With his signature blonde locks and bright red hat, Jon Knudtson is hard to miss at the skatepark. He is also the only one doing tricks on a scooter.
“It’s my favorite thing to do,” said Knudtson ‘12.

While most kids were putting away the late 90s craze for skateboards or sports, Kundtson kept practicing with his middle school birthday gift, transforming a childhood hobby into a chance to make money.

He has been sponsored twice, by a scooter company and a small business, and is set to appear on the front cover of Dialed Scooter Magazine’s July issue.
Knudtson started scootering later than most. His neighborhood friends all had scooters before he finally got his first one at age 12. All of his friends started to move on to other activities like skateboarding but Knudtson kept at it for one important reason.

“My older brother was really good at skateboarding and I really didn’t want to compete with him,” he said.

Despite being one of the few people in the world who scooter seriously (Knudtson thinks there are about two people in the world who make a living scootering), he kept with it and got sponsored by Zero Gravity Northwest, a scooter company based in Washington. Now Knudtson is sponsored by a local skate shop, Bamboozle Skate Shop in Salem, Mass.

What sets Jon apart from his scooter peers are his creative tricks and the enthusiastic way he approaches a potential spot.

“I have a really unconventional style. My style is more influenced by skateboarding,” said Knudtson. “I love doing stuff that I haven’t seen other people do. I watch a lot of scooter videos and I get really bummed when I see kids do the exact same thing I’ve seen a million times. I try to do things I haven’t seen and I try to look at obstacles in a skatepark differently. I do the tricks that I want to do, even if they are weird.”

Knudtson’s favorite trick is the tailwhip rewind. Launching off a jump, he will kick around the base of his scooter in a 360 degree motion. When it arrives back at its starting point, he will kick it back in the opposite direction for another 360 degree motion before landing the trick. All of this takes no more than a couple of seconds.

Doing tricks like the tailwhip rewind at a Bamboozle in California skate event caught the attention of Dialed Scooter Magazine in California. They contacted Knudtson in March and asked him if he wanted to be in the magazine. He only expected a brief picture or blurb.

“They said, ‘Well, actually we were hoping that you would be the cover shot and the main feature story of the magazine.’” said Knudtson. “And I was like oh, well okay.”

Fortunately, Knudtson had just the place in mind that would be impressive enough to be on the cover of a magazine. It was a spot he found while scootering around Boston, a down-flat-down set of 15 stairs.

“I saw it (the jump) and I was like oh this is crazy I would probably never do this,” said Knudtson. But after finding out he would be on the cover he had to do it. “Well, I said, this is it I guess.”

On Knudtson’s first attempt, he leaned too far forward and collapsed on the ground, striking the back of his head. He wasn’t discouraged though; he jumped back up and did it again.  This time, the handlebar struck his chest but he landed it and kept on riding. It may have hurt but the painful and frightening jump was worth it.

“I had been thinking about the jump for a few weeks and when I landed I was so relieved,” said Knudtson. “It’s an amazing opportunity to be on the cover of the magazine. It’s a huge honor that I’m not taking lightly.”

You can find videos of Knudtson showing off his scooter abilities on youtube. Search “Jon Knudtson Bamboozle” for his latest scooter video.

Professor Tal Howard

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Dr. Tal Howard’s book on the religious history of America and Western Europe has won one of the highest honors in Christian publishing.

Howard, director of the Center for Christian Studies and the Jerusalem and Athens Forum honors program, recently won the 2012 Christianity Today Book Award for his latest work, “God and the Atlantic: America, Europe and the Religious Divide.”

Howard joked that he still considers his fifth-grade  little league baseball team’s championship to be his proudest achievement. Still, he appreciates the award. “Sometimes [someone] giving an award like this… makes more people want to read your book,” he said. “I feel like the book will get a larger hearing because of this.”

Since receiving the Christianity Today award, Howard has gotten strong reviews from several publications, such as Touchstone Magazine and the Church of England Newspaper, and he has been interviewed by Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio and Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

At its backbone, “God and the Atlantic” is a comparative religious history of Western Europe and the United States, that focuses mainly on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also deals with the challenging questions of how religion and public life ought to interact in a secular society.

