Bethel University - Spire Yearbook (St Paul, MN)

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Virgin, and it is to her and her omnipresent altars that we should be directing our criticism. Besides sanctifying a set of phony values. The Girl compounds her noxiousness by maiming her victims in a Procrustean bed of uniformity. This is the empty ‘'identity ' she panders. Take the Miss America pageant, for example. Are these virtually indistinguishable specimens of white, middle-class post-adolescence really the best we can do? Do they not mirror the ethos of a mass-oroduction society, in which genuine individualism somehow mars the clean, precision tooled effect? Like their sisters, the finely calibrated Rockettes, these meticulously measured and pretested beauties” lined up on the Boardwalk bear an ominous similarity to the faceless retinues of goose-steppers and the interchangeable mass exercisers of explicitly totalitarian societies. In short, who says this is bea uty? The caricature becomes complete in the Miss Universe contest, when Miss Rhodesia is a blonde. Miss South Africa is white, and oriental girls with a totally different tradition of feminine beauty are forced to display their thighs and appear in spike heels and Catalina swim suits. Miss Universe is as universal as an American adman's stereotype of what beauty should be. The truth is that The Girl cannot bestow the identity she promises. She forces her initiates to torture themselves with starvation diets and beauty-parlor ordeals, but still cannot deliver the satisfactions she holds out. She is young, but what happens when her followers, despite added hours in the boudoir, can no longer appear young? She is happy and smiling and loved. What happens when, despite all the potions and incantations, her disciples still feel the human pangs of rejection and loneliness? Or what about all the girls whose statistics or personality” (or color) do not match the authoritative ideal ? After all, it is God-not The Girl-who is God. He is the center and source of value. He liberates men and women from the bland uniformity of cultural deities so that they may feast on the luxurious diversity of life He has provided. The identity He confers frees men from all pseudo-identities to be themselves, to fulfill their human destinies regardless whether their faces or figures match some pre-determined abstract ideal . As His gift, sex is freed from both fertility cults and commercial exploitation to become the thoroughly human thing He intended. And since it is one of the last items we have left that is neither pre-packaged nor standardized, let us not sacrifice it too hastily on the omnivorous altar of Cybele. The Secular City by Harvey Cox (Copyright Harvey Cox 1965, 1966). We need not point any fingers at the girls who are but ragdolls in the hands of the playful public. Rather, we who maintain the necessity for their manipulation are the indicted. Let us take a hard look at how we, a Christian academic institution, relate to or borrow from our sin-wreaking society. 1. Pace-Setters. Alumni award: Rev. Mrs. Herman Tegenfeldt. Judy Tegenfeldt Fenlason. Mrs. Marcus Paw. John Tegenfeldt. Ed Tegenfeldt. Mrs. Ed legenfeldt 2. Karen Shetland. Lyn Ford. Sheloa Hanson, the Bethel Royal. Don Anderson 3. Homecoming Concert-Gene Cotton 29

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In recent years all manner of questions have been raised at Bethel and elsewhere over the phenomenon of homecoming. Why are we still doing this? Does it have any meaning to our generation? Who is supposed to come home? Is this some kind of vestigial appendix from a bygone era of nostalgia? Is the whole affair just an old teddy bear we cannot throw out? Considering our community of concentrated Christianity, we would do well to ask some more revealing, perhaps painful, questions. Why do we e-lect a queen? What are the criterion for choosing her? Are our standards for her position as pure, thought out, and Christ honoring as we would suppose? What does she really symbolize? Does that upset you? Try the following alka-seltzer by Harvey Cox. 1. Homecoming Queen Shirley Goodwin 2. Shirley Goodwin and court: Diane Lundberg. Jane Cahoon. Brad McNaughl (escort). Toni Magnuson. Karen Shafland Perhaps the most ironic element in the rise of the cult of The Girl is that Protestantism has almost completely failed to notice it. while Roman Catholics have at least given some evidence of sensing its significance. In some places, for instance. Catholics are forbidden to participate in beauty pageants, a ruling not entirely inspired by prudery. It is ironic that Protestants have traditionally been most opposed to lady cults while Catholics have managed to assimilate more than one at various points in history. If we are correct in assuming that The Girl functions in many ways as a goddess, then the cult of The Girl demands careful Protestant theological criticism. Anything that functions, even in part, as a god when it is in fact not God. is an idol. When the Reformers and their Puritan offspring criticized the cult of Mary it was not because they were antifeminist. They opposed anything-man, woman, or beast (or dogma or institution)-that usurped in the slightest the prerogatives that belonged alone to God Almighty. As Max Weber has insisted, when the prophets of Israel railed against fertility cults, they had nothing against fertility. It is not against sexuality but against a cult that protest is needed. Not. as it were, against the beauty but against the pageant. Thus the Protestant objection to the present cult of The Girl must be based on the realization that The Girl is an idol. She functions as the source of value, the giver of personal identity. But the values she mediates and the identity she confers are both spurious. Like every idol she is ultimately a creation of our own hands and cannot save us. The values she represents as ultimate satisfactions-mechanical comfort, sexual success, unencumbered leisure-have no ultimacy. They lead only to endless upward mobility, competitive consumption, and anxious cynicism. The devilish social insecurities from which she promises to deliver us are. alas, still there, even after we have purified our breaths, our skins, and our armpits by applying her sacred oils. She is a merciless goddess who draws us farther and farther into the net of accelerated ordeals of obeisance. As the queen of commodities in an expanding economy, the fulfillment she promises must always remain just beyond the tips of our fingers. Why has Protestantism kept its attention obsessively fastened on the development of Mariolatry in Catholicism and not noticed the sinister rise of this vampirclife cult of The Girl in our society? Unfortunately, it is due to the continuing incapacity of theological critics to recognize the religious significance of cultural phenomena outside the formal religious system itself. But the rise of this new cult reminds us that the work of the reformer is never done. Man’s mind is indeed as Luther said-a factory busy making idols. The Girl is a far more pervasive and destructive influence than the

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In our contemporary world we tend to get caught up in our own problems and try to apply immediate solutions under the assumption that our problems are unique. Many have argued that history is irrelevant and therefore its role in the college curriculum needs to be reevaluated. Let us suggest some ways in v hich history can be useful within the liberal arts tradition and then suggest an alternative usage. The study of history puts contemporary problems into perspective. It searches for the roots of issues and tries to isolate that which is significant. For example, the Irish-Catholic flareups in Ulster derive from previous crises. This background helps to explain though not condone such occurances and can help in determining solutions. The Soviet-Chinese border dispute is History is bunk Henry Ford not just a contemporary phenomena, but a dispute whose origins have roots in pre-communist periods. Second, a historical perspective is necessary to understand expressions (literary, philosophical, educational, etc.) in other fields of learning. Lack of historical perspective alienates the author from his historical period and helps to promote misunderstanding. Third, a historical background is necessary to temper the utopian dreams of men in all generations. In recognizing man's fallibility one recognizes the limits of human achievement. One wonders whether human history becomes the story of man’s disasters rather than his achievements. The danger here is that man often lets his historical tradition limit his ethical alternatives, a position a Christian ought never let happen. The study of history then becomes the basis from which to temper our Utopian dreams, but never to eliminate their validity. Fourth, students need to recognize the mythology of historical research both past and present. Each society attempts through its historians to place a cloak of legitimacy over its present and past and thereby emphasizes those aspects of its history that glorify and exonerate