Putting Principles into Practice: An Interview with Kenneth Foster about Concordia's Sustainability Council

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

Wilhelm argues that the rhetoric framing ELCA higher education as a binary between “secular” and “religious” is “hokum”: there is a third way of doing higher education from a Christian perspective that is religious in motivation and practice but on the ground looks secular. After more than half a century of debates, he calls on ELCA presidents to “do something” in 2013 to move forward in shared mission and vocation.

From the Editor

Jason A. Mahn

Mahn introduces the issue through Norman Wirzba’s The Paradise of God and the Genesis 2 vocation given to Adam to care for adamah—arguing that “vocation” is the Lutheran name for an incarnational, creation-centric theology of kenosis and that Lutherans bring distinctive theological gifts to environmental work even if no absolutely unique perspective on caring for creation.

Vocation for Life: A Report on a New Initiative for Alumni

A report on “Vocation for Life,” a collaborative initiative of ELCA-related colleges and universities to make vocational exploration available to alumni across the country regardless of which school they attended. The first pilot retreat—“Explore Your Life’s Calling,” in Rochester, Minnesota in November 2011, facilitated by Tom Morgan of Augsburg, Chris Johnson of Gustavus, and Tom Scholtterback of Concordia using the Circles of Trust approach—is described.

A Traveler's Manifesto for Navigating the Creation

Ann Pederson

Pederson asks who we are, where we are, and how then we shall live within the Epic of Evolution and the doctrines of creation, incarnation, and imago dei. Drawing on John 3:16 (“For God so loved the cosmos…”), Luther on God’s presence “in the veins of a leaf,” Augustine’s City of God, Phil Hefner’s “created co-creator,” Joseph Sittler’s “Called to Unity,” and Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, she argues for a cosmic reading of incarnation in which all of creation—not only the human—bears the image of God.

Facing Tornados and Climate Change: An Interview with Jim Dontje about Environmental Innovation at Gustavus

Jim Dontje

Dontje, director of the Johnson Center for Environmental Innovation at Gustavus Adolphus College, describes the Center’s work with solar thermal and photovoltaic systems, LEED certification of Beck Hall, recycling and conservation initiatives, the Linnaeus Arboretum, and the difficult work of building consensus around climate response—reflecting on how Gustavus’s 1998 tornado recovery shaped a community capable of collective action, and on how the “Lutheran identity” both restrains and energizes the college’s environmental ethos.

A Lutheran Ethic of Environmental Stewardship

Jim Martin-Schramm

Martin-Schramm sketches a Lutheran ethic of environmental stewardship organized around four moral norms inherited from World Council of Churches discussions and developed by Presbyterian and ELCA social statements: sustainability, sufficiency, participation, and solidarity. He grounds each norm in scripture and the Lutheran tradition—the theocentric doctrine of creation against rampant anthropocentrism, the incarnation against destructive dualisms, Christ in community against modern individualism, and accountability to God for future generations—arguing that this “ethic of ecological justice” offers a common moral vocabulary for engaging environmental policy debates that would otherwise collapse into cost-benefit analysis.

Climate Justice, Environmental Racism, and a Lutheran Moral Vision

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda

Moe-Lobeda argues that the vocation of a Lutheran college is to prepare students for Thomas Berry’s “great work”: forging a sustainable relationship between the human species and the planet while diminishing the gap between those who have too much and those who have not enough. She develops a three-fold “moral vision” rooted in Luther’s theology of the cross—seeing what is (climate injustice and environmental racism for what they are), seeing more just and sustainable alternatives, and seeing God’s saving presence at work—and offers it as a distinctive Lutheran contribution to the panhuman and interfaith challenge of our day.

Farming and Eating Locally: An Interview with Garry Griffith about Augustana's Farm2Fork Program

Garry Griffith

Griffith, Director of Dining at Augustana College (Rock Island), describes the Farm2Fork program’s shift from pre-packaged food to fresh produce sourced from local farms (beginning with Jim Johansen of Wesley Acres in Moline), the Augie Acres campus garden tended by students in learning-community courses, the bio-diesel conversion of used fryer oil for greenhouse heat and farm equipment, and the stewardship calling that grounds these efforts in Augustana’s Lutheran identity.

