Redskins’ Roy Helu is a different sort of running back By Rick Maese, Published: October 13 Rookie Roy Helu is the least known of the three running backs who split time in the Washington Redskins’ backfield. There’s apparently a reason for that.

“He’s very different,” said New York Giants cornerback Prince Amukamara, one of Helu’s closest friends and a former college teammate at Nebraska.

Helu has flash, but he’s not flashy.

“I don’t know how to describe it. You have to be around Roy to experience him,” said Redskins safety DeJon Gomes, another college teammate. “He might seem dingy, but that’s not it at all.”

Helu is set in his ways, but he’s hard to pin down.

“He has a unique spirit about him,” said Matt Penland, the Nebraska team chaplain.

As coaches decide whether to start Ryan Torain or Tim Hightower at running back in Sunday’s game against the Philadelphia Eagles, Helu has been the backfield constant through four games. He’s a change-of-pace back who is averaging 5.3 yards per carry. He’s elusive and quick, and though he’s just 22 years old, coaches say they’re impressed with his focus.

“He’s a guy who lives without cable and television and Internet,” Amukamara said. “He doesn’t need that. He’s such a simple guy. He doesn’t really need much. He’s not someone who’d ever need to spend a lot of money on anything.”

In fact, earlier this month Helu texted Redskins wide receiver Niles Paul, another Nebraska teammate. Helu was shopping for his first pair of Nike sneakers but was shocked to learn they would cost more than $100. “Get them, Roy! Get them!” Paul told him. But Helu didn’t. “That’s just Roy,” Paul said.

“You only can describe him as Roy Helu,” Paul continued. “He is Roy. He is his own person. He’s not embarrassed; he’s not ashamed of anything he does. He takes it all with a smile and goes about his business.”

A father’s influence

Helu credits his father for his football ability, though Roy Sr. didn’t even know about football until he moved to the United States from Tonga in 1974. Roy Sr. grew up playing rugby, eventually earning his way onto the U.S. national team.

Living in California’s Bay Area, the Helus had six children. After three girls, Helu was the first boy. He started in soccer at a young age but began playing football when he was 8. His father’s skill set translated nicely to the football backfield.

“You have to have speed, vision, cutting ability and quickness,” Roy Sr. said of rugby. “It’s just like football.”

With his father helping teach him footwork and running, Helu eventually earned a scholarship to Nebraska. The Tongans are a tight-knit, family-oriented people, and Helu had to adjust to life away from home.

The football team was struggling as well, and Helu says he lacked a sense of direction. He called the team chaplain, who arranged to have breakfast. “The day I gave my life to the Lord, everything changed,” Helu said. “It gave me more purpose. Not more purpose, but purpose.”

His career took off, too. Helu totaled 803 yards as a sophomore and 1,147 as a junior. Roy Sr. still followed his son’s games closely. Watching Nebraska play Texas on television, he saw his son miss holes right in front of him. He flew out to Nebraska and sat down to study film with Helu. Roy Sr. was no football expert, but he knew running.

“Running is running,” Helu said. “Period.”

They studied the film and spent several days talking about the upcoming game. The next Saturday, Helu ran for 307 yards and three touchdowns against Missouri. Nebraska is known for its history of talented running backs, but no one before Helu — not Roger Craig, Calvin Jones, Mike Rozier, Lawrence Phillips, Ahman Green nor anyone else — had posted so many yards in a single game.

“After the game, he knew he was going to be a hot commodity for the media,”Amukamara said. “They’d want to ask him and talk about it. He said, ‘Watch, I’m just going to talk about Jesus. Let them hear about Him.’ ”

Former teammates say Helu shied away from any celebrity attached to his athletic prowess. He prays in practice and says his play on the field is an “opportunity to glorify God.” Football is merely a platform.

“We’d go into these retirement homes on team visits,” said Penland, the Nebraska chaplain. “A lot of the kids stand around and don’t know what to do, Roy just walks over, sticks his hand out and starts asking questions. He has so much charisma. And he’s not trying to promote himself, he’s genuinely interested in other people.”

‘You have to work hard’

Helu left Nebraska fourth on the school’s all-time rushing list. At the NFL Combine, he posted top-10 marks in six of his seven drills, including the best times among running backs in both the 20-yard dash and the 60-yard shuttle drill.

“He called me before the draft,” Roy Sr. said, “and he asked me, ‘Dad you never told me I can make it to the NFL. Why?’ I said, ‘No, I never told you that. I didn’t want you to think it’s easy to get there. You have to work hard.’ ”

During the NFL draft, when Helu’s name hadn’t been called through the first three rounds, the Redskins jumped, trading their way to the 105th pick. The Redskins saw a raw talent, a player with great one-cut ability. The same skills that made Roy Sr. one of the nation’s top rugby players had been passed on to his son.

