Summer 2011 Northwestern College Magazinethe Classic the Crescent and the Cross Can Christians and Muslims Find Common Ground?
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SUMMER 2011 Northwestern College MagazinetheClassic The Crescent and the Cross Can Christians and Muslims find common ground? Also Northwestern’s Oman Semester Dog handler Riley DeVos Art by Rein Vanderhill Contents Classic People Editor Duane Beeson 712-707-7116 Across the Faith Divide [email protected] 18 18 When beliefs differ, Christ’s command to love our neighbors as ourselves begins with understanding. Staff Writers Carrie (Odell ’01) Anderson Duane Beeson Arab Spring Anita Cirulis During Northwestern’s first Oman Semester, students Amy (Schmidt ’93) Dahl 26 lived in the Middle East and learned what it means to be Tamara Fynaardt Christians in a multi-faith world. Rein Vanderhill will have Designers 14 Ryan James Top Dog more time to work on his Roy Trevino A dog handler’s visit to Riley DeVos’ fifth grade classroom paintings, like this Lake John Vander Stelt ‘83 28 led to a lasting friendship and success at dog shows around Michigan shoreline landscape, the country. now that he has retired after Web Designer Dan Robinson ‘01 36 years on the art faculty. Departments The Classic is published three times a year—in March, July and November—for alumni and friends 2 Zwemer View of Northwestern College. So named because it served what was then On the Web 3 In Box known as the Northwestern Clas- sical Academy, the Classic was the Your Turn school’s first student newspaper, Share comments about any article in this 5 Around the Green begun in 1891. It has been an alumni publication since 1930. issue, including your thoughts about interfaith 11 Of Course dialogue. Send correspondence or address changes to the Classic, Northwestern 13 Face Value College, 101 7th Street SW, Orange City, IA 51041-1996 or classic@ 14 1,000 Words nwciowa.edu. classic.nwciowa.edu Opinions expressed in the Classic visit 16 Red Zone do not necessarily reflect the official position of Northwestern College. 17 Looking Back On the cover: 26 30 Class Notes The Dome of the Rock, 36 Classic Thoughts an Islamic mosque built on the Temple Mount, is the backdrop for a church’s cross in the Old City of Jerusalem. 17 28 DAN ROSS Northwestern Classic 1 Zwemer View Box A New View of God’s World inThou Shalt Not Murder by U.S. or Iowa law (as the article erroneously stated), there are zero verified instances of stem cells derived from embryo clones, even We read your spring 2011 Classic with great interest. Your cover story after years of attempts. Whether such cells would be a match and not any institutions of higher education are committed to sending students abroad was about issues we’ve dealt with as a Christian legislator, attorney and rejected upon transplant is only hypothesis, and is actually contradicted to study for a few weeks, a semester or even a year. With the global marketplace lobbyist (Chuck) and scientist (David): embryonic stem cell (ESC) by the few attempted animal studies. graduates are entering today, learning in another country has perhaps never been research, cloning, etc. But even if these ghoulish experiments help another patient someday, more important. Technologies such as in vitro fertilization or cloning may be they would still be morally wrong. oss R M “exciting” and Meanwhile, perfectly moral adult stem cells from bone marrow, an However, at Northwestern we view global education through the lens of our Vision for D Learning (www.nwciowa.edu/vision), which makes our approach distinctive. “promising,” but umbilical cord blood and many other tissues are treating over 50,000 Northwestern doesn’t send students abroad just to study and experience another culture, whenever human life patients a year around the globe for various cancers, heart damage, and as important as that may be. Similar to all students’ learning at NWC, we want their is created or used dozens of other conditions, improving health and saving lives. Adult experience to better prepare them to trust, love and worship God; engage ideas; connect specifically to be stem cells are not limited to repairing only the tissue from which they knowledge and experience; and respond to God’s call. sacrificed (killed) for are taken; the old scientific dogma about their limitations is simply not Before sending students abroad, our faculty and staff work diligently to ensure they are scientific experiments, true, disproven by multiple published scientific studies. strongly rooted academically and spiritually—ready to experience other cultures and learn our Lord’s commands Please be more careful in reporting on life and death issues. Lives and more of what it means to pursue God’s redeeming work. to love your neighbor souls are at stake. This summer Northwestern sent 52 students on study trips to the Czech