During the last academic year, Boe Memorial Chapel at St. Olaf College underwent major renovation. The lower level of the chapel had previously housed the religion department, but they had moved to the newly renovated Old Main the previous year. So, we began to envision how this space might become a new hub for student activity. We would call it “The Undercroft.” It would house a very large student lounge and study space. There would be rooms for small and large group meetings. There would be new and necessary “church related” spaces: a new sacristy, new offices, rehearsal space for handbells. And, there would be a prayer and meditation room.
We have a mosque, but it is in a residence hall away from the heart of daily campus activity. The chapel is always open, but it is large and public. A Quaker meeting had been held in an unused office. The meditation group had been using a classroom. It was clear that we needed a space that was specifically designed for prayer and meditation.
I met with a number of religious groups on campus, including a meditation group. Together, we discussed possible paint colors, wall hangings, furniture and furnishings. During the early meetings with this group, they called me “Matt.” The use of first names is common on campus. So, it was not strange for a group of student to sound so informal and personal in their communication. In fact, I understood this to be a sign that we were working together on a common project.
However, as we continued to meet together and as we continued to become closer in our personal relationships, they started to call me “Pastor Matt.” Typically, as we become more familiar with one another, we become less formal in our address. So, a move from “Pastor Matt” to “Matt” would have been expected. But, in this case, the move to a more formal address was telling.
There is no doubt that I am a Lutheran Christian. From my black cleric shirts to my “College Pastor” name badge to my preaching and teaching, I am Christian. This identity did not change when I met with the meditation group. I did not change my language, nor did I water down my faith. But I was also deeply intentional about showing this group of students that as a Lutheran Christian college pastor, I was interested in and supportive of their faith stories. I wanted to work together. When they became aware of how much I respected them and their practice of meditation, I believe they began to more fully appreciate my role on campus as the college pastor. I became “Pastor Matt.”
One month after the official opening of The Undercroft and the prayer and meditation room, the college hosted an awards event. The Meditation Group won the award for “Emerging Organization of the Year.” Dressed in suits and dresses, they came directly from the event to my office to show me their award. They proudly announced, “Pastor Matt, we won!”
It was gratifying to share in their (our?) victory and my work with the meditation group is ongoing. It is our hope that all religious organizations at St. Olaf College would share in the mutual respect that we have enjoyed throughout our experiences together.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm draws a parallel between the rediscovery of vocation and the rediscovery of interfaith understanding in Lutheran higher education, arguing that previously under-emphasized aspects of the Lutheran tradition point us to interfaith work and that an authentic Lutheran college or university will make interfaith understanding a feature of its mission.
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Editorial
Guest Editorial
Kristen Glass Perez, Richard Priggie
Glass Perez and Priggie introduce the issue by recounting the campus conversations and the June 2014 Interfaith Understanding Conference at Augustana College that gave rise to it, framing the central question, “What does it mean to be Interfaith at a Lutheran College?,” as a living example of the praxis of being a Lutheran college in the twenty-first century.
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Article
Vocational Re-Formation for a Multi-Religious World
Elizabeth Eaton
ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton frames vocational formation for a multi-religious world as one of the most significant challenges facing the church and the liberal arts today, calling ELCA colleges and universities to live into Darrell Jodock’s “third path” that is both deeply rooted and dialogical.
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Article
Why Interfaith Understanding is Integral to the Lutheran Tradition
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn returns to the root of the Lutheran tradition — church, theology, and pedagogy — to argue that interfaith encounter is not the vanishing point of Lutheran identity but central to it, beginning with confession of Luther’s anti-Judaic legacy, working through the typology of exclusivism / inclusivism / pluralism, and showing how the kenotic Christ and the theologian of the cross open Lutherans to authentic encounter with religious others.
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Article
What it Means to Build the Bridge: Identity and Diversity at ELCA Colleges
Eboo Patel
Through the contrasting stories of two college students — Cassie’s identity relativism and April’s soft fundamentalism — Patel diagnoses Peter Berger’s twin pathologies of modernization and argues that ELCA campuses, anchored in Bonhoeffer and the Lutheran capacity to “have faith without laying claim to certainty,” are uniquely equipped to be places where the light falls: bridges of cooperation that nurture both strong religious identity and benevolence toward others.
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Reflection
Danya Tazyeen
Danya Tazyeen
Tazyeen, a Pakistani-American Muslim student at Augustana College, reads Qur’an 49:13 — that God made us into peoples and tribes “that you may know one another” — as a charge to break down fear with open dialogue and to see one another as flawed and relatable fellow human beings.
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Article
Building on a Firm Foundation: ELCA Inter-Religious Relations
Kathryn M. Lohre
Lohre traces the ELCA’s twenty-year arc of inter-religious work — from the 1994 Declaration to the Jewish Community and the Lutheran-Jewish Consultative Panel, through the post-9/11 Lutheran-Muslim Panel and the Shoulder to Shoulder Campaign, to fledgling dialogue with Sikhs and the dharmic traditions — and frames Lutheran inter-religious engagement as the strengthening, not the dilution, of Lutheran vocation.
