Author: hope mckeever

You may find second year music graduate student, Fabio Menchetti working hard in the music building, but one thing you will not catch him doing is complaining about the snow. He shared, “I really like winter. I hope there is so much snow that we can’t get out of our houses.” Menchetti’s adventurous spirit denies the opportunity for life to get stale. He believes, “The process is more important than the result.”  

Although he is currently pursuing a master of arts in piano, Menchetti’s music studies began long before he arrived at Houghton in August of 2014. He began playing piano around age 7 in his hometown of Lucca, Italy. At a young age, he was accepted to a music conservatory in Lucca where he received a bachelor’s degree in piano performance. He pursued a second bachelor’s in music, theater, and visual arts at the University of Pisa. Later he attended a conservatory in La Spezia where he received two master’s degrees in music education and piano performance.

After receiving a job in music education teaching junior high students, Menchetti worried that he would stop growing if he taught at the same school for many years. He admitted, “I was afraid to be stuck.” Without any connections to music schools in the United States, he sent out many applications to different schools. When Houghton got back to him, Menchetti left Italy and made the decision to go abroad and pursue a third master’s degree. He reasoned that a master’s degree from a school in the United States would be important to pursue as a transition between studying in Italy and achieving a doctorate in the United States or in another country. The decision to go abroad and leave familiar places and people was not easy, but he communicated how much he has learned and is learning from the experience of studying abroad.

Currently Menchetti has 22 piano students at Houghton as a part of his assistantship for the master’s program. He explained that it was difficult to understand and be understood by his students at the beginning of the year due to the language barrier. His first year as a graduate student was exciting because he had to navigate a new culture and language in an academic setting, he expressed. In addition, he discovered that he could not only survive the courses, but he could thrive in the Houghton environment making new friends and enjoying his work alongside fellow music students at Houghton.
This semester, Menchetti is focusing on preparing applications for Doctorate programs in piano performance. He aspires to teach music in the higher education field. He finds his musical roots in early romanticism and late classicism and especially enjoys listening to Beethoven and Chopin.

Walking on good intentions is like walking on clouds: it sounds beautiful in theory, but lacks enough substance to support true progress. Good intentions lack the practicality that encourages individuals to seek tangible opportunities for change. This type of change starts from the roots and slowly climbs towards the surface. As a globally engaged campus, social justice issues are at the forefront of Houghton students’ minds. As college students, are there practical ways for action to transcend mere intention? Chris Way, class of 2012 offers an application for this query. The application is enhanced by an abstract cognitive exercise in human relationship that aids in the physical incarnation of development strategies. Way and Princess Nabintu Kabaya began a collaborative work called The Atinga Project. Way works with a team of artisans who create sandals made from repurposed tires. The simple, durable design is not only a resilient shoe, but also a powerful metaphor for Christ-centered relationships. The three core values of the Atinga project: dignity, honor, and humility give diverse meaning to this metaphor.

This three-dimensional value statement applies to many forms. For example, the dignity of artisans is protected when a fair wage is received for the product. Junior International development major, Emily Barry, interned with the Atinga project this past summer as a communications and social media representative. In her work, she conducted research on the average Rwandan salary as published by the World Bank compared to an artisan employed in fair wage artisanship. She found that fair trade artisans make more per year than the average Rwandan. This is one way of directly restoring economic dignity. For this reason, buying fair trade is crucial for restoring dignity to the individual artist and to the art form. According to Barry, fair trade is saying, “I’m doing something, I’m doing it responsibly, and we’re doing it together.” Supply and demand then becomes a collaborative effort of human relationship on an international scale.

Furthermore, artisans honor and protect the environment by recycling a product that might otherwise prove harmful for the atmosphere. Tire waste emits toxins and attracts unwanted pests. As the international demand for Atinga sandals increases, potentially harmful waste has a reliable means of re-entry into a productive market.  

Contributors to the global market engage in a mutual learning relationship because of this exchange of goods and ideas. But sometimes “mutual empowerment” and “mutual learning” according to Barry, are romanticized on a global scale. However, These are more challenging ideas when applied to individual relationships. To embrace the Atinga Project slogan, “Walk a Mile in Their Shoes” is to walk in close connection with the people we encounter everyday. With this slogan, Way encourages Houghton students to “listen with love” as everyday opportunities to learn and grow with fellow classmates present themselves. To listen with love is a response to the Biblical mandate of Proverbs 12:15 to “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” Consumerism can no longer be about an economic transaction.

Part of the Atinga mission is to walk alongside someone with a humble attitude in order to listen to the needs of another person. The mission is to acknowledge that behind every headline there are individual stories. With global and local interactions, relating to others in a dignifying, honoring, and humbling way gives motion back to the wheel in its reconstructed state.

If you are interested in learning more about the Atinga Project, please visit atingaproject.com or check out their display in the campus store.

The business department welcomed new faculty members, Pil Joon Kim and Naomi Christensen, this fall. Kim will serve as the Assistant Professor of Business Administration and Christensen as Instructor of Accounting. Christensen was a member of the 2008 Houghton class. She graduated as a Business and Accounting major and was involved in track and field. Many of the current business professors also taught her when she was a student at Houghton. As a student, Christensen enjoyed how “down to earth” her professors were and how they made studying business practical and applicable to daily life. She hopes to implement some of these same principles as she gives her students hands on learning that will prepare them for experiences in the field of accounting.