“Once you have to teach a running back how to run, you have the wrong running back,” Redskins Coach Mike Shanahan said. “When you get a guy like Helu, you don’t know why guys make plays, but the great ones do. I think Helu is giving people the idea that he does have some skills. . . . Hopefully, he just continues to grow.”

With both Hightower and Torain more likely to serve as a lead back, Helu knows his rookie season is one designated for growth. In the Redskins’ second game, against Arizona, Helu strung together 112 all-purpose yards, including 74 on the ground. After the game, he discussed his faith, then praised his offensive line before finally discussing his own play.

In the next game at Dallas, though, he had only 15 yards on five carries. Roy Sr. flew to Northern Virginia the following week, and once again, father and son spent several days watching tape, talking about footwork and identifying holes.

“I never interfere with any coach. I just talk to him,” Roy Sr. said. “The idea is to get better. And that takes a lot of work. This is what I’ve been telling him since he first started.”

Steve Jobs: The Secular Prophet

Steve Jobs turned Eve's apple, the symbol of fallen humankind, into a religious icon for true believers in technology. But can salvation be downloaded?

By ANDY CROUCH

For every magical thing Steve Jobs revealed in his Apple keynote addresses, there were many other things he concealed. Like the devices he created, his life was more and more opaque even while becoming more and more celebrated. So his death this week came as a shock for nearly all of us, even though we knew that only grave illness could be keeping him from the company he co-founded and loved. He told us almost nothing about his prognosis—right through his last public appearance he was as turtleneck-clad and upbeat as ever. But suddenly, this week, he was gone.

Steve Jobs was extraordinary in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (demanding and occasionally ruthless) leader. But his most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple's early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.

That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs's many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world. The biblical story of the Fall pronounced a curse upon human work—"cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." All technology implicitly promises to reverse the curse, easing the burden of creaturely existence. And technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible—when the machinery is completely hidden, combining godlike effortlessness with blissful ignorance about the mechanisms that deliver our disburdened lives.

No company combined simplicity and hiddenness better than Apple under Mr. Jobs's leadership. Apple made technology not for geeks but for cool people—and ordinary people. It made products that worked, beautifully, without fuss and with great style. They improved markedly, unmistakably, from one generation to the next—not in the way geeks wanted technology to improve, with ever longer lists of features (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Word) and technical specifications, but in simplicity. Press the single button on the face of the iPad and, whether you are 5 or 95, you can begin using it with almost no instruction. It has no manual. You cannot open it up to see its inner workings even if you want to. No geeks required—or allowed. The iPad offers its blessings to ordinary mortals.

And so it came to pass that in the 2000s, when much about the wider world was causing Americans intense anxiety and frustration, the one thing that got inarguably better, much better, was our personal technology.

In October 2001, with the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldering and the Internet financial bubble burst, Apple introduced the iPod. In January 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession, the very month when unemployment breached 10% for the first time in a generation, Apple introduced the iPad.

Steve Jobs in front of a Tokyo Apple store Thursday. The 2000s were defined by disappointments—except technologically, as Mr. Jobs strode on stage always with another miracle in his pocket.

Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—but technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket.

Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress—and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. He believed so sincerely in the "magical, revolutionary" promise of Apple precisely because he believed in no higher power. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It's worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn't, say:

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceive—it requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliver—since all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own "inner voice, heart and intuition."

Mr. Jobs was by no means the first person to articulate this vision of a meaningful life—Socrates, the Buddha and Emerson come to mind. To be sure, fully embracing this secular gospel requires an austerity of spirit that few have been able to muster, even if it sounds quite fine on the lawn of Stanford University.

Upon close inspection, this gospel offers no hope that you cannot generate yourself and only the comfort of having been true to yourself. In the face of tragedy and evil—the kind of tragedy that cuts off lives not just at 56 years old but at 5 or 6, the kind of evil bent on eradicating whole tribes and nations from the earth—it is strangely inert.

Perhaps every human system of meaning fails or at least falls silent in the face of these harsh realities, but the gospel of self-fulfillment does require an extra helping of stability and privilege to be plausible. Death is "life's change agent"? For most human beings, that would sound like cold comfort indeed.

But the genius of Steve Jobs was to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of "the Apple faithful" and the "cult of the Mac" is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

It is said that human beings can live for 40 days without food, four days without water and four minutes without air. But we cannot live for four seconds without hope.

