Concordia College observed MLK Day 2020 on the theme of “Not Racist: A White Moderate Myth.” My ethics students were required to attend the events and reflect on three questions: What was the primary message? How did that message resonate with you? And: What questions did the speeches and workshops raise for you? Inevitably, as a predominantly white institution (PWI) working on equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) ideals, Concordia met the topic with some resistance. I am the only Black woman tenured faculty member, so the resistance came as no surprise. How are we ever going to get to sufficient, sustainable livelihoods for all (as the ELCA social statement has it), if we cannot discuss one of the reasons for economic inequality—racism and racist structural arrangements in the United States? As an intersectional scholar, I introduce my students to issues of race, gender, sexual identity, religion, and other sources of diversity and marginalization in organizations. MLK Day offered the perfect entry point for talking about race in class this semester.
As I read through my students’ reflections, it was clear that, on the one hand, they were profoundly moved and informed by the messages from the speakers. One of the speaker’s talk focused on the question of “who has a right to belong here”—an issue we obviously struggle with as a PWI. We are not yet an inclusive campus; in fact, most minority students would describe the climate as hostile. As such, our retention rates for minority students are insufferable. My ethics students’ comments such as “everyone belongs here and everyone should be accepted here” suggests that some students are open to expanding their worldview. As an example, through student activism, a meal bank fund was begun last semester to help food insecure students.
On the other hand, statements such as “white people do not have to interact with colored people,” or “the power behind [white privilege] is considerably smaller and less impacting to colored people”—and, indeed the fact that they use the term “colored people” to refer to minorities—suggests that we have a lot of work to do to educate our students to become more culturally competent. We have far to go to become a welcoming institution for all.
During our next class period, I led the class through a discussion on race and racism, beginning with a five-minute New York Times documentary, “Conversations with White People about Race.” My goal was to help the students collectively process what their experiences in a safe space, and to help to destigmatize these taboo topics. We can only truly learn how to be ethical leaders in the issues of race and diversity by openly engaging with these topics. Students resonated with the views expressed about the discomfort that white people have towards talking about race. They also talked about how they first came to realize that they were of a certain race. My goal in bringing such difficult conversations to the ethics classroom is to equip my students with the ethical tools to engage in dialogue. We must do better, as an institution committed to helping our students “BREW”: Becoming Responsibly Engaged in the World.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
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
Guest Editorial: Moral Deliberation in NECU Classrooms
Ernest L. Simmons
Simmons introduces the guiding question of the NECU working group: could the ELCA’s twelve social statements and thirteen social messages — expressions of Lutheran social teaching originally formulated for congregational use — turn campuses into “academic communities of moral deliberation”?
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Article
The Responsible Professional: Vocation and Economic Life
Martha E. Stortz, Tom Morgan
Stortz and Morgan argue that the “value-added” of Lutheran higher education is a responsibility ethic — one that frames the professional as a first responder “called and empowered to serve the neighbor so that all may flourish” — and unpack the four criteria of the 1999 ELCA social statement Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All as a framework for economic deliberation.
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Institutional Focus
A List of ELCA Social Teaching and Policy Documents
A reference list, as of September 2019, of the ELCA’s twelve social statements, fourteen social messages, and over 150 social policy resolutions — with Spanish translations where available.
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Article
ELCA Social Teaching for the Classroom?
Roger A. Willer
Willer argues that the body of ELCA social teaching, taken as a whole, constitutes an actual social ethic — relatively comprehensive, responsibly consistent, and remarkably cogent — whose mode of responsibility ethics commends it as a classroom resource for any discipline that wrestles with moral questions.
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Article
Business as Usual? Marketing, God, and the Limits of Christian Callings
Emily Beth Hill
Hill, a former corporate marketing consultant turned theologian, returns to Luther’s claim that no vocation is more holy than another — and uses Luther’s Large Catechism definition of God to argue that the modern practice of branding intentionally redirects the love and worship of human beings toward capital, raising the question of whether Christian neighbor-love places limits on what professions Christians should pursue.
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Article
Responding to Student Hunger at NECU Institutions
Kristen Glass Perez
Glass Perez recounts how her work as college chaplain at Augustana and Muhlenberg evolved after a student offhandedly declared, “I am always so hungry at this school,” and shares five lessons learned from launching campus pantries, emergency grant programs, and the HOPE Survey to address food insecurity as a defining calling of NECU institutions.
