By Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals

For decades, especially since the 9/11 attacks, the Islamic faith has been viewed by some people to be a religion of hatred and violence.  The fact that the vast majority of Muslims are gentle, law-abiding citizens belies this criticism.  One young Muslim woman has made it her mission to publicize illustrations of the inherent goodness of Islam.  On her blog, The Muslimah Soapbox, she calls herself simply the Proud Muslimah.  The purpose of her blog is straightforward.  She writes, "I am a Muslim woman from Madison, Wisconsin who is on a mission to help spread that Islam is a progressive religion of peace and tolerance."

The Muslimah's Soapbox dispels many negative stereotypes of Islam.  In one blog post, the Proud Muslimah sets the record straight about women in Islam, noting that the faith permits women the right to education, to work, to receive equal pay, to vote, and to enjoy the same rights and protections as women in the free world.  "So many Americans picture countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia as the poster countries for Islam and assume that how they treat their women is at the fault of the religion itself," she says, emphasizing the progressive stance of Islam in gender relations. The Proud Muslimah laments how images of women being mistreated in a few Arab nations are "being used to attack a religion which does not support" such mistreatment.

In another blog post, she condemns people who use Islam "to cause hate and murder in the name of Allah," and she urges "more Muslims to try to think of ways to spread peace in the name of Islam. Go out and volunteer, start a study group, hold a picnic, start a blog, ask the cultural anthropology departments in your universities about allowing you or a friend to give a lecture on Islam. Do anything you can to open the eyes of your community. It starts small, my friends, but even if you can enlighten one person, that's one person who wont be grabbing their pitchforks if another atrocity were to happen in the name of our faith again."

One recent addition to the Proud Muslimah's blog is a feature called Muslims Who Make a Difference.  She writes: "Every month, I want to provide a small article about a Muslim who is doing their part to make the world a better place for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. I feel this is incredibly important," she says.  The goal of this feature is to put "the spotlight on a different Muslim individual every month who actively does what they can to represent the love and peace that Islam truly stands for."

The first person whom the Proud Muslimah believes makes a difference is Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, a well-known environmentalist, author, and speaker.  Abdul-Martin is described as "a steward of the earth" and author of the important book Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet. "Abdul-Matin urges people to understand that environmentalism is rooted deep into our religious responsibility," she writes. His goal is to emphasize that it "is our responsibility to make sure that we are being stewards of the planet. It goes so much further than political affiliations and whether you are Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, or Athiest.  It is your job to do what you can" to be environmentally responsible.

In our opinion, the Proud Muslimah is performing a heroic service by enlightening the world about the positive contributions of Islam as a faith and about Muslims who are making the world a better place.  In a time of heightened cultural divisions, the Proud Muslimah is building bridges, illuminating the true loving core of the Islamic faith, and encouraging healthy, productive connections among all the world's people.  We applaud her work, support her cause, and eagerly await her future blog posts.

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Do you have a hero whom you would like us to profile?  Please send your suggestions to Scott Allison at sallison@richmond.edu.

Oops!  We had to remove the hero profile you’re looking for because it will soon appear in our new book Heroic Leadership: An Influence Taxonomy of 100 Exceptional Individuals, to be published by Routledge in 2013.

Our contract at Routledge required us to remove many of our profiles on our blog at this time.  But we do have other hero profiles and information about heroes on the menu bar located on the right side of this page.  Check it out!

In the mean time, please accept our apologies.  Here is more information about our new book.

You can click here to return to our HERO home page.  And thanks for visiting!

— Scott Allison and George Goethals

By Rick Hutchins

Teachers are a precious, if often overlooked, resource in any society. But even more precious are those rare few who, in addition to offering knowledge and nurturing, keep the flame of culture alive. Bob Mitchell was such a teacher. He was, ostensibly, a high school Latin teacher; but he was, in fact, much more than that.

