To the Editor:
I am a Lutheran pastor out here in the Pacific northwest struggling to articulate the Gospel in meaningful ways while not abandoning the core convictions we live by. I am also on the Board of Regents at Pacific Lutheran University, where I graduated in religion and history some nineteen years ago. I am writing to you out of a sense of perplexity regarding the current assumptions in the church related institutions. I recently read in the Christian Century, a review of a book by James Tunstead Burtchaell titled The Dying Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches. Apparently Burtchaell feels we are merely paying lip service to the gospel in the so-called Christian university. He articulates what he believes has been a whole hearted selling out of Christian core assumptions in deference to a watered down, less than offensive language of character building and lives of service for our fellow human beings. As a regent at PLU, I believe I understand some of the perplexities of appealing to a wider spectrum of people under the guise of openness and tolerance. I wonder, however, if we have lost, amidst the generic language of service and leadership, a compelling word of hope and forgiveness in Jesus Christ? Have we, in an effort to become tolerant, abandoned our core convictions because of the offense? I write to you with these thoughts because I was impressed with the article you wrote for the Intersections journal on some of these very issues. I am neither a Christian without sensitivity to the cultural assumptions, nor do I consider myself among the ranks of those who are seemingly appalled when the Gospel is rightly proclaimed and articulated. I write as one convinced of the need for openness and necessary contemplation of varying perspectives and persuasions. Simultaneously, I am concerned for a differentiation between a liberal arts school unaffiliated with the church and one, that at least in theory, still yearns for the connection. I thank you for your consideration in this vital matter.
Pastor John L. Vaswig
Spokane, Washington
-
Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg celebrates the popularity of the previous issue—the first to draw on papers from the annual “Vocation of a Lutheran College” conference—and announces a new Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation grant that will fund the inaugural Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education, a two-week seminar at Harvard led by Ronald Thiemann on “Finding Our Voice: Christian Faith and Critical Vision.”
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson introduces the issue’s contents—papers from the 1998 Vocation conference by Cheryl Ney and Robert Scholz, a response by Jennifer Sacher Wiley, an interview with four Capital University faculty about Cuba, a meditation by St. Olaf senior Erik Haaland, and the journal’s first letter to the editor—and commends the Mount Mary College volume Wagering on Transcendence as a model of a faculty community sustained by Friday-afternoon conversation over a glass of wine.
-
Article
Rooting Science in Empathy: Growing Towards a Sustainable Science Practice for the 21st Century
Cheryl L. Ney
Ney, a DNA biochemist turned feminist science educator at Capital University, traces her own search for the “grounding” of teaching from Ernest Boyer’s scholarship of teaching through Cathleen Loving’s Scientific Theory Profile, Evelyn Fox-Keller’s critiques of science as “truly masculine philosophy” and her biography of Barbara McClintock (“A Feeling for the Organism”), and Arnold Pacey’s definition of science as a web of technical, organizational, and cultural practice. Drawing on the Dutch Science Shops, the Loka Institute’s community-based research, and academic service learning, she calls for “sustainable science practice” rooted in empathy and asks whether Lutheran institutions have the courage to claim an institutional freedom of vision rather than reduce themselves to preparation for the job market.
-
Article
How Can We Keep From Singing?
Robert Scholz
Scholz, professor of music at St. Olaf, responds to Tom Christenson’s “Freedom of a Christian” by walking through his own Nunc dimittis for the St. Olaf Christmas Festival, an Elderhostel choir of singers aged 60 to 95, and the four liberating arts (enablement and change, melioristic, embodying, and critical) as they shape conducting, composition, and music education. He defends the fine arts and folk traditions over “contemporary Christian” soft pop-rock and taped accompaniments, citing Luther’s preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae and the family of God’s need to interact in song against the virtual community of TV evangelism and the Crystal Cathedrals of the air.
-
Reflection
Some Personal Reflections on the ELCA Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, 1998
Jennifer Sacher Wiley
Sacher Wiley, a Unitarian Universalist with one Jewish parent and a first-year music faculty member at Susquehanna, reflects on common-ness and other-ness at the 1998 conference—Tom Christenson’s weaver’s warp and Charles Ives’s essay on American music—and proposes four markers of group identity. Against the fear of secularization expressed by some attendees, she suggests that “Christian” might be defined less by belief in Christ as Savior than by living a vocation as Jesus lived, with Cheryl Ney offered as an example of a “working prophet,” or “little Christ,” regardless of specific belief in the Trinity.
