As I was thinking of what I might say for this brief meditation, I stumbled on the realization that what we are doing here, right now, is a curious thing. How many communities, at least in this country, gather daily in an activity such as this? Why do we gather together in an activity like this? Why did you as individuals choose to come here to this place, now? What do you find here? While I’m not presumptuous enough to try to answer these questions for you, I will attempt to answer them for myself. And in the process, I would like to share a few perspectives on worship that I have adopted during my time at St. Olaf.
This place and this act of worship fill a need within me in a way I struggle to describe. It’s something spiritual, something emotional, something deeply human. And although I struggle to describe it, I know it has something to do with the totality of this experience. All of the elements around us are involved: the candles, the architecture, the stained glass, the music. Now, in this bit of rambling, I have conceptually combined two things—the deeply human and the manipulation of the physical world. And in my mental meanderings, I have found, in the combination of these two ideas, no better way to broadly define art—the expression of what is deeply human through the manipulation of the physical world.
But should we even be talking about the arts in worship? Given our Protestant history, this is a valid question. Christian worship and what are commonly thought of as the arts (especially music) have had an interesting and even antagonistic relationship. Church leaders have condemned the arts in worship at times, believing that our worship forms (liturgy or scripture reading) are specifically commanded by God. They believed these forms should not be polluted by human creativity.
As a committed humanist, I have to disagree with this interpretation of worship. I do not believe that worship is set on us from above as an obligation or duty—instead, it comes from deep within us as an expression of needs and experiences that touch the very core of who we are. And, if my definition of art has any value, then it should come as no surprise that our religious needs and experiences find expression in a worship that is infused with art—indeed a worship that is art. With architecture, stained glass, music, and on days with more qualified chapel speakers, eloquence, our worshipful response to God is art, and it flows through so many of the mediums in which our humanity has found expression. And for what greater endeavor could we use our artistic gifts than to proclaim the word of God’s saving grace?
However, my Lutheran tradition has always been very leery of allowing worship to look anything like a secular performance, and rightly so, for our worship should remind us of God’s kingdom—not our own. But this concern should not prohibit us from realizing that our worship is really an art form, and as such, it requires our best and most sincere efforts. For as Christians, we have faith that what we express here is of infinite importance, not only for our lives, but for all of creation. So let me repeat; this worship/this art requires our best and most sincere efforts.
And if I might, I have one more perspective to offer. I can only speak from my own experience, but I know there are times when the God we worship and the salvation we proclaim do not seem to be very near. And if our worship were only the bare proclamation of those ideas in, say, a confessional creed, Christianity would have at those times little to offer those of us with questions and doubts. But in artful worship, we are presented not with something we must believe against our intellect, but something real and tangible we can hold on to. Here power and truth can be known experientially, even if not conceptually. At least for me on my faith journey, this reality has been an infinite help keeping the faith, even if I have sometimes found my belief at an impasse.
Perhaps you are confident in your faith and knowledge of God—perhaps you are not. But no matter who you are, take heart in what we do here today. Seek to experience truth in what you see, hear, and say. For at its best, this communal experience in which we are engaged has the power to bring us a glimpse of God and of the kingdom. And as we now see in a mirror only dimly, worship has the power to bring us a glimpse of our salvation. Amen.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Institutional Focus
Letters to the Editor
The journal’s first letter to the editor: Pastor John L. Vaswig of Spokane, a Pacific Lutheran University alumnus and member of the PLU Board of Regents, writes after reading James Tunstead Burtchaell’s The Dying Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches to ask whether church-related institutions, in their effort to be open and tolerant, have abandoned a compelling word of hope and forgiveness in Jesus Christ.
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Article
Who Said You Have Only One Calling?
Peter Marty
No. 27 · Spring 2008
Marty argues that our normal practice of thinking singularly about vocation must be enlarged: God has not limited any of us to one expression or gift, and Martin Luther never spoke of individuals as having only one calling. Drawing on Max DePree’s parable of the millwright-poet, William May on the etymology of “career,” Evelyn Underhill on the verb “to Be,” James VanOosting, Scot McKnight’s “Jesus Creed,” and a Golden Gate Bridge patrolman who has saved hundreds of lives, he identifies four features common to every story of vocation in scripture: special purpose, special gifts, a caller from outside, and the requirement of sacrifice and generosity.
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Article
Learning and Teaching as an Exercise in Christian Freedom
Tom Christenson
No. 6 · Winter 1999
Christenson, the 1998 Wittenberg keynote, argues that what makes our institutions Lutheran is not the percentage of Lutherans served or employed, ethnic celebration, or self-conscious difference, but a theologically informed vision of the educational task framed by the linked ideas of gift, freedom, and vocation. Drawing on Joe Sittler, Wendell Berry, David Orr, Harold Kushner, John Updike, Frederick Buechner, and Luther’s On the Freedom of a Christian, he reframes the liberal arts as four “liberating arts”—critical/deconstructive, embodying/connecting, melioristic/creative, and arts of enablement and change—and closes with his mother’s “end-of-the-month soup” as an image of vocation in a particular place.
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Article
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.
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Editorial
From the Editor: Why All This Talk About Vocation?
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Windham-Hughes introduces the Fall 2022 issue built around Mark Wilhelm’s keynote “Why all this talk about vocation?” and previews five panel responses, two first-time conference reflections, and companion pieces on Womanist theology — framing vocation as a call not to privilege but to constructive and corrective work that undoes unjust systems.
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Article
Point / Counterpoint: What It Means to be a "College of the Church"
Robert Benne, Tom Christenson
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Moderated by Wartburg College pastor Larry Trachte and introduced by Kathryn Kleinhans, this Wartburg campus conversation between Robert Benne (Roanoke College) and Thomas Christenson (Capital University) probes what it means to be a college of the church—Benne emphasizing ethos, vocation, and the Christian intellectual tradition over against secularization and generic education, and Christenson lifting up persistent vocational questions, the gift of difference, and induction into a community of discourse—and finds large common ground around hiring for mission, pedagogy that asks deep questions, and the courage to claim a living religious tradition while inviting everyone to the banquet.
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Reflection
Currents
Jaime Schillinger
No. 25 · Spring 2007
Preached in St. Olaf chapel on March 29, 2005, Schillinger reads three “currents” pulling on her hearers—Minnesota spring, the academic year’s final stretch, and Holy Week’s passion and resurrection—against poetic voices from ee cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, before turning to the Song of Songs to suggest that this nexus calls students into the rhythms of love, awakened desire, and an elusive, unresolved promise that animates academic, spiritual, and vocational search alike.