Free Republic

There’s hardly an evangelical who doesn’t know about Wheaton College. Alma Mater of the Reverend Billy Graham, Wheaton boasts a student body of superior intellect and an education rivaling much of the Ivy League. Wheaton College graduates can boast of presidential speech writers and Speakers of the United States House of Representatives along with doctors and executives and professors and missionaries and pastors across the globe. But Wheaton is different. Founded by an anti-slavery father and son, Jonathan and Charles Blanchard, Wheaton was established as a chain in the Underground Railroad to help runaway slaves. Wheaton’s distinctive has always been...

Anthropologists from Wheaton College (Illinois) and The Field Museum have discovered how the ancient Maya produced an unusual and widely studied blue pigment that was used in offerings, pottery, murals and other contexts across Mesoamerica from about A.D. 300 to 1500. First identified in 1931, this blue pigment (known as Maya Blue) has puzzled archaeologists, chemists and material scientists for years because of its unusual chemical stability, composition and persistent color in one of the world’s harshest climates. The anthropologists solved another old mystery, namely the presence of a 14-foot layer of blue precipitate found at the bottom of the...

<p>The Wheaton College student newspaper, The Record, reports today that the influential evangelical college’s president, provost, and chaplain have removed their names from a letter to Muslim leaders that has attracted criticism in some quarters.</p> <p>“Loving God and Neighbor Together” was published in the November 18, 2007, New York Times as a response to an October statement from 138 Muslim scholars and clerics calling for interfaith cooperation. Wheaton College president Duane Litfin and provost Stanton Jones were among the signatories, along with pastors Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, National Association of Evangelicals president Leith Anderson, Youth With a Mission chairman Lynn Green, Frontiers mission founder Greg Livingstone, theologians Miroslav Volf and John Stott, and Christianity Today Media Group editor-in-chief David Neff.</p>

From Catholic World News:Muslim fundamentalists attacked a Catholic school in India's Kashmir valley on Monday, demolishing a wall and smashing windows and furniture. The Good Shepherd Mission School in Pulwama is run by a popular missionary priest, Father Jim Borst of the Dutch Mill Hill order, who has been in the region since 1963. Although Muslim militants persuaded the state government to begin proceedings to expel the priest in 2004, Christian groups campaigned successfully to reverse that order. A leading retreat preacher, Father Borst is credited with initiating the translation of the Bible into the Kashmiri language. The elderly priest...

A former Wheaton College professor who was fired because he converted to Catholicism found himself this week at the center of a debate about diversity and theological perspectives in private, faith-based schools. Faculty members at the west suburban evangelical Protestant college must sign a faith statement that the Bible is the final authority. Catholics follow the authority of Scripture and the pope. Joshua Hochschild, an assistant professor of philosophy at Wheaton College for four years, became a Catholic on Easter 2004. He was dismissed last spring.

Wheaton College was delighted to have assistant professor Joshua Hochschild teach students about medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas, one of Roman Catholicism's foremost thinkers. But when the popular teacher converted to Catholicism, the prestigious evangelical college reacted differently. It fired him. Wheaton, like many evangelical colleges, requires full-time faculty members to be Protestants and sign a statement of belief in "biblical doctrine that is consonant with evangelical Christianity." In a letter notifying Mr. Hochschild of the college's decision, Wheaton's president said his "personal desire" to retain "a gifted brother in Christ" was outweighed by his duty to employ "faculty who embody...

<p>VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- An American academic wants to see a Bible translation, put together by scores of conservative scholars, become the one Bible everyone uses.</p> <p>Alan Jacobs, an English professor at Wheaton College near Chicago, said the new English Standard Version Bible, whose translation was overseen by Vancouver's J.I. Packer, is the only one with the potential to become the universal Bible of all English-speaking Christians.</p>

<p>WHEATON, Illinois (AP) -- Andy Morgan can't dance, but he figured he was in no danger of embarrassing himself.</p> <p>After all, he went to a high school that did not permit dancing. And when it came time to pick a college, he settled on a Christian school that had not allowed social dancing since the war. The Civil War.</p>

The Arabists Among Us By James M. Hutchens ________________________________________ In 1995, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year,” was Robert D. Kaplan’s The Arabists. It is a fascinating and insightful account of how the State Department of the United States government became, and remains, pro-Arab. Basically, it is a story of how, over the last two centuries, the children of missionaries to the Muslim world of the Middle East, have been pipelined through Ivy League schools into the State Department. Once embedded there, in the Office of Near Eastern Affairs, their love for the Arab peoples and culture...

Among the elite young socialites of Wheaton College in the early 1960s, Mimi Beardsley was part of the most envied clique - the most attractive, wealthiest, brightest and most charming girls at the toney school south of Boston. That she could sign herself out on weekends with the words that she would be traveling with ``The President of the United States'' only added to her status. No one then imagined the truth, that the demure former White House intern, now known as Marion ``Mimi'' Fahnestock, was having an extended affair with President John F. Kennedy. It was a secret she...

Flag furor goes on BY RICK THURMOND AND SUSAN LAHOUD / SUN CHRONICLE STAFF NORTON -- Despite growing criticism from veterans groups and town officials, Wheaton College will not order students to remove a U.S. flag hung upside down on a campus house as an anti-war statement. Two Norton selectmen weighed in on the controversy during the board's regular meeting on Thursday. `` That's not an opinion, that's a disgrace,'' selectman James Brown said. `` I'm extremely disappointed with the administration about not taking action.'' Selectmen Chairman Bob Kimball said town hall requested the flag be taken down, but college...

Wheaton College, an evangelical school that for years has held tightly to strict moral standards, is loosening up a bit, lifting an old rule against dancing on campus and easing a ban on alcohol and smoking for faculty and staff. For a school that counts Rev. Billy Graham among its graduates and has as its dictum "For Christ and His Kingdom," the unanimous decision by the administration and board of trustees was a major policy shift.