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Today is Friday, March 29, 2024 at 07:45 AM.


Reedies and religion
From Karl Hester '87
Thank you for "Our Spiritual Journeys" article. Faith and spirituality can be such deep and powerful forces in our lives, and Reed is such an intense environment. The joining of the two most certainly creates interesting and powerful experiences. At a recent prospective student gathering in California, I found myself talking to another Reedie who was impressed that my faith had persisted in the cauldron of the Reed experience. She was a person of deep faith. Even though we were of very different faiths, we had similar experiences in trying to live them out in the Reed environment. Thanks for taking on such an important and timely topic.

I was grateful for the time that Kate Bernheimer put into that article. I was also pleased to be able to share from some of my experiences of Reed and my faith journey. The author competently expressed the heart of what I was sharing.

There are a few things that were attributed to me in quotes or anecdotally that aren't quite correct. First, my wife, Suzanne, is a woman of great faith. She did not convert with me. She has been a Christian since she was very small. She was, in fact, one of the major influences in my own path of faith.

I would never say that I believe people in general are on a "life course towards salvation." I wish this were so, but experience and scriptures firmly convince me that this is not the case. I believe salvation is a very real and available option to all of us. This does not mean, however, that all our lives are leading us to that point.

The account with the evangelist should have read more like this: an evangelist type showed up in front of the student union ranting and raving about how we were all going to hell. As I was walking past with another Reedie, she said "I can't stand those Christians." I replied, "I'm one of them."

Thank you for devoting space in your magazine to this topic. I was struck by one of the sentences in the splash page for the article. "In true Reed spirit, those described in this article are at turns serious and playful, compelled by ritual and open to change." What a marvelous description of how our walks of faith ought to be, no matter what faith path we chose. Grace and peace to all.

From Clyde M. Senger '52
Spiritual groups existed on campus when I was there 1949-52. I am not sure when they started, but I remember meetings on campus as well as in private homes. It was a Christian group, perhaps Youth for Christ or Campus Crusade for Christ. I believe it was Richard Saloum '51 who organized things. I understand he went on to get an M.D. at Loma Linda Medical School. At one meeting, we had a faculty member from Multnomah School of the Bible. At that time, tests at Reed were taken under the honor system without monitoring. I assume they still are. I asked him how things were done at MSB. He said all tests had to be monitored and he couldn't understand how our system could work. An interesting contrast in viewpoints and morality.