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Article
Gen Z is Made for Lutheran Higher Education
W. Kent Barnds
Barnds argues that Generation Z’s defining traits — socially responsible, purpose-driven, cost-conscious, culturally open, and tech-expectant — align almost perfectly with the missions of NECU institutions, and offers concrete suggestions (from replacing “vocation” with “purpose” to embracing Gen X parents as co-pilots) for Lutheran colleges seeking to attract and serve this generation.
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Article
Ethical Deliberation and the Biblical Text—A Lutheran Contribution to Reading the Bible
Ritva Williams
No. 22 · Spring 2006
Williams articulates a Lutheran “critical traditionalist hermeneutic”—a phrase borrowed from her Hebrew Bible professor Robert Polzin—that honors Scripture as queen while keeping Christ as its king, and tests it by critiquing Robert Gagnon’s use of Romans 1:18-32 in The Bible and Homosexual Practice. Drawing on Lazareth, Lotz, Philip Esler’s Conflict and Identity in Romans, Stanley Stowers’ Rereading Romans, and Ben Witherington III, she proposes an alternative reading in which Paul recites a Hellenistic-Jewish ethnic caricature in 1:18-32 only to overturn it in 2:1-16, making the passage a critique of self-righteous stereotyping rather than the foundation of a moral doctrine on same-sex intercourse.
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Article
Sexuality over the Lifespan—Social Trends Pose Moral Dilemmas for Communities of Faith
Adina Nack
No. 22 · Spring 2006
Nack, a sociologist who presented to the ELCA Task Force for Studies on Sexuality, surveys empirical research on three life-stages flagged by the Task Force as particularly contested—premarital sexuality among adolescents and young adults, sexuality after divorce and within single parenting, and sexuality in late adulthood. Drawing on the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the Office of the Surgeon General, AARP, National Council on the Aging, and the World Health Organization’s 2002 definition of sexual health, she closes each section with questions about the church’s role in education, blessing of committed nonmarital relationships, and dismantling stereotypes about aging and sexuality.
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Article
What I Have Learned: Maybe Plato Was Right
Richard Ylvisaker
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Inaugurating the new “What I Have Learned” column, Ylvisaker reflects on a career of teaching philosophy at Luther College and offers four hard-won “preliminary examples” in which Plato turned out to be more right than fashionable criticism allowed: (1) communities are not necessarily better off by becoming more diverse—diversity needs a unity of purpose if it is to enrich rather than fragment; (2) politics, to be more than a struggle for power by competing interests, must rest on a moral basis that transcends those interests; (3) the much-derided body-soul dualism contains a measure of truth about the cognitive and moral limitations of embodied life; and, deepest of all, (4) reason itself depends on a community of discourse in which doctrinaire pronouncement gives way to disciplined inquiry. Athens and Jerusalem, he concludes, should meet at the college of the church.
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Article
A Church, the Human Condition, and the Fissured Face of Peace
D. M. Yeager
No. 22 · Spring 2006
Yeager, a member of the ELCA Task Force for Studies on Sexuality, reflects on lessons for the church’s educational mission in the wake of the 2005 Churchwide Assembly. Drawing on Macquarrie’s The Concept of Peace, Polanyi on the personal coefficient of knowledge, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and responses to the task force report from Roy Harrisville III and Larry Rasmussen, she proposes “the fissured face of peace”—peace as the absence of hostility rather than disagreement—and maps how Arendt’s five conditions of human existence (life, earth, natality, mortality, worldliness, plurality) might shape Lutheran colleges’ curricula in history, epistemology, and the sociology of knowledge so that graduates can disagree without hostility and embrace the slow work of reformation.
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Article
Conciliatory and Queer: The Radical Love of Lutheran Higher Education
Kiki Kosnick, Sharon Varallo
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Kosnick and Varallo reflect in conversation on how Augustana’s Five Faith Commitments and its conciliatory ecumenical roots in the Augsburg Confession have given them — a non-binary queer first-generation faculty member and a twenty-one-year veteran — the “street cred” to act on radical love, build bridges to imprisoned and non-binary communities, and discover that Augustana is welcoming not despite the fact that it is Lutheran, but because of it.
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Article
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? A Homily on Liminality and Vocation
Lori Brandt Hale
No. 45 · Spring 2017
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.