Category Archives: Collection-related Publications

Colleen Townsend Evans

October 26, 2010Collection-related Publications, Special Collectionsadmin

As a natural beauty growing up in Hollywood, California, Colleen (known as “Coke” to her friends) Townsend worked as a model to pay college expenses. After receiving a scholarship for dramatic training, she took a screen test. Suddenly “discovered” by the studios, she signed a contract with 20th Century Fox and performed in such films as The Walls of Jericho, Willie Comes Marching Home and Chicken Every Sunday. Hers was truly the American Dream. But one night a high school friend, Louie Evans, Jr., son of Dr. Louis Evans, Sr., pastor of Hollywood Presbyterian, excitedly told her about his experience with Christ during services at a mountain retreat. At that moment Coke realized the difference between religion and relationship. Now her faith was energized. After marrying Lou, the young couple headed overseas through the auspices of the World Council of Churches, helping with reconstruction efforts after WW II. Returning to the U.S. with valuable practical experience, Lou pursued seminary training in San Francisco, then journeyed with Coke back to Europe for two years of post-graduate studies at the University of Edinburgh. As Coke’s missionary endeavors increased, her desire for Hollywood evaporated. “I was only shifting from something I enjoyed to something I wanted even more,” she told an interviewer.

Though the Evanses had asked the Los Angeles presbytery to assign them to urban neighborhoods, they were instead sent to Bel Air, and later La Jolla, to establish churches among the affluent. But Coke and Lou would not deny their desire to minister among the destitute and marginalized. After a successful ministry in Southern California, they moved in 1973 to Washington, DC, where Lou would lead as pastor of National Presbyterian. First living in the suburbs, they soon moved to the inner-city, occupying a 100-year-old row house located four blocks from the Capitol. Eager to serve, they frequently opened their home to visitors. “Using our home for entertaining is something we love,” she remarked. “Our kids have always brought home lots of friends from college during the summer or on holidays. One night we had 29 for supper.” In addition to teaching adult classes, leading prayer groups and developing “covenant relationships” among ethnic friends, Coke was honored to chair the 1986 Greater Washington Billy Graham Crusade. After 16 years in DC, the Evanses relocated in 1989 to California. They were the parents of four children. Colleen Townsend Evans is the author of several books, including Love is an Everyday Thing, Living True, A New Joy and Bold Commitment, co-written with Lou.

The papers of Colleen Townsend Evans (SC-39), comprising manuscripts and interviews, are housed at Wheaton College Special Collections.

Rite on!

October 13, 2010Books, Collection-related Publications, Researcher Publications, Wheaton College Archivesadmin

Generally, on alternating years Wheaton College Special Collections has hosted a conference examining the influence of Christian faith and traditions in the poetry and plays of William Shakespeare. Dr. Beatrice Batson, Professor Emerita of English at Wheaton College and Coordinator of the Shakespeare Special Collection, has invited accomplished scholars from all over the world to present papers exploring a suggested theme. These specialists typically address such issues as whether the Immortal Bard of Avon was Protestant or Catholic, or the presence of Christian reconciliation and other scriptural elements woven throughout his plots. After each conference Dr. Batson, acting as editor, collects the lectures into a book.

The most recent title, Word and Rite: The Bible and Ceremony in Selected Shakespearean Works (2010), produced by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, attempts to show something of the ways in which the Bible and Christianity intersect the language of Shakespeare. Word and Rite also focuses on the matter in which rites are efforts to illuminate mysteries: the mystery of marriage, the mystery of baptism, the mystery of confession, the mystery of the Eucharist, the mystery of funerals, and even the mystery of words in their relation to the Word. Holy objects such as the Fountain of blood are also considered. Contributors include Dr. Leland Ryken (“Shakespeare and the Bible”), Dr. Brett Foster (“‘Each letter in the Letter’: Textual Testimonies in Shakespeare”) and Dr. Jack Heller (“‘Your statue spouting blood’: Julius Caesar, the Sacraments, and the Fountain of Life”).

