Christian colleges rethink sports mascots.
Litfin was prompted to think about the appropriateness of the school's mascot two years ago when Wheaton's student newspaper raised the issue. He launched a personal study of the Crusades, which were military conquests by European Christians designed to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslims in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. Other Christian colleges with the Crusader mascot see the issue differently. Calvin Holsinger, professor emeritus at Evangel, says that school sees the historic connotations of Crusader as positive. The word originally meant one who bears the cross, and when we selected the name Evangel and the mascot of a crusader, we were intentionally trying to communicate our desire to bring the good news and cross into every situation we encountered.