Telling New Stories

Last year a group of provosts convened to engage in conversations about Emerson’s essay, “The American Scholar.” Over the period of a year, we looked for insights into the role of the Christian scholar by reflecting on Emerson’s description of the ideal American scholar. He admonished the American scholar to break free from the European way of thinking. “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” he argued. Instead, Emerson articulated a vision of education that was profoundly transformative. He emphasized the importance of self-­reliance, urging scholars to trust their own instincts and intellect rather than conforming to established norms and authorities.

This call for intellectual independence is a central theme in Emerson’s thought, advocating for a break from traditional rote learning towards a more dynamic and self-­directed pursuit of knowledge. The tendency toward over-­specialization, group-­thinking, and reverence for the great scholars of the past was problematic for Emerson. He felt that it produced fearfulness and passivity with very limited categories of thought. Additionally, Emerson envisioned the scholar as a moral and social leader, one who actively engaged with and contributed to society. He critiqued the isolation of scholars within the confines of academia and called for their active participation in addressing social issues and advancing the common good.¹ This perspective underscores scholars’ responsibility to apply their knowledge and talents for the betterment of society.

Today’s Christian scholars should espouse the similar expressions of freedom of thought that Emerson was encouraging in 1837.² Contemporary Christian scholars should be unintimidated by secular and postmodern worldviews. Instead, they should be committed to Christian categories of thought and be, if not self-­reliant, then Christ-­reliant. The Christian scholar should accept and embrace the fact that their own ontology will be different from other contemporary scholars. Like Emerson’s ideal American scholar, today’s Christian scholars should be courageous in embracing their own conceptual framework.³

Comparing Emerson’s vision with the practices of Christian universities, however, reveals both synergies and tensions. Emerson’s emphasis on self-­reliance and individualism contrasts with the communal and collaborative ethos often found in Christian education. While Christian universities encourage personal growth and intellectual independence, they also stress the importance of community, mutual support, and collective responsibility. Emerson urged the American scholar to be engaged with the broader world around him.⁴

“The world . . . lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself.” Christian scholars should embrace Emerson’s admonition to engage vigorously with the world, “to run eagerly into this resounding tumult . . . to grasp the hand of those next to me and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work. . . .”

What might this look like in a Christian university in the twenty-­first century? The answer to that question is rooted in our willingness and ability to tell new stories.

What is a Christian University?

There has been much written about “What is Christian higher education?” and “What is a Christian university?” Much of this conversation has explored aspects of how to think “Christianly” about disciplinary content,⁵

with the result ultimately revolving around methodology that aligns with and gains validity from secular theories. In essence, it has focused on the topics and issues such as: a Christian understanding of mathematics,⁶ Christian psychology, Christian geology, etc., and how the disciplinary content in such areas can be integrated into a Christian perspective. Rather than continuing to fall into the trap of over-­specialization, deeper clarity can be gained through examining the origins of what is known today as the university.

It is often asserted that the Academy founded by Plato was the first university.⁷ While much cannot be known for certain as to its history, most historians agree that it was a place for cultivating new ideas and explorations, for research, and, interestingly, for events, particularly social gatherings. As to the curriculum, course of study, or similarly related pedagogical issues, much remains unclear. However, as Paul Kalligas notes, “the only aspect of which we can be relatively certain is the persistent use of dialectic as a means for presenting and debating the various views discussed, whereas set lectures appear to have formed the exception rather than a regular feature. . . .”⁸ Additionally, he notes there can be no doubt that this practice encouraged an understanding of philosophy (i.e., scholarly activity) as communal enterprise, one evolving in a continuous exchange of view and arguments in a spirit of open and unprejudiced, albeit occasionally fierce debate.⁹

Consequently, the essential feature of the Academy (i.e., university) appears to be that it was a community of scholars. For these scholars of the Academy, as was later true for Emerson, a scholar was a student of the world around him, and someone who was passionately engaged in understanding the workings of the world—who is man? why is he here? and how does he connect with the broader world about him, and to each other in community? These scholars valued time for personal reflection and thought, and the Academy provided a place to share those ideas in a community.

