Letters to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I know I ‘m speaking to a large crowd and I don’t expect you will all like what I’m going to say.

But seeing the words “EU Idol” plastered around campus two years in a row stirs up in me emotions that would be foolish to hide.

I do not pretend to be perfect. In fact I am one of those sinners Paul writes of in I Corinthians who was saved by grace from my wicked ways, and yet I still stumble.

But, please, please, could someone tell me why we let ourselves stumble so far into the things of this world that we barely notice our Christian community proudly displaying a competition for university “IDOL” on campus?

Why does that not stir up conviction?

You may say that it is a semantics issue: “We don’t mean the same thing that the Bible did when we say ‘idol.'”

Oh really? You don’t? And what’s the difference? One is on a TV screen sucking you into its grip while the other is a stone carving?

What happened to us that we accept this as okay? Where is our Christian common sense?

It’s bad enough that we have idols in this world that we barely recognize because they are not the stone carvings we think of in the Old Testament. Yet, how do we explain the fact that we don’t recognize an idol when the words are staring us in the face?

How complacent we are! We have allowed people, images, talents, entertainment-all these and more–to be idolized and put on a platter, served directly into our Christian living rooms.

Please, just take the time to notice.

Notice words. Question what they might mean. Are they okay to use as we try to shine the light of Christ in a dark world?

We need to probe our hearts and really think. What are we doing? What are we saying? Have we missed something big?

-Libby Hedrick

Dear Editor,

Although I appreciated Rebecca Harwick’s come-back cartoon depicting bishops wearing hats listing the crimes of Christianity (“Theologian Deathmatch”), it falls far short of evoking the sentiments that the similar cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad draw out of Muslims.

If you wanted to make a true parody of the controversial Danish cartoons, you would have had something more like a figure of Jesus clad in medieval armor, brandishing a sword that said “Crusades.”

-Sevag Bakalian