It's probably true for nations as well.

Mr. Jobs's final leave of absence was announced this year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And, as it happened, Mr. Jobs died on the same day as one of Dr. King's companions, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, one of the last living co-founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Dr. King, too, had had a close encounter with his own mortality when he was stabbed by a mentally ill woman at a book signing in 1958. He told that story a decade later to a rally on the night of April 3, 1968, and then turned, with unsettling foresight, to the possibility of his own early death. His words, at the beginning, could easily have been a part of Steve Jobs's commencement address:

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now."

But here Dr. King, the civic and religious leader, turned a corner that Mr. Jobs never did. "I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"

Is it possible to live a good, full, human life without that kind of hope? Steve Jobs would have said yes in a heartbeat. A convert to Zen Buddhism, he was convinced as anyone could be that this life is all there is. He hoped to put a "ding in the universe" by his own genius and vision in this life alone—and who can deny that he did?

But the rest of us, as grateful as we are for his legacy, still have to decide whether technology's promise is enough to take us to the promised land. Is technology enough? Has the curse truly been repealed? Is the troublesome world simply awaiting another Steve Jobs, the evangelist of our power to unfold our own possibilities?

And, correspondingly, was the hope beyond themselves, and beyond this life, that animated Dr. King and his companions merely superfluous to the success of their cause, an accident of religious history rather than a civic necessity?

For people of a secular age, Steve Jobs's gospel may seem like all the good news we need. But people of another age would have considered it a set of beautifully polished empty promises, notwithstanding all its magical results. Indeed, they would have been suspicious of it precisely because of its magical results.

And that may be true of a future age as well. Our grandchildren may discover that technological progress, for all its gifts, is the exception rather than the rule. It works wonders within its own walled garden, but it falters when confronted with the worst of the world and the worst in ourselves. Indeed, it may be that rather than concealing difficulty and relieving burdens, the only way forward in the most tenacious human troubles is to embrace difficulty and take up burdens—in Dr. King's words, to embrace a "dangerous unselfishness."

Whatever the limits of Steve Jobs's secular gospel, or for that matter of Dr. King's Christian one, our keen sense of loss at his passing reminds us that the oxygen of human societies is hope. Steve Jobs kept hope alive. We will not soon see his like again. Let us hope that when we do, it is soon enough to help us deal with the troubles that this century, and every century, will bring.

—Mr. Crouch is the author of "Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling" and an editor-at-large at Christianity Today.

Reversing the Decay of London Undone

Britain's chief rabbi on the moral disintegration since the 1960s and how to rebuild

Article

By JONATHAN SACKS

It was the same city but it might have been a different planet. At the end of April, the eyes of the world were on London as a dashing prince and a radiant princess, William and Kate, rode in a horse-drawn carriage through streets lined with cheering crowds sharing a mood of joyous celebration. Less than four months later, the world was watching London again as hooded youths ran riot down high streets, smashing windows, looting shops, setting fire to cars, attacking passersby and throwing rocks at the police.

A priest and an imam join with the local community to pray as they begin to clean up the damage in the London borough of Hackney. In the 1800s, in Britain and America, religious and community organizations 're-moralized' those countries.

It looked like a scene from Cairo, Tunis or Tripoli earlier in the year. But this was no political uprising. People were breaking into shops and making off with clothes, shoes, electronic gadgets and flat-screen televisions. It was, as someone later called it, shopping with violence, consumerism run rampage, an explosion of lawlessness made possible by mobile phones as gangs discovered that by text messaging they could bring crowds onto the streets where they became, for a while, impossible to control.

Let us be clear. The numbers involved were relatively small. The lawkeepers vastly outnumbered the lawbreakers. People stepped in to rescue those attacked. Crowds appeared each morning to clear up the wreckage of the night before. Britain remains a decent, good and gracious society.

But the damage was real. Businesses were destroyed. People lost their homes. A 68-year-old man, attacked by a mob while trying to put out a fire, died. Three young men in Birmingham were killed in a hit-and-run attack. While it lasted, it was very frightening.

It took everyone by surprise. It should not have.

Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened half a century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West. In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: whatever works for you. The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions. Or as Allan Bloom put it in "The Closing of the American Mind": "I am the Lord Your God: Relax!"