Reviewing the contents, Dr. Maurice Hunt, author of Shakespeare’s Romance of the Word and professor at Baylor University, states: “This book amounts to a fitting capstone of the several previously published Institute volumes of high-quality papers. Deserving special mention in this latest volume are Jeffrey Knapp’s fresh reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets as confessional autobiography, Grace Tiffany’s comprehensive analysis of the triumph of the English language over the French tongue in Shakespeare’s plays, Christopher Hodgkins’ eloquent account of Christian apocalyptic thought in The Tempest, and David George’s persuasive linking of the abbreviated rites and interrupted ceremonies typical of Shakespeare’s plays to the wars of religion waged in the playwright’s lifetime…Here we have a banquet – a smorgasbord – of commentary on Shakespeare’s art.”

The Shakespeare Special Collection (SC-34), housed at Wheaton College, is considered the premiere holding of secondary literature pertaining to the use of religion in the plays of William Shakespeare.

Living on the Edge

September 30, 2010Books, Collection-related Publications, Special Collectionsadmin

As the final section of his autobiography, Life is Mostly Edges (2008), Dr. Calvin Miller, pastor, poet and professor, asks the reader what he or she would do differently, if life could be repeated. At age 72 he answers the question for himself:

1. I would put more emphasis on being a better husband and father. To the church or the university I would whip out a lot more noes, and a lot more yesses to my family. I would eradicate almost all of the “Daddy’s-too-busies,” and the “later, darlings,” from my vocabulary. If the church suddenly came up with a critical meeting on circus night, I’d go to the circus.

2. I’d celebrate my mother in her presence. She was a simple woman whose humility kept her from seeing just how great she was. This adherence to her modesty I would shatter with the sledgehammer of praise. How would I do this?…I would write her a check for all the times she struggled to keep the family together…I would walk her to work in the morning and carry her lunch, and meet her when the day was over to tell her that I loved her…If anyone had maltreated her, I would get their address and visit them with an axe at midnight…For every time when I had made life hard for her, I would do seven years of penance…I would be there all the more for the woman who was always there for me.

3. I’d build a monument on Golgotha. I would build myself a replica of Golgotha, an Everest of Calvary, so high that the empty cross at its summit would be hidden by the mist of sheer altitude. I would keep a shrine at the top of my giant Calvary, with no sugary idols where the dying was done. I’d have no icons there, for the living Jesus who has been the central icon of my life would meet me there. When he came at sunrise, I would be there with the bread. And when he came at dusk, I would be there with the wine. And I would reverse my prayer life. I wouldn’t talk to him so much; I would listen more. I still wonder after a lifetime of chatty prayers, if I had not been so noisy in his presence, would he have told me more of his giant heart?

4. I’d babysit. Could I pass this way again I would take seriously a little girl in our church with whom I was hugging and laughing and having a great time, when suddenly she stopped my teasing her and asked point-blank, “Dr. Miller, do you ever do babysitting?” I told her I was too busy. But if I had to do all over again, I’d do more babysitting. In general I’d take more time for children and perhaps less for deacons.

5. What am I doing to be sure that I am a good steward of the years I have left? First, I am determined that this question will not drive me. One thing I do not want for the years I have left is to be so preoccupied with an agenda that I will not have time for anything but the drive…Such a tight little squinting of the eyes gobbles up our peripheral vision. It steals the panorama of what we might have seen if we had laid down some of our busy agenda and looked around a bit.

6. I’ll stop looking ahead and look around more. Looking around more will be my focus in my final years. I will smell the roses of Versailles and count the scent as sweet as those on the altar of the church. I will bypass a great many Christian novels and go on reading Pulitzer Prize winners just as I have always done. And I will not be so bent on my writing that I have no time to look around. I will not type my manuscripted way into the grave, staying so busy that I cannot take a walk with my wife, work the New York Times acrostic, go to a movie, or see a play…Looking around more means walking in a good direction but with an unhurried step. I would like to begin each day with God and then, coffee cup in hand, go out into the world. I don’t want to try and dissect it. I don’t want to figure it out. I just want to walk about in it. I also want to celebrate the simple things.

