Words Awake! maestro and professor Tom Phillips (’74, MA ’78) shared the news this week that Shane Harris (’98) has left his senior writer position at Washingtonian magazine to move to Foreign Policy magazine as a senior writer.

Shane Harris (’98), author, senior writer, analyst

In a note to Phillips and friends, Harris wrote, “I wanted to let you know about an exciting new chapter in my career. … I’ll be a senior writer at Foreign Policy magazine, where I will cover intelligence and cyber security. And of course, in light of recent events, surveillance!”

Harris no doubt will be blogging and writing nonstop about Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked news of classified intelligence about domestic surveillance to The Guardian and The Washington Post. “Forget PRISM, the National Security Agency’s system to help extract data from Google, Facebook, and the like,” Harris wrote on Monday in a blog post. “The more frightening secret program unearthed by the NSA leaks is the gathering and storing of millions of phone records and phone-location information of U.S. citizens.”

Harris is the author of “The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State,” which The Economist named as one of the best books of 2010. He was a star panelist at the Words Awake! conference at Wake Forest in March 2012. Congratulations to Shane on his new job, a timely posting for commenting on the latest in ‘watching.’

Wake Forester Will D. Campbell died Monday at age 88 in Nashville. I first met him in the funny pages but didn’t know then he was a Demon Deacon. He was the inspiration behind the Rev. Will B. Dunn in “Kudzu,” the syndicated comic strip created by my late friend and fellow Charlotte Observer editorial board veteran Doug Marlette.

Rev. Will B. Dunn of “Kudzu”

Marlette had the eccentric cartoon version of Campbell tell it like it was. In one strip, Rev. Dunn said, “Lord, I know we’re called to be fishers of men. But I want to throw ‘em all back.”

In a 1992 article, journalist David L. Langford described Campbell this way: “Here’s a whiskey-swilling, tobacco-spitting, guitar-picking Baptist preacher and truck farmer who is a widely respected writer, thinker, humorist and ex-officio chaplain to the Grand Ole Opry crowd. He doesn’t have a church — a steeple as he puts it — and doesn’t want one.”

Last year, during Words Awake!, Wake Forest honored an inaugural class of inductees to the Wake Forest Writers Hall of Fame. Campbell (’48, L.H.D. ’84) naturally was among the honorees. His “Brother to a Dragonfly” was a finalist for the 1978 National Book Award and named one of the 10 best religious books of the 1970s by Time. But our Wake Forest notable author was unable to attend the ceremony. His son, Webb (’81), returned to campus on his behalf. We didn’t know Campbell was struggling to recover from a stroke in 2011. What we did know and laud was his national, historic reputation as a voice of conscience in the South’s struggles against racism.

Campbell was born to Mississippi cotton farmers in 1924 and became an ordained Baptist minister at 17. He served in the Army during World War II and arrived at Wake Forest afterward, majoring in English. You can find no activities listed under his name in The Howler of 1948, but Campbell more than made up for that omission in his unparalleled life of social activism and advocacy for the marginalized.

Campbell’s senior photo in The Howler

He attended Tulane University, earned his theology degree from Yale Divinity School, pastored a church in Louisiana, became an integrationist chaplain at Ole Miss and served as a field officer for the National Council of Churches. He was the only white person present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Wherever there were momentous events in the civil rights movement, Campbell typically had a role: counseling Freedom Riders; participating in boycotts and sit-ins; challenging the clergy to step up on behalf of society’s forgotten ones; helping escort the nine black students through angry mobs at Central High School in Little Rock.

In 1984, along with Eudora Welty, he came to Wake Forest to receive an honorary degree at Commencement. Wake Forest Magazine welcomed him “home to his college,” adding in an article that year: “In a pickup truck, carrying a Gibson guitar and whittling a cedar stick, and wearing a black plowman’s hat, Campbell preaches and sings and saves.” As The New York Times noted in Campbell’s obituary yesterday, his friends and followers called him “hilarious, profound, inspiring and apocalyptic” as he stomped around “uttering streams of sacred and profane commentary that found their way into books, articles, lectures and sermons.” In 2000 Bill Clinton awarded him the National Endowment for the Humanities medal. A PBS documentary, “God’s Will,” profiles his life.

This week Bill Leonard, the Divinity School’s founding dean, who holds the James and Marilyn Dunn Chair of Baptist Studies, offers a must-read remembrance of Campbell called “The Freedom of Will” at ABPnews.com. Leonard examines the paradox of a man who witnessed unspeakable “meanness” all around him in the turbulent South but who never gave up on grace.

He also recounts a fine Wake Forest anecdote: “Will once told me that he fully understood the name “Demon Deacons” for the Wake Forest University mascot. ‘Hell,’ he commented, ‘anybody who’s ever been in a Baptist church knows at least one demon deacon!’ Will could sanctify profanity like no one else.”

