Here we are this beautiful morning in March, at a nexus of three currents of life pulling us into their rhythms. First, it is spring in Minnesota, and we can feel the earth starting to stir, starting to grow and green. Second, as faculty, staff and students we’re back from spring break heading into the final seven weeks of school. There is a lot of work to be done, and we may be uncertain about what the future holds, nevertheless, we know that the future will come, the end of the school year will be upon us before we know it, and we’ll be on our way even if we don’t know where we’ll be going. Third, for those of us who find strength and meaning in the church, we’re fresh from the joy and the drama of Holy Week and its passion—the crucifixion, the empty grave, and the resurrection. In this third rhythm, as with the rhythms of spring and the school year, we find ourselves asking “What is happening now? Where is this current pulling us?”
In the midst of these three currents, one might be forgiven for feeling somewhat overwhelmed! Spring, at least for me, is quite enough. It is difficult for me to concentrate. My senses are awakening after the longest slumber. I can smell the earth that has been dormant for too long coming back to life and hear the birds that have been absent. The cycle of birth and life is beginning again, and it makes me giddy.
Perhaps we might content ourselves with celebrating this rebirth of spring. Perhaps we ought to refuse attempts to synthesize its meaning with our own personal journeys, or the mythos of a religious narrative. Maybe spring should be protected against a religious desire to baptize and control it’s unruly energy. ee cummings, for example, seems to urge this resistance when he writes to the earth:
“ how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods
(but true to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic lover
thou answerest them only with spring)” (O sweet spontaneous)
Alternatively, if the brute naturalism of cummings is unpersuasive, we might try to connect spring with the rhythms of the Christian life, reading into its significance the innocence of the garden, as does Gerald Manley Hopkins when he wonders,
what is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet beginning
In Eden garden –
Have, get, before it cloy
Before it cloud, Christ, land, and sour with sinning
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy. (Spring)
But suppose you hesitate at this tug of spring; you might not find it so innocent. With Edna St. Vincent Millay, you might acknowledge that
The smell of the earth is good
It is apparent that there is no death
And yet, as she does, you might require better answers, noting
But what does that signify?
Not only underground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots…
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April comes like an idiot,
babbling and strewing flowers.
I leave it to you to decide which current you feel most strongly today, whether you feel swept up by the pulse and eternal rhythm of nature, or can also feel the pull of career, academy, and religious narrative. Regardless, we find ourselves here together this morning in the midst of spring and the Easter season, being called into a future that is redolent with promises of unruly growth, graduation and vocation, a future that is coming but a future that we cannot predict or control.
And the passage from Scripture read this morning, I’d like to suggest, speaks beautifully to our situation. A fragment of a poem taken from the Song of Songs, it offers another poetic voice to add to those I’ve mentioned. (Actually it offers two voices, two rather bold young lovers, a bride and a bridegroom in the P.C. version.
The young woman imagines her beloved, and in her anticipation compares him to spring itself bursting forth in the land, a gazelle bounding over the hills, the very picture of exquisite desire.
And in that bucolic setting, she tells us, she hears her beloved calling to her. He uses the occasion of the tempestuous promise of spring, to call:
Rise up, my darling; my fair one, come away.
For see, the winter is past! ….
Rise up, my darling; my fair one, come away.
To where is she being called? Why can’t he come to her where she is? And, if, following our Jewish and Christian forbearers, we read ourselves into this fragment somehow, we must also ask: To where are we being called in the spring? And who is calling us? And if we respond, will we be found?
With the right kind of imagination, I think, we ought to read ourselves and this spring morning into this biblical passage. Whether you manage to feel all three of the currents carrying us forward this morning or only one or two, I would like to suggest that at this very moment you are being stirred up to the rush and rhythm of something like love, provoked by a promise, called out of yourself by someone else.
Even if we were to focus only on the academic current, the language of love should hardly seem strange. The erotic attraction of truth and beauty and goodness has been an essential element of true liberal-arts learning since Plato penned dialogues like the Symposium and the Phaedrus. You may not realize it, but when you sit down to contemplate that end of the semester seminar paper, I’m suggesting, you’re being called by a kind of love. And how implausible is it really, to extend this excitement to the sense of spiritual journey that your life ought to have—how surprised should you be to discover that your late night jaunt to the L & M, or your chance encounter with a homeless woman on a street corner in the city was a moment for you to experience the agitation of new life presenting itself to you as awakening desire. Why can’t this call be understood in terms of the promise and frustrations of love?
Finally, suppose that you understand your spring, your academic search for knowledge, and your spiritual search for vocation in the context of Easter, suppose that you are flush with the surprise and joy of an empty grave. Consider the astonishing mix of terror and joy the two disciples felt as a result of their encounter on the road to Emmaus. Is it really so implausible to understand the provocations lying in wait for you this season in the same way? As hoped for but unpredictable meetings with the new surprising life to be found in your risen Lord?