The term community in popular usage is multifaceted and nuanced. Dictionary definitions (i.e., Merriam-­Webster) tend to emphasize community as locality, a group of people living in a common geographical area. Or it may focus on community as economic or political, a group of people having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests. Additionally, with the urgent concerns of various disease outbreaks (e.g., HIV, COVID-­19, etc.), the public health perspective has been on the notion of community as “a group of people with diverse characteristics who are linked by social ties, share common perspectives, and engage in joint action in geographical locations or settings,”¹⁰ or in slightly different words, a group of inhabitants living in a somewhat localized area under the same general regulations and having common norms, values and organization.¹¹

Thus, while the term community may function in a variety of roles, an essential feature is that a community is not just a geographical collection of people but that its members are bound together by commonalities of values and norms. In the Academy, scholars shared passionately in the common value of dialectical inquiry and a vigorous as well as rigorous inquiry into understanding the world and their place in it.

Henri Nouwen adds additional lucidity to our understanding from a Christian perspective as he observes that,

Community is not an organization; community is a way of living: you gather around you people with whom you want to proclaim the truth that we are the beloved sons and daughters of God. Community is not easy. Somebody once said, “Community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives.”¹²

I propose that Christian scholars hold these same common values previously noted, while adding to them a shared value of their commitment to Christ and to His “agape” ethic which supplies the cohesion that enables Nouwen’s understanding to become reality.

What is agape and why is it important?

It is commonly known that Scripture contains four different Greek words that are often translated into the same English word, love: agape, storge, eros, and phileo.¹³ Storge refers to love in family and kinship relationships; eros denotes romantic or sexual love associated with physical and emotional relations typically between a man and woman; and phileo describes friendship or brotherly love between individuals sharing common interests, experiences, etc. Agape is the Greek word that in its basic sense “designates the divine, selfless love which will go to any length to attain the well-­being of its object.”¹⁴

The Apostle Paul uses this word in his famous chapter on love in 1 Corinthians 13:1–13 (NIV):

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-­seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now, we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Agape is the love that God shows to us, and that is seen in the love of Christ. It is love that, by example and definition, cares more for the other than it cares for itself. This self-­giving love is a fully mature love that can be totally mutual and satisfying. It is not reserved for God alone, but God is the best exemplar of it.

This is a love that loves on purpose and is an act of the will. It is love that can be promised and love that is commanded as a duty in the followship of Jesus. Sacrificial love as Christ showed is agape love. It is the love Christ showed for His Church, His people. It is a love that cares for another, wants and does the best for them.

Agape was the identification badge of the first Christians. In John 13:35 (NIV), Jesus says, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Such behavior was unusual in the first century. Love did not enter into an understanding of a person’s relationship with the gods for those outside of Christianity.¹⁵ In 197 AD, the church father Tertullian emphasized this contrast as he wrote to the Roman authorities to plead for justice in the church and encourage loyalty to stand up for the gospel in the face of intense persecution: “Look they say, ‘how they [Christians] love one another; and how they are ready to die for each other.’ ”¹⁶

In his classic treatise, Agape and Eros, the Swedish theologian Anders Nygren summarizes the specific uniqueness. “Agape is Christianity’s own original basic conception.”¹⁷ This single conception, however, “became the foundation of later Christian ethical conceptions [and in a foundational sense] . . . Christianity can be understood as a religion of love. . . .”¹⁸ Hence, the Christian university should be a community of Christian scholars who freely commit to follow Christ and model that commitment through their expressions of an agape ethic to one another and extend these expressions of love to their students and the larger world around them.

