3/10/5

Greetings:

        When Jim Henry sent out his message (2/28/5) regarding
someone named God who walked this campus, which I followed with my
comment about his departure to Cincinnati to study law, I gathered
that some of you believed that both of us were being irreverent.
Now, this  series of crossfires, has spawned the ubiquitous,
inevitable lawyer joke. Is this not an omen that it is time to stop
this (mis)direction?
        To set the particular record straight, if that is still
possible in our current atmosphere of point-counterpoint, Jeffrey L.
God, a transfer to UTC from Tennessee Temple, became a History,
pre-law major, graduated in 1996, and was that same year awarded one
of the prestigious Chapin-Thomas Scholarships to the University of
Cincinnati College of  Law.

        If nothing else, let us desist in this particular rhetorical
category at least: no more lawyer jokes, a seedy, overworked, gufffaw
genre which needs must be plucked from the dregs of the humor barrel.

        For the nonce, I offer an oblique commentary on the current
Raven debate
(would that it were "Nevermore!") from one of the sanest of all American poets.

        O sweet spontaneous
by: e.e. cummings

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty, how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)




        tcw