You’d have to know this guy to fully appreciate him. Picture long blond hair, glasses, a handlebar mustache and a barrel chest, always moving like a runaway train– in heavy clogs, so you could hear him coming a mile away (he was a devoted runner and participated in the Boston Marathon many times). He was the smartest person I’ve ever met face to face. He spoke more than twenty languages and could flip between them like another man would flip between TV channels. He read at least one book a day and retained everything. He had traveled all over the world and retained all of that, too. He didn’t just teach a dead language– he breathed life into an ancient world, he took the words and made you see beyond their definitions to what they meant to the people that had actually spoken them, the colors and shades and nuances of idioms and turns of phrase and slang and how it related to their culture and their daily lives.

I’d sit in his class and be in awe of him. He was never still, always moving at a hundred miles an hour; but that was only a fraction of the speed of his mind. Watching him teach was like watching a brilliant performance– or, rather, a performance of brilliance, a stand-up act of the mind, a Vaudeville of the intellect. Stories, puns, wordplay, endless digressions into the minutiae of the ancient world; a single word could conjure up an entire aspect of a lost civilization and he would paint a picture of it as if he had been there. Seeing him in action was inspirational; it was like watching the pure essence of Humanity at work. Or, rather, at play. Mister Mitchell never worked. He just lived and breathed his passions and let them overflow into whoever was lucky enough to be near him.

He was an inspiration just by existing, but he also was generous with his individual attention. No student ever lacked for his undivided focus, no question ever went unanswered, no quirk or eccentricity ever went unappreciated. For me, he always encouraged my writing, and was never less than brutally honest in his assessments. After graduation, he actually took me out to dinner at the No Name Restaurant to talk about writing and give me encouragement. He was, in short, the coolest teacher a student could hope to have.

The following anecdote, related by his student Esther Mobley, will give you a bare hint of what he was like:

"Once a student casually asked him if there was a translation of the Gettysburg Address in Latin. There was not, and so Mr. Mitchell came into school at six o'clock the next morning and translated it himself, from memory, unaided by any dictionary, within a matter of hours. He filled Room 318's two wall-length chalkboards in his narrow, near-unintelligible calligraphy."

How can you not love a guy like that?

At the youthful age of 60, Bob Mitchell succumbed to melanoma. He is no longer with us, but he has left behind a legacy of cultural and intellectual devotion, passed on like an Olympic torch to not one, but thousands of kindred spirits over decades of teaching. We gained from him not just a wealth of knowledge, but the example of a life well lived: To embrace your passions and to never pretend to be less than you are.

Below is a video tribute to the late, great Bob Mitchell.

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Rick Hutchins was born in Boston, MA, and has been an avid admirer of heroism since the groovy 60s. In his quest to live up to the heroic ideal of helping people, he has worked in the health care field for the past twenty-five years, in various capacities. He is also the author of Large In Time, a collection of poetry, The RH Factor, a collection of short stories, and is the creator of Trunkards. Links to galleries of his art, photography and animation can be found on http://www.RJDiogenes.com. He’s no Mister Mitchell, though.

The following blog post is the winner in our recent contest for a free autographed copy of our Heroes book.  The author, Athena Hensel, is currently a psychology major enrolled at the University of Richmond.  Congratulations Athena!  And congratulations to all of our readers who make our Heroes Blog possible.  — Scott Allison and George Goethals

By Athena Hensel

My father, simply put, is an actor.

In elementary school, while other fathers in my area tried to instill good capitalist values in my peers by bringing their kids to the office, mine was introducing me to Shakespeare by bringing me to his rehearsals of The Tempest, or encouraging my hobby of singing by having me work with him on sound recordings for children's plays. At his "real job," he worked for a nonprofit radio organization to read newspapers and magazines for the blind.

But passion by itself does not create greatness. What I see as heroic in my father was his refusal to let go of his passion for acting despite setbacks. In the face of losing his wife€”my mother€”he involved himself even deeper into acting rather than drown in his grief. A few years later when the recession hit, he was one of the millions who were laid off and was unable to find work for over a year and a half. For that year and a half, my father spent hours every day on the computer and out on the streets, job hunting and networking so that he could support our family€¦ yet at the end of the day, exhausted, he would still find time to go to rehearsal for a play which didn't even pay him anything.

