I have a lot of opinions about alumni magazines, and I did even before my own high school’s alumni magazine shot itself in the groin by getting rid of alumni notes; those updates on classmates—and, often more interesting, updates on members of other classes, men and women whom I knew slightly (because a year or two ahead of me or behind me in school), or never knew—that I used to find in the small agate-like type in the back of the magazine have been banished, and the curious reader is now advised to “Follow us on Instagram or Facebook for alumni updates!” (So let me get the straight: just as the rest of the world us getting over social media, you, the Loomis Chaffee School, are going all in?) Since the only thing anybody reads alumni magazines for is the alumni notes, this would seem to be a move ill recommended. If I were a betting man, I’d say that the editors got embarrassed by the paucity of notes, and instead of doing what I’ve been advocating for decades all alumni-mag editors do, which is hire some young underpaid person to just call a few hundred alumni every month and extract nuggets of news from them, they tried to smear lipstick on the pig of their incompetence and just shuffle us off to Insta. Well, that dog won’t hunt, or whatever George W. Bush would say.
But then, just as I am about to declare the death of the alumni magazine, or at least the death of my alma mater’s alumni magazine, the school sends me an issue with this item, buried near the back, in the section on faculty obituaries. It’s about the life of Barbara Snow, who ran the school bookstore when I was a student (1988-1992), and long before and after, selling us textbooks, special planners customized with the school schedule, and crew shirts (like this1). Put on your reading glasses and read it carefully. It’s worth it:
I always knew Mrs. Snow as the bookstore lady, but it turns out that she had an epic existence beyond that (in a way a callow teenager would never have suspected). She grew up with all those relatives under one roof, and attended a one-room school house (in the 1940s!) and been a Girl Scout (as she was later a troop leader). She was a world traveler, and she took her sister along with her and her husband on her travels. She was a communicant of the same church for over fifty years. She learned about her roots, amateur genealogist that she was, and put dow new roots. She was a real daughter of the region: cheering on UConn women’s basketball, chowing down on friend dough, and drinking limeade by the Rhode Island shore. And surely it’s a reflection on Mrs. Snow herself that whoever wrote the obituary knew to thank “her dedicate caregiver of the last two years, Joyce Boahen.”
What I see in that obituary is the description of a wisdom-filled life, one lived with steadfast purpose and, probably, buckets full of joy. How many us of are doing the same? I didn’t know Mrs. Snow well; I was one of thousands of students whose names she surely forgot. But I feel as if, this summer, we all should drink a limeade in her honor. And I’ll keep reading this forsaken alumni magazine, at least a little bit longer.
Farewell, Ted Lasso
I don’t know when Ted Lasso actually aired its last episode, but Mrs. Oppenheimer and I watched it last week, so now is when you’ll get my thoughts.
First: Am I the only one who was waiting three seasons for Ted to go home to his son? I would never move four thousand miles away from my son (or daughters), and I always felt the show was a bit less judgmental than I would have been. Also, it didn’t seem in keeping with his character. So, good on you, Ted.
Second: at the end of the final episode, we were treated to the best closing montage since the epic final seven minutes of Six Feet Under back in 2005. I cried really, really hard watching that—the artistry of it just flipped me inside out and rubbed my innards raw—and I think my wife, who had just married me, wondered what on earth she had gotten herself into, hitching her wagon to this man who sobbed when TV series ended. Well, Ted Lasso’s end didn’t make me sob, but the forward-looking montage was pretty terrific. Spoiler: it seems to go well for all of them.
Except, maybe, Rupert. Which raises the question: will there be forgiveness for the Wanker? I only ask because, as David French argued a couple years back in a piece for The Dispatch that I think about often, Ted Lasso is great on the subject of forgiveness. Here is an excerpt of that French piece:
As Lasso’s fundamental decency relentlessly breaks down barriers and remakes his team, Rebecca realizes not just what she’s done [set him up to fail as coach, to spite her ex-husband], but who she’s done it to: a person she’s grown to love and respect. Lasso has become a friend, but it’s a friendship stained by a lie, and until that lie is exposed, the relationship can’t be real. So Rebecca knows she must confess. We, the viewers, brace for the moment.
… Rebecca walks in and tells him what she’s done, in detail. With tears in her eyes, she walks through all her sins. She’s desperate to preserve their relationship, but he has to know what she’s done.
At that moment, her heart is completely in Lasso’s hands. In the era of “they’re waiting,” this is when they [the swarms of haters on social media] [would] pounce—she deserves pain, and she’s going to receive pain. But something else happens. There’s a pregnant pause. He shakes his head. He stands up, and he simply says, “I forgive you.”
She’s stunned. “Why?”
“Divorce is hard,” he replies. “It makes folks do crazy things.” They embrace. That’s it. That’s the moment. Just like that, she’s forgiven. There’s no meltdown. There’s no rift between them. Lasso doesn’t punish Rebecca, not in the slightest. There’s no rom-com period of anger followed by tearful reconciliation. Lasso’s mercy is immediate.
In fact it was the speed of Lasso’s response that was so profound. That’s when television art connected with divine reality. It reflected the character of God. His mercy is immediate. Even better, His forgiveness transforms our souls.
Being of the Hebrew persuasion myself, I don’t favor French’s Christian twist, but he is right about the power of forgiveness in Ted Lasso, which made the part at the end, in which all viewers can righteously collude in hating Rupert, a bit uncomfortable for me.
But hey, then the show closed with two terrific songs, two songs historically linked by a lawsuit, and you can watch the video for one of them here:
My friend becomes a Christian
I have known Molly Worthen since my grad-school days, when she was an undergrad at the same institution, and aspired to be me—or at least to be like me. That is, she and I, seven years apart in age, shared the same mad ambition, to be religion journalists. She’s great, and we’ve stayed in touch, and I’ve watched as her journalism and her scholarship have become widely read and important. You might have seen her recent essay arguing that “Universities Should Be More Like Monasteries.” She is also the guest on this recent podcast episode, which has been widely circulated in the evangelical world; on the episode, she discusses her recent conversion to Christ and her baptism at a large Southern Baptist megachurch. The episode is long, and smart, and pretty gripping (even if I am no closer to becoming a Southern Baptist than when I started listening). Give it a listen.
What is interesting is that her conversion, as she describes it, was born of reason, rather than some inexplicable movement of God in her soul. That is, she says that after having read a lot of books, especially those of N.T. Wright, she realized Jesus’ resurrection was probably true. This is the kind of apologetic I find least persuasive; I’m far more likely to become a Christian because of a dream, or a miracle, or the example of some really nice Christians at a small church somewhere leading splendid lives. But arguments from reason fail for me. One of the most famous is C.S. Lewis’s “trilemma,” according to which those who accept Jesus as a great teacher ought to also accept that he was divine, was God. For as Lewis wrote:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
If something seems fishy here, it’s because something is fishy here. And to be fair, N.T. Wright, like many others, never accepted this reasoning. But Lewis and Wright are united—along with the philosopher Richard Swinburne, and many others—in arguing that belief in God is rational, according to the facts on hand. I think that the historical “facts,” especially as supposedly derived from the New Testament, are among the worst reasons to believe in God. But if you want to understand how a smart, educated woman can conclude otherwise, listen to Molly.
What I am calling a “crew shirt,” but which I may have the wrong name for, is this kind of tee shirt, with the little vertical tab thing coming down from the collar; this style was all the rage at prep schools in my era, and I (and everyone else at school) had the Loomis version. I couldn’t find a photo of the Loomis tee, so here is one from a rival school: