Lakeland Mirror

Issue date: 2/15/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: Brian Moser Dr. Reverend Mark Allan Powell was the speaker at Lakeland's annual Founders Day Celebration on Feb. 9.

On Founders Day, Feb. 5, 2007, Dr. Reverend Mark Allan Powell spoke at a convocation titled The Timeless Tale of a Prodigal Son: What it Means Both Near and Far. It was about real reader response criticism, how we, the readers respond to biblical stories. Although school was canceled, students still filled a little under half of the auditorium.

The main example he gave the audience was the story of the prodigal son. The exact same Bible story was told to three different groups. The story tells of a man who had two sons. He divided his property between them. The first son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country where he squandered his money. After he had spent everything a great famine came. No one gave him any food. So he went back to his father and begged for forgiveness. The father was very compassionate and took his disobedient son in and fed him well.

The three culturally different groups of people, the Russians, the Americans and Tanzanians, read the story and then were told to recall the story in their own words to see what each group remembered or focused more. The moral was not all that important but the study wanted to see how the different cultures perceive the son.

The main question was "Why did the young man end up starving?" 100 percent of the American group mentioned squandering the money away, and only 6 percent mentioned the famine. With the Russian group 34 percent mentioned or remembered the squandering and 84 percent mentioned the famine. While on the completely opposite side 80 percent of the Tanzanians said that the young man was starving because no one gave him anything to eat.

The Russians remembered the famine because they, or their relatives, have lived through one. In 1941, 670,000 people died of starvation because of a 900 day famine. While we the Americans focused, as always, on the currency aspect of it. Americans seem to be engulfed daily by the mere thought of money. Americans skip over the thought of famine because it's not part of our real memory of America.

The real plight of the young man in the story was that he squandered his money and had to go through a famine, but one group seemed to focus more on one aspect than the other. This whole concept about the capacity of text stories having multiple meanings to different people in literary criticism. The meaning is affected by social location.

This concept is not just for locations. Women perceive stories differently than men do, and there is also a difference between ages.

As you can tell, the convocation was filled with information. Maybe not the most exciting convocation ever, but it goes to show that you can learn something new everyday. I personally found it interesting just because we have such a diverse campus population. You might come from a well-to-do family who can afford to pay for your college tuition while just right next to you may be a Malawi student who relied on government funding to make a difference in their home country by learning to educate.

I find it amazing that just a couple doors down from you or me are people with completely different cultural lifestyles and backgrounds. It keeps in perspective the different ways of thinking. There is always a different way of looking at it.

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