Others have expressed the belief that someone like my father€”who is in his forties, graying a bit, and is working to lose the extra weight€”is too old and too responsible to be acting. He passed the point of a major breakthrough, one which would allow his passion to pay the bills, the mortgage, his children's tuition€¦ what logical reason would he have for continuing? Obviously money is the end goal, right? Sometimes I've even asked him those questions myself, when my pragmatic side rose up. But he told me, and others, that he simply would not€¦ he would keep trying, because acting defined him.

And through all of this, has my father made a big breakthrough? Not really, unless you count his cameo in Die Hard 4. This isn't an underdog-becomes-the-champion story; it's the story of a man who is just trying to live happily. Yet that is the very reason my father is heroic to me. My father showed me and my siblings, through example, that real happiness and satisfaction doesn't come from a paycheck, but from active living; from doing what makes you, you. When my father acts, it's not for the applause at the end, the accreditation, or even the knowledge that he is making others happy; rather he acts for the moments when he is onstage and€”paradoxically€”feels most like himself.

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Do you have a hero that you would like us to profile?  Please send your suggestions to Scott T. Allison (sallison@richmond.edu) or to George R. Goethals (ggoethal@richmond.edu).

The following blog post finished 5th in our recent contest for a free autographed copy of our Heroes book.  Each week we will post another hero profile in the top 5.  Congratulations to all five of these excellent entries.  — Scott Allison and George Goethals

By Geoff McQuilkin

Desperate Heroes feel as though they have nothing to lose, but everything to gain.  They are not martyrs in a sense that they want to die for a cause, but they would rather risk losing everything if it meant being able to gain something significant.  When backed into a corner with a ubiquitous sense of despair, these characters emerge with a driven, almost manic focus to defy their oppression and live on despite their troubled circumstances.

Jeb Corliss is a modern day example of such a hero.  Abandoned by his mother at the age of fifteen, Corliss dropped out of school in sixth grade.  In an interview with Men's Journal, Corliss stated that "[school] was a place to go fight€¦it made me a very dark, unhappy person."  He suffered through severe depression throughout adolescence until he discovered skydiving at the age of 18.  After his first dive, Corliss became addicted to the adrenaline rush that accompanied the intense sensation of freefall.  He began to attempt more and more dangerous stunts in the realm of skydiving and base-jumping. In an otherwise hopeless world, Corliss decided that he was either going to achieve greatness in his newfound passion, or die in his attempts.

Now, at the age of 34, Corliss has become one of the world's most famous extreme athletes, having illegally jumped off of some of the most recognizable structures in the world (The Eifel Tower, The Empire State Building, The Golden Gate Bridge, The Petronas Towers, The Stratosphere Casino€¦etc.).  His next major project is building a $2 million ramp that he will use as a gradual landing structure so that he can successfully jump out of a plane without a parachute.  Jeb Corliss might not be every mother's favorite role model for their children, but his story of overcoming his depression and awing the world with his stunts is a great boon for those who have weathered the dismal years of adolescence.

Another prime example of the desperate hero can be found in the movie Gattaca. Ethan Hawke plays the role of Vincent Freeman, a man who is considered by his futuristic society to be slightly subhuman because he was born without the aid of liberal eugenics, which is used at birth to optimize children and rid them of any physical, intellectual or psychological dysfunction. Because Freeman is less than perfect, he is considered ineligible to fulfill his dream of traveling into space.  After realizing that he would rather be dead than continue to live as a subordinate, Freeman goes through the grueling task of impersonating an elite member of society.  After a number of near fatal setbacks, the hero miraculously boards a shuttle and launches into space.

This triumph of the human spirit over seemingly insurmountable odds is a classic hero story. However, the fervent desperation that gives life to these heroes warrants the creation of a new subcategory of heroism.  At a few points throughout Gattaca, Vincent and his brother, Anton (who is a member of the genetically superior class), play a game where they see how far they can swim out into the ocean, knowing that they will have to swim back to shore.  Anton is astounded that his weaker brother always wins.  At a defining moment in the movie, Anton asks his brother how he was always able to beat him.  Vincent smiles at his brother and says, "I never saved anything for the swim back."

Below is a clip from Gattaca.

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