Emily Dickinson in Columbus, Ohio

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

Selbyg explains that the four essays in this issue grew out of the first Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education—a two-week seminar funded by the Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation and the Lilly Endowment, led for its first three years by Dr. Ronald Thiemann of Harvard Divinity School—whose official theme “Finding Our Voice—Christian Faith and Critical Vision” became informally “What’s Faith Got To Do With It?”

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

Christenson introduces the four essays by participants in the first Lutheran Academy of Scholars as fruit of the “genuine conversation” that emerges when specialists set aside their lecturers’ podiums to speak as human beings, and welcomes the issue’s additional “Intersections first”—a response to a response to a review—continuing the conversation between Baird Tipson and Robert Benne about the paradigm of Lutheran higher education.

'In, With, and Under:' The Tradition and the Teaching of Christian Ethics

Pamela K. Brubaker

Brubaker describes how she teaches Introduction to Christian Ethics at California Lutheran University—a religiously diverse classroom where about 30% of students are Lutheran, 30% Roman Catholic, and many are “unchurched”—as a community of moral discourse rooted in the Lutheran dialectic of faith and reason. Drawing on Larry Rasmussen and Bruce Birch, Elizabeth Bettenhausen, Roger Crook, and Robert Benne’s typology of “Hot and Cool Connections” between church and politics, she walks through her course’s units on human sexuality, economic life, and war and peace—including the Bomb Shelter simulation, a mock Disney stockholders meeting on sweatshops, and a Congressional hearing on the School of the Americas—to show how ELCA social statements function as case studies in critical inquiry and education for citizenship.

Impelled to Pluralism: Thoughts About Teaching in a Lutheran University

Jim Huffman

Huffman traces his personal journey through three stages of faith—the “comfortable Christ” of his Midwestern Christian childhood, Clark Pinnock’s “faith principle” of accessible salvation, and finally Christ as the “humble teacher”—to a pluralism that rejects religious triumphalism without abandoning Christian commitment. Drawing on Diana Eck, Wesley Ariarajah, John Cobb, the Catholic novelist Endo Shusaku, and the histories of Confucian China and imperial Japan, he then describes how this commitment shapes his teaching of East Asian religion and nationalism at Wittenberg University: insisting on respectful language, working sympathetically through doctrines like Buddhist non-attachment, and helping students see the pernicious effects of triumphalism in both religious and political life.

Making Dry Bones Stand: Lutheran Higher Education at Century's End

Diane Scholl

Scholl reads John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” the banishment of Anne Hutchinson, de Crevecoeur’s American farmer, Olaudah Equiano, Phyllis Wheatley, and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter alongside Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones to ask how a Lutheran college can be a community that holds difference and commonality together. Drawing on Ernest Simmons’s warning against collapsing into either dogmatic absolutism or thoroughgoing relativism and Bruce Reichenbach’s companion essay in this issue, she identifies five features of shared life at a Lutheran college—the liberal arts, political process, the arts, the community of caring, and the recognition of difference and the right to dissent—and argues that the necessary tension between individualism and corporate identity, framed by theological vision, is “our best legacy and our best hope for the future.”

Lutheran Identity and Diversity in Education

Bruce Reichenbach

Reichenbach applies the theological taxonomy of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism to Lutheran colleges and argues that institutions self-consciously committed to inclusivism must hold a non-negotiable theological core in paradoxical tension with intentional diversity. Drawing on Richard Hughes, Darrell Jodock, Gilbert Meilaender, Robert Benne, and Mark Schwehn, he surveys the theological themes Lutheran writers identify as identity-forming—the four solas, law and Gospel, two kingdoms, vocation, simultaneously saint and sinner, the theology of the cross—and proposes that diversity at an inclusivist Lutheran college is to be employed in service of educating “head, hands, and heart,” maintained through a critical mass of faculty and staff who carry the “DNA of the school.”

Response to Robert Benne

Baird Tipson

Tipson responds to Robert Benne’s comments in the previous issue about his review essay of The Future of Religious Colleges, affirming their fundamental agreement that the Enlightenment epistemology dominant in higher education poses the most serious threat to the vitality of Lutheran colleges. Using the example of lecturing on early Mormon history and the Book of Mormon, he concedes that the methodological “solvent” of Enlightenment historiography acts on Christian as well as Mormon faith claims, and concludes that while H. Richard Niebuhr’s “inner” and “outer” history and Walter Brueggemann’s approach in The Theology of the Old Testament are comforting to believers, they do not offer an epistemology that can stand alongside the Enlightenment model in evaluating truth claims in the academy.

Sprigs of Mint

Caitlin McHugh

No. 21 · Summer 2005

McHugh meditates on three light green mint stalks dying in a plastic cup of water in her window frame’s shadow, drawing a parallel between the neglected mint, the “tainted papers” of her unread journals, and the time that both holds her back and drives her forward.

Valuing Poetry

Allison Wee

No. 37 · Spring 2013

Writing from California Lutheran University as “value” in higher education collapses into “can it get you a job?”, Wee makes a case for poetry as a life-saving discipline. Drawing on William Carlos Williams, Shakespeare, the Psalms, Wordsworth, Pattiann Rogers, Mary Oliver, and her own Environmental Literature assignment that sends students outside for an hour of attentive stillness, she argues that the poet’s skill of translation cultivates the close attention, fresh perspective, and immaterial dimensions of life her students need most.

Sprigs of Mint

Caitlin McHugh

No. 21 · Summer 2005

McHugh meditates on three light green mint stalks dying in a plastic cup of water in her window frame’s shadow, drawing a parallel between the neglected mint, the “tainted papers” of her unread journals, and the time that both holds her back and drives her forward.

Calling and Learning: On Losing and Then Finding Myself

Rachel Hammond

No. 9 · Summer 2000

Hammond, a Capital University junior who spent two semesters studying in Guayaquil, Ecuador, recounts watching the sucre collapse from 10,500 to 29,000 per dollar between September and January, the overthrow of President Jamil Mahuad, the freezing of bank accounts over $4,000, the threatened eruption of the volcano at Baños, and her work at an orphanage that needed only $6.81 to feed a child for a month—and calls her fellow students, in light of Elie Wiesel’s warning that indifference is the enemy, to recognize their education as a gift and a responsibility to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.

What's in a Name?

Matthew J. Marohl

No. 40 · Fall 2014

St. Olaf College Pastor Matt Marohl tells the story of designing The Undercroft’s prayer and meditation room with a campus meditation group whose members began as “Matt” and ended — as their mutual respect grew — calling him “Pastor Matt,” a counterintuitive movement toward a more formal address that signals what intentional Lutheran-Christian hospitality looks like in practice.

Endtimes

Dave Hill

No. 34 · Fall 2011

A four-stanza meditation on the “last perfect day” when an unblemished Sun makes the cool Ocean roll—and on the relation of each questing mind to the Deep, of each frail mortal to the pulse of the Sea at the edge of the grave. “Let it die full of Life! Let its murmurs and sighs / Give the drama a meaning. Let it not, Lord, die dead.”

Sweet on My Lips

Corin Wesner

No. 13 · Winter 2002

A passage from Wesner’s travel journal during the same South Africa workshop. Walking into a wood-and-tin shack church where raindrops fall on already-soaked carpet and the service is in Xhosa, she remembers her painted, carpeted home church and her adolescent argument with her mother about wearing a dress to worship, and finds herself engulfed in warmth as the few women sing—welcomed by a stranger’s smile and opened up.