Poetry: After Months of Clouds, the Sun; First Bird

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

Wilhelm describes how ELCA colleges and universities have shifted the definition of Lutheran higher education away from institutional markers toward alignment with educational values drawn from the Lutheran intellectual tradition — and previews a NECU-convened faculty working group whose recommendations will go to the ELCA college presidents at their June 2017 conference on Lutheran identity.

From the Editor

Jason A. Mahn

Mahn introduces “Education in the Age of Trump” by recounting a difficult academic year on his own campus — the Augustana “chalking” incident, a Latinx Unidos rally, and post-election conversations with marginalized students and quietly conservative Trump supporters alike — and frames the issue’s essays as careful (re)imaginings of the vocation of Lutheran higher education in an anxious political climate.

Higher Education in the Age of Trump

Daniel B. Braaten

Braaten surveys what the Trump administration has and has not done on higher education — from the selection of Betsy DeVos and a rumored Falwell-led task force to the travel ban and expanded deportation priorities — and argues that Lutheran colleges, guided by the ELCA’s social message on immigration, have a special obligation to consider what they will do to protect their most vulnerable students.

Resistance in the Age of Trump: An Interview with Ivonne Wallace Fuentes

Jason A. Mahn, M. Ivonne Wallace Fuentes

In conversation with Jason Mahn, Roanoke College historian Ivonne Wallace Fuentes describes how she launched a local chapter of Indivisible after the 2016 election, how the skills of teaching and historical research carry over into grassroots advocacy, and how her sense of vocation (vocare) has become intertwined with the work of advocacy (advocare).

Religion in the Age of Trump

Daniel A. Morris

Morris reads the 81% evangelical vote for Donald Trump through two historical theses: that evangelicals’ once-coherent story about Godly participation in political life has fallen apart, and that their long-running tendency to exclude others — once aimed at Black Americans and Catholics — has now turned decisively against Muslims. He argues that scholars of religion and politics have a responsibility to tell these stories well, and that appeals to classroom objectivity can no longer be a luxury.

Room at the Table: Reflections on Identity and Inclusion from a Lutheran-Friendly Muslim

Rose Aslan

Aslan reflects on her experience as a Muslim professor of Islamic studies at California Lutheran University — teaching “Introduction to Christianity” from her strengths in the Abrahamic religions, preaching an Eid khutba in a Lutheran chapel, and conversing with the university’s convocators — and proposes “Lutheran-friendly Muslim” as a way of being host and guest at once in a pluralistic Lutheran institution.

Jonah: The Anti-Hero of Vocation

Martha E. Stortz

In a chapel talk first given at Augsburg College’s Vocation 2.0 series in September 2016, Stortz reads the prophet Jonah as the great anti-hero of vocation — one who tries to outrun God’s call to the great city of Nineveh — and argues that, in a season of urban violence and divisive election-year rhetoric, the story is less about public calling than about being called by the publics in our midst.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? A Homily on Liminality and Vocation

Lori Brandt Hale

Drawing on Wes Moore’s The Other Wes Moore, Warren St. John’s Outcasts United, Victor Turner’s anthropology of liminality, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poem “Who Am I?”, Hale considers how Hmong, Muslim, Latinx, LGBTQ+, non-traditional, and other students live in “double liminal” spaces — and asks whether liminality might itself be a place of transformation in conversations about vocation.

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.

A Rainfall of Questions Collected in the Form of a Poem

Sig Royspern

No. 16 · Winter 2003

Royspern offers fourteen oracular questions on aging, addiction to possessions, water striders, magnolias, slippery fish, moths and the moon, priests and leaf-rakers, weeds and flowers, the price of education, abandoned groceries, spiritual pilgrimage, melons and oats, similes, and the impossibility of finding a store that sells a spring wind.

Well, Well…Plumbing Our Depths, Telling Our Stories

Ann Boaden

No. 40 · Fall 2014

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.

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.

Unpossible

Tim Knopp

No. 19 · Summer 2004

A new Capital University education graduate reflects on the bargain of trading childhood for “four years closer to some hidden knowledge, four years farther from what I once knew,” as the noon chimes call him out into a campus where professors and students teach one another along worn brick paths that “love is” should be “love can be.”