Education in the Age of Trump
Published in the wake of the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Spring 2017 “Education in the Age of Trump” issue gathers reflections on educating, teaching religion, organizing, preaching, and writing poetry in the early months of the Trump presidency. Contributors examine federal higher education policy, sanctuary campus debates, the religious story behind evangelical politics, the place of a Muslim professor at an ELCA institution, the prophet Jonah as anti-hero of public vocation, and the liminal experience of students caught between worlds—inviting readers to search for truth amid “alternative facts” and remain hopeful.
Editors
Articles in this Issue
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm describes how ELCA colleges and universities have shifted the definition of Lutheran higher education away from institutional markers toward alignment with educational values drawn from the Lutheran intellectual tradition — and previews a NECU-convened faculty working group whose recommendations will go to the ELCA college presidents at their June 2017 conference on Lutheran identity.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn introduces “Education in the Age of Trump” by recounting a difficult academic year on his own campus — the Augustana “chalking” incident, a Latinx Unidos rally, and post-election conversations with marginalized students and quietly conservative Trump supporters alike — and frames the issue’s essays as careful (re)imaginings of the vocation of Lutheran higher education in an anxious political climate.
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Article
Higher Education in the Age of Trump
Daniel B. Braaten
Braaten surveys what the Trump administration has and has not done on higher education — from the selection of Betsy DeVos and a rumored Falwell-led task force to the travel ban and expanded deportation priorities — and argues that Lutheran colleges, guided by the ELCA’s social message on immigration, have a special obligation to consider what they will do to protect their most vulnerable students.
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Article
Resistance in the Age of Trump: An Interview with Ivonne Wallace Fuentes
Jason A. Mahn, M. Ivonne Wallace Fuentes
In conversation with Jason Mahn, Roanoke College historian Ivonne Wallace Fuentes describes how she launched a local chapter of Indivisible after the 2016 election, how the skills of teaching and historical research carry over into grassroots advocacy, and how her sense of vocation (vocare) has become intertwined with the work of advocacy (advocare).
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Article
Religion in the Age of Trump
Daniel A. Morris
Morris reads the 81% evangelical vote for Donald Trump through two historical theses: that evangelicals’ once-coherent story about Godly participation in political life has fallen apart, and that their long-running tendency to exclude others — once aimed at Black Americans and Catholics — has now turned decisively against Muslims. He argues that scholars of religion and politics have a responsibility to tell these stories well, and that appeals to classroom objectivity can no longer be a luxury.
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Article
Room at the Table: Reflections on Identity and Inclusion from a Lutheran-Friendly Muslim
Rose Aslan
Aslan reflects on her experience as a Muslim professor of Islamic studies at California Lutheran University — teaching “Introduction to Christianity” from her strengths in the Abrahamic religions, preaching an Eid khutba in a Lutheran chapel, and conversing with the university’s convocators — and proposes “Lutheran-friendly Muslim” as a way of being host and guest at once in a pluralistic Lutheran institution.
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Article
Jonah: The Anti-Hero of Vocation
Martha E. Stortz
In a chapel talk first given at Augsburg College’s Vocation 2.0 series in September 2016, Stortz reads the prophet Jonah as the great anti-hero of vocation — one who tries to outrun God’s call to the great city of Nineveh — and argues that, in a season of urban violence and divisive election-year rhetoric, the story is less about public calling than about being called by the publics in our midst.
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Article
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? A Homily on Liminality and Vocation
Lori Brandt Hale
Drawing on Wes Moore’s The Other Wes Moore, Warren St. John’s Outcasts United, Victor Turner’s anthropology of liminality, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poem “Who Am I?”, Hale considers how Hmong, Muslim, Latinx, LGBTQ+, non-traditional, and other students live in “double liminal” spaces — and asks whether liminality might itself be a place of transformation in conversations about vocation.
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Poem
Poetry: After Months of Clouds, the Sun; First Bird
Farah Marklevits
Two poems by Augustana writing instructor Farah Marklevits: “After Months of Clouds, the Sun” calls the reader up from a desk of doom-scrolling addiction and into breeze and light, while “First Bird,” epigraphed by Emily Dickinson, watches a robin flit through mid-January Midwestern loam as a phenological fairy tale of dread and the urge to live.