-
Article
The Face of the Neighbor: An Interview with Four Capital University Faculty About Their Recent Visit to Cuba
Brian Forry Wallace, Michael Yosha, Reg Dyck, Susan Narita
Four Capital University faculty—political scientist Brian Wallace (returning to Cuba a third time after the 1994 boat lift), English professor Reg Dyck, ESL teacher Susan Narita, and political scientist Michael Yosha—recount their summer 1998 trip with Pastors for Peace, describing Cuban priorities of education, health care, and military (in that order), the cultural richness of Havana from sixteenth-century cloisters to Miramar, the Cuban Foreign Service’s vision of a Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, the counter-productive U.S. embargo (including its effect on kidney dialysis machines), Castro’s 1991 reconciliation with religious communities, and a recurrent image of a little girl named Marguerite singing at a school for amputee and terminally ill children. The interview was conducted by Capital senior Jessica Brown and Tom Christenson.
-
Reflection
Meditation—Band Chapel Service, St. Olaf College
Erik Haaland
Haaland, a St. Olaf senior, offers a brief Band Chapel meditation that defines art as “the expression of what is deeply human through the manipulation of the physical world” and defends worship—architecture, stained glass, music, eloquence—as an art form requiring our best and most sincere efforts. When the God we worship and the salvation we proclaim do not seem near, artful worship offers not propositions but something real and tangible to hold on to.
-
Institutional Focus
Continuing the Dialogue: Augustana College
Sandra C. Looney
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Looney describes Augustana College, Sioux Falls, debating and renaming its values—Christian, Liberal Arts, Community, Excellence, Service—under the leadership of religion professor Dr. Arthur Olsen and the T’N’T (“Through Thick and Thin”) committee, in the wake of ELCA Region III’s “What Does It Mean to be a College of the Church?” conversations. She describes Augustana’s 56% Lutheran student body, daily 10 a.m. chapel, dual Christmas Vespers in Our Savior’s Lutheran Church and St. Joseph’s Cathedral, the Capstone classes on moral and aesthetic issues, and the ongoing work of enlarging Augustana’s conversation to include Native American, Jewish, and Islamic voices.
-
Article
Vocation Outside of Career: Discovering Purpose through Comics
María Evelia Emerson
No. 53 · Spring 2021
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.
-
Article
Lutheran Colleges, the Lutheran Tradition, and the Future of Service-Learning
Joseph McDonald
No. 34 · Fall 2011
McDonald, who has used service-learning since the early 1990s and now directs the Values Based Learning Program at Newberry College, traces the service-learning movement from its 1960s socio-political pioneers (Nadinne Cruz, Ira Harkavy) through its institutionalization as classroom pedagogy and citizenship education (Stanton, Giles, and Cruz; Edward Zlotkowski; Jane Addams’s Hull House and John Dewey). He argues that three strengths of the Lutheran tradition—robust reflection as a community of discourse, Christian vocation as service infused in all roles, and the capacity to negotiate tension and paradox—uniquely equip Lutheran colleges to hold the pedagogical and socio-political dimensions of service-learning together, recovering the energy of the pioneers without sacrificing classroom rigor.
-
Institutional Focus
About the Cover and Artist
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Kristen Gilje, a Bellingham, Washington artist who spent nine years as Artist in Residence at Holden Village, recounts the “Tree of Life” she painted for the Holden Village 1999 summer theme and the unexpected interpretation Lapidary Fred offered of Yggdrasol, Prometheus, the Druid Tree Spirit, and the crucifix all at once.
-
Article
Changes
W. Robert Sorensen
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Writing as former executive director of the Division for Higher Education and Schools, Sorensen places the DHES within the threefold movement of Luther’s Reformation—university, church, and individual piety—and recounts how the Division cohered its work with colleges, universities, campus ministries, and schools around Joseph Sittler’s definition of education as “movement into a larger world.” Drawing on Huston Smith’s “primordial tradition,” the Namibian student program, work in India and Palestine, and the Bergendoff series of publications, he raises a twofold concern about the proposed merger of DHES into a Division for Vocation and Education: whether the new structure will signal the core significance of education in the heritage and life of the church, and whether it can carry forward the effectiveness and scope of DHES’ work.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Haak frames the issue around “Lutheran conversations,” centered on the exchange between Robert Benne and Tom Christenson at Wartburg College’s ongoing campus conversation about what it means to be a “college of the church,” alongside Mark Wilhelm’s historical and social context, Lake Lambert’s sermon, and Bishop Mark Hanson’s short piece reprinted from The Lutheran—and points readers to the Lutheran Academy of Scholars seminar at Harvard as a place to continue the conversation.