AlumniArticles from TF Academy Alumni
Wed 23 Apr 2008 • Responses: 0 • by Wendell Kimbrough (’07), Ali Phillips (’08), and Will Weir (’08)
Reflections on the Conference from three Academy Fellows
At this January conference you might have expected another fifteen-dollar guilt trip on how we’ve failed to serve the poor, but what these Fellows found was something a little different. Some new topics were part of the discussion—real estate development, racial reconciliation, and the arts—and a diverse group of people were in attendance. In light of this refreshing approach, new challenges also arise. How do we go beyond developing a fresh approach with different language and strive for a renewed heart?
Wed 23 Apr 2008 • Responses: 1 • by Josh Britton (’08)
“Here was a place that had not only given rise to jazz and jambalaya in the French Quarter but had sustained the Otts, the Joneses, and the Brittons in Livingston Parish—generations of my ancestors who had planted themselves in one place and worked hard to make it better. Aware of all this, I decided to leave.”
If I feel a sense of responsibility for any place in the world, it’s south Louisiana. I spent the first twenty-two years of my life there and I have been shaped by that place in more ways than I can count. Much of that shaping came from a dense network of family and friends. I went to college at LSU in Baton Rouge, just a short distance from the small town where I grew up amidst my extended family. Until I came to Maryland last August as a Trinity Forum Academy Fellow, the longest I had ever been away from home was two months.
It is perhaps unsurprising that much of my thinking and reading during my time at the Academy has concerned the notion of place—specifically, how relationships develop within the contours of shared places and how those places affect who we are and how we live. I began thinking seriously about place after hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit my state in the fall of 2005, as I was starting my senior year of college. The damage was a local and inescapable concern for residents of south Louisiana. After the storms, we couldn’t just change the channel or click a new link to escape the story. Even if the rest of the world moved on, we still had a devastated region and a dysfunctional major city to tend to.
Fri 16 Nov 2007 • Responses: 1 • by Anna and Josh Hayden
Anna Caruso Hayden, Class of 2004, and her husband Josh spent their summer vacation helping to train leaders in a region of Europe ravaged by centuries of conflict. “Other students remarked that they were eager to value everyone—except Serbs. At those moments we were reminded that without the transforming power of Jesus Christ, true change was impossible.”
When people asked us where we were going on vacation last summer and we responded, “Kosova,” most gave us a funny look and remarked dryly that it wasn’t the typical vacation destination.* They were right. A war-torn European province struggling for independence wasn’t exactly the beach. Yet this past July, we spent two weeks in the province of Kosova teaching a leadership workshop for Albanian college students. We were invited on the trip by a friend and colleague from Belmont University, never imagining that Kosova and the Albanian people were what God had in store for us this past summer.
Tue 24 Jul 2007 • Responses: 0 • by Amin Aminfar
Amin Aminfar (’03) is finished with grad school but is still learning. “There is no phrase more semantically empty than ‘the real world.’ Once one enters the real world, apparently, the airy considerations of Christian community—or the kind of idealism that corresponds to a “protected” learning experience—must give way to harsher truths of driving to work and paying the bills.”
There is no phrase more semantically empty than “the real world.” And this is something of a surprise, given the way that the phrase looms in the consciousness of young people, or at least has been invoked over that consciousness as a kind of boogeyman, sent to scare students onto the path of hard-nosed pragmatism about their lives. For it is to students that the phrase is spoken, used to draw a contrast between their lives as students and their lives after being students which, because these lives at least notionally involve mortgages, taxes, and the like, have this quality of concreteness that qualifies them for membership in “the real world.”
Tue 20 Mar 2007 • Responses: 2 • by Judd L. Robertson
A 2004 Academy alumnus discusses his recent spiritual and intellectual journey from “Bible study” to “small group” and its implications for a church in a lonely world.
I’ve been involved in Bible studies since my freshman year in college, and have led them on and off since my junior year. Their success is hard to judge, if that is even the right language. Do people keep coming? Are they learning? When the former was true, I’d often walk away wondering how much people really got out of the time, questioning the effectiveness of my teaching, and criticizing myself for not knowing enough. At times I wished for a Matrix-like infusion of raw Biblical data—not only for me but for the whole group.
In my mind, the purpose of the Bible study was, obviously, studying the Bible. Like the sermon on Sunday, the measure of Tuesday’s gathering was how much we learned about the Bible—and, by extension, about God. Fellowship before and prayer after, though important, were the crescendo and decrescendo. In this way of thinking I found knowing God got easily confused with knowing about God, and learning was mistaken for growth.
Wed 13 Dec 2006 • Responses: 6 • by Jamin Warren
TFA Alum Jamin Warren takes on the relationship between books and death.
“Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers.”
One of The Twilight Zone’s earliest episodes entitled “Time Enough at Last” portrays a man named Henry Bemis who can never find time to read. His philistine wife torments him and his boss thinks reading is trash. After taking a lunch break in the vault of the bank where he works, a nuclear blast decimates the human population, finally removing the tongue-cluckers who stood between Henry and his beloved pages (truly one of this century’s greatest segues).
Wed 11 Oct 2006 • Responses: 2 • by Joshua Hordern
“When God calls us and our nations to repentance, do we groan in selfish stupidity? God’s gospel call is both personal and public and commands our attention. How will we respond?” A reflection from a TF Academy alum.
‘When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long . . . Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover up my iniquity.’ (Psalm 32:3,5)
When God calls, men and women groan. In Jesus Christ and by the Spirit, God calls on us to repent and trust Him. Yet we resist God’s call with every fibre of our selfish being, turned in on ourselves and away from God and others. And so we groan, burdened by sinful, silent stupidity.
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