Lutheran Colleges and the "Other"
The Fall 2009 “Lutheran Colleges and the ‘Other’” issue explores how identity is formed in distinction from some “other” as partner rather than foil. Ronald D. Witherup marks ten years of the Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration; Rosemary Radford Ruether’s 1968 essay from Holden Village offers a Catholic’s view of Lutheranism from inside the sauna; Ahmed Afzaal charts a path from Christian-Muslim suspicion to trust; Paul Dovre traces fifty years of change in Midwestern Lutheran colleges; Mark Wm. Radecke offers a Screwtape-style satire on short-term mission trips; David C. Ratke recovers Löhe’s educational vision.
Editors
Articles in this Issue
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm reports on the difficult financial season facing the ELCA churchwide organization — a ten-percent budget reduction announced in November and significant cuts to unrestricted grants for colleges and universities — while affirming that the ELCA’s commitment to the mission of its schools remains strong, including its commitment to engaging the “other,” the theme of this issue.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
Haak frames the issue around the question of Lutheran college identity as formed in distinction from some “other,” introducing essays by Witherup on the Joint Declaration, Reuther on Holden Village, Afzaal on Christian-Muslim dialogue, Dovre on the history of Midwestern Lutheran colleges, Radecke on service-learning, and Ratke on Wilhelm Löhe — each making the claim that the “other” is an essential partner in conversation who helps us know who we are and shape who we will become.
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Article
Bringing an Ecumenical Milestone Out of the Shadows
Ronald D. Witherup, S.S.
Witherup draws attention to the tenth anniversary of the Lutheran-Catholic “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification” signed on Reformation Day 1999, summarizes the document’s claim that justification is the work of the triune God received by grace alone through faith, surveys the remaining questions raised by Pope John Paul II and the 2006 endorsement by the World Methodist Conference, and proposes a pastoral strategy for bringing this ecumenical milestone out of the shadows in Catholic parishes.
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Reflection
On Sharing the Sacred Sauna
Rosemary Radford Ruether
Reprinted from the National Catholic Reporter (August 1968), Ruether’s reflection from her time as a theologian on the faculty of Holden Village describes Lutheran community life in the mountains of northern Washington from a Catholic perspective — finding more catholicity in this Lutheran retreat than in many Roman Catholic communities — and culminates in a celebration of the Holden sauna as “the new sacrament, the new fellowship, the new theology.”
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Article
Between Suspicion and Trust
Ahmed Afzaal
Afzaal argues that scholars and educators have a unique vocation to shift Christian-Muslim relations from suspicion to trust, drawing on the 2007 Muslim open letter “A Common Word,” Robert Shedinger’s Was Jesus a Muslim?, and Muhammad Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam to argue that Christianity and Islam converge in the insight that religion is a spiritual force for social justice and human liberation — an insight obscured by the modern Western discourse of sui generis religion.
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Article
Lutheran Colleges: Past and Prologue
Paul J. Dovre
Dovre offers a reminiscence rather than a research paper, drawing on Aristotle’s ethos, logos, and pathos to trace fifty years of change at Midwestern Lutheran colleges through the key issues of survival, respectability, faithfulness, and relationship to the church — from the dependence of the 1950s through the independence of the late twentieth century to the partnership of the 2000s — and identifies key variables (the student marketplace, faculty formation, and the identity/diversity paradox) for shaping the identity and mission of Lutheran colleges into the future.
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Article
SCAM-ing Service-Learning and Mission Trips: A Satirical Essay
Mark Wm. Radecke
Radecke couches his research on best/worst practices in service-learning and short-term mission trips in a fictional Screwtape-style correspondence between Horatio Gumnut, CEO of “Spiritual Consultants and Mercenaries, Incorporated” (SCAM, Inc.), and Dwayne Pipe, an untenured professor seeking to sabotage a colleague’s Nicaragua mission trip — cataloging through indirection the disorienting dilemmas, commodification of the poor, exhaustion of reflective practice, and false noblesse oblige that derail such ventures, while pointing toward the genuine philoxenia, accompaniment, and structural awareness that mark a transformative experience.
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Article
Wilhelm Löhe and Higher Education
David Ratke
Ratke recovers the educational vision of Wilhelm Löhe (1808–1872), spiritual father of Wartburg College and Wartburg Seminary, drawing on Löhe’s “Aphorismen über Schule und Schulunterricht” and other writings to argue that education is about the formation of whole persons by whole teachers in whole institutions, that all education is religious and never neutral, and that education is for eternity as well as the present — a vision in which the values of Christianity sanctify the so-called worldly means of education.