I write this column with the famous (in Christian circles) words about the human tongue from the Letter of James in the New Testament freshly on my mind. The text was one of readings yesterday at my church. The passage from James reads, “How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire. And the tongue is a fire! No one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (James 3:5b-6a; 8). As James writes more succinctly earlier in his letter, “If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues… their religion is worthless” (1:26).
Social ethics is not my academic discipline. Nonetheless, I can safely say that much Christian discourse about ethical conduct turns around the interplay of “bridling the tongue” and at the same time endorsing frank, honest conversation. The latter concern finds expression in a passage in the Letter to the Colossians, which urges Christians to always let their speech “be seasoned with salt” (4:6). Christians are to embrace a love ethic, but they are not to be door mats for Jesus, nor are they to ignore the evils they see. As the Lutheran tradition puts it, a theologian of the cross (that is, a follower of Jesus), calls a thing what it is.
Balancing the need for frank honesty in our speech, while at the same time not permitting frank speech to degenerate into hateful speech, is a daunting challenge. It is no virtue to avoid challenging difficult issues or wrongful acts under the banner of maintaining civility. At the same time, it is no virtue to speak with an arrogant, haranguing, unbridled tongue. We struggle to find the sweet spot. In response to the evil of segregation in the United States, Martin Luther King was convinced that nonviolent action was the way to “speak” frankly and honestly, controlling and avoiding “speaking” hate through a violent response. Malcolm X thought otherwise. The debates continue.
The challenge is further complicated because evil in our speech is easily disguised. This can be true in personal speech, for example, when overtly mild speech is used to demean someone, as in the damning of African Americans with faint praise in the comment “he speaks so well,” while omitting the implied “for a (n-word).” Evil social or organizational speech may also be disguised, often perniciously. For example, overtly “good” public speech by organizations is increasing used for evil through the mechanism known as astroturfing. Astroturfing is the practice of hiding the true sponsors of a message to make a message appear to be from some other (typically, grassroots) group. See John Oliver’s September 16 episode of Last Week Tonight on HBO if you are unfamiliar with the dastardly practice of astroturfing.
In higher education, the received practices of the academy give us an advantage over many groups in the United States for facing the challenge to sustain frank and honest but not hateful discourse about complex and divisive public issues. We should insist that the standards of academic discourse prevail when such issues are taken up on our campuses. These standards do not allow any and all speech, as guidelines adopted by many NECU institutions demonstrate. The standards of the North Atlantic academy, in which NECU institutions share, are deeply rooted in the Lutheran tradition and its insistence on frankness, honesty, and calling a thing what it is, while maintaining a concern for others and the common good and avoiding acrimony amid divisive disputes. The standards of academic discourse do not eliminate the challenge of speaking appropriately, but they give all of us in ELCA-related higher education a solid platform on which to stand. And they do this within a larger, fragmented culture struggling for pathways into civil discourse.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn recounts how a participant’s probing questions at the 2018 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference turned “civil discourse” from an innocuous theme into a contested one — and previews essays that variously urge listening and common ground, or speaking truthfully even when those words sound angry.
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Article
Vocation and Civil Discourse: Discerning and Defining
Lynn Hunnicutt
Hunnicutt draws on Rabbi Amy Eilberg’s reading of Moses’ calling to identify four features of vocational discernment — attention, wonder, communal consciousness, and humility — and argues that these same qualities are also key aspects of civil discourse, so that forming students for vocational discernment is simultaneously forming them for civility.
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Article
Polarization, Incivility, and a Need for "Change"
Guy Nave
Nave argues that when Americans demand “change,” they usually mean that “others” need to see things their way — and that meaningful transformative change requires acknowledging the provisional nature of our perspectives, seeking to understand as much as to be understood, and bursting the ideological echo chambers of social media through projects like Clamoring for Change.
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Article
Putting the Kind Back in Human
Sarah Ciavarri
Drawing on Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability and Edwin Friedman’s family systems theory, Ciavarri distinguishes “kind” from “nice” and argues that courageous, vulnerable, and playful truth-telling — rather than yelling louder or trading pithy memes — is the path back to one another and to our common humanity.
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Article
It's Time to Rewrite the Rules of Civility
Jon Micheels Leiseth
Leiseth contends that the prevailing rules of civility too often function as the majority’s rules, stifling those facing real harm — and proposes that NECU institutions rewrite civility as “neighboring,” guided by the ELCA’s five values of accompaniment: mutuality, inclusivity, empowerment, sustainability, and vulnerability.
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Poem
Original Song Lyrics: "Just a Little"
Mike Blair
Lyrics for an original song inspired by biblical images and stories, by Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” and by the faith, hope, love, and courage of immigrant friends and neighbors — led as a devotion during the 2018 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference.
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Article
The Musician's Vocation
Jeffrey Bell-Hanson
Bell-Hanson argues that musicians, who exercise profound influence over the emotional flavor of a moment, are called not merely to technical proficiency but to a sense of vocation: understanding their art well enough to use it responsibly, to intend truthfulness rather than manipulation, and to articulate its significance in dialog with other disciplines.
