Author: Alanna Paris

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Stories In Focus

Dancing Through Houghton: Campus Club Gives Students the Ability to Swing

Houghton Swing via facebook.com

The Houghton College Swing Dance Club has been a popular club on campus for years. Current Swing Dance leader, Hannah Banks ‘17, is optimistic about the club, whose meetings take place twice a week in the Nielsen Center auxiliary gym. A typical night involves the leaders teaching a new move, followed by an open dance where partners are rotated. However, one can attend with a partner and dance with them exclusively if that is what one is comfortable with, but Banks encouraged students to come as singles so as to make friends with their dance partners.

The club does more than just simply having nights of laid back dancing. Over October break, four members of the club went to a ballroom dance competition at Cornell University. Banks, along with three other current students, Katherine Stevick ‘19, Elizabeth Moore ‘20, and Jared Frey ‘18, attended the competition. Not to be confused with swing dance, ballroom dancing is a completely different style, more concerned with technique. The group participated in 12 subcategories of four main styles: Smooth, Standard, Latin, and Rhythm. In the Smooth style they participated in the waltz, tango and foxtrot in the Standard style, the waltz, tango, and quickstep; in the Latin style the jive, international rumba, and international cha-cha; and in the Rhythm style the East Coast swing, the American rumba, and the American cha-cha.

Banks was incredibly proud of her dancers, with herself and Stevick earning multiple callbacks after roughly a month’s worth of practice. They won a ribbon in the Fun Dance category, a separate category open to anyone without registration dancing the back-to-back tango, a dance literally executed with the dancers’ backs to each other. Stevick’s roommate, Anna Schilke ‘19, said, “I was proud of her accomplishment.”

After pulling off a successful swing dance social on campus that involved University of Buffalo (UB) instructors and swing dance club members interacting with around 30 to 40 Houghton College students, Banks looks forward to the future for Houghton Swing Dance. Herself and the club are planning at least one, hopefully two, trips to Buffalo to dance off-campus, including UB’s swing social on December 2. Banks hopes to forge a stronger relationship with UB’s swing dance club so that the two clubs can learn from and grow with each other. Claire Brower ‘18 expressed her enjoyment last year during a swing event in Buffalo, and encourages others to give it a try.

In closing, Banks said that “more people should come” to the club’s meetings. She added, “It’s a great place to pick up chicks.” The club meets Monday and Tuesday nights from 9:30 to 10:30 p.m. in the auxiliary gym.

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Stories In Focus

Houghton Athletics Celebrates Major Milestones

Houghton College is embarking on a new chapter of athletics starting this year as it enters a full membership in the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) Division III. According to Jason Mucher, the Empire 8 (E-8) category has proved to be a great fit for Houghton College. “It’s allowed for less travel time, keeping students around,” said Mucher, who also mentioned how the schools themselves were more like Houghton, with the E-8 mainly composed of “small to midsized, private liberal arts colleges who emphasize good academics.” The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletes (NAIA) ceased to be a viable fit for Houghton geographically, and was slowly diminishing, which led Houghton to pursue membership into the more widely known NCAA Division III.

The college embarked on a five-year process to earn this new status. The process began with one exploratory year, and then four provisional years. Each year, the college received a promotion until full membership was achieved. In order to start the process, Houghton had to add multiple sports, including baseball, softball, men and women’s lacrosse, men and women’s tennis, and men and women’s golf. When they first started on the path to NCAA Division III, athletic director, Harold “Skip” Lord, met with the Commissioner and the Council President of the E-8 to look at Houghton’s facilities. At the time, the campus only had Burke Field, a practice soccer field, and a field hockey field.

“The question was, what would we do for facilities,” said Lord. Houghton needed all-weather facilities to be viable along with a baseball and softball field. Mucher and Lord both commented that they started looking into what they would like to see built. This is when the Pegula and Kerr families asked what they could do to help. They then decided to give the gift of the Kerr-Pegula Athletic Complex (KPAC) that includes the Kerr-Pegula Field House (KPFH), baseball field, and softball field.

As Houghton celebrates a new chapter in athletics, it also celebrates its athletic history with this year making 50 years of athletics at Houghton. Lord praised Mucher and stated, “Jason Mucher has been doing a lot of the work.” He also stated it was a team effort and that “many have vision casted what it would look like.”

