Confessions of a Collaborator

From the Publisher

James M. Unglaube

Unglaube opens the journal’s second year by previewing the 1997 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference at Carthage, which will examine the Lutheran tradition from outside (Richard Hughes of Pepperdine on the Lilly Endowment’s Models for Christian Higher Education; David Johnson, President of the University of Minnesota at Morris and Luther College graduate, on the tradition from the public sector) and inside (Ann Pederson of Augustana in Sioux Falls; Timothy Lull of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary), and previews Eric Eliason’s emerging proposal for an Academy of Scholars in Lutheran Higher Education modeled on NEH/NSF-style summer seminars.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

Christenson explains that this issue breaks from the first two issues’ single-focus pattern to feature three principal papers on the environment, the education of desire, and hiring and personnel policies, plus two poems and a piece of reflective bemusement. He then commends George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford, 1997) and challenges Lutheran scholars to articulate how the particulars of their faith inform their scholarship—in conversation with Calvinist work like Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and Art in Action—rather than remaining silently complicit in the view that faith has no place in the academy.

The Lutheran Liberal Arts College and Care for the Earth

H. Paul Santmire

Santmire, author of The Travail of Nature, proposes three mandates for the Lutheran liberal arts college: take responsibility for spiritual particularity by confronting the ambiguities of the classical Christian tradition (Lynn White’s charge against anthropocentric Christianity vs. the Franciscan ecological tradition from Irenaeus through Luther) and of classical Lutheran social ethics (the Two Kingdoms, Romans 13, the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer); promote responsible cultural criticism (against Thoreau’s sociopathic anti-urban suburbanism); and promote a holistic environmental ethos through an interdisciplinary core curriculum with ecology as the queen of the sciences, a community that liberates the social imagination (Mumford, Marcuse), a cosmic Liturgical praxis rooted in the Colossians 1:15–20 hymn to the cosmic Christ, and an academy that models ecological responsibility.

An Aristotelian Twist to Faith and Learning

Gregg Muilenberg

Muilenburg, chair of Philosophy at Concordia, surveys the four traditional models for faith and reason—conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration—and argues that the Lutheran dialogical model is insufficient for wholeness. Drawing on the post-foundationalist epistemology of perspective and Aristotle’s account of knowing as desire-driven action, he proposes that faith is an ultimate value (an assessment belief of the form ‘x is better than y’), that learning is desire-directed action, and that the core of Christian education is the education of Christian desire—requiring both reflection and commitment, both integration and diversity.

Two Poems: The Dark Angels / Decorative Cooking

Gary Fincke

Two poems by Gary Fincke of Susquehanna University: “The Dark Angels,” a return to the sidewalk in front of the father’s razed bakery in Etna, the soot-pocked windows, the Saturday trash fire, the last eclair on the work room’s folding chair; and “Decorative Cooking,” the mother’s story of St. Julitta, Betty Crocker’s “New Design for Happiness,” the Sunday dinners of shaped Jellos and anise Magi cookies, the visit of the former pastor returned to Pittsburgh to declaim the death of God, and the father who lays evergreen crosses by the mother’s headstone in the Garden of Dreams.

Mission and Hiring in the Christian College

Bruce Reichenbach

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).

A Call for Creative Education

Wendy McCredie

McCredie of Texas Lutheran responds to Reichenbach by reframing the four ideas embedded in his claim that “the entire college community should be knowledgeably committed to the college’s mission”—community, knowledge, commitment, mission—and argues that the Lutheran tradition’s unwillingness to be separate from the world should lead us to educate the public about the Lutheran tradition rather than interrogate prospective employees about their faith. She questions whether agreement on “Christian values” is possible (or even Lutheran), and reads Reichenbach’s “creative education” as the dialectical tension between gospel and law, God’s love and our human limits, that members of communities related to the Lutheran church are uniquely positioned to inhabit.

Hitting a Moving Target

Harry Jebsen

Jebsen, former Provost of Capital University, responds to Reichenbach by arguing that the institutions, the ELCA, congregations and pastors, students, and curriculum are all moving targets. Drawing on Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and his own fifteen years of hiring as Dean and Provost (a candidate who hoped the cross out front didn’t mean anything), he traces the drift from the “Mr. Chips” faculty who personified Dana and Midland Lutheran to a campus culture where “everybody is nice to each other” has replaced theological substance, and where MBA programs, conservatories, law schools, and adult-education programs further dilute the focus of the residential Lutheran college.