Unfortunately, by focusing so much of our discussion on the disciplinary content, we have devalued the essential component of the agape ethic by trying to create institutions based purely on narrow, specialized content experts. This challenge harkens back to Emerson’s critique of over-­specialization. The consequence of forming institutions based purely on such content specialists is reflected in the attitude taken by some administrators to the hiring process of a Christian university:

Long experience in academic personnel recruitment convinces me that a sufficiently large pool of qualified candidates to staff [an] entire University faculty with Christian scholars . . . is just not out there. . . . We must not deceive ourselves into believing that there is a large guild of seasoned Christian scholars somewhere on which we can draw in staffing our university faculty.”¹⁹

While the factual assertion of the statement is dubious at best, if not blatantly false and presumptuous, such an assumption at the onset of the endeavor surrenders the entire possibility of realizing a true community of Christian scholars, a Christian university. The “muse of the courtly” secular Weltanschauung flutters about uninhibited in such a perspective.

A community of Christian scholars rooted in agape is not only important for defining the ethic binding the community together, but for establishing the ethic for a corporation of students. As Fisher Humphreys explains, “The students in a modern university have been made a little lower than God. They bear the image of God, and they are crowned by God with glory and honor. Clearly creatures such as these should be treated with respect. . . . [This] means that the university takes an interest in them and their lives.”²⁰ And the agape ethic should correspondingly impact our complete embracing of the goals to which we aspire. As Tom Corts noted:

Associating our institutions with the God of the universe, we need to be certain that we are working to be exceptional institutions. Truthfulness is required. Shabbiness—in academics, in the physical campus, in treatment of individuals, in administrative practices—is not worthy of our Lord. Where we are uncomfortable about weaknesses, we should move to correct them. Where claims are overstated, we should change them. And we should have the courage NOT to participate in practices that compromise our integrity.²¹

Continuing, Corts argues:

Make your peace with the reality that your institution is not like all others; it has a higher and holier calling. No matter the bias of the culture. And make your peace with the reality that the recognition and respect bestowed on other institutions may never be yours in a culture like ours. But then, you are not accountable for being popular with the local Chamber of Commerce. “When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more,” you will account to the Lord God for your stewardship. Therefore, be certain that, if Baptist [Christian] colleges were someday, somehow, to be outlawed, we would see one another in jail.²²

As Christian scholars in Christian universities, we will not be like others. Emerson argued that the American scholar must challenge the traditional educational paradigms of the time and called for a transformation in how scholars perceive their role in the world. In their own ways, Christian scholars must also challenge the prevailing paradigms with conviction and confidence. To fully live out a community bound together by an ethic of agape, we are destined to a higher calling.

The Higher Calling

Emerson recognized the demand for the scholar to follow the voice of a higher calling. In a sermon in 1832 he said, “Every individual mind has its assigned province of action, a place which it was intended of God to fulfill . . . [and] he will never be at ease, he will never act with efficiency until he finds it. Whatever it be, it is his high calling.”²³

There are many ways in which Christians have sought to live out the higher calling on their lives in gratitude for what Christ has done for them. Each of us, perhaps, can think of models and actions that enable us to express our own commitment. In seeking such models or patterns of behavior, we can do no better than to look to the example of Christ. In particular, we see that on the cross, Christ took on Himself the worst evil and suffering that humanity contained and brought forth, not more evil and suffering, but something more radically unexpected—new life, resurrection, new creation—all as the first born of a new humanity. Thus, as Christ followers, we should emulate His example. Leonard Hodgson observes:

Here we see why it was that so much of our Lord’s ministry was occupied with works of mercy, which were summed up in the phase, “He went about doing good,” and why it is that all down the ages Christian faith has borne the fruit of philanthropic activity. This is not a mere “optional extra” to the practice of Christian religion; it is of its essence. Wherever the sick are unattended, children uneducated, human beings housed in hovels and tenements not fit for habitation and denied the opportunity of a full and free human life, there are the potential sources of hatred and strife and ever widening circles of evil. What is needed is a body of men and women to step in and say, “Never mind whose fault this is; let it be ours in the name and Spirit of Christ—at the cost of our time, our money, our energy, it may be our lives—to see that these things bring forth as their fruit goodwill and love.”²⁴

An ethic of agape implies that as followers of Christ, we should be co-­laborers in bringing about the transformation of suffering and evil into new life.

