Faith and Meaning in the Disciplines
The Spring 2013 “Faith and Meaning in the Disciplines” issue gathers six essays from ELCA faculty thinking through value, vocation, faith, and meaning from their own disciplines. The first five—on poetry, economics, choral music, biology, and religious studies—share parallel titles (Valuing Poetry, Calling Economists, Singing Faith, Living Biology, Professing Religion) and invite readers past the fact-value split between “hard” knowledge and “softer” meaning. Ernest Simmons closes with a Lutheran dialectical model in which faith and learning are kept in dynamic relationship at the intersection where vocation takes root.
Editors
Articles in this Issue
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm reports that decisions at the February 2013 LECNA and ELCA presidents’ meetings authorized reviews of funding and organizational practices and appointed a working group to draft a presidential statement on what it means to be a college or university of the ELCA, signaling a more substantive future role for the annual presidents’ gathering in shaping the shared identity and common mission of ELCA schools.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn introduces the issue’s six essays as parallel attempts—from poetry, economics, choral music, biology, religion, and Lutheran higher education—to resist our culture’s fact-value split, and uses Augustana’s Fritiof Fryxell, a 1922 biology and English graduate who began teaching just as the Scopes Trial ignited, to illustrate how church-related colleges have long held faith and disciplinary inquiry together.
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Article
Valuing Poetry
Allison Wee
Writing from California Lutheran University as “value” in higher education collapses into “can it get you a job?”, Wee makes a case for poetry as a life-saving discipline. Drawing on William Carlos Williams, Shakespeare, the Psalms, Wordsworth, Pattiann Rogers, Mary Oliver, and her own Environmental Literature assignment that sends students outside for an hour of attentive stillness, she argues that the poet’s skill of translation cultivates the close attention, fresh perspective, and immaterial dimensions of life her students need most.
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Article
Calling Economists
Lynn Hunnicutt
Reading Luther’s Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved alongside Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, Hunnicutt asks whether economists, too, can be saved—and whether economics can host a serious conversation about vocation. She traces her own move from Utah State to Pacific Lutheran University and its Wild Hope Center for Vocation, and turns to Deirdre McCloskey and George DeMartino as economists whose work makes room for vocation and the common good within the discipline.
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Article
Singing Faith
Adam Luebke
Luebke describes the Waldorf College Choir as a community of faith whose daily devotions, century-long lineage from F. Melius Christiansen, and disciplined wrestling with sacred repertoire—from Fauré’s Requiem to African-American spirituals to Romans 8 sung backstage—form students spiritually as they form them musically, so that fully grasping what they sing becomes a discovery of why they sing.
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Article
Living Biology
Stephanie Fuhr
Fuhr recounts how a one-credit Becoming Biologists course at Augustana College was rebuilt around the biological worldview after a student flagged John Janovy Jr.’s argument that values are legitimate tools in biology. Drawing also on Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, she argues that visions and values—not skills alone—inspire a life’s work in science and provide the foundation for lifetime engagement in the work of biology.
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Article
Professing Religion
John D. Barbour
Barbour reflects on the vocation of a Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College, asking when and how a teacher should disclose personal faith in the classroom. Drawing on his graduate teachers Anthony C. Yu and Langdon Gilkey, and on Augustine’s Confessions, Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, C. S. Lewis, and Kathleen Norris, he argues that teaching autobiography invites teaching autobiographically—and that professing religion is finally a matter of how one believes, not just what.
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Article
A Lutheran Dialectical Model for Higher Education
Ernest L. Simmons
Drawing on “The Freedom of a Christian,” simul justus et peccator, Richard Hughes, Joseph Sittler, Martha Nussbaum, and Tom Christenson, Simmons argues that the Lutheran tradition informs an open, dialectical educational model that holds Christian and academic freedom together. He locates vocation at the intersection of the practical (why are you here?) and the existential (why are you here?) and proposes Lutheran higher education as education for self-transcendence and leadership Soli Deo Gloria.