They arrived as they always do: high on independence, terrified of freedom, looking for a place to belong. They carried with them bins, and bags, and boxes full of stuff (so much stuff!) labeled carefully, dutifully, with their name and hall assignment. A printed orientation schedule and a stack of forms tucked neatly in a folder lay on their dashboard. The lanyard around their neck held a college student ID, the ultimate signal of first year status.
They also arrived with cautious eyes above masked noses (for those who didn’t need correcting). They carried with them six months of disappointment and heartache; with it, almost unbearable amounts of anticipatory grief. Some didn’t bother bringing winter clothing, sure we’d be sending them home before the temperatures ever dropped. Others didn’t bother coming at all. The heightened sense of uncertainty created a haze of reluctancy; better not get too close, too comfortable, or too confident—knowing all too well how quickly this can all be taken away.
Fall of 2020 required all of us—staff, faculty, students—to reach deep into our (nearly depleted) reservoirs of perseverance. We resumed mitigated life on a college campus in ways that on the surface felt familiar but were often unfulfilling. The triage we found in the Spring was continuing, and some of the greatest concern was felt, specifically, for the first-year students. What a time to move into college, to be met with such a monumental transition during an international health crisis, to be asked to take on another challenge in an already challenging time.
At Wartburg College, all first-year students are enrolled in a first-year seminar course, called Inquiry Studies or IS 101. In addition to being the cornerstone for the first-year transition, IS 101 seeks to welcome students into an academic community by introducing the value of a liberal education. Curated by the IS 101 teaching team, students interact with an anthology of essays, book chapters, manuscripts, and poems throughout the course. This IS 101 Reader is organized using the college’s mission pillars: leadership, service, faith, and learning.
Effective first year seminars center opportunities for active involvement, social integration, personal reflection, personal meaning, and personal validation (Cuseo). Done well, students are met with content and pedagogy that upholds these five learning processes. Recognizing that the circumstances of the world and the environment in which these students were beginning college, and valuing Cuseo’s research, we made two additions to the IS 101 Reader just before it was published for the Fall 2020 cohort. The first, a piece written by the Dalai Llama titled, “Prayer is Not Enough,” which ran in the New York Times. The second, a reflection and story penned by Paul Kingsnorth titled Finnegas.
Through readings and discussion about the coronavirus pandemic, using these two additional works as a backdrop, first year students heard the call for a unified response toward a global crisis. Many could express deep commitment to wearing a mask, following campus policy aimed to mitigate the spread, and holding their community accountable so that everyone could be safe. Even with a student body comprised almost entirely of traditional students (age 18-22), class discussion about remaining vigilant in the fierce protection of those most vulnerable were prevalent; these are not times to be selfish. No matter how uncomfortable, inconvenient, or unwanted this exercise in compassion is, the call to consider and serve the neighbor was a sentiment much discussed and well honored. Consideration and service to the neighbor—a theme had surfaced that would transcend the current topic.
As part of a new community, often more diverse than the homes from which they came, first year students were invited to consider and reflect on stereotypes by reading the transcript of Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichi’s TedTalk Danger of a Single Story. They were also participants in a workshop on microaggressions (what they are, how they happen, what to do when one occurs). Through this IS 101 content, students were called to consider their privileges (everyone has privilege!) and reflect on ways that those identities hold unearned yet clearly given power in our society. Students quickly understood that there is another pandemic plaguing America, and this pandemic wasn’t a new one; black people have been fighting the effects of slavery and racism and bigotry for years.
“Consideration and service to the neighbor—a theme had surfaced that would transcend the current topic.”
These conversations around racial injustices in our nation are challenging, especially when done in a students’ first term. Yet we must be bold in commitment to be a part of the work of antiracism—work that starts in the head, takes roots in the heart, and serves through the hands. In considering the stereotypes of which they held, students begin to understand their own biases and learn to interrupt their thinking—work of the head. By acknowledging their privilege, they see themselves as both part of the problem and part of the solution—work of the heart. At our predominantly white institution, many of our students have been able to separate themselves from the direct effects of racism. Now, though, they are offered the tools to no longer be complicit in systems that uphold discrimination and white supremacy. Antiracism is work of the hands, and another example for what it means to serve the neighbor.
“Antiracism is work of the hands, and another example for what it means to serve the neighbor.”
