Drunks in a Midnight Choir

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

Selbyg announces that the 2001 ELCA Churchwide Assembly has commissioned a new social statement on education, placing it alongside the economy, the environment, abortion, sexuality, health, and peace, and invites Intersections readers to submit input on which topics within the field of education the statement should address.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

Christenson introduces an issue of varied voices—bishops and university presidents, philosophers and poets, students and their teachers—and defends the T. S. Eliot cover selection (“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?”) against the charge of being too depressing, arguing with cover artist Ida that Lutherans are realists about human accomplishments and that there is a huge difference between optimism and hope.

The Marks of an ELCA College: One Bishop's Reflections

Stanley Olson

Olson, speaking as a bishop and “Harness Boy” whose job is to keep the church’s connections working, replaces his original four-noun outline (fealty, ingenuity, insouciance, focus) with eight marks the ELCA should be able to observe in its colleges: intentional Lutheran identity, significant Lutheran presence, Christian faith at every table, freedom of inquiry, coaching toward vocation, gravity and grace, nurtured community, and excellence by its own standards. Drawing on his survey of all twenty-eight ELCA college mission statements (two tables) and on Darrell Jodock and Mark Edwards, he argues that the Lutheran connection must be made explicit in mission, marketing, and faculty searches, and closes with six reciprocal expectations the colleges should hold of the ELCA—commissioner, mature parent, supporter of adventurous teenagers, advocate, steward of graduates, and a church faithful to its own Lutheran mission.

Welcome Strangers

Gregg Muilenberg

Muilenberg, a non-Lutheran philosopher at Concordia, argues that self-consciously Lutheran colleges cannot make non-Lutheran faculty feel welcome through “institutional fit” rhetoric (he cites Concordia’s own hiring boilerplate) because identity must be sustained and developed, not preserved like a pickle. Drawing on Nikos Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco and the three marks of the “profoundly religious person”—commitment to the truth, to the power of the spirit, and to metousiosis through myth—he proposes that faith and reason are best understood as an unending struggle into which strangers must be invited as valuable and active participants, safeguarded by the strongest possible affirmation of academic freedom (citing Martha Nussbaum on Notre Dame and BYU).

The Etiology of Eschatology

Kevin Griffith

A wry meditation on end-times and beginnings in which the last trumpet is only a prelude to the longest dawn, newly handmade animals grow fat waiting for caretakers to name them, dark-robed cryptologists fret over the end of everything, and once everyone has solved the great conundrum the big man simply hits rewind.

The Identity, Mission, Vision, and Goals of a Lutheran College vis a vis Bacon's "Of Studies" and Newman's "The Idea of a University"

Cora Lazor, Mary Theresa Hall

Hall, an Associate Professor of English at Thiel, and Lazor, a Thiel junior and 2002 ELCA Division for Higher Education summer intern, read Thiel College’s Statements of Identity, Mission, Vision, and Goals alongside Sir Francis Bacon’s “Of Studies” (1625) and John Henry Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University (engaging Azade Seyhan’s May 2002 PMLA essay along the way). They argue that Bacon’s “Read…to weigh and consider” and Newman’s defense of liberal over technical training underwrite Thiel’s new Writing-Intensive Course requirement, its ten institutional objectives, and its commitment to “service to society” in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Honesty of Mind: On the Uses and Abuses of Socratic Ignorance in Environmental Studies, Religion, and the Classroom

Don Braxton

Braxton, taking his cue from David James Duncan’s defense of ignorance as a fly-fisher’s most crucial tool and from Socrates’ midwife’s art in the Theaetetus, defends a doctrine of “honesty of mind” resting on four premises—knowledge is constructed, judgments are wagered amid imperfect knowledge, expertise can disable learning, and we are encumbered by other ways of knowing. He field-tests the disposition against three domains: the climate-change and creationism debates in environmental studies, the post-September 11 turn toward religious pluralism (engaging Union Seminary’s Joseph Hough and Hauer and Young’s “three-world” approach to the Bible), and the liberal arts classroom where students “become democrats of the mind” through Reinhold Niebuhr’s balance of conviction and contrition.