In conclusion, let me return to the Song of Songs and observe an important point essential to understanding the kind of love that the text urges. While I’ve invited us all to read the text with imagination, we cheat ourselves if we spiritualize and allegorize too much or too quickly. Particularly as Christians, we may read the Songs as an allegory of Christ and the church; even so, I don’t think we should ignore the fact that the language of love here is the language of love in the spring, it is the language of flirtation, it depends on felt desire in its raw form—insistent, straining, delighting in and surrendering to and searching out the concrete details. She has more hope than cummings will allow. While the lover who calls the woman may be a symbol of Christ to Christians or God to Jews, the main character of the Songs is not the woman’s lover. It is undoubtedly the woman herself, and while she is young, she is not an innocent child to be comforted by a father figure who will keep her safe and secure. So the poet of the Songs offers a counter to Hopkins as well as cummings. It is this bold woman’s desire and her trust in this desire that is felt most vividly in the Songs. And if you read the rest of the Songs, you discover that her felt desire is not easily resolved. Hers is not a love of blessed assurance. Thus, while she is more hopeful than St. Vincent Millay, she does not respond to her request for better answers with pat guarantees. The woman searches for her lover, she tries to answer his call, but she does not seem to find him nor is it clear that she is finally found. This is not to say that she is not truly both lover and beloved; it is only to avoid simplifying or sentimentalizing the desire and love that animates her.
What does it mean then to read the Songs in the spring at St. Olaf? Like the woman in the Songs, you are being caught up in something and called by an elusive promise. “It is spring,” the voice says, “rise up and come away.” This love that can animate us may not be easy or smooth, but it is there if we pay attention and respond, it is coursing through our lives, pulling us into its current, as sure as spring is coming and as sure as our lives will continue to unfold and, we hope and pray, blossom.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg notes that most papers in this issue grew out of a pan-Lutheran conference organized by the Association of Lutheran College Faculties in fall 2006 rather than the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, and argues that the ELCA’s ecumenical posture—truthful but open to learning from others—is a good foundation for institutions of higher education whose faculty likewise profess while remaining subject to change based on new research and insights.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
Haak frames the issue around the question of what holds the twenty-eight ELCA colleges together amid their geographic, economic, and theological diversity, introducing Mark Hanson’s address to the assembled college presidents, Randall Balmer’s outsider perspective on the commonalities of Christian liberal arts, José Marichal and Pamela Brubaker on diversity rooted in community and globe, Storm Bailey’s argument that being Lutheran is precisely what makes us embrace diversity, and Jaime Schillinger’s St. Olaf chapel reflection on the formative power of worship and liturgy.
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Article
Reflections on Our Shared Commitments
Mark S. Hanson
Originally delivered to the Lutheran Educational Conference of North America in March 2007, Hanson’s address describes the ELCA as “an ecology of interdependent ecosystems” and locates the church’s relationship to its twenty-eight colleges and universities in a shared mission rather than in older anxieties about church-relatedness. Drawing on Wittenberg’s Lutheran Identity Study, Augustana’s “Five Faith Commitments,” Pamela Jolicoeur’s Concordia address, W. Robert Connor on “big questions,” Joseph Sittler on grace, Walter Brueggemann on fear, Jonathan Strandjord on being “other-wise,” and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s Public Church for the Life of the World, he names four marks of shared mission: communities of free inquiry, encouragement of religious expression in a diverse society, education for the common good, and the formation of leaders for church and religious communities worldwide.
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Editorial
Guest Editor
Madeleine Forell Marshall
Marshall introduces the four papers in this issue from the 70th annual meeting of the Association of Lutheran College Faculties, held at California Lutheran University in October 2006 on the theme “Identity and Diversity in the Lutheran College.” She notes a geographic pattern—the two East Coast contributors (Balmer and Bailey) defend Christian liberal arts against perceived suspicion, while the two Westerners (Marichal and Brubaker) treat Lutheran identity as advantage and diversity as a Lutheran given—and announces the 2007 ALCF meeting at Newberry College on “Beyond ‘Whatever’: Values Based Learning in Lutheran Higher Education.”
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Article
Sojourners in a Pluralistic Land: The Promise and Peril of Christian Higher Education
Randall Balmer
Balmer, a Barnard scholar of American evangelicalism reared in evangelical parsonages and formed at Trinity College in the Chicago suburbs, defends public education even as he champions Christian higher education as a “halfway house” for students moving from religious subculture into a pluralistic world. Drawing on his own undergraduate experience, his books Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory and Thy Kingdom Come, and a chastening visit to Patrick Henry College, he names three perils of Christian higher education—the Scylla of secularism (intellectual arrogance allergic to piety), the Charybdis of sectarianism (intellectual dishonesty as exemplified by intelligent design’s special pleading), and insularity—and prescribes mentors, primary sources, internships outside the subculture, and a broader, intergenerational pluralism on campus.