Howard said that one of his biggest findings was that whether on the European right or left, America’s attitude toward religion and independence was perceived as very unusual.

He said that the continued strength of religion in the West has puzzled Europeans, since along with “enlightened” values such as religious freedom, “they see a [natural] progression to secularism. [But] there’s no inherent perspective in the global order… If you look at most countries today, there’s actually something rather odd about the high degree of secularity that prevails in Europe.”

On campus, both faculty members and students have praised the book.

“If you listen to the popular press and pulpit we often settle into such easy clichés about secular Europe and evangelical America,” said Provost Mark Sargent. “I appreciated Tal Howard’s sophisticated, nuanced assessment of the religious sensibilities of both continents.”

Hilary Sherratt ‘12, who has used Howard’s book repeatedly in her own research, said the text “asks and answers important questions for everyone who is interested in studying the history of America and Europe, and their different relationships with religion.”

Howard said he hopes that the book’s transatlantic vantage point will enable Gordon students who read it to take away more than just historical knowledge.
“It’s often helpful and illuminating to have outside perspectives,” he said. “You learn a lot of things you can’t [otherwise] see by looking at what others have done.”

The Gordon College Model UN team represented Cameroon

Jenny Hyde has white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. She doesn’t look like the typical citizen of Cameroon. But on the weekend of Feb. 16, when she went with 17 other Gordon students to the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, she and the group transformed into Cameroonians for Harvard’s Model United Nations.

“No delegation is representing their home country. I met boys from the Netherlands that represented Slovenia, and girls from Argentina representing South Africa,” Hyde ‘14 said. “We are trying to understand that we live in a globalized world where we are all interconnected.”

Gordon has always chosen to represent African countries, according to Dr. Paul Brink, associate professor of political science. Brink teaches the international diplomacy class that prepared the students for the event. He has been involved in Model UN for 10 years, and has run this course at Gordon since 2006.

“We’ve been quite committed to remaining in Africa,” said Brink. “I think there’s real value for students who study international relations or politics to look at international politics from the perspective of a country that is not as powerful as the United States.”

Like her fellow delegates, Hyde began preparing over Christmas break, looking at laws passed by the government and speeches by the President of Cameroon that related to her topic. Already getting into character, Hyde talked about the country as if it were her own in an interview before the event.

“We’re a lot better off than a lot of other African countries even though we have a really high rate of corruption in our government,” Hyde said.

Students felt a responsibility to get the best resolution they could for Cameroon. To aid them in preparation, Brink discussed strategy by helping the students identify opponents and key players. Yet, pressure at the event makes it difficult to do justice to their country, according to Dawn Cianci ‘14.

“Unlike the real UN where it would take months, you have four days to get a resolution passed,” Cianci said.

Model UN drew students from 36 different countries, Brink said. Students came together to represent 150 countries, as opposed to the 193 countries that comprise the actual United Nations. Brink encouraged students not to be too easily impressed by the many prestigious schools, including Yale and Harvard, that participate in the simulation.

Out of the 17 Gordon students who attended, seven have participated in Model UN before, according to Rachel Ashley ‘13, co head delegate with Phillip Valdes ‘14. This will be Ashley’s third trip.

Cianci said the thrill of being there sets in the moment they walk into the hotel and encounter the atmosphere of intense energy.

“People are dressed to the nines and you hear so many different languages,” said Cianci. “That energy keeps you going for four days without sleep – straight. But I wouldn’t’ have it any other way. It’s fantastic.”

According to Brink, this experience mirrors the real world of politics as students who attend discover that doing politics is difficult and messy.
“Making law is like making sausages,” said Brink. “You don’t really want to see up close how they’re put together.”

At the closing award ceremony on Feb. 19, Gordon’s Chris Mawhorter ‘12 received the Outstanding Delegate award along with a Russian Federation delegate. Mawhorter said he wasn’t expecting to win the equivalent of a silver medal.

“I was making a list in my head of who I thought deserved awards. Then they called me,” said Mawhorter. “I was blown out of the water.”