Kyle Webster’s portrait of Campbell for Words Awake!

Campbell was truly a distinguished alumnus, ahead of his time, and, through it all, as brave in the cities as in the backwoods.

Steve Duin (’76, MA ’79) joined the crowd of Wake Forest alumni writers who returned on March 23 for the Words Awake! writers conference, but he didn’t leave the experience behind after he landed at home in Portland. He treated his Oregon newspaper readers to his take on what made the event special, including his appreciation for his time at Casa Artom in Venice and the guidance provided by the inimitable James Barefield, Wake Forest history professor and purveyor of the comic view.

Portland's Steve Duin

Duin is metro columnist for The (Portland) Oregonian and is the author or co-author of six books, the latest of which is “Oil and Water,” a graphic novel illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Shannon Wheeler. He served on the Words Awake! panel titled “Writing Sports,” an appropriate topic for someone who penned a compelling cover story for Wake Forest Magazine last summer about baseball coach Tom Walter’s gift of a kidney to then-freshman and centerfielder Kevin Jordan.

“Some of us are lucky. We happened upon Wake Forest, often by chance, and when we’re asked why we love the place, we remember Sunday mornings on the Quad, Saturday nights at the stadium and Wednesday afternoons with the romantic poets,” he wrote. “But everyone else? This is the story they will remember. When they hear the words ‘Wake Forest,’ they will celebrate the kidney that passed from Tom Walter to Kevin Jordan, a gift as big as life. And when they become fathers, this is the history they will tell their sons.”

Look for Duin’s next story that explains the University’s literary tradition in the Wake Forest Magazine summer issue, arriving in mailboxes in June. Here’s a preview of what’s in store: “And there were few checkpoints where we had to flash credentials, pay our dues or beg for permission.  When we were still clueless, Wake Forest allowed us to make waves and mistakes.  When we were still searching for God knows what, the University encouraged us to push the limits, exploit our immaturity, even take our innocence abroad to London, Venice or Ireland. You want to know why so many Wake grads became writers?  Because when we walked into the room with a novel idea, someone’s eyes lit up.”

Joy Goodwin ('95) and Steve Duin at Words Awake!

In the photo above, you see Duin with Joy Goodwin (’95). The two share a love for Barefield. (The upcoming summer issue also features a Goodwin piece about the peripatetic professor who enjoys being a character.)

In the meantime, don’t miss Duin’s tribute in The Oregonian to Barefield in which he writes, “He and I have remained close over the years, a friendship that owes as much to the intimacy of Wake Forest as it does to the intensity of the Venice program.”

Overseeing a magazine, one picks up all sorts of magazines wherever they are in reach. That happened today at an appointment when I grabbed a stack and started perusing the latest issues. The hot-off-the-press March issue of O, The Oprah Magazine caught my eye, and when I flipped to the books section so did this version of a valentine:

This book got a mention for having a great title. What the magazine failed to mention is that it is the latest book by Eric G. Wilson, the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest. “Everyone Loves A Good Train Wreck: Why We Can’t Look Away,” published this month by Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, examines our culture’s attraction to evil and to darkness. According to advance publicity for the book, Wilson draws on findings of biologists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians and artists.

In a precursor to the book’s publication, Wilson discussed his fascination with the moral of the morbid in November in Psychology Today. “Renaissance scholars kept skulls on their desks to remind them how precious this life is. John Keats believed that the real rose, because it is dying, exudes more beauty than porcelain,” he wrote. In describing his trip to the Ground Zero Museum in New York, he encountered what is now “holy ground” born of “horrific terrain.”

“At that moment,” he wrote, “I understood the terrible wisdom of suffering: When we agonize over what has cruelly been bereft from us, we love it more, and know it better, than when we were near it. Affliction can reveal what is most sacred in our lives, essential to our joy. Water, Emily Dickinson writes, is ‘taught by thirst.’

“To stare at macabre occurrences — this can lead to mere insensitivity, gawking for a cheap thrill; or it can result in stunned trauma, muteness before the horror. But in between these two extremes, morbid curiosity can sometimes inspire us to imagine ways to transform life’s necessary darkness into luminous vision.”

My guess is that you will be hearing a lot more about the “train wreck” book and what Wilson as scholar has learned from his research. (He posted this at Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Work in Progress blog today for those of you not in the mood for chocolates, roses and sweet sentiment. It’s his take on why horror is good for you and lists his favorite horror films. No shock here: “I’m a serious horror film fan,” he writes. Yes, “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Shining” are among them.)

Best wishes to the professor as he launches his book about what it means to be human, in all its shadow, not just its light.