Mucher talked much about how Houghton is celebrating the milestone. The department created a timeline of milestones, a logo, the mural, giveaways, events, contests, and many other different ways to encourage students to come to athletic events, while also celebrating the legacy and tradition of sports at Houghton. Events started early in September and many students have participated through Homecoming weekend, the legacy chapel, and attending sports games on the Saturday of Homecoming weekend. According to Mucher, the original sports teams at Houghton in 1967 were all men’s and included soccer, cross-country and basketball. In 1968, Houghton added baseball, track, tennis and golf. Finally, in 1969 Houghton added its first women’s sport, basketball.

Students have been enjoying the celebrations and revisiting Houghton’s athletics history. Olivia Bullock ‘20, a women’s soccer player, said, “It’s meaningful to be a part of such a long tradition of high level athletics focused on glorifying God through sports.”

Mucher and Lord agreed this celebration has been a team effort throughout the department. Mucher is proud of the well-rounded teams at Houghton, and the attitude being taken beyond the school. As Houghton continues to celebrate its athletics, the department is looking to plant major events in February and April. There will be continual celebratory events throughout this semester, the next including Throwback Thursdays on Houghton social media, athletics panels, and reminders at games.

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Reviews Stories In Focus

Music Review: The Heart Speaks in Whispers by Corinne Bailey Rae

After the untimely death of her husband and scaling back on writing music for a while, Corinne Bailey Rae has come back with the highly anticipated album The Heart Speaks in Whispers. In this newest affair, Bailey Rae has found a way to integrate the vintage style of R&B with a modernized Synthpop. While this album is much more instrumentally heavier than her last, she finds a way to still let her full-bodied, yet silky voice sound relaxing and effortless while doing so. She is not as lyrically raw in this venture, much more akin to her first album, and her vocals are much more soulful, allowing listeners to hear her more unrefined and powerful voice. We get to hear a range of her abilities, from her edgier, more bluesy efforts, her classic smooth R&B sound, and in this effort she experiments more on the very 80’s, Prince styled, pop sound that listeners experienced on her last EP Is This Love.

The Heart Speaks in Whispers is easily her most eccentric work to date. We get tastes of how unique she could be with previous songs like “The Blackest Lily” and her cover of Belly’s “Low Red Moon.” Her latest venture starts out with the biggest sound and most instrumentally diverse track that she has ever attempted with “The Skies Will Break”. It suits her well and allows Bailey Rae to venture away from her usual sound that generally tends to be more of an urbanized version of easy listening.

 

She eventually fills the album with a mixture of 80’s inspired Synthpop styled songs such as “Been to the Moon,” “Horse Print Dress,” and soulful R&B such as “Green Aphrodisiac” (the album’s biggest hit) and “Hey, I Won’t Break Your Heart.”  The lowest point is “Stop Where You Are” a surprisingly cookie cutter song similar to what Jason Mraz or Sara Bareilles have made popular. Eventually, the album mellows out to her attractive and typical strings heavy, blues tinged love songs. This album’s biggest strength and overall theme is experimenting with what Corinne Bailey Rae’s voice can do, along with a more diverse and full instrumentation than she has previously attempted.

The album, for Bailey Rae, is a step in the right direction to what she wants to be as an artist. Each of her albums has a unique air, but this one ventures into new territory for the singer and also allows her to show off her instrumental tastes, something she is shy to do in her first two albums. It’s also simply a good album for music listeners. Some may find it a tad too eccentric or not quite their style, but no one would really go away feeling like they had listened to a bad album. The album itself is beautiful. It’s rich and quirky, while still maintaining the quirky chic vibe that is Corinne Bailey Rae. It should satisfy fans of hers and draw a few more in.

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Opinions

The Crumbling of the Church Family

AllanaParis RGBThe Church has always been big on family. Many churches preach about how today’s society has lost the value of family. The divorce rate is thrown around and pastors have people raise their hands to see who actually eats dinner together. While this is a lovely sermon that I can’t disagree with, I am finding it increasingly hypocritical. Not because I find that Christians do not have whole, healthy families, but because the Church itself has ceased to be a family.

This issue never bothered me until a third grader at my home church came up to me and informed me he was angry he could not go to ‘his church’. When I told him that he was at his church, he explained that his church was the children’s church and that I had a separate church in ‘the big room’. This completely horrified me. He essentially viewed the children’s church as separate, and did not realize that he was in the same church family as his parents.