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Article
Why All This Talk About Understanding the Mission of NECU Member Institutions as a Vocation?
Mark Wilhelm
No. 56 · Fall 2022
In his valedictory keynote, retiring NECU Executive Director Mark Wilhelm argues that Lutheran higher education is, properly understood, vocation-based education — outlining four core practices recovered over the past fifty years and naming the constructive and corrective work still to be done, including a fuller embrace of DEIJ and of the diverse vocations of NECU’s 27 institutions.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Wilhelm announces his planned retirement on January 31, 2023, after serving as the founding executive director of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities, and gives thanks for the privilege of helping NECU articulate a shared vision for Lutheran higher education in twenty-first-century North America.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Wilhelm reflects on an NPR report of teenagers’ pandemic diaries and the fraught Christian history of struggling to live out Jesus’s ethic of love, framing the issue as a record of NECU institutions working out how to act for the common good through the pandemic of 2020–2021.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Wilhelm argues that the “hackneyed” expressions of higher education — “you are not just a number,” “the college experience,” “risen to the challenge” — tell the simple truth about NECU institutions even as the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed budgets, employees, and campus life to the breaking point.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Wilhelm frames the issue by tracing how Lutheran educational ideals — once a primary source of contemporary higher education — were masked in the United States, and introduces a NECU initiative that uses the case of business ethics to explore Lutheran social teaching as an academic resource.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Wilhelm frames the issue by noting that a federal court’s vindication of Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process is a win for higher education’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion — and argues that for Lutheran higher education, the commitment to diversity is an old and foundational claim, rooted in Christianity’s openness to all and reflected in the four diverse gospels of the New Testament.
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Reflection
Tom Natalini
Tom Natalini
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Natalini, a Susquehanna University senior raised Lutheran, schooled Mennonite, and seasoned by a meditative encounter in India, reflects on his journey through churchgoing, philosophy, near-Jewish conversion, and Buddhist practice to a stance he calls patience — neither Christian, Jew, Buddhist, seeker, nor “none.”
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Response
Response to Robert Benne
Baird Tipson
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Tipson responds to Robert Benne’s comments in the previous issue about his review essay of The Future of Religious Colleges, affirming their fundamental agreement that the Enlightenment epistemology dominant in higher education poses the most serious threat to the vitality of Lutheran colleges. Using the example of lecturing on early Mormon history and the Book of Mormon, he concedes that the methodological “solvent” of Enlightenment historiography acts on Christian as well as Mormon faith claims, and concludes that while H. Richard Niebuhr’s “inner” and “outer” history and Walter Brueggemann’s approach in The Theology of the Old Testament are comforting to believers, they do not offer an epistemology that can stand alongside the Enlightenment model in evaluating truth claims in the academy.
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Editorial
From the Editor: So That We, Too, May Flourish
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Windham-Hughes introduces the 2023 VLHE conference theme of educator flourishing, drawing on Dr. Monica Smith’s plenary challenge — “How can we flourish if only some are centered and others are at the margins?” — and invites readers to ground themselves in Us/We, the cover art by Augustana graduate William Hatchet, and join the conversation.
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Article
Vocational Leadership
Darrell Jodock
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Jodock proposes “vocational leadership” as a name for a distinctive educational value at the heart of a Lutheran college — one that seeks to benefit the neighbor and the community, inspires and invites others to participate in that service, and is institutionally anchored in the Lutheran concept of vocation. He unpacks twelve facets of vocational leadership and ties them to Luther’s own leadership around indulgences, public schooling, and beggary.
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Book Review
A College Degree or a College Experience? Reflecting on Selingo's College (Un)Bound
Laurie Brill
No. 39 · Spring 2014
Brill reads Jeff Selingo’s College (Un)Bound from inside the Lutheran Educational Conference of North America, drawing on LECNA’s alumni research with Hardwick-Day and on Brandon Busteed’s Gallup data to argue that, in an age of competency-based degrees and college-as-commodity, Lutheran colleges must speak more clearly about the transformational, vocational impact of a college experience that develops the whole person.
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Article
'In, With, and Under:' The Tradition and the Teaching of Christian Ethics
Pamela K. Brubaker
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Brubaker describes how she teaches Introduction to Christian Ethics at California Lutheran University—a religiously diverse classroom where about 30% of students are Lutheran, 30% Roman Catholic, and many are “unchurched”—as a community of moral discourse rooted in the Lutheran dialectic of faith and reason. Drawing on Larry Rasmussen and Bruce Birch, Elizabeth Bettenhausen, Roger Crook, and Robert Benne’s typology of “Hot and Cool Connections” between church and politics, she walks through her course’s units on human sexuality, economic life, and war and peace—including the Bomb Shelter simulation, a mock Disney stockholders meeting on sweatshops, and a Congressional hearing on the School of the Americas—to show how ELCA social statements function as case studies in critical inquiry and education for citizenship.