Republic, and not murder are Chuck Hurley, J.D. violated—even if those Germany, Israel, Japan and Turkey. During the last four years, we have developed and President, Iowa Family Policy Center launched our own study abroad semesters in Romania and Oman (see story on page 26). experiments could Pleasant Hill, Iowa Reflecting our mission and Vision for Learning, these programs are rich experiences for help alleviate someone Dr. David Prentice growth that integrate faith, learning and living in community. else’s suffering. Senior Fellow for Life Sciences, Family Research Council In the summer of 1990 I had the opportunity to experience something like this myself. The article Washington, D.C. I spent five weeks traveling with Athletes in Action, a ministry of Campus Crusade for concludes by EDITOR’S NOTE: Among the information shared in “Faith in Our Genes” was Christ, to what was then Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Holland and Spain. citing Jesus’ healing ministry the statement, “[human] embryos created by SCNT [somatic cell nuclear transfer] Our ministry team conducted baseball clinics, played games against national teams, would never be implanted into a womb because the resulting fetus would be a clone and shared our faith in Christ publicly and personally. What impacted me most was staying as justification for … and human cloning is currently banned.” While cloning of human cells is not with host families in two of the countries and learning how much we had in common even these scientific currently banned, cloning of embryos for purposes of growing a fully developed human though it seemed we were so different. experiments. But clone is banned. The author apologizes for the lack of clarity. Jesus didn’t heal anyone at the expense of someone else’s life. Up to that point in my life, I saw the world from a very limited perspective. This trip Hitting Home gave me a new vision of God’s world and my place in it. In a similar way, our students are Life’s beginning is a biological fact. Conception, whether through normal fertilization or through technology like cloning, marks the experiencing this with the added benefit of an academic component. The “Faith in Our Genes” cover story really hit home as my husband objective beginning of each individual’s life. A human being’s size or As our students travel, study, learn and live in community with those who are different and I found ourselves in the middle of an ethical situation much like the level of development doesn’t determine his or her value or sacredness. from themselves, they experience growth as never before. The world becomes smaller and ones in the article. Human ESCs are derived by destroying a living human being at the their vision of who God is becomes larger. After four miscarriages, a genetics lab found a rare paracentric earliest stages of development. Northwestern should put “Thou shalt not Northwestern’s study abroad experiences engage students in courageous and faithful inversion in my seventh chromosome. The geneticist told us we had murder” ahead of any “exciting” scientific venture. learning and living that empowers them to follow Christ and pursue God’s redeeming work a 50-50 chance of passing the “bad” chromosome each time I got Beyond the moral issue, no human life is “excess” or needs to be in the world—a big, diverse world. This is yet another way we live out our mission pregnant, and the likelihood of a pregnancy with the inversion carrying discarded. The Snowflakes® Adoption Program facilitates adoption of as a Christian academic community. to term was very low. Because of this, she recommended we do in vitro embryos “left over” by in vitro fertilization. fertilization (IVF) so the embryos could be tested before implantation. The article also made some misrepresentations about stem cells. Only ones that weren’t carriers of the inversion would be used. While the “excitement” continues about ESCs’ “potential” to form It all sounded so reasonable—after all, the ones carrying the most tissues, no such thing has actually happened in the laboratory. (It inversion probably wouldn’t survive anyway. However, we really has only happened in the womb, when embryos have been allowed to struggled with the idea of the “imperfects” being tossed away. The continue as normal pregnancies.) ESCs have yet to help a single human. question that kept haunting me was this: If my own mother had had the Also, it is unproven speculation that stem cells from cloned embryos opportunity to do this, would I have been tossed out? might someday be used to grow matching replacement cells or organs. Greg Christy Much to the consternation of the geneticist, we decided the most President Even though human embryo cloning to harvest ESCs is not banned 2 SUMMER 2011 Northwestern Classic 3 IN BOX God-honoring thing to do was to keep trying to get pregnant naturally.