I left the small town where I grew up for college in 1970. The focus of the next decade was my education. By the end of the decade, I was living in a small town once again, after a journey that could be measured in more than miles. My undergraduate years were spent at a small liberal arts college located just eighty miles from my home. The world of ideas I found there was expansive. I met students and teachers who were very different from those I had known in my small town high school. I read books and discovered ideas that surprised and amazed me. I was a very different person by 1974. I learned how to study and be a successful student. I fell in love and got married. I studied philosophy, theology, and ethics. I formed some firm opinions that I have retained ever since.

Following undergraduate education, I spent four years in graduate school, which further opened my eyes and expanded my experience. Having shared our undergraduate years, my wife and I moved out of our home state to Chicago, Illinois. In Chicago, we faced a steep learning curve as we transitioned to urban living. We learned to navigate public transportation and to drive on busy freeways. We learned about apartment living, locks, and security. We learned about academic research and professional writing.

By the end of the decade, we were serving two small congregations in the southwest corner of North Dakota, where I learned a great deal more. Those congregations challenged me to integrate my academic experience with what I knew growing up in a small town with an agricultural economy. I needed to be able to conduct scholarly research, write, and speak with confidence, while also responding to the cycles of planting and harvest. I might be asked to discuss moral issues over coffee at the cafe and talk about life and death in a lambing barn on a ranch.

Key to my education were the people I met along the way. When we arrived in Chicago, our small entering class contained many international students. Among the people we met in our first weeks in our Chicago apartment were families from South Africa and Australia who had moved to Chicago to study.

From our classmates and colleagues, I learned about Apartheid in South Africa, where the white rulers of the Nationalist Party enforced harsh, institutional racial segregation. The white minority controlled political party forced a repressive regime on the indigenous black minority. Our entering class at seminary had both black and white students from South Africa. From them I learned part of the history of their country. They told me stories of Nelson Mandela, who was then imprisoned at a notorious facility on Robben Island. Mandela had been sentenced to life in prison because of his leadership in the banned African National Congress. Initially arrested for a passport violation for leaving the country illegally, while serving a five-year sentence for that violation was tried and convicted of sabotage. We followed South African history and the story of Nelson Mandela after we graduated from seminary. Mandela was released from prison in 1990 after serving 27 years and continued to lead the transformational politics of the end of apartheid.

Back in the 1970s, part of my education involved discussing my classmates' return to South Africa with them. As students, our personal property mainly consisted of books we had acquired during our educational years. Books of biblical scholarship, theology, psychology, and sociology contributed richly to our learning, and we invested in the books we felt we would use as we went out into the world to pursue our careers. Our South African colleagues, however, had to sort their books before returning home. In addition to shedding some books due to their weight and the cost of shipping, they had to remove from their libraries many books that were banned in their home country. I was shocked to learn that they had been allowed to come to the US, but that their government was trying to prevent them from returning with specific ideas. Among the banned books were treatises on education and books of liberation theology.

I thought of the repressive regime of South Africa as a relic of a past era. Surely they would someday discover democracy and allow their people to be free. I watched with deep interest as the next decades passed, apartheid came to a peaceful end, and the nation undertook a deep process of truth and reconciliation that has become a model for the world.

I could not imagine that we would come to a place where my home country would be a place with lists of banned books, arrests for misdemeanors such as passport violations evolving into imprisonment without trial, secret police raiding workplaces and schools wearing masks without identification, and minority rule.

I learned a bit of history in my education, but I did not acquire the ability to predict the future.

A group of college classmates formed a band and sang together as a group. After college, they became involved in supporting the struggle for freedom in South Africa. They wrote and performed songs about freedom. They organized and hosted an event featuring Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Recently, they shared a recording of one of the songs they performed at that event. It spoke of the power of freedom in the face of segregation and repression. When I first heard the song, my thoughts, like theirs, were of South Africa’s need to change for the freedom of its people. Listening to the song in 2025, however, it has become a song about the cry of oppressed people in our own country who long for freedom. You can listen to that song here.

The circle journey I took from a small town in Montana to another small town in North Dakota educated and transformed me. The circle journey from advocating for justice and freedom in South Africa to advocating for justice and freedom in my own country is a process of education and transformation.

We still have a long way to walk on the freedom path and many challenges along the way. But we’ll keep walking and we’ll keep believing that God calls us to walk alongside those who are oppressed and the victims of injustice.