Every year, a common read is selected campus wide as an opportunity to increase engagement through shared experiences. This year, we selected Climate Justice by Mary Robinson. After learning about what climate change is, what contributes to global warming, and what can be done to slow the effects, students discussed Robinson’s work, which engages the reader in stories from across the world to illustrate how those who contribute to climate change least are affected by it the most. Students considered how closely climate change reform is connected to policy, how policy is connected to people with power, and how people with power often only have a sliver of narrative for how others live (clear connections here with Adichie’s piece). Students reflect on how, beyond the devastating Iowa derecho and some hotter hot days and other colder cold days, their daily lives may be free from the deep pressure to change habits that can clearly impact climate change. However, the truth is clear that communities, tribes, families, and lives depend on a swift and coordinated world-wide effort by all global citizens to prioritize practices that lead to reduced emissions; we all must be committed to doing the work so all may flourish. Climate justice, too, is care of neighbor.
Each fall, our campus pastor accepts the invitation to speak to the first-year cohort about what it means to be attending a Lutheran institution. Students learn that there was a time that Lutheran institutions were only for Lutheran students and sought to produce Lutheran pastors. However, that is no longer the vocation of Wartburg College (but it is okay if they decide to be Lutheran in the end). Pastor describes that the Lutheran heritage informs a belief that everyone, every student, has a vocation, a calling, a purpose. Because Lutheran theology is rooted in sola fide (faith alone), the way to honor God is to live out our commitment through our vocation. Because God’s love and grace comes all the way down to us, we are freed up to go out and serve our neighbor.
By recognizing and taking seriously the injustices of climate change, in no longer being complicit in racism, in masking and distancing to protect those with the most weakened immune system, students were interfacing with Lutheran theology, which directly calls us to serve our neighbor. In embracing this theme, we were all reminded that Jesus’ gift freely given liberates us from reaching for God in attempts to achieve salvation; instead, the Spirit has come all the way down to us, and this “frees us to love our neighbor and promote the common good” (ELCA). Now, more than ever, we are called to be part of a global response to every pandemic rooted in the “down and out”.
“By recognizing and taking seriously the injustices of climate change, in no longer being complicit in racism, in masking and distancing to protect those with the most weakened immune system, students were interfacing with Lutheran theology, which directly calls us to serve our neighbor.”
They arrived as they always do. Unsure of the purpose of IS 101, eyes rolling with the consideration of liberal learning as having immense value, weary of what it means to be attending a Lutheran institution. They began to read, think, and write about the many pandemics—not just the most obvious health crisis, but also the pandemics of racism and climate change. They came to see that they are “called and empowered to serve the neighbor so that all may flourish” (NECU). For our first-year students, the “COVID class”, as well as liberal, Lutheran education as a whole, teaches service, citizenship, connectedness, and compassion. That education has never been more applicable, or more valuable, or more transformative.
Works Cited
Cuseo, Joseph. Instructor’s Manual for Thriving in College and Beyond: Research-Based Strategies for Academic Success and Personal Development, 2010, Kendall/Hunt. Accessed 1 April 2021, https://www.millersville.edu/gened/files/pdfs-faculty-handbook/1-fyscoursepedagogy-cuseo.pdf
ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America). “A Social Statement on: Our Calling in Education,”2007. Accessed 1 April 2021, https://download.elca.org/ELCA%20Resource%20Repository/EducationSS.pdf
NECU (Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities). “Rooted and Open: The Common Calling of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities.” Accessed 1April 2021, http://download.elca.org/ELCA%20Resource%20Repository/Rooted_and_Open.pdf
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm reflects on an NPR report of teenagers’ pandemic diaries and the fraught Christian history of struggling to live out Jesus’s ethic of love, framing the issue as a record of NECU institutions working out how to act for the common good through the pandemic of 2020–2021.
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Article
Teaching as an Expression of a Love Ethic
Abbylynn Helgevold
Drawing on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love and Kevin Gannon’s teaching manifesto, Helgevold describes how an ethic of upbuilding love—love that presupposes goodness in students—reshapes inclusive pedagogy at Wartburg College, from syllabus language to how she addresses plagiarism and attendance.
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Reflection
Keeping Close from a Distance: Pandemic Reflections of a Library Coordinator
Carla Flengeris
Flengeris reflects on a year of running Luther College’s library at the University of Regina from her basement and mourns the loss of the hourly walks through the stacks—the “roving reference” that, she realizes, were never disruptions to her work but were the work itself.
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Article
Preaching in Christ Chapel on Yom HaShoah: Reflections on Interfaith Relations at a Lutheran College
Sarah Ruble
Ruble shares her 2019 Holocaust Remembrance Day homily preached before the cross in Christ Chapel at Gustavus Adolphus, then reflects on whether “professional Christians” on Lutheran campuses might practice a non-mutual, witnessed confession before colleagues of other traditions as a check on Christian self-deceit.
