Brian Williams - 25 Years of Templeton Honors College

Dear Templeton Alumni, 

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” The past few months have seen Templeton and its community experience the gamut of what the seasons of ordinary, embodied life often brings in this glorious and broken world: “a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance…” 

These months the Templeton community has seen sickness and death, marriage and birth, grateful farewells and fond greetings, tears and laughter, somber reflection and joyous celebrations. All of this seems rather natural, I suppose, for a community entering its 25th anniversary year, and we do so with humility and gratitude for the myriad ways God has blessed and sustained this community since it began in 1999, and for all the people (like you!) that he has brought through our doors. 

As many of you will know, our Director of Recruitment, Austin Ricketts, was diagnosed with cancer this past spring and passed away this summer. Though not an alum, Austin embodied the Honors College with his wonder-filled probing of the deep mysteries of God, his remarkable breadth of reading, his practical wisdom, and the gentle humility which marked every encounter with him. We were just beginning to discover his depths when he began passing through the veil. In order to honor Austin and his time with us, one of the rooms in the new Templeton Hall will be the “Austin Ricketts Reading Room.” I look forward to showing it to you when you visit. Even if you never met him, please remember in your prayers Austin’s wife, Catherine, as well as his sons, Torrance and Oliver, and his infant daughter, Evangeline (“good news”), born into the world just days before Austin passed from it. 

But this season of life has also brought us a wedding (“Bekah Edwards” became “Bekah Interiano”), the retirement of two long-serving professors (Phil Cary and Fred Putnam) and the departure of another (Kathryn Smith) to return to family and classical school teaching in Colorado. We also welcomed three new wonderful professors to Eastern and the Honors College (Matt Moser, Amber Bowen, and Ravi Jain), and invited two current Eastern professors to join the Templeton faculty of friends (Andy Rasmussen and Burke Rea). We broke ground on the new and long-anticipated Templeton Hall (during a ceremony in which alumni Emmie Brown and Micah Skinner spoke), led the First Things Intellectual Retreat and, of course, carried on the important practices that mark the rhythm of our community life: Freshman and Senior banquets, faculty retreat, summer MAT courses, the Adirondacks camping trip (wet and windy this year!), and Matriculation (during which former Dean Jonathan Yonan addressed the new cohort).  

Throughout it all, I have been grateful to you, our alumni, for your prayers, financial support of the building fund and the student aid fund, encouraging notes, book and speaker recommendations, and for your continued participation in the Templeton community during this season of its life. I also hope that you are carrying on in your own seasons some of the community practices you learned while you were here: asking meaningful questions, reading good books, conversing with good friends, loving God, and serving your neighbor. 

As you pursue the true, good, beautiful, and holy in your own life, let me invite you to thank God for the past 25 years of the life of the Templeton Honors College, and to consider how you might support it over the course of the next 25 years and beyond. In this anniversary season we are looking back with gratitude, celebrating with thanksgiving, and looking forward with hopeful anticipation of the many ways God might use this Christian academic community in the lives of students yet to come and in the good but broken world in which we live. Over the next year, I hope to see you, hear your stories, and share with you the good work still being done in the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University. 

Sincerely, 

Dean Brian A. Williams