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Article
Lutheran Identity, Academic Integrity, and Religious Diversity
Storm Bailey
Bailey argues that one might rightly say of a college “that’s a pretty good school because it’s religious,” defending the proposition under three headings: academic and curricular virtues, free inquiry, and religious diversity. Drawing on Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden, Richard Hughes on the Lutheran tradition’s “most potent theological resources” for the life of the mind, Parker Palmer, Lendol Calder, Mill’s On Liberty, Newman’s Idea of a University, and the AAUP’s 1940 Statement, he proposes a “critical mass” alternative in which the Lutheran commitment to truth-seeking and self-critique itself requires—rather than tolerates—a religiously diverse faculty whose opposing voices are needed for the mission to flourish.
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Article
Why Diversity and Civic Engagement Don't Talk to Each Other on College Campuses: The Need for Public Work
Jose Marichal
Marichal opens with Thurgood Marshall’s line from Milliken v. Bradley and traces the “decoupling” of campus diversity and civic engagement initiatives back to their shared grounding in Benjamin Barber’s “thin” or pluralist democracy. Reviewing CIRCLE data on youth political disengagement, the limits of mandatory volunteerism, and persistent residential segregation, and drawing on Mary Ann Glendon, Lani Guinier, Caryn McTighe Musil, and Richard Rorty, he argues that only Harry Boyte’s notion of “public work” can bind diversity and civic engagement together—and contends that Lutheran colleges, with their understanding of vocation as call into the world, are uniquely positioned to build that infrastructure.
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Article
Rich and Poor in an Era of Globalized Religion and Economies: Challenges to Lutheran Colleges
Pamela K. Brubaker
Brubaker opens with two World Council of Churches communion stories—a generous Aymara potato meal in Bolivia and a gated invitation-only lunch at a prosperous immigrant German Lutheran church in Brazil—to frame the question of which stance Lutheran colleges will adopt toward diversity. Drawing on Richard Hughes and Ernest Simmons on Lutheran “ecumenical confessionalism,” Linell Cady, Ulrich Beck, Held and McGrew, the World Bank’s 2006 Equity and Development report, Mark Juergensmeyer’s Global Religions, Harvey Cox on the Market as God, the WCC’s “economy of life” / AGAPE document, and Larry Rasmussen on universal human rights, she argues that part of the academic work of Lutheran colleges is to educate for critical citizenship by questioning neo-liberal assumptions and equipping students to claim social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights for the whole human family.
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Article
Rooted and Open: Background, Purpose, and Challenges
Mark Wilhelm
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Wilhelm traces Rooted and Open’s seventy-year backstory — from Conrad Bergendoff’s 1948 call for a Lutheran philosophy of education through the recovery of the vocation tradition — and describes the document’s process, purpose as a teaching and study resource, and the embodiment, contextual, and cultural challenges it implies for NECU institutions.
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Book Review
Vocation on Campus: Reading Mark Tranvik's Martin Luther and the Called Life at Pacific Lutheran University
Alex Lund, Michael Halvorson
No. 47 · Spring 2018
Halvorson and Lund — faculty member and student — review Mark Tranvik’s Martin Luther and the Called Life alongside PLU’s Wild Hope Center for Vocation, weighing the book’s warning against “vocation lite” against the challenge of speaking of God’s call to students in the Pacific Northwest’s “None Zone,” where most students have little exposure to Lutheranism.
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Article
Mars, Mammon—and Other Options
Carl Skrade
No. 20 · Fall 2004
In a wide-ranging public lecture from a Capital University Philosophy and Religion department series on “The Empire, Its Religions, and Some Alternatives,” Skrade distinguishes the military from militarism (using Oxford and Chalmers Johnson definitions), catalogs evidence of contemporary U.S. militarism—budget allocations, arms sales, the military-academic complex, post-1945 interventions, overseas bases, and Bush-era profiteering through Bechtel and Halliburton—and traces its roots in resource greed, racism, right-wing religiosity, and Augustinian incurvatus in se ipsum. After surveying the financial and human costs through testimony from Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam, Samuel Hynes’s The Soldier’s Tale, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, and Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey, he applies Vincent Ferraro’s seven principles of just war to Gulf II, reads Matthew 5:43-48 as a call to indiscriminate care, and proposes a www.religiousleft.org website to host a Christian alternative to Mars and Mammon.
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Article
Mission and Hiring in the Christian College
Bruce Reichenbach
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Reichenbach of Augsburg argues that the Christian or Church-related college’s mission to educate the whole person from a perspective of Christian faith and values can only succeed through intentional hiring of a “critical mass” of faculty, administrators, and staff committed to that mission (following George Marsden and the 1960s Danforth Commission), supplemented by on-going faculty development. He defends an inclusive community-with-diversity, a freedom-and-commitment tension grounded in Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of tradition, and the legality of preferential religious hiring under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the relevant case law (Tilton, Hunt, Roemer, Blanton, Grove City, Amos).
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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.
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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
No. 53 · Spring 2021
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.