Thus, this part of our understanding of Christ’s atonement for us should be recognized that it is an “incarnational atonement.” And there is not an area of life in which this love cannot be lived out. Again, Hodgson observes:

We can now see how the message of the cross is relevant to all departments of human life. For there is no field of human endeavor in which the world’s possibilities of good can be realized without toil and pain. The scholar or scientist who is seeking to free mankind from ignorance, the artist who would be true to his vision, the nurse or doctor or social worker—yes, the ordinary citizen who would play his part aright in the affairs of daily life, all these must master their passions . . . if their work is to be done and their contributions made. There is a redemptive element in every life lived in devotion to the truth or beauty or goodness; viewed in the light of the New Testament they are seen by Christians to have the cross at the heart of them . . . the cross is the secret of the cure of the world’s evil.²⁵

Thus, a Christian university should be preparing students to be at the points of pain and suffering in the world, and through the skills and mentoring provided by its community and curriculum, exercise their vocation to work to see that these places do not lead to continued, possibly even greater evil and suffering, but instead bring forth new creation and love.

Emerson’s call for scholars to engage with society aligns very closely with such an understanding of a key aspect of our mission in Christian universities, to develop ethical leaders and socially responsible citizens. The focus on service, ethics, and leadership in Christian education reflects a shared commitment to applying knowledge for the common good. Yet, the specific ways in which these values are implemented can differ, highlighting the diverse approaches within Christian higher education.

Telling New Stories

In his insistence on the self-­reliance of the individual as well as the scholar, Emerson laid the foundation on which was built the ethos of the “rugged American individual.” Within twenty years Mark Twain would pick up this emerging ethos, and using humor and storytelling, enlarge the persona of the rugged American, with Hemingway, Steinbeck, and others adding to it in the early twentieth century. Thus, through the use of story, Emerson’s ideal of the independent, self-­reliant individual came to represent the ideal American and the soul of a nation.

The power of story on human life is well known.²⁶ As children we are taught using stories, and as adults, a story is how many of our most basic concepts of the world are assimilated into our being. In fact, stories can gain such a control of our worldview that they take on what seems to be an existence of their own. We live and breathe through our stories. When asked why He ate with tax collectors, healed leapers, talked with prostitutes, Jesus replied with stories, stories drawn from the everyday life of the towns and villages through which He walked.²⁷

As a community of Christian scholars bound together by an ethic of agape, our actions and behaviors should challenge the world around us, which seeks to ascertain the why of what we are doing because it is not like the “courtly muses” of which they are accustomed. The challenge then for us, as Christian scholars breaking free from the structures of thought of those around us, is to tell new stories that breathe into those points of pain and suffering in the world the very spirit of the ethic by which we are bound, just as Jesus did when He was asked the same questions regarding His actions. He told new stories that illustrated and explained in ordinary ways the extraordinary events that were taking place. Our stories should animate our words with new hope and new life.

What stories might be told by a community of Christian scholars bound together by an ethic of agape? Let me offer examples from my university.

Wherever . . . the children are uneducated

The faculty of Samford’s Orlean Beeson School of Education has as one of their core values, the value of humility. The faculty began to see a need to model that value in various ways. According to faculty member Dr. Kara Chism, “it came out of a place of wanting to serve and invest in others and to humble ourselves.”²⁸ They decided to start with a simple act of kindness: go to a local elementary school and read to the students. They also brought enough copies of the book they read for each student to take one home. Bessemer City Schools was the system they chose for the project because it is a lower income area, with over 60 percent of students eligible for the federal free and reduced-­price meal program. Samford also had a cohort of master’s students in the Bessemer school system, and they wanted to show those students their support. Lastly, it was a way to remember a beloved faculty member who had died recently, who had attended Bessemer schools as a child.

. . . Denied the opportunity of a full and free human life.

Another way the education faculty have found to show humility and selflessness is to give up their annual Christmas party and serve the women of the Lovelady Center instead. A halfway house for offenders leaving correctional facilities, the center has over 400 bedrooms. So, their needs are great. Each December, education faculty and students collect toiletries and makeup and package them up as individual gifts. They also write encouraging notes that are included with each gift. These gifts are then delivered to the center.

