Class Notes

Ray and his wife just sold their home of 34 years in Maryland and will be living in New York temporarily until their new home in Maryland is built in mid 2016.

Writes in to say that he and his wife will be moving into their new home in Ellicott City, MD some time during the summer of 2016.

I am submitting information relating my Maryville College experience (Jan 1959 to May 1962) to my Peace Corps experience (June 1962 to July  1964).   My Peace Corps experience in Ethiopia was the defining time of my life.  After those two years I gave some thought to entering the ministry (two months at San Francisco Seminary) before deciding not to go in that direction.  The government then found a job for me.  In 1965 I was drafted and spent a year in Vietnam with the First Infantry Division working as a chaplain’s assistant.  I returned home in 1967, got married in 1969, and had a 25-year business career that took me to New York, California, and Maryland.  In 1998 (I think) I became an Associate Member of Westar Institute (https://www.westarinstitute.org) and have devoted much of my time to it since then.  They do most of their work through seminars, originally beginning with the “Jesus Seminar” in 1985 (I think).  Many seminars later they are now initiating something called the “Christ Seminar.”  No one knows what that may become.  On January 25, 2023, one of their Zoom programs was called “When Jesus became Plato.”  The presentation was well received, and some questions were raised.   The next day the executive director of Westar replied to eight of the questions.  He began by saying:

“One comment to make before we begin is that Jesus is not Plato, and there is no particular time when people thought about Jesus as one might think about Plato.  What we see in the historic transition of Christ communities into an official religion of an empire is the progressive molding of the memory of Jesus to fit the categories of Platonic philosophy.”

You may wonder how I got from the Peace Corps to Plato.  I applied to the Peace Corps in 1962 after graduating from Maryville College (where most of the classes were seminars) with a major in Philosophy and Religion.  After Maryville, the Peace Corps and Westar have been the focus of my life.

Ray Donaldson
Maryville College        Jan   1959 – May 1962
Peace Corps Ethiopia June 1962 – July  1964

writes in to share that her latest literary adventure is the newly released publication for the Friends of Blount County Library entitled “Foothills Voices.” This book features 12 writers and their creative non-fiction stories about a person, place, or event in E. Tennessee. Her story, “Call Me Isabella,” tells of the murder of her great-great-Uncle at the hands of his wife in 1893. Being of the Quaker faith, no judicial justice was ever sought as the matter was left up to God. After enrolling in a playwright course at M.C., she wrote a play, in conjunction with Alcoa Historian Shirley Carr Clowney ’58 and field work gathered by students of MC sociology professor Susan Ambler, about the black community working at Alcoa Aluminum plant. That play, “Voices of the Valley: Black Voices of a Company Town Called Alcoa, Tennessee,” will be performed at several local venues as part of the Alcoa Centennial Celebration in 2019.