Modeling Virtue: In Which a Social Psychologist Decides He Can Do Good Without Freely Choosing It

Chuck Huff

No. 9 · Summer 2000

Huff, recalling his 1975 sophomore disillusionment with a sterile introductory psychology in South Georgia (and Danny Saunders’s question from The Chosen), defends a scientific psychology as model-making rather than meaning-finding, traces the collapse of Lawrence Kohlberg’s totalizing theory of moral development into chastened mini-theories, and presents William Damon and Anne Colby’s interview study of twenty-three “moral exemplars” whose lives were marked by self-good unity, constant self-examination in community, a felt inability to have done otherwise, religious grounding, and genuine happiness. Following Aristotle on virtue as learned habit and the Christian tradition of the “slave for Christ,” he concludes that goodness flows from the choice of constraints rather than from the lone free-will hero of fairy tales, complicating C. P. Snow’s two-cultures divide. Originally the 1998 Mellby Lecture at St. Olaf.

On the Outside Looking Out: A Personal and Social Psychological Response

Chuck Huff

No. 2 · Winter 1997

Huff of St. Olaf—a self-described “Metho-Bap-terian” from the South educated at Bob Jones University—offers a personal response to Bouman’s themes (welcoming the rejection of biblical inerrancy, the distinction between gospel and scripture in the homosexuality debate, the gospel-in-the-creeds reading that releases him from Hellenistic conundrums, and the recasting of justification by faith as meaning rather than insurance policy) and a social-psychological response in which a planned study of campus social networks at St. Olaf was discontinued when preliminary interviews revealed that everyone—storied Lutherans, secular faculty, feminists, fundamentalists—felt like outsiders. Continuing the tradition requires constructing a conversation that is thoughtful, fair, inclusive, charitable, focussed, and still true to the tradition.

Do You Teach in a Different Manner at a Lutheran College? Unraveling the Lutheran Knot and Highlighting the Glory in the Theology of the Cross

Curtis L. Thompson

No. 16 · Winter 2003

Thompson argues that being Lutheran means having a “knot in the stomach”—a dialectical “Yes and No” tension between law and gospel, two kingdoms, Word and world—and that this knot is held together by Luther’s theology of the cross supplemented by an under-appreciated theology of glory in which God shines through human beings and creation. He then traces how the Lutheran knot shapes his teaching at Thiel College in the Religion department, the first-year team-taught “History of Western Humanities,” the second-year “Science and Our Global Heritage,” and his work as Co-Director of Thiel’s Global Institute, concluding that only such “dialectical doublespeak” leaves him with the “at-once dreaded and delightful dis-ease of the Lutheran knot.”

Roots and Shoots: Tending to Lutheran Higher Education

Jason A. Mahn

No. 49 · Spring 2019

Mahn revisits why “education-for-vocation” has become a leitmotif for the 27 NECU schools, distinguishes institutional vocation from individuals’ religious identities and educational priorities from their theological grounding, and offers a friendly critique of Jodock’s bridge metaphor: Lutheran colleges grow in two directions like plants — deep roots and wide branches alike require constant tending.

From the Editor

Jason A. Mahn

No. 52 · Fall 2020

Mahn narrates a year of crisscrossing pandemics — Covid-19, economic collapse, partisan politics, and the long pandemic of white supremacy revealed anew by the murder of George Floyd — and argues that Lutheran liberal arts schools, by educating for vocation, are uniquely poised to help students respond with character and capable callings.

In the Beginning of the Reformation Was the Word

George Connell

No. 46 · Fall 2017

Drawing on a Concordia faculty pilgrimage to German Luther sites, Connell appropriates John’s prologue to frame the Reformation as a movement about words — the printed page, the university classroom, the Marburg confession, the Wartburg translation, Bach’s music, and the dining-room conversations of Table Talk — while soberly noting that words can wound as well as heal.

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.

Sense of Vocation

Ruth R. Kath

No. 31 · Winter 2010

Kath describes Luther College’s Sense of Vocation program, organized into three components: General Program Initiatives (Vocation Visitors such as Parker Palmer, the Faith and Learning Workshop, self-directed reading grants, publications, and travel funds), the Church Ministry Program (Vocation Fellowships, the DIAKONOS discernment group, seminary visits, alumni discernment retreats, church leader workshops, clergy renewal, and the WIYLDE youth initiative), and the All-Student Vocation Program (Paideia I orientation, Peer Mentors, Capstone curriculum development grants, the Vocation Advising Workshop, and a Vocation Advising Handbook).