The Lovelady Center is a familiar place for many Samford students. Some of them work there regularly at a preschool for children of residents. The Christian mission class also has a partnership with Lovelady and helps in a variety of ways. Both students and faculty show their agape love to a group of women who have no way of giving anything in return.

. . . sources of strife and ever widening circles of evil.

In the twenty-­five or so years since Jenny Waltman graduated from Samford University, she has made a huge impact. The ministry she founded and leads, Grace Klein Community, rescues good food from local restaurants and grocers to redistribute to individuals and nonprofits in need. Headquartered in Birmingham, they serve over 40 counties in Alabama. In 2022 alone, they rescued more than two million pounds of food to serve almost 400,000 people. Waltman credited Samford with inspiring and directing her vocational choice. In the Fall 2023 issue of Samford’s Seasons magazine,²⁹ she said, “Samford’s motto is ‘For God, For Learning, Forever.’ God is intentionally in front as we cannot respect, nurture and learn from one another without our hearts aligned to God’s purpose for our lives.”³⁰

Samford expanded Waltman’s understanding of different worldviews and different cultures. She was able to study abroad and meet people whose lives and ways of thinking were very different from those in her in South Alabama hometown. “I am so grateful because we are more impactful for God’s kingdom if we can understand those different worldviews, not just from where we grew up.”³¹

Her Samford education helped her in the art of building relationships across various cultures and backgrounds. Her husband, Jason, also a Samford graduate, said his wife spends “countless hours working for the betterment and welfare of people.”³² But Samford also gave her practical skills that have served her well as she leads her nonprofit. Her degree in human development and family science laid the groundwork for many of the tasks she performs daily. Also, the writing skills that she honed as a student are especially useful. Leading Grace Klein Community requires her to write speeches, fundraising appeals, and even her own book.

What is needed is a body of men and women to step in. . . .

“While growing up in a smoke-­filled industrial town west of Birmingham, I knew little about Samford University,”³³ writes Dr. Jonathan Bass, professor of history and university historian at Samford University, and an eleventh generation Alabamian. However, in his new book on the origins of Samford University, Bass provides all of us with a deep and rich understanding of this institution. Founded in 1841 in Marion, Alabama by Alabama Baptists and known as Howard College in honor of the great British reformer, John Howard, the school was established “to liberate young men from the corrupting influences of frontier rowdyism, plantation hedonism, and cultural secularism and transform them into useful and enlightened Christian citizens.”³⁴ These early Alabama Baptists dreamed and imagined this new college as a “community of learners who accepted and furthered the gospel message (faith), pursued a deeper understanding of God’s universe (intellect), served their community and country (benevolence), and exemplified good moral character (virtue).”³⁵ Such an understanding of its identity, nevertheless, was not the situation to which Bass arrived as a new faculty member in the late 1990s. Instead, the prevailing notion of what Howard College had been was that of a “fundamentalist-­controlled Bible college and a ‘Baptist Preacher Boy’s School’.”³⁶

Through almost a decade of research, Bass found that the historical evidence, nonetheless, “revealed that Howard was a top-­notch school with a capable faculty committed to rigorous learning in the liberating arts. . . . producing . . . alumni [who] rose to the top of their professions, including . . . [one] who served as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.”³⁷

So why the discrepancy in the views of Samford’s origin and identity? Bass engagingly traces the many challenges and tribulations of Howard College from its beginning in Marion to its current location constructed in 1957 in Homewood, Alabama. The school endured through years of financial hardships, fending off at least two bankruptcies, as well as struggling through two world wars, segregation, and the tumult of the 1960s. Yet, the culture wars of the 1990s, the ever present focus on fundraising, the issues of maintenance and brick-­and-­mortar, and the need to attract students in a culture that was becoming openly hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular, appeared to do what all the other tribulations had been unable, to distract and decrease attention for an historical understanding of the missional identity of the school.³⁸ It is the reclaiming of this original identity as a “community of learners” with the goal of developing “enlightened Christian citizens” anchored deeply in the values of “faith”, “intellect”, “benevolence”, and “virtue” to which Bass calls his colleagues and students to seek once again.

