April 2006 Stories

Inside Politics: Willamette Student Wins D.C. Fellowship

In high school, Nathanael Stice ’06 worked with a group that doesn’t exactly scream “exciting” to most teens, or even to many adults: the local planning commission. But Stice saw his interactions with the organization in Umatilla, Ore. — as well as his service as a member of the Umatilla County Commission on Children and Families — as a chance to make his hometown a better place to live.

“I haven’t given up that dream of one day coming back and sinking a bunch of money into improving Umatilla, putting up a few sidewalks and trees and maybe a park or two,” he says.

After Stice graduates from Willamette University this spring, he will embark on yet another adventure uncommon for people his age. He will be one of six recent graduates from across the country to spend a year in Washington, D.C., as part of a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Junior Fellowship.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a private non-profit dedicated to advancing cooperation between nations and actively engaging the U.S. in the international scene. Through research, the organization seeks fresh approaches to government policy. During his fellowship, Stice will assist the organization’s senior fellows with their research. Stice, who double majored in politics and Russian, will work in the organization’s Russian and Eurasian Program.

Because of Stice’s experiences in Umatilla, he came to Willamette thinking he wanted to study local government. Instead, a newfound interest in the Russian language pushed him toward international politics, specifically the issue of civil societies and how people overcome problems using collective action.

He witnessed such action firsthand during his junior year, when he studied in Ukraine. He observed local protests as part of the Orange Revolution, a breakthrough for the country as a still-emerging democracy. Ukrainians took to the streets in response to corruption and electoral fraud during the country’s 2004 presidential election. “They’re a country in transition, so it’s pretty shaky there,” Stice says.

Stice dabbled in several politics-related groups while at Willamette. He helped start a student-led course this year, “Examining Progressive Values,” where he and his classmates compare different progressive movements and try to find connections among the values of people involved in them.

He downplays the importance of his fellowship, calling it “not a big deal” and “just a job.” But he can’t ignore the exciting prospect that he’ll be living in the nation’s capital for a year, the perfect place for someone who dedicated his college — and high school — years to studying and being a part of government. “It’s going to be a ridiculous amount of fun living there,” he says, with a grin.

Willamette Student Named Kemper Scholar

Ben Bryant ’09 grew up with an interest in public service and government. He couldn’t really avoid it, with a father who worked for 17 years as the city manager of Albany, Ore. Now, Bryant hopes to follow in his father’s footsteps by finding a career in public administration.

“I really liked what I saw of his job, and I’m proud of what he did,” he says. “I want to do something that combines leadership with public service.”

A national scholarship Bryant received this spring should help him reach that goal. Bryant is one of 15 students to be named a Kemper Scholar by the James S. Kemper Foundation. The award comes with a $3,000–$8,000 yearly scholarship and includes two summer internships after Bryant’s sophomore and junior years.

Willamette is one of 15 small private liberal arts colleges that partner with the Kemper Foundation for the scholar program. One person from each college is selected as a scholar each year.

Bryant, a freshman, was chosen based on his strong academic record, his record of service and leadership and his interest in a career in business or administration. He plays on Willamette’s golf team and is on the University’s Student Athlete Advisory Committee, which acts as a liaison between the athletes and staff.

He will spend the summer after his sophomore year in Chicago doing an internship relating to his career interest of public administration. The following summer, he will have another internship in any location he chooses.

Willamette Archaeologist Digs History

Religious Studies Professor David McCreery was headed for a career in the ministry but got sidetracked. Rather than restricting his search for meaning to books and churches, he has spent the last 35 years searching underground, unearthing ancient cities and artifacts in the Near East. In the 1970s he spent three seasons excavating at Bâb edh-Dhrâ` — believed by some to be the biblical city of Sodom — where he felt his way through layers of sun-dried mud brick with a trowel.