What does that teach children? What does that teach anyone? It can create, in the most toxic of environments, an intense self-centeredness and narrow-minded attitude. How are we supposed to grow and stretch if we are only interacting with our own age group or demographic? I don’t have an issue with a Bible study geared towards a demographic for that relation and encouragement to happen. I don’t have an issue with specialized groups. The main issue is that worship should include the entire congregation.  

Church worship is meant to be done as a family. I find it discomforting that it is increasingly prevalent for churches to be split by age. It usually tends to look like this: infants go to the nursery, preschool/elementary aged children spend the ENTIRE church service in a classroom having “children’s church,” some churches put teens in a “youth service” and, even worse, there are churches having a separate church service for college aged students.

The ochurch-famne place where ages should mingle and find solidarity in Christ, where Christians engage with and learn from different demographics, where we learn to worship together whether or not we personally enjoy drum-kits or liturgy or gospel music, is gone. Families outside of church include the mixture of ages, the compromise of living with those of a different generation, so why shouldn’t the church have that too? Shouldn’t the church be a mirror of what God intended a family to be? We use the word family because it’s all-inclusive and signifies a personable and close relation, so why make church age exclusive?

To give a solution of how I feel congregational worship should look, let me start with an example I have witnessed while at Houghton. One of the ministries that I have encountered the last few years is Sojourner’s Mennonite. While their style of worship is unusual and not meant for every worshipper, there is one thing that every church can take away from them: their focus on family. Children help pick out songs for worship, the older members might bring food to share or play an instrument, college aged congregants may lead worship. It’s communal. Church should be a place where all ages feel welcome and included. I think a church should have congregational worship that does not focus on an age group, but worship that clearly recognizes the diversity of ages represented and respects them. Worship that makes one look at what they can give instead of what they can take and, in many cases, that simply starts with blending age groups together.

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Opinions

The Church and ‘The Good Testimony’

When I was 18 I got baptized. It was the right thing to do after growing up in a Christian household and going to church my entire life. I was the first one to be baptized in the group that had made the decision with me. Uniquely, I was the only member of the group who was born into a Christian household and therefore the only one to become a Christian as a child. I didn’t have a flashy story or years of sin and turmoil to mull over, my story was short and to the point.  Now, you are probably wondering why I am telling you this; what does this have to do with anything?

AllanaParis RGB The problem with my baptism is that it was handled insincerely. Instead of a way to profess my faith publicly and to outwardly declare myself a child a God, it became a warm-up for something better. There were about five baptized that day, and each salvation story was more intense. The finale involved a couple on the brink of divorce who testified that after they found our church, God wiped all their problems away. This testimony is not a way to show people Christ’s love or of His faithfulness to those still struggling or still hurting. Instead, it was a way to sell a brand and to reel people in. That’s a problem.

Many churches make this mistake. A big event such as a baptism or a special holiday service brings visitors. Therefore, the church displays testimonies that say ‘look at not only what God did for me, but also make sure you see how good this church is and they can fix all of your problems too.’ This atmosphere creates an awful situation where people’s real struggles, heartache, and lowest moments are used as selling points to get numbers in a church.

In contrast with this insincerity, why not show a consistent Christian whose life is a testament to years of following God and His mercies? Or better yet, why not humanize the Christians who seem to have it together by showing their vulnerabilities? Why is it always the ones the world would deem ‘messed up’? Until you give yourself to Christ, you’re ‘messed up’ too. Why is it we dwell on someone’s past when God has made them a new creation?

We remember Abraham and Paul for their Christian acts more than their past lives. I do not mind if someone, in an act of humbleness, wants to share their story because they want others to know of Christ; this is something Paul did often.

Alanna-QuoteI encourage people to stop exploiting past sin as ways to get numbers. I encourage the Church to invest in everyone; both the drug addict that doesn’t know Christ and the clean-cut community leader that doesn’t know Christ. I discourage the Church from using human struggles and common societal ills being ‘cured’ as attendance boosters and encourage them instead try showing God’s love and mercy by interacting with those struggling outside of the safety of church walls. Invite those struggling to church, but do not give up if they never come. Lead them to Christ without indoctrinating them into their particular brand of Christianity or ministry needs.

Teach people to be disciples of Christ, whether they think like you or not; to really care about the problems in the world, that is what Christ calls us to do. Let’s stop making Christianity a show and start making it lifestyle.