. . . let it be ours, our money, our energy, it may be our lives . . .

During an interview in 2020 Jeremy Towns proclaimed that “I want to love and serve you so that you will ask me what I’m doing and what makes me the way I am . . . I want to bring mercy to earth. Whoever I see walk through the doors, my job is to provide the utmost care and bring God’s love to them.”³⁹ So, who is Jeremy Towns? He is a former Samford graduate turned NFL football player turned medical doctor with a residency in emergency medicine turned sports medicine physician and founder of the campus ministry program RANSOM (Radical Athlete and Student Oasis Ministry).

Towns, however, started from humbler beginnings. Born and raised in Dolomite, Alabama, near Birmingham, his single mother, Janice, gave him a stethoscope for Christmas when he was nine years old. “To use this device”, she told him, “You will have to do well enough in school to become a doctor.”⁴⁰ And so he did, graduating as valedictorian of his 2008 Wenonah High School class. Jeremy also played high school football. Despite having a couple of excellent seasons in his freshman and senior years, he was not heavily recruited by colleges. One day, however, while working part time at a local Walgreens Pharmacy, he received a call from Samford University, inviting him to play football for Samford on a full scholarship. Towns went on to be a star athlete for Samford as well as graduating magna cum laude in 2013.

During his freshman year, he was invited to a Bible study that would change his life. There he was told about Jesus and how Jesus loved him. He fell in love with Jesus and became a very vocal advocate for his faith around campus. Feeling frustrated that no one had told him about Jesus sooner in his life, he set about finding ways to spread his joy and love more widely and with haste. His quest both ended and started afresh as he founded RANSOM. His vision for RANSOM was to be a diverse, student-­led, family-­like group of athletes and other students spreading the message of Christ throughout campuses and communities.⁴¹ RANSOM now has active groups on five national college campuses, and it continues to grow. Towns continues to serve as the leader and chief mentor for RANSOM, and he still “wants to love and serve you so that you will ask [him] what [he is] doing and what makes [him] the way [he is] . . .”

This essay has been years in the making. Having spent over thirty years in Research 1 public universities, I long had wondered how my life as a scholar might be enriched and perhaps, become even more satisfying, if it was lived within the context of an explicitly Christian university. The past nine years as provost at Samford University have given me this opportunity. It has been an exhilarating, exciting, frightening, frustrating, joyous cacophony of experiences, but ones filled with an ever-­abiding sense of purpose and direction. Emerson admonishes us to break free from our “dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands. . . .” This I have done. To what do we aspire? As Christian scholars that we should follow Christ and His agape ethic as we tell new stories.