Sustaining Sustainability

Baird Tipson

Tipson—former Provost of Gettysburg College, President of Wittenberg University, and President of Washington College—reads Romans 12:2 (“be not conformed to this world…”) against Victor Ferrall’s Liberal Arts at the Brink and the contemporary financial reality of small Lutheran colleges. He tells three case-study stories from Washington College’s Center for the Environment and Society—the Chino Farms partnership, the Chesapeake Semester, and the acquisition of the work boat Callinectes—to show how presidents must engage “the world” to secure resources for sustainability work without being conformed to it.

Health Food in the Inner City: An Interview with Brian Noy about Augsburg's Campus Kitchen

Brian Noy

Noy, Director of Campus Kitchen at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, describes the Kitchen’s four-fold program—Food to Share (2,000 meals per month from surplus dining-services food and Campus Cooking Classes), Food to Grow (an 80-plot community garden), Food to Buy (two farmers markets that accept EBT/food stamps), and Food to Know (educational programming)—and the deep history of Augsburg’s service to the immigrant communities of the Cedar Riverside neighborhood, now Somali and Mexican as well as historically Norwegian.

Education as a Christian (Lutheran) Calling

Tom Christenson

No. 21 · Summer 2005

Christenson opens with an imaginative reconstruction of early Christian communities as radically egalitarian, pacifist, communitarian gatherings within the Roman Empire and argues that such communities are natural homes for the educational vocation. Naming two temptations for contemporary Christian higher education—the parochial Bible school and “Generic U”—he uses his friend Sig Rauspern’s tree metaphor to insist that a university is Christian in its trunk and roots rather than in grafted-on branches. Drawing on Wendell Berry, Jacob Bronowski, Walter Wink, Douglas John Hall, and his own Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education, he names faithful criticism, engaged suspiciousness, simul justus et peccator, and a fallible, love-related Lutheran epistemology as the particular gifts Lutherans bring to the Christian educational calling.

Vocation for Emerging Adulthood: Within and Beyond College

Adam Copeland

No. 47 · Spring 2018

Copeland uses scenes from Master of None, David Brooks’ columns, Meg Jay’s The Defining Decade, and the stories of two ELCA college graduates to argue that emerging adulthood has fundamentally changed — and that Lutheran colleges should call out cultural lies about work, reframe vocation as meaning-making, and help graduates take small, wise steps into their twenties.

Critical Engagement in Public Life: Listening to Luther's Troubling Questions

Samuel Torvend

No. 35 · Spring 2012

Torvend narrates the medieval “spiritual/temporal” division and the neo-platonic devaluation of the body that shaped the world into which Luther was born, then traces the disruptive questions Paul’s letters provoked in Luther: about indulgences, the two estates, vocation, and the public reach of baptism. He argues that Luther’s reform — expressed in Kirchenordnungen, social welfare reform, public schools, and writings on lobbyists, usury, and monopolies — carries a “genetic encoding” of public engagement that Lutheran colleges should reclaim against the temptations of holy apathy and Christian nationalism.

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.

"Our Calling in Education": An Educator's Perspective

Cheryl Budlong

No. 23 · Summer 2006

Budlong, Professor of Education at Wartburg College, asks educators to reexamine their ‘mental models’ of what education itself means in light of the rapidly expanding literature on how young people learn. Drawing on Malcolm Gladwell, Eric Jensen, Ruby Payne, Judith Harris, Robert Slavin, and the AACTE’s Leading a Profession retrospective on the AACTE agenda 1980–2005, she calls on Lutheran educators to articulate vocation intentionally in their classrooms and to ground curricular and pedagogical reform in Wartburg’s focus on Discovering our Calling.

Mentoring in the Academy: Of Gurus, Coaches, and Sponsors

Faith Wambura Ngunjiri

No. 41 · Spring 2015

Ngunjiri urges faculty, staff, and administrators in faith-based institutions to assemble a “personal board of directors” of mentors — connectors, sponsors, taskmasters, motivators, dreamers, sages, and proofers — and reflects on how race and gender complicate mentoring in predominantly white, male-led ELCA institutions, where women and minorities must reach out to build the “cloud of witnesses” they need to thrive.