The History Channel recently filmed at the site of two ancient cities (Bâb edh-Dhrâ` and Numeira), thought by some to be Sodom and Gomorrah. They both show evidence of fire and collapse, and their apocalyptic downfall corresponds with the biblical account of dense smoke and burning sulfur that rained from the skies — divine retribution for sins, according to Genesis. The History Channel program, which includes an interview with McCreery, will air April 24.

McCreery, who is a paleoethnobotanist, reconstructs ancient environments by looking at preserved seeds, crops and foods, conducting archaeological research in what is known to many as the “Holy Land.” When he began excavating in Jordan in the mid-1970s few archaeologists had attempted to recover botanical material, and the Bâb edh-Dhrâ` site was an open book, with everything preserved in a layer of ash.

“Fire is the best way to preserve organic material,” McCreery says. “Plants carbonize, so it’s an ideal situation for archeologists. They last for thousands of years.” When the reed roofs burned, they fell and sealed each layer, preserving the houses, along with grapes, barley and other crops.

“The city may have been destroyed by an earthquake or by an invading army,” McCreery says. “It was common for invaders to pillage and burn cities.”

Located on a trade route, Bâb edh-Dhrâ` was small by contemporary standards but large by ancient local standards, with about 500 inhabitants. “It probably wasn’t as big as the Willamette campus,” McCreery says. “Cities were a lot like the medieval castles in Europe where the wealthy lived inside the walls and the lower class lived outside.”

McCreery went to Pittsburgh Theological Seminary after college, and happened into an archaeology course. He volunteered to help his professor at a dig in Cyprus during the summer break, and surveyed tools and kitchen utensils from ancient homes and clay figurines from temples. In spite of the dust and heat, something about the experience must have drawn him in; halfway through his doctoral studies he switched from theology to archaeology and began his own archaeological investigations.

For more than three decades McCreery has worked on archaeological projects in Cyprus, Syria and Jordan, and published numerous articles about Near Eastern archaeology and paleoethnobotany. He directed the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan from 1981-88. The excitement of the “find” is still with him. “Archeology is not like writing a ‘book report,’” he says. “You are uncovering something valuable and unique.”

Since coming to Willamette in 1988, McCreery and his students have excavated tablets buried under the Star Trees in 1942, and uncovered the site of the original Oregon Institute, Willamette University’s first incarnation. When he’s not in his office surrounded by maps, a weathered hat, tattered books and shards of pottery, he speaks to church groups and service organizations about the Old Testament, Near Eastern archaeology, the ancient and modern Middle East, and Islam.

The History Channel's production, “Digging for the Truth: The Real Sin City: Sodom & Gomorrah” will air on Monday April 17 at 9 p.m. PST and Tuesday April 18 at 1 a.m. PST Check your local History Channel listings for other air dates and times. (The History Channel is channel 37 on Comcast Cable in Salem.)

Greening the Divine: Bowersox Talks About How We Talk

Politics Professor Joe Bowersox has run circles this year as chair of Willamette’s Sustainability Council, so it might surprise some to discover that underneath that frenetic activism lurks a first-rate scholar. Bowersox’s soon-to-be-published book chapter, Greening the Divine: Religion, the Environment, and Politics in 21st Century North America, explores how politicians, environmentalists and “green” Christians and Jews speak to their audiences.

Bowersox earned his credentials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but he received his “calling” in the South Salem hills, where he wandered as a boy. “I watched the cherry and plum orchards all being transformed into subdivisions,” he says. “It really set that issue in my mind.” He listened to a Pete Seeger song that talked about how the world will be “a’ doublin” and “a’ doublin,” and the words translated to him as “That field next to me will soon be gone, and the field on the other side, too.” There was a visible impact on the things he loved.

When Bowersox lived in Korea he saw the loss—or gain, depending on how you’re measuring—on a frightening scale. “I saw Seoul marching outwards,” he says. He arrived in 1986 and lived in a thatched-roof village. Six months later, the government had razed the entire village and replaced it with concrete buildings, and when he went into Seoul his throat grew raw from the pollution.