Paul Dovre, ed.: The Future of Religious Colleges

Baird Tipson

Tipson, president of Wittenberg University, reviews Paul Dovre’s edited proceedings of the October 2000 Harvard Conference on the Future of Religious Colleges (Eerdmans, 2002), summarizing essays by Douglas Sloan on the failure of the “two-realm theory of truth,” George Marsden on faith-shaped scholarship, DeAne Lagerquist, Father David O’Connell, Mark Noll, Robert Benne, Mark Roche on Notre Dame, Joel Carpenter on neo-Calvinist Kuyperianism, and Mark Schwehn on a Lutheran “college-related church” and the centrality of vocation. Against Benne’s suggestion that only two or three robustly Lutheran colleges can be sustained, Tipson defends a less robust but still authentically Lutheran model embodied at places like Wittenberg, Gettysburg, and Roanoke, arguing for the enlightenment commitment to subjecting all truth claims to rigorous criticism and for hiring Marsden-style faith-shaped scholars rather than counting Lutheran heads.

Poetry: Rituals for an Uninvented Religion / On the Recently Discovered Mass Grave of Mice

Kevin Griffith

No. 6 · Winter 1999

Two poems by Kevin Griffith of Capital University: “Rituals for an Uninvented Religion,” a seven-part liturgical bestiary of made-up customs (lead-filling cups in June, masks for the dying, two bottom-feeding August fish, wax grave markers with wicks, the leap-day child, and the carnival-free day of judgment), and “On the Recently Discovered Mass Grave of Mice,” prompted by New Zealand shepherds’ uncovering of 300,000 mouse skeletons, on the bones “each light as a child’s first question” and the “graveyard rush” we share with the good flock.

Holy Odors

John P. Trump

No. 14 · Summer 2002

A one-act play by John P. Trump, premiered at Pacific Lutheran University, in which Maggie, a senior studying Reformation history in the library stacks, falls asleep over the Apology of Augsburg and dreams a 16th-century pickled-herring merchant—Herr Leonard Kopp, the man who smuggled Katie von Bora and eight other nuns out of the convent—into existence to argue that her call to archaeology (“digging up old bones”) is as holy as ordained ministry, with Luther’s joke that the church burns incense to insulate priests from the “holy odors” (not holy orders) of everyday life.

Original Song Lyrics: "Just a Little"

Mike Blair

No. 48 · Fall 2018

Lyrics for an original song inspired by biblical images and stories, by Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” and by the faith, hope, love, and courage of immigrant friends and neighbors — led as a devotion during the 2018 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference.

Meditation—Band Chapel Service, St. Olaf College

Erik Haaland

No. 7 · Summer 1999

Haaland, a St. Olaf senior, offers a brief Band Chapel meditation that defines art as “the expression of what is deeply human through the manipulation of the physical world” and defends worship—architecture, stained glass, music, eloquence—as an art form requiring our best and most sincere efforts. When the God we worship and the salvation we proclaim do not seem near, artful worship offers not propositions but something real and tangible to hold on to.

The Musician's Vocation

Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

No. 48 · Fall 2018

Bell-Hanson argues that musicians, who exercise profound influence over the emotional flavor of a moment, are called not merely to technical proficiency but to a sense of vocation: understanding their art well enough to use it responsibly, to intend truthfulness rather than manipulation, and to articulate its significance in dialog with other disciplines.

Two Poems: The Advent Carol / The Madonna of Dohany Street

Brian Forry Wallace

No. 2 · Winter 1997

Two poems by Brian Forry Wallace of Capital University: “The Advent Carol,” a litany of the babies who were not adored—the Jewish baby shot with a Luger, the Black child hanged from a tree, the female messiah tossed into a river, the Tutsi infant cut by machetes, the Japanese newborn incinerated by atom bombs, the Chinese baby crushed by Japanese bombs, the aborted Mary’s child—ending with the baby “whom we do not understand, cannot feed, whom we kill”; and “The Madonna of Dohany Street,” on a Holocaust photograph in a Budapest museum of a dead mother and her dead Christ-child daughter in the former ghetto, in which annunciation, nativity, adoration, and crucifixion are seen together in a single instant.

Things That Renew Hope

Sig Royspern

No. 8 · Winter 2000

Inspired by Andrew Greeley’s Religion as Poetry, which defines religion as hope-renewing experiences and the stories, symbols, rituals, and images that preserve them, Rauspern offers a list-poem of small renewals of hope: lovers kissing in the street, the first snowfall of each year, compost and spring sprouts and Jewish humor, kids’ summer mischief, a mother nursing her baby on the bus, small jazz ensembles, two old men reconciling without remembering why, an unscheduled gift, the blues, a child taking him by the hand, and a gray-haired man who threw his cellular phone in the river.