This year marks the 175th birthday of A. J. Gordon, who founded Gordon College in Boston, Mass. in 1889. The first graduating class from the Boston Missionary Training School was racially integrated, and this was a unique, and almost revolutionary trait at the time.

If Gordon was raised in Louisiana instead of New Hampshire, there is a good chance Gordon College would be a different place today, one where diversity is discouraged and minority voices are suppressed. But Gordon College is the open, welcoming place it is today is because of one man, one train ride, and a case called Plessy v. Ferguson.

In 1896, Homer Plessy refused to leave a “whites only” railroad car in a planned act of civil disobedience. Although he was only one-eighth black, he was considered “colored” under Louisiana law, and arrested on the spot.

His case made it to the Supreme Court, which upheld the ruling that the state law did not violate the “equal protection clause” of the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments by a seven-to-one vote. (The ninth justice was unable to vote because his daughter died suddenly the day before the ruling.) The majority judged that state laws forcing racial segregation were not unconstitutional as long as the facilities were “separate but equal.” This meant that as long as the patrons were able to frequent the same restaurants, schools and other public places, that they were essentially “equal” despite their segregation. This ruling slammed a granite boulder to hold open the gate for almost 60 years of Jim Crow Laws in the South.

The doctrine of “separate but equal” was upheld until the historic Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. At this time, 17 states had laws requiring segregated elementary schools and four other states had laws allowing segregated schools. This Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed segregation in schools, and the doctrine was extended to state-supported colleges and universities in 1956.

Within the next three years, nine of those 17 states began integrating their school systems. It wasn’t until the early 1960s when violence erupted in Mississippi, that black students began to widely be admitted to white colleges. Even in the North, it took lawsuits in New Rochelle, N.Y. to prompt formal attempts to integrate the school system.

Given this historical context, and continuing racial tensions in the U.S. and worldwide, Gordon’s original vision for his college become even more significant. It could be that Gordon was continuously supporting global missions, or that he cared more about people than the status quo, but one thing is for sure: we owe our founder a great accolade for building this school on just principles of racial freedom. Gordon acted on his belief that segregation based on skin color is wrong long before the law told him to do so.

In Gordon’s words, “If it God’s prerogative alone to call out His workmen; but it is ours to recognize and encourage those whom He has called.”

“After a Holocaust, most Israelis simply want to live in peace with their neighbors and that includes Turkey and Egypt,” he said.

On Sept. 10, the staff at the Israeli embassy in Cairo, Egypt required rescue after violent protests erupted. Events like these, along with other threats to Israeli borders and gas pipelines, continue to devalue the 1979 Egypt-Israeli Peace Treaty.

“Violence against Israel will cause both Egypt and Israel to suffer. One of the keys about the stability of relations with Egypt will be the degree radical Islam controls the newly emerging government,” said Wilson.

Tied commercially and militarily, Turkey and Israel have remained civil since the 1990s, however Turkey recently expelled Israel’s ambassador and suspended military agreements. Tensions have risen since Israel’s refusal to apologize for killing nine Palestinian activists during an Israeli raid on six Palestinian ships in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the raid was an act of self-defense.

Traditionally strong United States support for Israel has waivered since President Obama made clear his stance that Israel should withdraw to its pre-1967 borderlines. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this would leave Israel “indefensible.” Wilson agrees that such a move would leave Israel extremely vulnerable. He also believes the U.S. should remain out of the decision.

“The precise borders of Israel should be negotiated face-to-face between the Israelis and Palestinians,” he said.

Palestinians are attempting to declare statehood at the United Nations (UN).

“I think the Palestinians should deal with Israel directly and not go to the UN,” said Wilson. “Many Palestinians have yet to recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish State. Israel is entitled to that recognition before trying to bring the UN into this.”

Israel’s future position in the Middle East remains unclear as tensions escalate and allies become increasingly vague.

“Israel’s situation in the Middle East is dire and is also strategic for American as well as Israeli interests,” said Wilson. “The question in the Middle East is, ‘Who do you trust?’”