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Article
Building an Interfaith Bridge
Belle Michael
Drawing on the holiday of Shavuot, the Book of Ruth, and Martin Buber’s I-Thou, Rabbi Belle Michael picks up Patel’s bridge metaphor and identifies three building blocks for it: experiences with people of different ethnic and religious groups, genuine and long-lasting relationships, and the holy curiosity to ask the questions we are otherwise afraid to ask.
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Reflection
Gifty Arthur
Gifty Arthur
Reading John 10:3 as a Ghanaian Christian student at Luther College, Arthur reflects on how Luther’s Journey Conversations have deepened her own spirituality precisely by giving room for students to share the personal experiences and beliefs at the center of their own traditions.
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Article
Journey Toward Pluralism: Reimagining Lutheran Identity in a Changing World
Jacqueline Bussie
Bussie chronicles Concordia College’s Forum on Faith and Life initiative — assessing campus climate, building a President’s Interfaith Advisory Council, and drafting a one-sentence statement that Concordia practices interfaith cooperation “because of” (not “guided by”) its Lutheran identity — to argue that simul justus et peccator thinking equips Lutheran institutions to hold loyalty to tradition and reverence for others together as one piece.
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Reflection
David Kamins
David Kamins
Kamins, a Jewish student at Muhlenberg College, reads Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s The Lonely Man of Faith alongside his own journey at the Interfaith Understanding conference on the eve of Shavuot, finding in the dual figures of Adam I and Adam II a way to remain firmly grounded in his faith community while going out to learn from those around him.
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Reflection
Annie Schone
Annie Schone
Schone, raised in a small conservative Central Illinois congregation, recounts how Augustana’s Interfaith Understanding group and Interfaith Youth Core gave her the first chance to befriend Muslim, Unitarian Universalist, and atheist peers, and how she hopes to bring the joy of those friendships back to her home church through the power of storytelling.
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Article
Journey Conversations
Amy Zalik Larson, Sheila Radford-Hill
Larson and Radford-Hill describe Luther College’s Journey Conversations Project, a four-phase contemplative practice — quiet, listen, speak, respond — rooted in the Lutheran call to be true to one’s own faith while welcoming all faiths or none, and illustrate its fruit through faith journey stories from Luther students Sukeji Mikaya (South Sudan), Habibullah Rezai (Afghanistan), and Gifty Arthur (Ghana).
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Reflection
Tom Natalini
Tom Natalini
Natalini, a Susquehanna University senior raised Lutheran, schooled Mennonite, and seasoned by a meditative encounter in India, reflects on his journey through churchgoing, philosophy, near-Jewish conversion, and Buddhist practice to a stance he calls patience — neither Christian, Jew, Buddhist, seeker, nor “none.”
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Article
Well, Well…Plumbing Our Depths, Telling Our Stories
Ann Boaden
Beginning with a college visit that turned into a grieving mother’s confidence about her daughter’s last moments, Boaden uses John 4’s well of living water to argue that an interfaith education worthy of the name requires Lutherans to plumb the depths of their own tradition’s wells — with rituals, stories, and seasons intact — before they can see, respectfully, into the wells from which others drink.
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Article
Making Diversity Matter: Inclusion is the Key
Monica Smith
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Smith, Augustana’s inaugural Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, frames the work of a Chief Diversity Officer as that of a disrupter and argues that while diversity in higher education is already happening, inclusion is a choice — one requiring a fundamental institutional transformation that diversifies faculty and staff, infuses diversity into the curriculum, invests in professional development, and draws on senior leadership to dismantle barriers.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 35 · Spring 2012
Wilhelm describes the “four-legged stool” supporting ELCA higher education—the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, the Lutheran Academy of Scholars, the Thrivent Fellows program, and Intersections—and argues that the conversation about Lutheran mission and identity must now be extended beyond college and university personnel to the larger church and community before the gains of a generation are lost.
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Reflection
Reflecting on Belonging
Melissa Woeppel
No. 60 · Fall 2024
Woeppel, campus pastor at her own alma mater, wrestles with a Bethany student’s plea — “I want to feel like this is my home, like I belong” — and Mindy Makant’s reminder that we don’t choose the story of the past but do choose how we tell it forward, opening space for students from 35 faith traditions to find Lutheran institutions to be their home.
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Institutional Focus
Vocation for Life: A Report on a New Initiative for Alumni
No. 36 · Fall 2012
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.
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Institutional Focus
A List of ELCA Social Teaching and Policy Documents
No. 51 · Spring 2020
A reference list, as of September 2019, of the ELCA’s twelve social statements, fourteen social messages, and over 150 social policy resolutions — with Spanish translations where available.
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Response
Of Imaginary Cows and a White Toy Sheep: The Freedom of a Christian College
Ryan La Hurd
No. 6 · Winter 1999
La Hurd, president of Lenoir-Rhyne and a former Thiel English professor and Augsburg academic dean, responds to Christenson by insisting (with Robert Kegan’s story of Tommy’s imaginary cattle farm) that a college is composed of people but is not itself a person, and so cannot share in Luther’s freedom of the Christian. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, George Marsden, Mark Schwehn, Jacques Barzun, and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable, he distinguishes the “imagined college” (the gift-economy realm of teaching and the alma mater) from the “real college” (the commodity-economy realm of fund-raising, deferred maintenance, and federal aid reconciliation that does not have such freedom)—and ends with Pablo Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry” and the marvelous white toy sheep offered through a hole in a fence.