Dean's Update - June 16, 2025
Dear Colleagues:
I once taught a great texts course on how to live well in light of our mortality. We read Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle, Plato’s Apology, Seneca’s On the Brevity of Life, St. Gregory’s On the Soul and the Resurrection, Petrarch’s Secretum, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, Camus’ Stranger, and Robinson’s Gilead. The material was great, the students were good, and I was at least adequate. For all that, I wonder if the course succeeded. It’s a tall order to get college students (or any of us) to think—to really think—about the inevitability of death and how to live each day accordingly.
My summer reading has found fresh material in John Kenney’s novel: I See You’ve Called in Dead. Witty and poignant, it’s full of laugh-out-loud moments in various shades of situational and dark comedy. As good comedy, the novel also invites reflection. At one point, protagonist Bud Stanley quotes the Sanskrit text in which the greatest wonder in the world is “that every day, all around us, people die, but we act as if it couldn’t happen to us.”
Bud is a middle-aged, NYC obituary writer whose life unravels. He bears unresolved childhood trauma. He and his wife want to start a family but suffer a miscarriage. His wife dumps him for a better looking and more promising man. Meanwhile, his career has stalled out. Unhappy at heart, unhappy at home, unhappy at work, unhappy with everything and everyone, most of all himself, Bud does something colossally idiotic. He writes a fantastical obituary for himself, uploads it to his newspaper, and sends it irretrievably to the whole world via wire.
Suspended from work, Bud has time to ponder life’s absurd contradictions, tenderness, and deep meaning. Friends help: his paraplegic landlord Tim, the precocious boy Leo who lives next door, his boss Howard and co-worker Tuan, Clara, who he meets at his ex-mother-in-law’s funeral. Their presence, patience, honesty, and love bring Bud back to himself. So does attending the wakes and funerals of strangers, where he gets an education in wisdom.
John Kenney has won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. The man knows how to make you laugh. But he also summons deep thought. Bud’s best friend Tim muses, “Maybe we’re all obituary writers. And our job is to write the best story we can now.” Among Bud’s last words are these: “I don’t understand death. . . . I think to fully get it, you have to feel it so profoundly that it upsets your sense of the world. It has to make you a little crazy. But it also has to make you love this miracle of existence to the point of bursting. If it doesn’t, well, then you don’t get it yet.”
If you read it, I imagine I See You’ve Called in Dead will make you laugh, shed a few tears, and just possibly live a little better life. For my part, I can check off the laughing and weeping. I’m still trying, every day, to live well as one who both “flourishes like a flower of the field, for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more” and knows “the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.”
In the life and work of the Honors College, summer activities and accolades continue apace:
- We have two new capable leaders in key roles. First is Michael Stegemoller, our new associate dean for faculty. Mike comes to the dean’s office from the Hankamer School of Business, where he currently serves as the Harriette L. and Walter G. Lacy, Jr., Chair of Banking and Finance. Second is Sarah Walden, new director of University Scholars. Sarah is a long-time member of the BIC’s faculty, where she has most recently served as associate director. Take a few minutes to read and enjoy the profiles of them that Emily Clark has prepared. Mike’s is here and Sarah’s is here. And then please congratulate and thank them!
- Give Light, the most successful comprehensive fundraising campaign in Baylor’s history, concluded on May 31, 2024. In campaign cycles, the “year after” is sometimes a slowdown season. However, during the last year the Honors College recorded our largest number of unique givers ever—more than 50% above our five-year average. Join me in gratitude for our director of development, Cheryl VanAllen, and her colleagues in University Advancement, whose great work brings visibility and financial support to our academic community. We’re in a solid position for more success to come.
- Speaking of records, we remain on track for one of the HC’s largest and most academically qualified incoming classes of students. Once the dust settles on summer advising, class registration, orientation, and Line Camp, we’ll have a clearer picture of headcounts across all our programs, but all signs are very positive. Thank you, colleagues, for the time and energy invested in successful recruiting efforts this past year.
- For 2025-26, positions and related searches have been approved for a tenure-track assistant professor in theology (Great Texts), a clinical assistant professor in global/public health (Honors Program), and postdoctoral teaching fellow in the theology, ecology, and food justice program led by Jennifer Howell and shared between the HC and Truett Seminary. Even now at this early date, I urge you to think intently about superlative candidates for these openings, to utilize your professional networks to raise awareness of opportunities with us, and to be in touch with the relevant program directors about good ideas.
- Keep in prayer our colleagues and students who are traveling in our summer abroad programs. England, Greece, Italy, Korea, and Türkiye are among the places in which our faculty and students are studying and learning, with HC leaders including Drs. Candi Cann, Charles McDaniel, Darren Middleton, Jason Whitlark, Colleen Zori, and Davide Zori. Special recognition is due to these faculty for living up to the BIC’s reputation for global engagement and advancing Commitment III of Baylor in Deeds: “building a vibrant caring, global community.”
- Congratulations to recent retiree, Lynn Tatum, senior lecturer in the BIC, on his emeritus faculty designation. Among the career distinctions I was pleased to note in my nomination letter, Lynn was a recipient of the university’s Outstanding Faculty Award for Teaching and the AAUP’s William S. Tacey Award for outstanding service, and he was a longtime leadership as a member of Faculty Senate and Associate Director of Middle East Studies. A complete list of emeritus faculty is available here. Well done, Lynn!
All the best,
Douglas V. Henry, Ph.D.
Dean of the Honors College
Baylor University
honors.baylor.edu | 254.710.7689