“There was a sense of loss associated with patterns of human behavior,” Bowersox says. “I wanted to understand the political structures that encourage that behavior.” While most of his research these days focuses on forest and fire policy, Bowersox is also interested in the language environmentalists, politicians and even green Christians and Jews use to persuade the public—and each other. “Success or failure may depend on knowing how to use the right language to make a convincing argument,” Bowersox says.

Historically the environmental movement often appealed to religious language to attract converts, Bowersox says. Conservationist John Muir described nature as a “window opening into heaven” and forests as “God’s first temples.” And after the 1930s Dustbowl disasters, Charles Lowdermilk, in the Roosevelt administration, spread the message of soil conservation through “Soil Conservation Sundays,” where preachers spoke of the sin of land loss. Lowdermilk invoked religion in the quest to save land, and it was a powerful tool.

Contemporary environmentalists often feel squeamish about speaking about the natural world in spiritual or emotional terms, so arguments for sustainable lifestyles or preservation are reduced to hard, empirical science and economics. Decision-making is stripped bare of ethical and spiritual consequences.

The danger with this path, Bowersox says, is that many secular arguments for environmental protection become abstract accounts, devoid of language that compels people to rethink their values or make sacrifices. Their messages only reach those already converted.

And contemporary green Christians and Jews often use the same rhetoric employed by secular environmentalists, offering up statistics and data to convince decision makers, the public and their own congregations. They have, for the most part, failed to employ spiritual language as an argument for living a sustainable lifestyle.

Bowersox wonders if that limits their appeal. “In some ways, it gets down to the ‘emotion versus facts debate,’” he says.

On the other hand, many politicians, especially in the conservative camp, are not shy about basing their arguments on their convictions, or on King James. “Despite our church/state separation, religion and spirituality have always influenced politics,” Bowersox says, “and politicians dip into religious language to attract voters.

“George Bush had it down during the election,” says Bowersox. “John Kerry never knew whether to risk failure by playing the religion card.”

Bowersox advocates looking past data-driven arguments and politicized, standoff language, to begin an authentic discussion about shared—or dissimilar—values. Perhaps, Bowersox says, after we strip away all the rhetoric, it comes down to simple values, and they should have an authentic place at the table.

Perhaps, Bowersox says, environmentalists shouldn’t be so hesitant about revealing their passion for a forest cathedral—a passion instilled from childhood hikes or from a conviction that to lose a place they love would be like losing their right hand.

Perhaps green theologians and congregations shouldn’t feel the need to rely so heavily on empirical arguments while throwing out the eloquent phrases from the Bible, the Talmud, the Qur’an or other religious texts.

And perhaps it should be safe for politicians to speak openly about why they ran for office, what they stand for and what they believe—in their gut. “Although many intellectuals chided presidential candidate George W. Bush when he identified Jesus Christ as the greatest philosopher who ever lived, most North Americans probably would have a hard time coming up with an alternative,” Bowersox wrote. “Whether they are religious or non-religious, they are probably more familiar with a religious text than they are with Plato.”

Apparently, Bowersox and the Sustainability Council must be speaking a language many people understand. Their list of first-year accomplishments is astounding, as they facilitate adoption of sustainability across the Willamette campus. They’ve sponsored a Sustainability Retreat, Earth Day and Sustainability Month activities, lectures, forums, sustainability grant projects, booths, a website and a newsletter. They have also helped facilitate sustainable construction guidelines, food service educational events and increased attention to sustainability in University and Willamette Academy curricula.

Where does Bowersox find his energy? “Students keep me going,” he says. “The best thing we did with the Sustainability Council was to turn much of it over to the students. They have a lot of energy and enthusiasm.

“The biggest challenge is how to nurture them,” he says. “I don’t want to turn out a bunch of Pollyannas, but I don’t want to turn out cynics. I want to inculcate a sense of balanced stewardship. There’s a joy in taking care of the Earth.”

Bowersox’s chapter, Greening the Divine: Religion, the Environment, and Politics in 21st Century North America, will come out soon in Religion and American Politics: New Perspectives, New Directions from Lexicon Books.