Miller, formerly pastor of Westside Baptist Church in Omaha, Nebraska, is currently Professor of Preaching and Pastoral Ministry at Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School. He has written over 40 books, including novels and poetry, notably The Singer and The Symphony trilogies. His papers (SC-24), comprising manuscripts, correspondence and watercolor artwork, are archived at Wheaton College (IL) Special Collections. He has lectured at Wheaton College on several occasions.

Dr. Louis H. Evans, Sr.

September 7, 2010Collection-related Publications, College-related Publications, Special Collections, Wheaton College Archivesadmin

William Evans, a native of England, heard D. L. Moody preach in New York City in 1890, and there received the gift of salvation in Christ. Advised by Moody to attend his new school in Chicago, Evans traveled to the Windy City, enrolled at Moody Bible Institute and graduated in 1892. He was, in fact, its first graduate. After a few years in various pastorates, he was appointed as Director of Bible at his alma mater. Aside from his classroom accomplishments, Dr. Evans contributed three lasting agents in the propagation of the gospel message. His first contributions were books titled How to Prepare Sermons (1917) and Great Doctrines of the Bible (1912), still in print through Moody Publishers.

His other contribution was not a book but a son, named Louis Hadley Evans, who would one day be cited as one of the notable preachers of the twentieth century. Born in Goshen, Indiana, in 1897, Louis was raised in Wheaton, Illinois, in a house that stood on the corner of Franklin and Irving, where the Nicholas wing of Buswell Memorial Library now stands on the campus of Wheaton College. Louis attended Wheaton Academy, across the street from his home, for one year (1914-15), then later entered Occidental College in Los Angeles. A remarkable athlete, muscled and broad-shouldered at 6 ft. 4, he participated in football and basketball, winning multiple honors. After serving in the Navy during WW I, he acquired a theological education at McCormick Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Chicago. Ordained in the United Presbyterian Church, Evans led congregations in North Dakota, California and Pennsylvania. While serving as pastor at Third Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh he received a call to Hollywood, California. Initially he found the request unappealing. “I said no at first when their call came,” he commented to Time magazine. “But later I realized it would be a burr in my saddle and that Hollywood would be one of the finest recruiting grounds in America. Also, I wanted to get my teeth into something.” When Evans assumed leadership at Hollywood Presbyterian in 1941, he found the church $250,000 in debt with a membership of 2,378. Within the first year the debt was wiped out, and for each successive year his parishioners topped their offerings, giving more than any other Presbyterian congregation in the U.S. As membership increased, swelling to the largest assembly in the denomination, so did Sunday School enrollment. Henrietta Mears, Director of Christian Education, was responsible for discipling these converts and implemented an engaging program that inspired hundreds of young people to enter full-time Christian activity; among these were Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ.

After serving for 12 years at Hollywood Presbyterian, Pastor Evans resigned in 1953, leaving a healthy congregation of 6,400 members. “It made a rancher out of me instead of a shepherd,” he joked. For the next nine years he traveled as Minister-at-Large for the National Board of the United Presbyterian Church, USA, speaking to universities, conventions and churches, often appearing on radio or television. As he journeyed from one engagement to another, his wife, Marie, usually drove as he sat in the back seat, tapping out sermon notes on a specially built typewriter stand. In addition to itinerating, he served as President Eisenhower’s summer pastor in Washington, DC, and was one of the co-founders and early president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Life magazine named Evans as one of “America’s Twelve Outstanding Religious Leaders,” along with Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Fulton Sheen and George A. Buttrick. Writing eight books, he continued public ministry until four months before his death in 1981. His memorial service was officiated by Dr. Lloyd John Ogilvie, who also served as a pastor at Hollywood Presbyterian (1972-95) and eventually as Chaplain to the U.S. Senate. “Rolled into one man,” eulogized Ogilvie, “was the brilliance of an Apostle Paul, the impetuousness of a Peter, the love and tenderness of a Barnabas.”