1. Kenneth S. Sacks, Understanding Emerson (Princeton University Press, 2003).
2. I wonder how “freedom” might also be contextualized or differentiated in terms of academic freedom at a university and what implications there might be for a Christian campus and its theological positions, as well as in terms of Galatians 5. From Karen A. Lee (provost and professor of English, Wheaton College), personal communication, July 1, 2024.
3. There is a vast literature on conceptual frameworks/worldviews, but space does not permit a review.
4. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Emerson on the Scholar (University of Missouri Press, 1992).
5. David S. Dockery, Faith and Learning (B & H Publishing, 2012); David S. Dockery and Christoper W. Morgan, Christian Higher Education (Crossway, 2018).
6. James Bradley and Russell Howell, Mathematics Through the Eyes of Faith (Harper Collins, 2011).
7. Arthur Herman, The Cave and the Light (Random House, 2013).
8. Paul Kalligas, introduction to Plato’s Academy: Its Workings and Its History, eds. Paul Kalligas, Chole Balla, Effie Baziotopoulou-­Valavani, and Vassilis Karasmanis (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 4.
9. Kalligas, introduction to Plato’s Academy, 7.
10. Kathleen M. McQueen et al., “What is Community? An Evidence-­Based Definition for Participatory Public Health,” American Journal of Public Health (2001); Richard A. Goodman, Rebecca Bunnell, and Samuel F. Posner, “What is community health? Examining the meaning of an evolving field in public health,” Preventive Medicine (2014).
11. L. W. Green and J. M. Ottoson, Community and Population Health, 8th ed. (McGraw Hill, 1999), 41–42.
12. Henri J. M. Nouwen, Community (Orbis Books, 2021).
13. A popular expression of these four words has been given by C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Harper Collins, 1960).
14. A. C. Myers, The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary (Eerdmans, 1987), 26.
15. Nijay K. Gupta, Strange Religion (Brazos, 2024), 212.
16. Apologeticus, in Oxford Essential Quotations, 5th ed (Oxford University Press, 2017), ch. 39, sec. 7.
17. Anders Nygren, Agape & Eros (University of Chicago Press, 1982), 49.
18. Oda Wischmeyer, Love as Agape: The Early Christian Concept and Modern Discourse (Baylor University Press, 2021), 7.
19. William Hull, “Toward Samford as A Christian University,” (Occasional Papers of the Provost, Samford University, Birmingham, AL, July 15, 1990), 5.
20. Fisher Humphreys, “A Christian University Exploring One of Its Aspirations,” in Thinking Christianly: Christian higher education and a vigorous life of the mind: essays in memory of Thomas A. Corts, ed. Paul Corts (Samford University Press, 2011), 166.
21. Thomas E. Corts, “The University, the Church and the Culture” (Hester lecture, annual meeting of the Association of Southern Baptist Colleges and Schools, Franklin, TN, June 2, 2004), 8.
22. Corts, “The University, the Church and the Culture,” 8.
23. Emerson, Sermon 143, 1832, cited in Sealts, Emerson on the Scholar, 11.
24. Leonard Hodgson, Christian Faith and Practice (Basil Blackwell, 1951), 46.
25. Hodgson, Christian Faith and Practice, 46–47.
26. For brevity I will not trace the rich and extensive research of the past thirty years on story and narrative. Among many excellent resources available on the topic, N. T. Wright’s review and discussion is particularly helpful: The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress, 1992).
27. R. Alan Culpepper, The People of the Parables: Galilee in the Time of Jesus (Westminster John Knox, 2021).
28. Kara Chism (assistant professor of educational leadership, Samford University), personal communication, June 22, 2024.
29. “Jenny Waltman: Humanitarian of the Year,” Seasons 41, no. 2 (2023): 33.
30. “Jenny Waltman: Humanitarian of the Year,” 33.
31. “Jenny Waltman: Humanitarian of the Year,” 33.
32. “Jenny Waltman: Humanitarian of the Year,” 33.
33. S. Jonathan Bass, From Every Stormy Wind That Blows (Louisiana State University Press, 2024), xi.
34. Bass, From Every Stormy Wind That Blows, 5.
35. Bass, From Every Stormy Wind That Blows, 6
36. Bass, From Every Stormy Wind That Blows, xi.
37. Bass, From Every Stormy Wind That Blows, xi.
38. S. Jonathan Bass. “Back to the Basics: Reviving Christian Identity at Samford University” (Board of Ministerial Mentors meeting, Samford University, Birmingham, AL, April 25, 2024).
39. Cheryl Wray, “From Samford to NFL to UAB Resident: Jeremy Towns,” Birmingham Christian Family, July 13, 2020, https://birminghamchristian.com/from-­samford-­to-­nfl-­to-­uab-­resident-­jeremy-­towns/.
40. Nathan Turner, Jr., “This former pro football player is pouring his life into Alabama’s at-­risk youth, Yellowhammer, May 25, 2016, https://yellowhammernews.com/former-­pro-­football-­player-­jeremy-­towns-­focuses-­mentoring-­medicine-­alabama/.
41. Sarah Cain, “Samford Alumnus Jeremy Towns Featured on Cover of Birmingham Christian Family Magazine,” Samford University, August 4, 2020, https://www.samford.edu/news/2020/08/Samford-­Alum-­Jeremy-­Towns-­Featured-­on-­Cover-­of-­Birmingham-­Christian-­Family-­Magazine.