Alumni Story Contest: “Thinking, Laughing, Arguing, and Growing Together”

It was a warm Monday morning in July 2025. Classes for the MLCT Men’s Summer Seminar were due to begin. After hours of reading our assigned texts, my peers and I were prepared for debate – or so we thought. But then, the clock struck 9:15. The atmosphere around Dr. Snell shifted instantly from convivial to philosophically demanding. I was utterly shocked by what happened next. Dr. Snell began arguing against propositions I thought we agreed on. He started defending the authors we disagreed with, speaking for the thinkers that would have ridiculed his own Christian faith. He pressed some of us so hard that, upon our incapacity to disprove the viewpoints he adopted, we were backed into a corner between atheism and nihilism. My classmates and I, over the week of instruction, thought long and hard about what exactly Dr. Snell was trying to do. Through his spirited defense of authors whom many in his religious tradition would reject, Dr. Snell reminded us that intellectuality is not merely deciding which values you hold and carrying on; it is exploring all viewpoints as if they were your own. Dr. Snell was forcing me and my peers to confront the best arguments on the other side so that we would be more prepared to debate them in the future. One cannot claim to seek the truth if he cannot contend with the very best opposing positions the world’s intelligentsia has to offer. Truly curious intellectuals – the kinds of students whom the Witherspoon Institute fosters – must come to the public forum knowing the other side’s arguments well. Dr. Snell has continued in his pursuit of the same message during my time at the John Witherspoon Fellowship. Studying complex topics such as beauty, reverence, and philosophical anthropology in a peer group with diverse viewpoints requires more than good debating skills. To succeed in the Fellowship, members must come to class having read the assigned texts, or they will be easily swept aside when the time comes for arguing the topics of those texts. I think that is the greatest lesson the Witherspoon Institute has taught me: real intellectual curiosity means doing the work to engage with competing views at their strongest.

One of my favorite memories from the MLCT Summer Seminar is an afternoon when our group decided to stage a spontaneous performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, improvising with our own white bed sheets wrapped around our shoulders as makeshift togas. What followed was part theater, part philosophy seminar, and part comedy. I ended up playing an unfortunate Roman who was “stabbed” and spent the scene lying dramatically on the floor. It was ridiculous in the best way. Between exaggerated death scenes and mock betrayals, we laughed constantly. I realize afterwards that we were discovering something real about the text. Acting it out forced us to inhabit the drama in a way that simply reading it never could. That mixture of humor and serious thought defined the entire seminar. In lectures we moved from Plato to contemporary thinkers like Peter Singer, wrestling with questions about justice, the human person, and what gives a life value; I also remember joking exchanges with Professor Snell about “people seeds” and playful but sincere debates about whether I had a soul or whether my life had value. Late at night my roommate and I would keep talking, circling back to ideas from the day’s lectures and trying to sort out what we actually believed. It was one thing to hear an argument in a lecture; it was another to wrestle with it alongside someone who was just as curious and unsettled as you were. And then there were the simpler moments of community, like eating pizza and talking about Calvinism and basketball with Professor Watson. The fact that our professors could move so naturally from serious intellectual discussions to ordinary conversations made the whole environment feel alive and human. Looking back, what made the seminar special wasn’t just the books we read or the lectures we attended. It was the way ideas seeped into everything: into improvised Shakespeare performances in bed-sheet togas, into late-night conversations, into jokes that turned into philosophy. The seminar made learning feel like something shared. It created a community of people thinking, laughing, arguing, and growing together.