher Education

In the last year and a half, I have begun to observe a strange trend in Adventism. To be completely frank: I’m worried. We have become insecure in our ability to raise and educate our children in our own homes. We have abdicated our responsibility to train our children and instead depend our our SDA educational institutions to do the job the family should be doing.

This is not just a response to WWU’s budding controversy over internet censorship. It’s also the creationism/evolutionism debate that is raging at LSU. It’s also a response to one of the votes that came up at the NCC Constituency meeting. (Yes, I attended just to listen since I was not an official delegate.)

Adventism is very afraid right now. We are afraid for very little reason. We have become afraid of that which we have constructed to be dangerous to our faith. In our post-colonial world we have become the moral colonists. We continue to assert our logical positivism. This on the whole is not the problem or the issue that I am observing. It is good to be firm in our belief system. However, it is the point that this has lead us to.

Just like the western colonists of not so long ago, we have found an irrational fear of losing what little bit of control we have. Hatred was born out of the middle class because they were afraid of loosing what they had. The good people of our church are terrified of loosing what little control we have over our children. They are terrified that their children will loose their way when distracted by the ways of the world. Parents are terrified about their children and the internet addictions they struggle with.  Parents are afraid that their students might have to grapple with concepts like “atheism,” “LGBT,” and “evolution.” However, this does not stem from a true firmness in our beliefs, but rather from an developed insecurity about our beliefs and more importantly in the way we have raised our own children.

The role of the family is to teach our children about God and Jesus and to give them a basis for our faith system. The role of our elementary schools should be to reinforce this while beginning to educate our children how to function in society, learning reading and writing. This should continue through high school. By the time our children graduate from high school and are ready for college, if they have been raised well, we as parents should have nothing to fear. The challenges

The Bible says, “Raise up a child in the way he should go and he will not depart from it.”  (Proverbs 22:6) Do not leave the job of raising up your children to our colleges and universities. It is not their job. (They must have been given the basis long before reaching the college level.) The job of our colleges and universities should be to challenge and push our students to academic, spiritual, and personal excellence. To push our students to the next level, to learn to love as Christ loved. To teach us this, our colleges must treat us, the students, with the same level of respect we hold for our professors.

Our universities provides the unique environment where we can be challenged and pushed but it also provides us with a support structure for when we do fall into crisis. This is how I see our higher education system, and to be honest it’s the reason I decided to come back to PUC instead of going to UC Davis or UC Santa Cruz where I had been accepted as a transfer student. Adventist higher education should function as a nurturing support system that challenges students to figure out their own faith. A student’s faith is much stronger when they have gone through a crisis of faith and come out the other side. It gives us the chance to constructed our faith from the ground up, not just using our parent’s or our pastor’s pre-made faith. Our colleges and universities should have the goal of challenging us, but should also help to provide the mentors to help us come out of it. This is how I have come to see many of professors here at PUC. This faith based learning community does not exist outside of our Adventist system. I cannot stress enough about the importance of having the ability to investigate and figure out these things now rather than later in life when we do not live in a supportive community that can help us through. Without the process now, they will fall into crisis later in life, when they will not have the support network they have now. Would we rather our children face these things for the first time when they are 35 and find themselves unable to enter the conversation? At least here the professors continually care about our emotional, spiritual and personal development and can help us find ourselves.

The goal for me, if/when I have children will be to raise them with the basis but allow them to find their own path. This is how we should be treated at the collegiate level. We do not need the good people of our church to be breathing down our backs making sure we go in the way they would have us go. The only reason that they feel that we need stems from the fear and the insecurity in how they have raised us in the first place. Let your children become thinking adults. Give us that level of equality.

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that we want to protect our children and make sure they stay in the faith. I have been raised in this church my entire life, and my dad is an SDA minister. I understand the importance of the values of our church. That being said, I would not be at PUC without the freedom to create my own place in Adventism. I think my parents did a great job with me. I have to give them a lot of credit. I am about to graduate college this next weekend and I feel great about the times and the experience I have had here. My parents have taught me to be open minded, but also to have a basis in the history and doctrine of our church. This is what I know: If a student (including myself) has been trained and taught to continue the search for “truth,” it does not matter what challenge or concept they are faced with. If we truly believe in the message of our church we do not have to be afraid of that.  It’s really as simple as that. I  hope and pray that we learn to live, love, let go, and continually seek what we understand to be “progressive revelation.”

Timothy Widmer
Student; PUC
B.A. English with Theater Emphasis.

Living the Dream

Another poster design. =D

Kingdom Borrowed: A Tragedy

So again, I've been trying out my design hat this week. I've been having a lot of fun. Here is my newest poster. This time it's for my very own play "Kingdom Borrowed: A Tragedy." The dates reflected on the poster represent the two stage readings it had this month. Enjoy.

Julia Gibbs Never Went to Paris

Every once in a while I like to put on my designing cap. I do not claim to be an incredible designer, but I like to have a little fun. I make it look good to my eye. Backstage durring the dress rehearsal for my friends play I decided to make a poster for it. Enjoy. =D