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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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Christenson introduces the four essays by participants in the first Lutheran Academy of Scholars as fruit of the “genuine conversation” that emerges when specialists set aside their lecturers’ podiums to speak as human beings, and welcomes the issue’s additional “Intersections first”—a response to a response to a review—continuing the conversation between Baird Tipson and Robert Benne about the paradigm of Lutheran higher education.
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Article
Private University, Public Witness: Life in the "None Zone"
Loren J. Anderson
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Drawing on sixteen years at Concordia College in Moorhead and twelve at Pacific Lutheran University, Anderson contrasts the Lutheran heartland with the Pacific Northwest’s “None Zone”—Patricia Killen and Mark Silk’s name for the country’s least churched region—and argues that a faithful Lutheran witness is possible in this changing context. He proposes five callings for the colleges—an academic program shaped by both educational philosophy and Lutheran theology, vibrant campus communities of faith and learning, inclusiveness and ecumenical outreach, global vision, and vocational exploration—and closes by sketching PLU’s shift toward “partnership” congregations and a new Center of Religion, Culture and Society in the Western United States.
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Reflection
Reflections on Lutheran Identity on Reformation Sunday
Thomas W. Martin
No. 19 · Summer 2004
Beginning with an “intellectual vertigo” experienced when his celebrant announced that “today the Church gathers to celebrate the Reformation,” Martin—a biblical scholar who has belonged to four Protestant denominations—asks how Lutherans should tell their own foundational myth. He argues that the Reformation was a mixed bag whose dark side includes a century of religious warfare and the killing of Anabaptists; that Luther himself is too mythic a figure to monopolize; and that distinguishing “constitutive” from “prophetic” reading (after James Sanders) opens the way to a Reformation Sunday told “together with” rather than “over and against” the rest of the Church—one that mixes repentance for the dark with celebration of the glory.
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Reflection
David Kamins
David Kamins
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Kamins, a Jewish student at Muhlenberg College, reads Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s The Lonely Man of Faith alongside his own journey at the Interfaith Understanding conference on the eve of Shavuot, finding in the dual figures of Adam I and Adam II a way to remain firmly grounded in his faith community while going out to learn from those around him.
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Reflection
Dreaming God's Dream: A Sermon on Isaiah 56:1-2, 6-8
Stephan K. Turnbull
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Preached at the 2008 “Savvy with Substance” Convocation of the ELCA at Central Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, this sermon by parish pastor Stephan K. Turnbull (First Lutheran Church, White Bear Lake) sets the small dreams of pastors and academics—balanced budgets, peaceful congregations, coherent midterm papers—over against the prophet’s dream in Isaiah 56 of a God who gathers all nations to a house of prayer for all peoples. Turnbull calls educators, preachers, and church leaders to articulate God’s dream of getting the world back through the dying of Jesus the Messiah and the resurrection’s first fruits of new creation.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 47 · Spring 2018
Wilhelm celebrates that NECU schools continue to educate for vocation but warns that the culture of Lutheran higher education is at risk — sustained largely by informal cadres of individuals — and introduces NECU’s Rooted and Open statement as a first institutional step toward reclaiming the 500-year-old Lutheran intellectual and educational tradition.