Whenever I have a spare hour from my classes, work, and the rest of life, I sometimes attend a guest lecture that looks interesting. One of my afternoon classes was cancelled today, giving me the chance to hear a visiting professor talk about the Amish school shooting of October 2006. I had not been following the news much then, so most of what I know about the event I learned this afternoon. The speaker was Dr. Stephen Nolt from Goshen college, an expert on Amish culture and co-author of a book I got for free just for showing up: Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy. I won’t have time to read it until it bubbles up to the top of my reading list in a few years, but I’ve heard great things about it, and I hope it will be a window into Amish culture as well as a personal challenge to think about what forgiveness means to me and make a better effort to practice it.

The most interesting thing I got from Dr. Nolt’s lecture was the observation that in American culture, revenge is usually practiced by speaking badly about someone. I tend to think of revenge as involving physical harm — it doesn’t help that I’m currently reading about Odysseus killing the suitors in his house for one of my classes — but when I think about it, words really are our favorite weapons. I’ve seen that in my life and the lives of my friends, and I expect that thinking about demeaning words as being a form of revenge, even when the person I’m talking about and the person I’m talking to will never meet, will make my tongue a little wiser.

Last semester I spent an hour at a lecture by Dr. Francis Beckwith, a professor in Baylor’s philosophy department. (A friend of mine is a philosophy major who took one of his classes.) He’s a fairly well-known pro-life author, and his lecture was about his latest book, Defending Life. He talked about some of the specific disagreements he has with pro-choice philosophers and then took some questions. I asked him what criteria he used to determine the moral worth of a fetus’ life — I think I know just enough philosophy and science to have used the right words — and he said it was a very good question. It’s unfortunate that I don’t remember his answer, but there’s a whole chapter on it in his book, so I guess it’s something I could learn if I had the time. I just wanted to brag.

After the lecture he had a few minutes to mingle, so I walked to the front of the room and got in a somewhat more complicated question relating to one of his arguments for human lives having moral value from conception onward (one of many matters on which we disagree). The argument is that you can pick a point at which a life is clearly important — for example, at birth — and rewind, second by second, looking for a point at which you could say “ah, there! that’s where their life becomes worth consideration!” Of course, human development being a gradual process, such a point would be hard to pinpoint and hard to justify as non-arbitrary, even if you were looking for something specific like a heartbeat or organized brain activity. My question to him was that if you can rewind to conception and conclude that a zygote deserves moral consideration, why couldn’t you rewind just a little more to the point at which the sperm and egg cells (both of which are also alive) are still separate? A common response is the Christian idea of “ensoulment”, which is fine for establishing personal beliefs but not so fine for establishing public policy. Instead, he offered a weak answer with a philosophical bent, saying that a zygote is one thing “in itself” (I’m not certain those were his words) while the sperm and egg are two different things. I didn’t see such an important difference, and his answer left me unimpressed. There wasn’t time for a longer discussion, though, so I just furrowed my brow and shook his hand before he left.

Finally, in September I attended a lecture on comets by Dr. Anita Cochran from the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas. The point of the lecture was that figuring out how the comets in our solar system formed will help us understand the formation of the solar system in general, since we’ll be able to weed out the ideas that don’t mesh with our comet data. I learned that comets are mostly rock, dirt, and ice, and I was treated to a neat description (with pictures) of the spacecraft NASA used in its recent Stardust mission. The craft used a paddle with a gel-like material in which high-speed particles became embedded. Once in space, the craft opened the paddle’s container and stuck it out sideways, kind of like we’d stick an arm out a car window to catch raindrops, only these particles were travelling six times faster than bullets. The ship tucked its paddle back in before its safe return to earth, and scientists down here have been able to look at the cool stuff it picked up. You can read more about the mission if you’re interested.

Living in the shadow of a university provides many opportunities like this, and I’m doing my best to take advantage of them.