Before returning to Houghton as a faculty member, Christensen worked at a certified public accountant firm for three years. Later, she applied her work experience to a job with The Seed Company, a Wycliffe Bible Translators affiliated program. She worked out of Texas assisting in translation projects by creating budgets, business plans, and assessing partners overseas. As a field business analyst, she has traveled with The Seed Company to Nigeria, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. Christensen mentioned the importance of learning to speak the language of business and to present it with integrity. She hopes that this semester will provide her with opportunities to explore what it looks like to integrate ethics and accounting. This fall, Christensen is teaching Financial Accounting and Auditing.

Kim agrees, “It is important to execute ethical norms when performing financial transactions.” Moreover, Kim believes that finance should be a field that Christians study in order to encourage the financial system to serve its intended purpose. Kim mentioned that the focus on financial studies should be “learning ways to mitigate unfair financial damages caused by conventional financial systems, rather than solely to gain wealth.” As an advocate for justice in the financial world, Kim reinforces Houghton’s goal to develop Christian leaders in many different fields of study. Before coming to Houghton this year, Kim taught at a large public university and a smaller private university. He expressed that he is looking forward to working at Houghton because a smaller scale school encourages individual attention for each student. Before teaching, Kim was a student at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois. During his masters and doctoral programs, Kim studied and researched many different subjects including corporate finance, fixed income, investment, and asset pricing, to name a few. Currently, he hopes to expand his research in financial markets. This includes topics such as security, bond, foreign currency, derivatives, and financial interest. Kim stated, “It is my duty as a financial professional to teach students to stay within the system and directly engage in the management of wealth which God has entrusted to them in a way that is honoring to him.” This fall, Kim is teaching Business Communication, Entrepreneurship, Financial Management, and Security Analysis & Portfolio Management.

Imagine a room where light speaks, shadows whisper, and introspection reigns supreme. For artist Charles Ritchie, this atmosphere creates an inspirational context for his life and for his artwork. Ritchie arrived on campus last Friday to present his show in the Ortlip gallery. The characteristically colorful room filled with large pieces of art was stripped down to its core displaying small, detailed prints, drawings, and journals. They primarily depict scenes from inside and around his home in Silver Springs, Maryland. Senior Amanda Irwin, a gallery assistant, commented, “There is something very personal about the work that I find to be intimate in size and subject matter.” Ritchie invites the viewer to step into his world through visual art. Professor of art, John Rhett commented, “The respect for the individual response is paramount in a show like this. It’s quiet, and it rewards meditative, introspective thinking.”

In his artist’s statement, Ritchie describes his small-scale presentation “as an invitation to the viewer to crawl into an intimate yet immense universe.” The set up of the gallery challenges the viewer to experience the same intense introspection that Ritchie finds important in the process of creating his work. The white walls are neatly adorned with frames that invite the viewer to step in closer. He challenges the viewer to detach him or herself from the corporate world and prompts an invitation into his own simple, yet profound existence. In response to Ritchie’s invitational objective, Rhett said, “Important artists give us visual vocabularies. We learn to see through their eyes.”

Ritchie works from a chair in his home, slowly creating a layered representation of the metaphysical world using watercolor, graphite, pen, and ink as his tools. He attributes his unique style of creating to rebellion. Rebellion against the way he was brought up. He moved a lot as a child, and he finds the stability of his home liberating. However, he does not settle for stagnancy. He described how he enjoys  “getting to know the world in a profound way through limited experience.” He compared this process to the life of a musician. A musician practices scales every day and listens to the rhythms and musicality of the notes. Ritchie described how he wants to be a receptor of the beautiful art that proceeds from his study of the observable world.

He sees his methods as a skill that takes time and patience to acquire. “Training the eye and hand has helped me isolate what is important,” he mentioned. His impeccable knowledge of color value is one of the important tools that he uses to create this isolation. Because he primarily works in black and white, Ritchie described how he must use the full range of color that these two colors offer. In a value class that Rhett taught, he used Ritchie’s work as an example of exceptional use of value. Rhett encourages his students to observe contrast between colors in their work instead of framing every section of color with lines.

Along with contrast in value, Ritchie studies time as a crucial element in his work. He finds immense importance in the stillness of time and the movement of time. Without the movement of time, he would not be able to capture the changing shadows on the wall, yet without the stability of time, he would not be able to document the reverently still environment. Both are crucial elements in his work and his observance of the world. He strives for moments that become “iconic rather than fleeting.” For example, Ritchie explained that he is currently working on a project that will take many years. He is observing the growth of an oak tree as it slowly adds layers to its core across a wide span of time, mastering the art of transitions.

Humility translates through his work because he realizes that he may not be alive to finish some of his projects as he believes, “no decision is final.” His work constantly evolves, creating an accurate representation of how his “inner voice” evolves with his work. Laurissa Widrick, a senior art major, observed this evolutionary aspect of his work and marveled at how, “his process is a lifelong commitment.”

Because his personal life connects so closely to his work, Ritchie’s own voice is the primary one that translates into his work. His inner voice, “the dream voice” as he calls it, captures the “train of consciousness” that goes through his mind during his early morning meditation times. These dedicated early morning reflection times are essential to the consistent patience that he exercises in his work, Rhett remarked. Ritchie finds solitude extremely important in the spiritual act of studying the inner voice and the psychology of self. He concluded that, “I think in a way, one’s spiritual world depends on those things.” This spiritual element permeates through his work turning small-scale pieces into scenes portraying vast universes that are easy to miss in a quick glance.

Even if you missed the gallery opening last Friday, the gallery is open during the day and welcomes students, faculty, staff, and community members. The invitational quality of Ritchie’s work, according to professor Rhett, can be attributed to the “non sequential” form of the work. Because of the open-ended nature of the show, viewers can continue coming back multiple times to glean new reflections about the work and about the self.