Cal Lutheran Teacher Helps Students Find Life’s Meaning

Even though the students have just finished lunch, no one nods off during Charles Hall’s religion and sociology lecture at Cal Lutheran University.

His students are seldom absent. And they mostly look pretty interested--all indicators of why CLU seniors voted Hall Teacher of the Year last semester.

Hall, who has a doctorate in sociology, has his own method for keeping students intellectually stimulated.

He arranges field trips to places such as the Church of Scientology International’s worldwide headquarters in Hollywood, to an orthodox Jewish service where men and women worship in separate areas, and to a Pentecostal healing service in Los Angeles.

If that’s not intriguing enough, in other sociology classes, Hall has been known to bring in prostitutes, millionaires and men suffering with AIDS as guest speakers.

“He’s challenging, and he knows how to read a crowd,” said senior Lakeeta Gardner, 23, a sociology major. “He’s conscious of the fact that people need to be entertained.”

But Hall said that’s not his motive.

“I no longer consider the lecture the main teaching method,” said the 42-year-old associate professor. “In fact, it is the worst teaching method you can use. Studies show that students retain very little from lectures.

“If you use a method that connects them to real-life experience, they will internalize that information for the purpose of understanding.”

Luther Luedtke, Cal Lutheran’s president, said of Hall: “He is a very compassionate person, a good listener and takes the ethical and moral character of his students very seriously.”

In his sociology classes, Hall cannot avoid lecturing, but when he pops a question, the students act like that is the moment they’ve been waiting for.

“Even when he’s doing a lecture, it’s fun,” said Andrea Maruca, 21. “He’s not just preaching.”

But even with his methods, Hall’s students say the first weeks of his courses can be the toughest.

“It’s boring--these definitions [are horrible],” said Maruca, a sociology and psychology major who has taken several of Hall’s classes. “But when we get into discussions, it’ll be awesome. It’ll be off the charts.”

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Hall, an ordained preacher turned teacher, received tenure at Cal Lutheran last year and earned the Teacher of the Year award last spring. Before that, the father of four taught at Prescott College in Arizona and at his alma mater, Purdue University in Indiana. From 1985 to 1989, Hall was an associate pastor at Calvary Community Church in Westlake Village.

“As a pastor, I always felt a little more restrained by the notion that you shouldn’t ask questions,” Hall said. “Jesus was someone who questioned the authority of his day.”

While serving at Calvary, Hall tried to raise the consciousness of church members’ obligations toward the poor. He even taught a class using a book called “Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.”

“I was proposing that we might consider our lifestyles--are they really lifestyles that value simplicity?” Hall said. “Our treasure is where our heart is. And sometimes I felt like our treasure was too much into materialism.”

Bob Feital, Calvary’s executive pastor, said, “He had a biblically solid issue. We need to be sharing those resources. It is up to the individual how to play that out in their lives.”

The issue of helping the less fortunate was one of several that caused Hall to rethink his role as a pastor and return to college to earn his degrees in sociology. In 1989, Hall began four years as a graduate sociology instructor at Purdue, where he received his master’s and doctoral degrees. And later, Hall accepted the teaching position in Arizona, where he worked for three years.

Hall, a Georgia native, grew up in a Southern Baptist home with a mom who worked as a secretary for a Presbyterian Church, a dad who worked for the Social Security Administration, and a younger sister.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the department of religion at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., and a master’s degree in religious education from Golden Gate Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, near San Francisco.

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Hall said that he had a difficult time maintaining his family’s form of faith while studying religion in college, as he explored new ideas that conflicted with the Southern Baptist faith.

“My college professors were real good at developing critical thinking, but when it came to having them help me work through an existential religious crisis, they didn’t now how to deal with [it],” he said. “I vowed that if I ever taught critical thinking, and if I’m going to lead students to rethink what they’ve always believed, that I’m going to be there for them.”

To that end, Hall said he makes time to meet with students outside the classroom to discuss ideas that have surfaced in class.

“It is really important for me to help students find the meaning to their lives,” he said. “I find that in my Christian faith. That gives a purpose to my life and my teaching.”

For some of his students, their primary motivation may seem much more basic.

“At this age, sex is a major focus in their lives,” said Hall, who teaches a course called “Sexuality and Society.” “To some extent their sexuality gives their lives meaning.

“I feel it is my job to put sexuality in a larger context. It is one part of our lives, but it is not the defining feature of our lives.”

The professor also has a chance to impart his philosophy about life in his class on death and dying.

“Students come face-to-face with the meaning of life,” he said. “They need to think about their lives from the vantage point of their death, rather than the vantage point of their youth.”

When Hall invited a wealthy businessman to speak in his class called “Modern Culture and Discontent,” the visitor told students about the effects of working about 85 hours each week to stay competitive in his corporate job.

“He was eye-opening for me,” said class member Bryan Card, who is CLU’s student body president and hopes to pursue a business career. “It made me reflect on how I spend my money and how I’m influenced by the media.”

Students in Hall’s sexuality class listened to a prostitute in her late 40s, who was seriously ill and required the use of an oxygen tank.

“I think we are sheltered,” said Tina Cormier, who was one of the graduating seniors who voted for Hall for Teacher of the Year in May. “I came away feeling sorry for her and the life she had to live and wondering how short it would be.”

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For Hall, receiving the campus teaching award “is a confirmation that what I’ve tried to do in the classroom and with the students actually does seem to make a difference in their lives.”

In addition to dividing his time between his CLU classes, which also include courses on introductory sociology and statistics, Hall and his wife, Lori, also direct the high school youth choir program at Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in Thousand Oaks, where they are members.

Hall has also been involved in several campuswide projects.

In coordinating a 1998 survey of CLU students’ sexual practices, Hall found that students who attend the Lutheran university are not much different than those attending secular schools.

“People often think that people of faith are different from the culture,” he said. “They attend church to help themselves with the same issues that secular people struggle with.”

In April, Hall and two administrators led a task force to investigate the use of alcohol and other drugs at Cal Lutheran. The university instituted stricter policies as a result.

Though the task force learned that many of those enrolled believed most of their fellow students consumed alcohol, the research suggested about one in five students on campus drink three or more times a week.

“The alcohol and drug problems on our campus are similar to what you would find at a secular school,” Hall said, citing surveys at public colleges across the nation that suggest about 20% of students are regular drinkers.

Luedtke, the school’s president, said Hall’s “integrity is so high--he will honestly report whatever the data of his surveys reveal.”

Though Hall’s academic and family responsibilities keep him busy, he is looking for grants that would allow him to travel to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to research how Christian churches are faring in the post-Communist culture.