The papers of Louis H. Evans, Sr. (SC-31), are archived at Wheaton College (IL) Special Collections. The collection is comprised of photographs, recordings and typewritten documents.

David Aikman’s book on Graham in paperback

September 1, 2010Books, Collection-related Publications, Researcher Publications, Special Collectionsadmin

Billy Graham: His Life and Influence (Thomas Nelson, June 2010) examines Graham’s impact on the worldwide development of Christianity, international affairs and the fall of Communism. Author and former TIME Magazine senior correspondent David Aikman integrates his Christian faith and understanding of world affairs into this careful analysis of Graham’s ministry. Aikman examines critical episodes of Graham’s life that explain his impact on American public life and the private lives of world leaders.

David Barrington Thomson Aikman was born on June 6, 1944, the same night as the Normandy invasion, in Cobham, Surrey, England. Dr. Aikman received his early education at Stowe School in Bucks, England. He was graduated with honors in Russian and French from Worcester College, Oxford, received his M.A. in Far Eastern Languages and Literature (Mongolian and Turkish) from the Far Eastern and Russian Institute of the University of Washington, Seattle and also received his Ph.D. in Russian and Chinese history from the University of Washington.

He began his twenty-three year career with TIME magazine in 1971, reporting from five continents and more than 55 countries. As foreign and Senior Correspondent he interviewed major world figures like Mother Teresa, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Boris Yeltsin and Billy Graham. He was bureau chief in Berlin, Jerusalem and Beijing aided by his skill in speaking Russian, Chinese, French, and German. He is an expert on China, Eastern Asia, and the former Soviet Union. From 1998 to 2002 Aikman was a Senior Fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center. Additionally, he served as editor-at-large of Newsroom, an Internet-based news organization reporting on the religious aspect of news events around the world.

David Aikman has been an eyewitness to the rise and fall of nations and regimes. Based in Hong Kong in the early 1970s, he saw first-hand the fall of Indo-china to Communist rule. He was the last correspondent to leave Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge invaded in 1975. While Eastern European Bureau Chief, Aikman also covered the emergence of dissident groups in Poland. Aikman was familiar with many of the people who became advisers to Polish President Lech Walesa. Dr. Aikman has also been Bureau Chief in Jerusalem, during the invasion of Lebanon by Israel; Beijing, during the reforms of Deng Xiaoping and the last days of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square; and in Moscow, during the Chernobyl disaster and the beginning of Yeltsin’s loyal opposition movement in 1989.

David Aikman is also an accomplished public speaker, appearing regularly on major C-SPAN, CNN, NBC and others. His speaking has focused on the Middle East, China and on religious persecution around the world. The David Aikman Papers are housed in the Wheaton College Archives & Special Collections.

[excerpted from David Aikman.com and David Aikman Papers]

Hickory Presbyterians

August 25, 2010Alumni, Books, Collection-related Publications, Special Collectionsadmin

Not only was Kenneth Landon ’24 involved in the incipient efforts by the U.S. government to organize its foreign intelligence during and after the Second World War (as reported here), he was also a remarkably well-educated man, with impressive institutional credentials to match his wide-ranging intellectual, and especially linguistic, gifts.

More than a decade before he received his doctorate from The University of Chicago in 1938, he attended Princeton Seminary after being graduated from Wheaton College with a philosophy degree. Princeton had by that time become embroiled in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy that marked the era.

The dramatis personae of these tragic events at Princeton pit, on one side, the president, J. Ross Stevenson, whose tenure as president began in 1914, and Charles Erdman, long-time student advisor and professor of homiletics, against Robert Dick Wilson, a talented Semitic philologist, and J. Gresham Machen, to whom students referred, with gibing affection, as “Das”. Despite the opposition and with the approval of the faculty, Erdman’s ouster took place in 1926.

