Mark Gilroy

Bringing Books to Life!

The Last Lecture: Randy Pausch on Living Well

Randy Pausch died on July 25, 2008, at age 47. A computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he achieved worldwide fame and became a bestselling author by the way he celebrated life despite a diagnosis of just months to live due to pancreatic cancer.

It began September 18 2007, when he gave a speech titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” The context was his university’s “last lecture” series, where professors were challenged to share with the audience something that matters most to them, as if they had only days to live. For Pausch, who spoke just weeks after learning he was suffering from terminal cancer, the context was not hypothetical.

The lecture became a hit as it crisscrossed the globe on the Internet, with more than three million viewers on YouTube alone. “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you,” said Pausch, the married father of three young children, at the start of the lecture. He spoke with optimism and humor, convinced that not even the specter of death could keep him from having fun; a buoyancy he maintained throughout his illness. He claimed you couldn’t escape the Reaper but you could still beat him … by living well.

In challenging his audience to really achieve their dreams, Pausch turned our typical success paradigms upside down by saying that achieving our dreams is not really about achieving our dreams. Huh? That’s not a chapter in The Secret is it?

“It’s about how you live and how you love,” he said. He believed he learned more from the dreams he had not achieved. How we travel the journey matters more than whether we get to the exact destination we had in mind. I guess knowing you are about to die will do that, will give that perspective, won’t it? Not necessarily according to Pausch.

“Cancer didn’t change me at all. I know lots of people talk about the life revelation. I didn’t have that. I always thought every day was a gift, but now I am looking for where to send the thank you note.”

Now that’s a challenge. I can’t think of a better place to start than a simple, “Thank you, Randy.”

Who Stole Jesus?

How do you define Jesus?

Who Stole Jesus?

We all know that the Grinch stole Christmas but who stole Jesus? According to an AP story last month we now at least know who found Him! In Detroit of all places.

Thu Jun 5, 2008, 12:57 PM ET

A Detroit woman has found Jesus … in an alley.

The pastor of a church in the city says its stolen 8-foot Jesus statue was recovered from bushes in an alley about two blocks away.

Patricia Bowers says she notified the church late Wednesday that she had seen the statue the previous day after she had gotten off a bus.

Bowers says she didn’t realize the green-hued, plaster statue had been stolen until seeing news reports Tuesday night.

The Rev. Barry Randolph says the only damage to the statue is a broken hand. The cross it was attached to suffered major damage.

A church member noticed the statue missing Monday. Randolph says thieves may have thought the statue contained copper, which often is stolen and sold as scrap metal.

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press.

When I was a seminary student many of us were pretty certain that theological Liberals like Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson who had written Honest to God, a thin book that had ignited a firestorm of debate, had tried or were trying to steal Jesus of His divinity. In Robinson’s case it was through a mind-numbing and fuzzy critique of the Medieval Church’s belief in a three-storied universe, which seemed fairly threatening at the time but in retrospect was a straw man argument that didn’t really address the topic at hand; God. Today such concerns might be directed at the Jesus Project (a methodical, decidedly agnostic, approach to understanding the historicity of Jesus) or come in response to bestselling books that put God on trial, like Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

Some would argue that Hollywood has stolen Jesus or, at minimum, the power of His name, by gratuitously inserting profane usage of Jesus Christ into almost any movie made that is not rated G. Can you imagine the outcry if names for God in other religions were treated in the same way?

After the Crucifixion, the religious authorities were concerned that His disciples would steal Jesus – while His followers, notably Mary and Martha, believed that it was the Jewish leaders who had done just that.

Parents, when sending their kids off to college, are concerned that skeptical professors will try to steal Jesus from their children. Only 8% of Americans consider themselves an atheist – so why do they all seem to be employed in higher education? I kid. (Sort of.)

Many Christians believe that Jesus has been stolen from the public square by a radical fringe that uses the courts to enforce a much more expansive view of the “separation of church and state” than Jefferson ever intended in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802.

The Death of God Movement, inspired by Nietzsche’s infamous sentence in Thus Spake Zarathustra, “God is dead … and we have killed him,” didn’t actually believe God had died literally or physically. But they did believe that the “idea of God” was no longer adequate as a system or inspiration for morality or finding ultimate meaning in life.

Is it possible to steal Jesus? to kill God?

We know that if God is God, if Jesus is who He says He is, then such questions are ridiculous. So why do they keep coming up?

Is it possible Nietzsche was on to something – at least on a personal experiential level? Faith, the requisite for knowing God, almost by definition – a confident belief and acceptance in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person or idea – seems to imply that we, by choice, can steal from Jesus His divinity and power; at least for our own lives. That raises too many theological questions to even pretend I could address in a quick blog or a lifetime of sitting in front of a typewriter.

But the question of whether someone has stolen or can steal Jesus is worth noting on a personal level. For we truly do live in a profane and secular day when it’s easy to just go with the flow of soft belief. So if you show up at church one Sunday morning or find yourself pondering the meaning of life in the middle of the night while staring at the ceiling and can’t seem to find Jesus, don’t go looking for Him in an alley in Detroit and don’t point an accusing finger at others.

The place to begin is found in the face you see in the mirror.

Color Blind Criticism Is Not Racism

Colin Powell was considered by many to be the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996 until withdrawing after his wife, Alma, publicly voiced her fear on 60 Minutes that he would be assassinated on the basis of his race.

Hillary Clinton, in a major campaign faux pas, brought the subject back to the forefront when, on May 23, 2008, in response to the question of why she had not bowed out of the Democratic primary race despite Barack Obama’s clear status as the presumptive nominee said, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

Oops.

Barack Obama has not steered clear of the idea that race will be used against him. Just a few days ago in a speech in Jacksonville, Florida, he said:

It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?

Ouch.

I hope that Obama is wrong. And I think he is, though maybe I’m being naive.

Here’s what I hope and pray is true of America at this moment in our history; I hope and pray we are color blind enough to …

■ vote for or against a man – or woman – no matter what his or her race;
■ affirm or criticize a candidate no matter what his or her race; and
■ when a person so follows his or her conscience in voting, affirming or criticizing, we not accuse them of racism.

If Obama wants to woo the hearts of swing voters in the face of real or perceived prejudice, he could take a page from Ronald Reagan’s game plan to turn a negative into a positive. When asked (again and again) if it was legitimate to make age an election issue, in a debate with Walter Mondale, he used his non-abrasive brand of humor to neutralize the power of the question to divide:

I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.