Over the last couple of years I’ve developed this ritualistic tic. When I’m feeling anxious, or angry, or frustrated I’ll open up my Pluto TV app and tune in to the 24-hour Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood channel. I am obsessed with the channel. It’s one of the few channels I keep on my Pluto TV watchlist, alongside the America’s Test Kitchen and the Bob Ross painting channel. It’s 4 AM and I can’t sleep, so Mister Rogers it is. I’ve watched enough episodes that I’ve even seen a few repeats. Not that this matters much to me. The music and sets may be simple, and the show is just as square now as it was when it first aired, but I am a man obsessed. I love Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. It is the absolute sincerity of Rogers himself that sucks me in. I watch him staring at me through the television screen, just like he stared at my twin brother, my sister, and me back in the 1970s when we watched him as part of a PBS children’s television block–Sesame Street, then The Electric Company, then Mister Rogers. Mister Rogers was our preschool teacher, and though we eventually outgrew his show he continued embodying empathy, care, and a respect for children decades after my siblings and I abandoned him for more mature media. I admire the man. Mister Rogers, I’ve come home.
This summer I’m thinking a lot about Fred Rogers. I am currently sitting at the Rebecca M. Arthurs Memorial Library in Brookville, PA–the town where I spent the first 18 years of my life. I flew in yesterday for a weeklong trip related to my summer research on Fred Rogers. After arriving in Pittsburgh yesterday, I spent much of yesterday driving by my parents’ old home, visiting my mother’s grave, and catching up with an old high school friend at a local bar. Beginning tomorrow I’ll be traveling daily to Latrobe, PA where I’ll be doing archival work at the Fred Rogers Institute.
I haven’t shared much on this blog about the specific focus of my work. Initially I was interested in exploring how Fred Rogers’ work was motivated by a coherent Christian social ethic, but while working on my grant proposal for my summer research I discovered a really great book by a Society of Christian Ethics colleague of mine, Michael G. Long, Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers. Long’s book already does a lot of what I was hoping to do, so this summer I’m focusing instead on an underexplored part of Fred Rogers’ work–the media that he created for adult audiences. In 1975, Rogers stopped producing Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and got funding to produce an adult-oriented PBS series, Old Friends, New Friends. The series ran for just two seasons, and few people have ever seen any of the 20 episodes. My speculation is that private papers and production notes about this series uncovers potentially fertile ground for exploring the theological commitments that shaped Rogers’ work with both children and adults. My goal is to turn my archival work into an academic article I’ll be working on this Fall.
I am so excited for this trip! In a way, my summer work exemplifies some changes that I have been experiencing in my own life with respect to personal vocation. I began as a professor of Christian ethics at ACU back in 2008. In my early career, a lot of my personal interest was focused on moral disagreement and difficult questions in the field of applied ethics. I’ve written on the topic of Christian faith and war, Christian libertarianism, rival theories of justice, and the like. I still think about these things, and I still teach about them in my ethics courses, but these days I find myself moving away from these sorts of questions toward a more fundamental focus on questions of virtue. What does it mean to be a good person? How do I cultivate virtue in my own life, and how do communities cultivate the dispositions of care and empathy? Speaking personally, over the last few years I’ve discovered that a lot of the things I used to give myself to–arguing on Facebook, posting barbed memes on social media meant to win points in threaded conversations with families, friends and strangers–were making me more anxious, more defensive, and much less empathetic. They were cultivating vice, in short. I don’t want to be that sort of person. I want to be less anxious, less defensive, more empathetic. I want to be more like Fred Rogers. I think we all should be more like Fred Rogers. I also want to think about how a vision of Christian ethics that elevates virtues like empathy, compassion, and care might be juxtaposed against the more “muscular” accounts of Christian virtue that are winning the day in the evangelical circles that I inhabit. We need to be more like Fred Rogers. Would that more of my Christian brothers and sisters would agree.
The only downside to being in Pennsylvania this week is that I am away from rehearsals for Seussical. I love the routine of preparing for a show. Though I am thrilled about my summer research, I miss the nightly practice. To this point, our rehearsals have focused almost entirely on learning the music, though starting tomorrow the cast begins work on blocking and choreography. I’ll have some catching up to do after Memorial Day. As I sitting here trying to figure out how to put a wrap on this blog post, I’m thinking a lot about the opening number of our show, “Oh, the Thinks You Can Think.” The song is a catchy, upbeat blast of a song to sing, and given Fred Rogers’ devotion to the power and potential of childlike imagination, I can’t help but feel that he would have loved the sentiment of a show celebrating the work of another children’s media icon, Theodor Geisl, aka Dr. Seuss. How can you not love this opening lyric, sung by the Cat in the Hat?:
Oh, the thinks you can think!
Oh, the thinks you can think
if you’re willing to try…
Think invisible ink!
Or a Gink with a stink!
Or a stair to the sky…
If you open your mind,
Oh, the thinks you will find
Lining up to get loose…
Oh, the thinks you can think
When you think about Seuss!
This show is going to be a thrill, one that Abilene locals won’t want to miss. Tickets are already on sale! Get yours.
And check out Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on Pluto TV! You won’t regret it.