The seminary class of 1927–Landon’s class–was, in his generous judgment, the most brilliant and talent-laden that the seminary had had for fifty years. More certainly they among the last classes ever to walk the halls of Old Princeton. In 1929, Machen was to lead a number of Princeton faculty in the founding of an alternative Presbyterian seminary, Westminster Theological in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In the 90-plus-hour “Landon Chronicles” oral histories, Kenneth and his wife, Margaret ’25 (of Anna and the King of Siam fame), tell about the controversy as they knew it from within and give their judgments on the falling out. According to them, Stevenson had a habit of splitting every institution he touched, not unlike the habit, Margaret mentions in passing, of a more local Presbyterian controversialist, Wheaton College’s third president, J. Oliver Buswell. He had his share in splitting institutions too, thus proving the byword, attributed to the ousted Charlie Erdman, that Presbyterians are like hickory: split easily.

(mp3 – 00:05:48)

The Beagle

July 12, 2010Collection-related Publications, College-related Publications, Wheaton College ArchivesDavid Malone

When some here the title The Beagle their minds may be drawn to Charles Darwin, but at Wheaton College this may not be the first thought to emerge. For “Wheaties” the thought should run to The Wheaton College Press, of course. Well, maybe not “of course.” The Beagle: treating of the history, breeding, rearing, training, showing and kennel management of the breed is quite a mouthful and was the result of the editing efforts by Reno B. Cole and was published by the Wheaton College Press in 1903. Cole was enrolled at Wheaton and studied art, science and literature over an eleven year period. After leaving Wheaton he made his way to DeKalb, Illinois. He became an authority on beagles.

Few know the history of the Wheaton College Press. However, the staff of the Archives & Special Collections have gathered together a variety of sources to tell its story. The press was begun when the college received a Marder and Luse press as a donation. Using the model of manual colleges like Knox and Berea colleges had been, Amos Dresser, Jr. and Charles Blanchard envisioned a press that could save the college money as well as employ students. Amos’ son, Ernest, was the first manager. As the press expanded another press and other equipment was added. The press employed nearly two dozen students at its peak. The college used the press to print and publish its own publications, such as the Record, Echo and Catalog. In its last years the expenses outpaced receipts and outside business accounted for less than two percent of revenue. The last known manager was Julius C. Phillips. When he finished college in 1920 and new technologies, such as four color printing and lithography, emerged the press lagged and then remained unused.

Below is a bibliography of known titles produced by the press. You will note the wide range of subjects covered.

Dresser, Amos. The Christian Flag. Wheaton: Wheaton College Press, 1894.

Hart, Walter Osgood. Bits of Exegesis. [n.p.]: Wheaton College Press, 1894.
[note: Hart was an alum and Civil War veteran]

Monrad, John Henry. A. B. C. in Cheese-Making. A Short Manual for Farm Cheese-Makers. Wheaton, Ill: Wheaton College Press, 1894.
[note: Monrad was a dairy expert with the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture]

Wheaton College (Ill.). Echoes. Wheaton, Ill: Wheaton College Press, 1895.

Monrad, J. H. Cheese Making in Switzerland …: Condensed Review of Swiss, German and French Literature, Combined With Observations in Wisconsin Factories. Wheaton, Ill: Wheaton College Press, 1896.

Daniel, Mooshie G. Modern Persia. Wheaton, Ill: Wheaton College Press, 1897.

Adams Memorial Library (Wheaton, Ill.). Catalog of the Adams Memorial Library. Wheaton, Ill: Wheaton College Press, 1901.

Pulley, James M., and Reno B. Cole. The Beagle: Treating of the History, Breeding, Rearing, Training, Showing and Kennel Management of the Breed. Wheaton IL: Wheaton College Press, 1903.

Wheaton College (Ill.). Wheaton College Bulletin. Wheaton, Ill: Wheaton College Press, 1910.

Straw, Darien Austin. Bible Sociology. Wheaton, Ill: Wheaton College Press, 1918.