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Article
(Re)Defining Vocation: Gladly Challenging a Vocational Giant
Andrew Tucker
Tucker challenges Frederick Buechner’s famous definition of vocation as “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet,” arguing that gladness reflects a privileged perspective and proposing instead that vocation be defined as “any meaningful, life-giving work you do for the world.”
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Article
Vocation Outside of Career: Discovering Purpose through Comics
María Evelia Emerson
Emerson recounts building an Augustana Vocational Discernment course around G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel series, using Kamala Khan’s juggling of family, friendship, faith, and superhero identity to help sophomores see vocation as not what they do for a living but how they want to live.
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Article
Leadership in a Pandemic: Grace-Filled Lessons in Unprecedented Times
Marc Jerry
Reflecting on his first year as president of Luther College at the University of Regina, Jerry argues that the best preparation for leading through a long crisis was not his economics or strategy training but seminary and pastoral formation—and that NECU institutions are called to a post-pandemic ministry of kindness, grace, and community.
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Book Review
Unconventional Wisdom and Talking about God: A Review of Beckstrom’s Leading Lutheran Higher Education in a Secular Age
Ann Rosendale
Rosendale reviews Brian Beckstrom’s Leading Lutheran Higher Education in a Secular Age, recommending its diagnosis of the gap between espoused and perceived Lutheran identity at ELCA schools and its prescription—Trinitarian Missiological Ecclesiology and a campus-wide willingness to talk explicitly about God.
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Reflection
Shelter in Place: Reflections from March 22, 2020
Jason A. Mahn
On the fourth Sunday of Lent in 2020, Mahn meditates on the etymology of “shelter” (from shield) and on an email from a former student in Boston whose mutual-aid organizing models a Lutheran understanding of vocation: the upending of ego by divine love that frees us, finally, to see and serve the neighbor.
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Response
Response to Bishop Olson and President Tipson
Robert Benne
No. 16 · Winter 2003
Benne responds to two articles in the Winter 2002 Intersections: former Bishop Stanley Olson’s “The Marks of an ELCA College,” whose narrow reading of the two kingdoms cedes all epistemological claims to secular knowledge, and President Tipson’s engagement with The Future of Religious Colleges, whose “rather unchastened Enlightenment spirit” underestimates how loaded the social sciences and humanities are with their own philosophical and religious assumptions. Drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr, John Milbank, and William Buckley, Benne defends a “critical mass” of pervasively Lutheran colleges and calls on bishops and pastors to take the schools seriously lest they drift from their religious heritage.
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Article
The Ought
Ned Wisnefske
No. 19 · Summer 2004
Wisnefske observes that students and faculty raise contradictory objections to moral education—that students are already morally formed, and that teachers must not form them—and argues that both share the same fear of “the Ought.” He proposes that the Ought is best encountered not in front of us but behind us, nudging us, as we exercise impartiality, sympathy, and free will and discover that the persons participating in moral inquiry deserve respect; the Ought can then reform our past formations and transform our wants, so that it is never too late, or a mistake, to be shaped by it.
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Article
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
No. 15 · Winter 2002
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.
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Article
Responding to Student Hunger at NECU Institutions
Kristen Glass Perez
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Glass Perez recounts how her work as college chaplain at Augustana and Muhlenberg evolved after a student offhandedly declared, “I am always so hungry at this school,” and shares five lessons learned from launching campus pantries, emergency grant programs, and the HOPE Survey to address food insecurity as a defining calling of NECU institutions.
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Article
The "V" Word: Different Dimensions of Vocation in a Religiously Diverse Classroom
Martha E. Stortz
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Stortz responds to a sea of blank stares when she used the word “vocation” in a religiously diverse required course by offering five metaphors — place, path, relationships, lens, and story — that point to different dimensions of vocation across the world’s religions and help students articulate their callings on their own terms.
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Institutional Focus
Embodying the Tradition: The Case of Wittenberg University
Baird Tipson
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Tipson, President of Wittenberg University, locates Wittenberg in the “American” strain of Ohio Lutheranism founded in 1845 under Ezra Keller (a Pennsylvania College and Gettysburg Seminary graduate and disciple of Samuel Simon Schmucker), with English-language preaching, financial support from the pan-Protestant New England Society, Presbyterians on the Board, and an Episcopalian teaching Latin. He names two ongoing challenges—remaining authentically Lutheran while welcoming a pluralistic student body (just under a quarter are Lutheran in a primary service area that is 5% Lutheran), and making the tradition clear and compelling to non-Lutheran or lukewarm Lutheran students—and presents the five things every Wittenberg graduate should be able to do (respond to the human condition; recognize, define, and solve problems; develop a sense of vocation; assume servant-leadership; take moral responsibility) as authentic expressions of the Gospel and of the university’s ELCA relationship.