Plague, pestilence, pandemic—these are not new phenomena. As someone who studies the history of theology, I think that one of the blessings of being part of a religious tradition is being able to look back on how people of faith in ages past have grappled with the scourges they faced.
I have been thinking lately of a short treatise that Martin Luther wrote in 1527, titled “Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague.” With all his talk of evil “vapors,” “mists,” and “spirits,” Luther definitely sounds like someone from another era. Then again, he also seems to understand the basics of respiratory transmission. Throughout the treatise, he actually shows a surprising degree of understanding of the nature of contagion and what we would today call public health. In fact, I would say that he has a lot of practical and spiritual guidance for our cities and our country as we struggle with the Covid-19 pandemic.
Luther’s response to pandemic centers around the theme of community. He reminds us that, like it or not, “we are bound to each other.” We live next to each other, we eat each other’s food, and we breathe each other’s air. On the one hand, he says, it is community that makes a pandemic possible, just like it makes a mass fire possible. On the other hand, he insists that the very thing that puts us at risk is also the very thing that can save us. If there’s a fire burning in our house, it is our neighbors who will help us put it out. So in a time of plague, God calls neighbors to take care of neighbors and to work together to restore the health of the community.
What does it mean to be part of a community during a time of plague? It starts, as it always does, with looking out for others rather than just ourselves. Like Jesus before him, Luther says that loving God means loving people. As he puts it, “service to God is service to our neighbor.”
For Luther, serving one’s neighbor in a time of plague requires first and foremost following the advice of medical experts. He insists that God has “created medicines” and “provided us with guidance” from doctors. He says that to put everything in God’s hands and then ignore experts’ advice would be like refusing to fetch water when your neighbor’s house is on fire.
“What does it mean to be part of a community during a time of plague?”
In Luther’s time as in our own, doctor’s orders started with vigilance about sanitation. Sure, pray to God for protection, Luther says, but then “fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it.” Luther practically issues a lock-down order: “Shun persons and places wherever your neighbor does not need your presence.” He goes so far as to say that negligence in these matters is akin to murder. He has especially harsh words for anyone who has symptoms of the disease and doesn’t take precautions not to infect others.
Within the community, Luther says that some people have special responsibilities. For example, doctors and nurses have a calling from God to care for the sick and the dying. In our time as in Luther’s, following this calling puts their own lives at risk. Luther promises that God is with them in what they do and says that they should be honored in the community for their selflessness.
Similarly, Luther argues that civic officials are called to be competent and responsible leaders in a time of crisis, always looking out, not for their own interests, but for the good of the whole. He insists that they have a particular duty to look out for the poor and the weak. When they flee from these responsibilities, he says, they sin against God.
Like it does for most, the pandemic currently sweeping our country and my city makes me fearful. As someone married to a hospital nurse, I am especially worried for my wife’s safety and that of my family. Still, Luther reminds me that we have faced pandemics like this before. We can get through them, with the help of God, if we work together for the good of all.
“Luther argues that civic officials are called to be competent and responsible leaders in a time of crisis, always looking out, not for their own interests, but for the good of the whole.”
So honor medical professionals and trust their advice. Thank grocery store workers, delivery personnel, and all those who risk their safety for the benefit of others. Remember that whenever we wash our hands, or check in on a neighbor in need, or stay home when we would rather go out, we are truly doing God’s work. Finally, as Luther would certainly remind us, have faith that even when we fail, God will never abandon our community or anyone within it.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
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 Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn narrates a year of crisscrossing pandemics — Covid-19, economic collapse, partisan politics, and the long pandemic of white supremacy revealed anew by the murder of George Floyd — and argues that Lutheran liberal arts schools, by educating for vocation, are uniquely poised to help students respond with character and capable callings.
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Article
A New Image for an Ancient Call: Lutheran Higher Education Amidst Pandemics Today
Caryn Riswold
Pairing Wartburg’s Lebenskreuz sculpture with the Matthew 25 acts of mercy and the commitments of Rooted and Open, Riswold reads the calls to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and care for the sick as urgent summons for Lutheran higher education in a year of overlapping pandemics — and as a call to dismantle the structures that produced them.
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Article
Radical Hospitality on Haunted Grounds: Anti-Racism in Lutheran Higher Education
Krista E. Hughes
Writing from Newberry College’s campus on land once home to the Cherokee and within a day’s drive of Mother Emanuel A.M.E., Hughes argues that NECU’s call to “practice radical hospitality” demands that predominately white institutions open themselves to the hauntings of racism — pursuing belonging rather than mere welcome, and risking kenotic transformation of institutional identity itself.
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Article
Activism, Justice, and the Danger of Silence
Dezi Gillon
In conversation with Jason Mahn, Augustana College alumnux Dezi Gillon traces the call to action they felt as a Black student organizing for Black Lives Matter on a predominately white campus — through seminary, art, spirituality, and restorative justice work — and warns white professors that staying silent “actually speaks volumes.”
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Article
Leadership in Lutheran Key at a Time of Pandemics
Deanna Thompson
Thompson draws on Luther’s theology of the cross and Shelly Rambo’s theology of trauma to sketch a Lutheran model of leadership for a season of pandemics — one that is attentive to pain, responsive to need, and intentionally nourished by food, friends, and deep conversation.