You do not have to be a Victorian sentimentalist to realize that something has gone badly wrong since. In Britain today, more than 40% of children are born outside marriage. This has led to new forms of child poverty that serious government spending has failed to cure. In 2007, a Unicef report found that Britain's children are the unhappiest in the world. The 2011 riots are one result. But there are others.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women—91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data—is practically absurd and morally indefensible. By the time boys are in their early teens they are physically stronger than their mothers. Having no fathers, they are socialized in gangs. No one can control them: not parents, teachers or even the local police. There are areas in Britain's major cities that have been no-go areas for years. Crime is rampant. So are drugs. It is a recipe for violence and despair.

That is the problem. At first it seemed as if the riots were almost random with no basis in class or race. As the perpetrators have come to court, a different picture has emerged. Of those charged, 60% had a previous criminal record, and 25% belonged to gangs.

This was the bursting of a dam of potential trouble that has been building for years. The collapse of families and communities leaves in its wake unsocialized young people, deprived of parental care, who on average—and yes, there are exceptions—do worse than their peers at school, are more susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse, less likely to find stable employment and more likely to land up in jail.

The truth is, it is not their fault. They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement.

What has happened morally in the West is what has happened financially as well. Good and otherwise sensible people were persuaded that you could spend more than you earn, incur debt at unprecedented levels and consume the world's resources without thinking about who will pay the bill and when. It has been the culture of the free lunch in a world where there are no free lunches.

We have been spending our moral capital with the same reckless abandon that we have been spending our financial capital. Freud was right. The precondition of civilization is the ability to defer the gratification of instinct. And even Freud, who disliked religion and called it the "obsessional neurosis" of humankind, realized that it was the Judeo-Christian ethic that trained people to control their appetites.

There are large parts of Britain, Europe and even the United States where religion is a thing of the past and there is no counter-voice to the culture of buy it, spend it, wear it, flaunt it, because you're worth it. The message is that morality is passé, conscience is for wimps, and the single overriding command is "Thou shalt not be found out."

Has this happened before, and is there a way back? The answer to both questions is in the affirmative. In the 1820s, in Britain and America, a similar phenomenon occurred. People were moving from villages to cities. Families were disrupted. Young people were separated from their parents and no longer under their control. Alcohol consumption rose dramatically. So did violence. In the 1820s it was unsafe to walk the streets of London because of pickpockets by day and "unruly ruffians" by night.

What happened over the next 30 years was a massive shift in public opinion. There was an unprecedented growth in charities, friendly societies, working men's institutes, temperance groups, church and synagogue associations, Sunday schools, YMCA buildings and moral campaigns of every shape and size, fighting slavery or child labor or inhuman working conditions. The common factor was their focus on the building of moral character, self-discipline, willpower and personal responsibility. It worked. Within a single generation, crime rates came down and social order was restored. What was achieved was nothing less than the re-moralization of society—much of it driven by religion.

It was this that the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville saw on his visit to America in 1831. It astonished him. Tocqueville was expecting to see, in the land that had enacted the constitutional separation of church and state, a secular society. To his amazement he found something completely different: a secular state, to be sure, but also a society in which religion was, he said, the first of its political (we would now say "civil") institutions. It did three things he saw as essential. It strengthened the family. It taught morality. And it encouraged active citizenship.

Nearly 200 years later, the Tocqueville of our time, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, made the same discovery. Mr. Putnam is famous for his diagnosis of the breakdown of social capital he called "bowling alone." More people were going bowling, but fewer were joining teams. It was a symbol of the loss of community in an age of rampant individualism. That was the bad news.

At the end of 2010, he published the good news. Social capital, he wrote in "American Grace," has not disappeared. It is alive and well and can be found in churches, synagogues and other places of worship. Religious people, he discovered, make better neighbors and citizens. They are more likely to give to charity, volunteer, assist a homeless person, donate blood, spend time with someone feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger, help someone find a job and take part in local civic life. Affiliation to a religious community is the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race.

Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives. Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent. Alexis de Tocqueville saw it then, Robert Putnam is saying it now. It needs religion: not as doctrine but as a shaper of behavior, a tutor in morality, an ongoing seminar in self-restraint and pursuit of the common good.

One of our great British exports to America, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, has a fascinating passage in his recent book "Civilization," in which he asks whether the West can maintain its primacy on the world stage or if it is a civilization in decline.

He quotes a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, tasked with finding out what gave the West its dominance. He said: At first we thought it was your guns. Then we thought it was your political system, democracy. Then we said it was your economic system, capitalism. But for the last 20 years, we have known that it was your religion.

It was the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave the West its restless pursuit of a tomorrow that would be better than today. The Chinese have learned the lesson. Fifty years after Chairman Mao declared China a religion-free zone, there are now more Chinese Christians than there are members of the Communist Party.

China has learned the lesson. The question is: Will we?

—Lord Sacks is the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth.