When I learned the awful news that Calli Townsend Newberry is dead, I was at Hillsdale College’s radio station, getting ready to record a podcast that would touch on the problem of theodicy, which is a fancy word for a familiar problem: If God is good, then why does he allow bad things to happen?
Calli was just 24. She graduated from Hillsdale in 2021. Then she went home, married her high-school sweetheart, and had a baby who is now about four months old. Last week, Calli died from injuries suffered in a car crash. Her funeral is today.
There you go: The exasperating problem of theodicy.
Calli was my student. She took a couple of my courses and devoted herself the Collegian, the campus newspaper for which I am a faculty adviser. She rose to become editor of the sports section. Athletics was one of her passions. She was a varsity runner and hurdler on the track team. She won a conference championship in 2019. She also loved popcorn.
Her professional plan was to remain active in sports as a journalist. She had the talent and drive to succeed at a high level. She cared about accuracy. One time, she came to my office to discuss a style-guide dilemma: In the campus paper, we refer to students by their academic year, but this didn’t make sense on the sports pages, where academic year and year of athletic eligibility can be different, due to redshirting and pandemic rules. Calli wanted to make the distinction in her section, so that’s what we did.
It would not have astonished me to see Calli’s byline in a national publication or a big-city paper. Yet she chose to return to her native place in Michigan’s Thumb and cover local sports. Last summer, she launched her own website, the Sports Report, which tracked everything from Little League performances to college signings.
It showed her entrepreneurial flair. Calli was full of ideas and ambitions. As a student, she self-published Semester Together, a devotional book for girls. “The goal is to help girls understand who God says they are and his love for them in a more clear and deep way,” she said, “and to allow that to transform their lives into something more purposeful and fulfilling.”
I was looking forward to seeing what this young lady would achieve.
Her death is out of order. Calli should be writing obituaries, not having them written about her. It makes you wonder why God has allowed her early death. It might even make you wonder if there is a God. It’s the problem of theodicy.
For her part, Calli never would have doubted: “I’ve learned that in the harder things of life is where we find Jesus the most,” she wrote about a year and a half ago on her blog. “When things are easy, it’s easy to stop and coast, just like on the treadmill. But when life gets tough, we seek God’s strength and grace a lot more. And when we seek, we find.”
This in fact is the thing I remember most clearly about Calli: her deep faith.
Everybody who knew her needs to seek a little bit of it right now.