Friends,
Freedom is one of those words that feels self-evident. It elicits certain thoughts, emotions, colors — a flag, maybe, or an open road. We think we know what it means to be free until we sit with it long enough.
The newest issue of The Baylor Line Magazine made me sit with it.
How do you cover freedom in a time like this? In a time when the rights of our neighbors are being called into question. When academic freedom has terms. When free speech is warmly welcomed — provided we agree. When identity feels less like a given and more like an argument. When the American Dream belongs to everyone, as long as you fit someone’s definition of American.
With this magazine and an incredible set of writers, I set out to examine different perspectives of service and freedom in the Baylor Family. But even within the months spent working on this issue, we found ourselves grappling with threats to freedom closer to home than we expected.
I’ll admit, I’ve never been much of a history buff. But this issue surprised me, pushed me to the fringes of the remarkable amount of archival knowledge tucked inside Baylor’s story. I found myself on the shores 1940s France, the scorched trails of the late-1880s Wild West, and the hallowed halls of Congressional office buildings.
And what it reveals is both humbling and clarifying: we have been here before. The questions we’re asking now aren’t new.
They’ve been carried by the veterans of Baylor, fought over in faculty meetings, and ridden hard across the Texas frontier long before any of us reading this issue arrived on Earth.
It’s both a comforting and startling revelation. That doesn’t make the present moment less urgent. If anything, it makes it more so.
I hope these stories do what the best stories do: unsettle you just long enough to make you think.
All my best,
Kourtney Nering (’22)
Editor-in-chief, The Baylor Line
