Becoming a Roux
In the very first week of my attendance at Luther College in 1963, freshmen were treated to a screening of The Seventh Seal , a movie made by Ingmar Bergman in which the character Death plays chess with a medieval knight during the time of the plague. The screening was meant to introduce us to the intellectual life at the college we were entering. That year an ambitious and energetic group of young professors had laid out a course they called Paideia , a core course tying together surveys of history, literature and religion/philosophy. Paideia referred to an educational idea of wholeness, since these disciplines were studied as they happened in time, resulting in a comprehensive look at the history of Western civilization as it arose from Judeo-Christian and Greek sources. The college motto was Mens Sana in Corpore Sano, which means “a sound mind in a sound body,” after all. I made little or nothing of the The Seventh Seal . A more clueless and innocent 17-year-old freshman could ha...
