The 2013 Grove City College Commencement Address by Dr. John A. Sparks ’66, Dean of the Alva J. Calderwood School of Arts and Letters
Editor’s note: As one of his final works of service to his alma mater before retiring, Dr. John Sparks delivered the 2013 Grove City College commencement address, “Because Faith and Freedom Matter,” on May 18. You can watch Dr. Sparks deliver the address here or read it below. Please note that we have embedded links to Dr. Sparks’ past work and commentary in this speech.
President Jewell, honored
guests, trustees, my dear faculty colleagues, parents, grandparents, and
the members of the class of 2013. I am deeply honored to be addressing
you.
I first set foot as a freshman on the GCC campus 51 years ago, in the
fall of 1962. My parents dropped me off on lower campus at the OLD
Colonial Hall. My father shook my hand and my mother cried which was
probably true of many of you four years ago (for a few it may have been
five or six years ago). I lived in the old Colonial hall and walked
across Rainbow Bridge and back more times than I like to remember. The
U.S. President was John F. Kennedy.
The Soviet Union and East Germany have just begun the construction of something called the Berlin Wall to keep their own citizens from escaping the “Communist Paradise” into the West. 2.7 million East Germans had already fled, seeking freedom. In 1962, the Berlin wall presented, starkly, poignantly the question of Freedom.
The Soviet Union and East Germany have just begun the construction of something called the Berlin Wall to keep their own citizens from escaping the “Communist Paradise” into the West. 2.7 million East Germans had already fled, seeking freedom. In 1962, the Berlin wall presented, starkly, poignantly the question of Freedom.
In 1962-63 the U.S. Supreme Court, in several decisions, eliminated
prayer and Bible reading from the public schools. These were the Post
WW II public schools where my 3rd grade teacher Mrs. Kennedy, taught us the 23rd
Psalm and the 100th Psalm by heart during the school day. That was 1953
prior to changes made by the Supreme Court. These were schools (mine
was in Canton, Ohio—Reedurban School) in which the day had begun with
morning devotions from the Bible. Our principal had students read from
the Bible on the PA system each day. I made trips to his office to
read from the Bible … and some other trips that I will not mention.
Those Supreme Court decisions produced an end to much of religious
content in the public schools. What part would faith continue to play in the formation of young minds? So, the question of Faith presented itself in those early 1960s as I began my GCC journey.
Those were very different times, yes, and yet, the same question
greets us today—Do faith and freedom really matter? Thankfully, GCC’s
answer to that question today is the same as it was in 1962. Do faith
and freedom really matter? At GCC our answer is an unwavering,
unflinching, a courageous YES!
First, Freedom. I came to GCC in 1962 because I wanted to learn more about freedom. I enrolled here to study under Dr. Hans Sennholz,
(whose wife Mary still attends GCC events today). He was the champion
of free economic institutions, free markets and freedom of individual
enterprise. I soon learned from him that economic liberty was only part of the larger fabric of liberty that our Founders loved and sought to protect for the generation to come.
We value freedom here because it is a God-given unalienable right.
As President Kennedy said in his 1962 inaugural, “…the rights of man
come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.”
Precisely so.
Our Founders fashioned arrangements in law and in the Constitution
that provided a free society. This free society, allowed for the
exercise of human ingenuity, provided for the use of talents and gifts,
and encouraged the release of God-given energy to the maximum. This
land of liberty served and still serves as a magnet drawing the poor,
discouraged and oppressed of the world to her shores and borders.
I have prominently displayed in my office a copy of the architectural
plans for Ellis Island (beginning in 1892 one of the key entry stations
into this land) and over those plans a large iron plaque which says
“welcome”. Welcome to the land of the free, you huddled masses yearning
to breathe free. Was it perfect? No, slavery of our black brothers and
sisters was a blot on this bold experiment, but that would be removed
eventually as the message of the liberty bell rang for all.
And why do we value freedom? Is it because it produces great
economic endeavors and enterprises? Yes, in part. Is it because
freedom allows us to pursue ends that we form, value and seek? Yes, in
part. But Ultimately, the liberty we enjoy is to be protected because
it is consistent with the way were made by Almighty God. We are meant to be free!!
All those horrific misguided efforts of the 20th
century—communism, national socialism, those efforts to enslave the
human spirit – Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Castro, and more recently
Kim Jong Un of the slave state of North Korea – all have ended in
failure, viciousness and unspeakable evil. The symbol of the
totalitarian state, the Berlin Wall was verbally dismantled by a great
president, Ronald Reagan—“Mr. Gorbechev, Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this Wall!” By which he was proclaiming—Your citizens, like our citizens, are meant to be Free!
And the fight to maintain freedom continues here at home. I could
talk about the GCC case of 1984 but today I want to talk about what one
student graduate did just 17 years after graduation from these hallowed
halls.
Imagine this picture: A young lawyer rises to argue before the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court. He is defending the right of Susette Kelo,
a single woman of modest means, to keep her home free from the eminent
domain powers of the government of New London, Connecticut. He argues
that Americans believe their homes are their castles. They were places
where they raised their children. They were places where they share
good times and bad, they were places where they hoped to live out their
remaining years.
