Joy in Mudville
Two-time Weter Award Winner Contrasts “the American Dream” and Biblical Hope
Renowned throughout Washington
state for his presentations on the history of baseball, Bill Woodward
began the 2005 Winifred E. Weter Faculty Award Lecture by doffing his jacket, donning an old-time baseball cap, and delivering a rousing rendition of the poem, “Casey at the Bat.”
“Like the American dream,” he explained, “baseball evokes the hope that springs eternal.” But all too often, he says, it delivers only “dashed dreams and joyless Mudvilles, because Mighty Casey has struck out.”
In the April 14 presentation titled “The People of Promise and the People of Hope:
A Response to the American Dream,” Woodward
went on to illustrate the unfolding of that dream through eight historical episodes spanning our country’s nationhood. “The American promise,” he said, “has often functioned
as a pipe dream, even a cruel hoax.
”Recounting eight biblical stories, Woodward
illustrated the unfolding of a very different kind of hope, one based on the promises of an unchanging, loving God. “There is another land and another promise,” he said. “It points us toward a different understanding of history, a different set of chapters, episodes that amend the sense of possibility cherished by the people of America into a sense of empowering expectation claimed by the people
of God.”
Named in honor of Winifred Weter, longtime
Seattle Pacific classics professor, coach, and dean of students, the Weter Faculty Award provides a public platform to faculty members “for scholarship informed by a Christian worldview.”
Recipients receive an honorarium and an engraved medallion. Woodward is the first person in 31 years to receive the award twice.
The historian, who joined the Seattle Pacific faculty in 1974, was named Professor of the Year in 1996. In 2000, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Historians Guild. Former chair of the War and Peace subject area of the American
Culture Association, and former social science editor for Christian Scholar’s Review, he received the Washington State Historical Society John McClelland Jr. Award for best article published in 1999 in Columbia Magazine,
and the 1988 Carl Bode Award for best article in the Journal of American Culture.
Woodward first delivered the Weter Lecture in 1978, before
many of the 350 in this year’s audience were born. This time
he asked them to consider what it means to be “people of biblical
hope.” “Might we become a community of hope, a university
modeling a vocation of hope?” he asked. “If so, then even
when Casey fails us in the clutch, even when the American
dream falters and the American promise falls short, there
will be joy in Mudville.”
Click
here to download the 2005 Weter Faculty Award Lecture
(PDF, 211KB).
— BY Kathy
Henning
— PHOTO BY MIKE SIEGEL
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“Baseball’s story, I like to say, is an epic of
biblical proportions,” says historian and
baseball enthusiast
Bill Woodward.
