As a former Ultimate Frisbee player and co-captain with my good friend, Doug Ross '81 of the 1979-80 team, I took great pleasure in reading Michael Doyle's article. He did an impressive job of capturing both the spirit and the history of the sport's genesis and history at Oberlin. Perfect reportage is rare, however, and I must correct one small but important--at least to me--historical error in the article. The Oberlin Mellow Invitational Tournament, or OMIT, was established not in the early 1980s, as Doyle wrote, but during the 1979-1980 season, when our team created the event as an alternative to the increasingly cutthroat atmosphere that we were encountering at tournaments around the region. We were shocked that other teams not only trained--you know, worked out and stuff--but would throw elbows in our ribs and call bogus fouls and prefer to win rather than to make friends. We Obies wanted to return the game to the days (they seemed so long ago!) when the score seemed to matter less than companionship, so we figured, let's host a tournament where you're not even ALLOWED to keep score. Omit the score! Thus was born the tournament and its double-entendre moniker.

Geoff Blodgett's "Warfare Between Science and Religion" (March 1999) characterizes the juxtaposition of deep spiritual faith with Darwin's theories as a "psychological wrench." While this clearly happened for some, Blodgett appears to be imagining or rewriting history when he portrays this experience as being of universal import.

For contrast, I refer readers to a paper entitled "The Age of the Universe" by Gerald Schroeder, a nuclear physicist who served on the staff of MIT and as a member of the U.S. Army Energy Commission. (www.aish.edu/issues/inverse.htm)

Schroeder's bottom line is that the Book of Genesis reflects exactly--albeit in very limited detail--local events of the past 15-3/4 million years. I have no doubt that there were some in the Oberlin community in 1871 who experienced the "price of lost belief" which Blodgett reports, or the state of being "orphaned because they can no longer believe in the infallible Word on which their faith is founded," which he also notes. After all, it's not unexpected to find that those ideas appear to be challenged by something of the caliber of Darwin's observations and resulting theories. But Blodgett's version of history presents the angst of Alfred Vance Churchill, evidenced by the quotes above, as being required to, as Churchill says, "complete the destruction and put away the debris." Hogwash. The English poet John Keats coined a phrase "negative capability" which he used to represent the capacity of the more mature members of the human species to function quite well without having to know (experience) all the details about something--in other words, to be perfectly OK with having incomplete data, and perfectly willing to wait upon further information (experience) without having to fabricate an intellectual decision.