Speaker will get to heart of the matter

Reverend to discuss schools' role in developing character

Monday, November 8, 1999

By CHRISTINE HAMM
For the Monitor

Henniker

HENNIKER - Four decades ago, the Reverends William Sloane Coffin and Charles H. "Kelly" Clark were students and assistant chaplains together at Yale University. Then their paths diverged.

Coffin became famous as the Yale chaplain who protested the Vietnam War, was jailed as a civil rights "Freedom Rider," helped found an organization to promote nuclear disarmament, and was indicted by the government in the Benjamin Spock conspiracy trial.

Clark, meanwhile, moved to Southeast Asia where he spent 20 years as a missionary, educator and administrator in Singapore, Malaya and the Philippines. Later, he served as dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, and during the '80s and early '90s, he spent a decade as rector at St. Paul's School in Concord.

Over the years, the two ministers have kept in touch. Several years ago, they cemented their friendship when Coffin came to St. Paul's to participate in a week-long seminar on values in education. Now Coffin has published The Heart Is a Little to the Left, a book of essays on the expanded subject of social justice. Ever the activist, Coffin continues to argue that "compassion demands confrontation."

Wednesday evening at New England College, Clark will review Coffin's book and apply its message to the mission of education. In "Where Does the Heart Go to School?" Clark will address the need for families, communities, and institutions of learning to confront the responsibility of developing not only students' heads but also their hearts.

The free talk, sponsored by the New Hampshire Humanities Council and the Friends of H. Raymond Danforth Library, will be at 7:30 p.m. in the Great Room of the Simon Center on the New England College campus in Henniker.

"The heart is what we mean when we speak of conscience, the seat of the individual personality, really the character of a person," says Clark. "There are many teachers of the heart."

While Clark includes the home, religious organizations, society-at-large and the media in the mix that influences personal and public morality, he says that, as an educator, his talk will focus on schools, which he believes have a "tremendous responsibility" for building civil discourse and an ethical society.

He intends to address, he says, how that charge is too often subverted by misinterpretation.

"I feel the noble mission statements of the great colleges and schools we know of expressed an intention to develop the character of their students as future citizens who would live in the community, making laws and carrying them out," says Clark.

"That's what schools are for. Too often though, we soft-pedal these mottoes and slogans or pay little attention to them, but they made a great difference to the founders," he says.

Clark cites the mission statement of St. Paul's School, which begins with the notion that "in all our gifts, we may never forget to be kind," as an example of this attitude.

The former rector remembers that before he joined the school he told the trustees he hoped to nurture not only its reputation for intellectual excellence but also what he believed to be its obligation to foster faith, hope and love, the cardinal virtues that St. Paul himself stood for.

Clark finds that these same themes occur throughout Coffin's text. Although he stresses that "I'm not going to try to be Bill Coffin because I haven't got the gifts he has," Clark will use Coffin's collection of sermons, commencement speeches, and lectures as a point of departure for his own remarks.

"I'm not saying I was there when Bill was leading the charge, but looking back on it, I see that he has been right far more than he has been off balance, and he certainly has influenced me," says Clark.

". . . The heart definitely should be on the right side of things but probably, as Bill says, that means it belongs a little to the left," he says.

Like his former schoolmate, Clark believes that spirituality is essential to the life of the mind.

He regards the film American Beauty, which he's seen twice in the past week, as testimony to the cruel consequences of people losing sight of their need to care for one another.

"It's a grim picture but I came away thinking it was a terrific movie," says Clark. "It really looks at the tragedy of dysfunctional families, at people in the agony of their lives. . . . We need to learn to bring to bear the great traditional values inherent in a liberal education to the problems we face today."

Monday, November 8, 1999