He denounced the town planners in New London who had bigger and
better plans for her property—luxury hotels, fancy apartments— that
would mean higher tax revenues for New London, but the demolition of Ms.
Kelo’s home. That fighter for freedom, that warrior for the
disadvantaged and relatively poor, Ms. Kelo, was Mr. Scott Bullock, GCC class of 1988.
His rousing defense, though it did not convince the court that day,
spawned a movement to curtail eminent domain abuse throughout the
nation—protecting the freedom to live peacefully in one’s home. I hope
and pray that you will follow Scott Bullock: Defend freedom at every
turn. It is the Grove City way!
Next, Faith. While fiercely independent, GCC has taught its students
to be humbly dependent upon the God of Scriptures. Thankfully, we are
saved spiritually and intellectually by a God who restores us to
communion with him through Christ. This enables us to see the world and
our place in it as it really is and we really are. Christians are the
true realists!
The Christian worldview is not complex in its fundamentals. God
Almighty made the universe in such a way that its features and contours
are knowable and discoverable. God is an intelligent rational being.
Therefore, the world he made is intelligible. This is the basis for the
natural sciences, mathematics and engineering in which faculty in those
areas uncover the dazzling, awe-inspiring created order—from the
startling predictability of blood clotting to the tensile strength of
steel. I never tire of hearing their testimonies of amazement.
This same Godly order, in other forms is also the raw material
revealed by the visual, dramatic and musical arts. In Pew Fine Arts,
can be heard and seen—the music, drama and art of the spheres.
What of the social sciences and humanities? The command to inhabit
the earth and bring it under control, sometimes called dominion, is the
foundation for human society—economic, social, political, literary. Humans are supposed to make cultural products; tangible buildings, yes, but also intangible ideas about social arrangements—rules, laws, constitutions and systems. These cultural products in the humanities are poems, novels, essays that enlighten us and inspire us.
Some in the post-modern snobby, secular academy view these Christian
faith-based perspectives as not being academically respectable. They
hold to a rigid, narrow dogmatic “establishment of unbelief” (Marsden).
Our faculty members, by contrast, think it is intellectually dishonest
and stultifying to examine the large questions of truth, beauty, evil,
community, the physical world and the human mind as though Christian
religious ideas have nothing to say about them. So faith is foundational
to everything we do here on this campus.
My old friend the late Russell Kirk use to put it this way—As he
watched students lining up, as they soon will here, to graduate, he
asked this question: Have we taught these students to love the things
that they ought to love and detest the things they ought to detest.
Will they love doing the right thing, even when it is costly; will they love others no matter what their background or color,
will they deplore the unfair persecution of the weak and defenseless;
will righteously hate regimes that kill and maim their own citizens? If
they detest what the Lord detests and love what he lauds, then we will
have taught them well. We will have taught them to be moved and
motivated by their Christian faith.
One final story in that regard: Picture yourself in a constitutional
law class at Harvard Law School. The professor, nationally known,
begins the class of eager first year law students this way: “Is there
anyone here who believes that a three-month old fetus is a person?” The
class is silent. Students look at one another nervously. Only one hand
goes up half-way back. It is the hand of a woman. She is small of
stature and build but her hand is raised high and confidently. She
undergoes quite a grilling that day at the hands of this professor. But
she holds up well. Her faith has taught her to defend the defenseless, the most vulnerable; those who have no voice or cannot speak.
Those still enveloped in the amniotic fluid of the womb. Her hand is
raised for life and that hand goes up because of her faith. I am proud
to say that she is Laura-Kate Denny, GCC class of 2008, early in her
career, active in seeing that child traffickers are brought to justice
and now a clerk to a Federal Court of Appeals judge. That is the kind
of student that this faculty produces at GCC. These are students not
only with convictions but the courage to proclaim and hold to those
convictions in difficult situations.
Closing: Before a jury retires to deliberate, the judge gives them a charge. And now I give a charge to you.
Now, class of 2013, go out from us here, as every class must. Leave
your classrooms, labs, and lecture halls. Leave the courts, fields,
arenas and diamonds where you competed. Leave those now familiar
grounds and buildings. Leave HAL, Hoyt, Rockwell, Buhl, PLC, TLC, Pew,
Breen, Rathburn, and Harbison—leave them behind.
Carry the banner of faith and freedom throughout this land, in fact, around this globe. Shape your communities for the good; take on tasks in your churches
and places of worship, influence your schools, yours clubs, your civic
organizations. Produce goods and services that improve the lives of
others. Make good use of the great stature you will surely achieve.
Make astounding contributions
to the sciences and the arts; gain influence, some of national fame.
However, do those little-noticed things of life—raising and training
your children in HIS nurture and admonition….
And, my dear friends, in the midst of all this, when there is a lull in your busy schedules…
Come back to our Towers and Campus, to the shores of Wolf Creek.
Come back to our quads and gardens.
Come back to share with us your victories and your challenges, and your families.
Come back to these hallowed halls, this special place, this little piece of the Kingdom.
Come HOME, Come HOME, Come HOME.
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