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Article
Through Truth to Freedom—by Way of Reconciliation
Paul C. Pribbenow
Reflecting on Augsburg’s 150th-anniversary motto “Through truth to freedom,” Pribbenow argues that in a season of three pandemics — pandemic illness, economic collapse, and the racial sin laid bare by the murder of George Floyd — higher education’s most authentic work is to educate for truth and freedom by way of confession and reconciliation.
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Article
Finding Purpose in Chaos: Reflection In and Beyond the Public Health Classroom
Lena R. Hann
When the pandemic hit her new public health professionalism course, Hann recalibrated her teaching from the “how” of professional preparation to the “why” of vocational reflection — and recounts how Augustana public health students and alumni found purpose in the chaos through food banks, disaster response, palliative care, and research on health inequities.
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Reflection
The Long Pilgrimage of 2020-21
Kara Baylor
Drawing on Martha Stortz’s definition of pilgrimage as “intentional dislocation, for the sake of transformation, where the body teaches the soul,” Baylor invites students and educators worn out by the 2020-21 academic year to ask what is essential, to listen to what their bodies are telling their souls, and to be more open to the transformations the dislocation might still yield.
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Article
Called to Flourish: An Ethic of Care
Mindy Makant
Drawing on Lenoir-Rhyne’s core value of Care, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, Darrel Jodock’s “Gift and Calling,” and Luther’s plague-era practice of opening his home to the sick, Makant argues that flourishing is interdependent — that self-care is a means to extending care, and that an ethic of care is the meaningful, transformative work to which Lutheran liberal arts education is called.
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Article
Called to the Moment: A New Vocation for Lutheran Colleges
W. Kent Barnds
After a derecho ravaged Iowa in August 2020 and Pastor Katy Warren preached on 1 Peter 4, Barnds watched line workers, neighbors, and Augustana colleagues simply show up where they were needed — and proposes that the true vocation of a Lutheran college may be making the case for “meeting immediate need with a deep willingness” alongside the longer work of vocational discernment.
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Article
Reclaiming Grundtvig at Grand View College
Mark C. Mattes
No. 27 · Spring 2008
Mattes traces the Grundtvigian heritage of Grand View College — the only North American institution founded by Grundtvigian Danes — from its origins in the 1880s split between Pietist Inner Mission and Grundtvigian Danish Lutherans through its golden years of folk dancing, gymnastics, and the weekly lecture, to the demographic and curricular changes of the 1950s through 1990s. He describes recent tangible initiatives, including the Grand View College Reader, Imaging the Journey, and the 2007 Strategic Planning Commission’s “Faith Foundations” statement, that seek to recover the “Human first, then Christian” mantra of Grand View’s ancestors for a generation of students whose “ship” has had not only its planks but its very model replaced.
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Article
Do You Teach in a Different Manner at a Lutheran College? Unraveling the Lutheran Knot and Highlighting the Glory in the Theology of the Cross
Curtis L. Thompson
No. 16 · Winter 2003
Thompson argues that being Lutheran means having a “knot in the stomach”—a dialectical “Yes and No” tension between law and gospel, two kingdoms, Word and world—and that this knot is held together by Luther’s theology of the cross supplemented by an under-appreciated theology of glory in which God shines through human beings and creation. He then traces how the Lutheran knot shapes his teaching at Thiel College in the Religion department, the first-year team-taught “History of Western Humanities,” the second-year “Science and Our Global Heritage,” and his work as Co-Director of Thiel’s Global Institute, concluding that only such “dialectical doublespeak” leaves him with the “at-once dreaded and delightful dis-ease of the Lutheran knot.”
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Article
From Alien to Citizen
Arne Selbyg
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Selbyg reflects on three experiences of being educated for citizenship—growing up in Norway under the legacy of Lutheran pastors and public school teachers who resisted the Nazi occupation, arriving in America as a resident alien, and becoming a naturalized American citizen—and proposes the jazz ensemble as a better metaphor for American society than the melting pot, one in which different citizens learn skills, study other instruments, and dialog with one another in service to the common music.
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Article
Freedom, Humor, and Community: A Lutheran Vision for Higher Education
Darrell Jodock
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Jodock’s inaugural lecture for the Bernhardson chair at Gustavus Adolphus develops three interlocking themes drawn from the Lutheran tradition as a deeper grounding for the liberal arts college than contemporary American assumptions. A sense of humor rests on Luther’s discovery that God takes the initiative—Luther could call himself a beggar, joke about the epistle of James, and credit Wittenberg beer for the Reformation—and underwrites the freedom of inquiry that John Updike traces to Grace Lutheran Sunday School in Shillington. Community, grounded in Augsburg Confession VII and Luther’s 1524 letter to the German city councils, makes the college a community of discourse pursuing wisdom rather than “the same old blockheads.” Freedom is both “freedom from” and “freedom for,” illustrated by Nechama Tec’s Polish Holocaust rescuers and by Jodock’s Holocaust-class corporate role-play in which students voted to build a factory in a death camp rather than risk losing their board seats—a vivid case for educating toward “a passion for justice.”
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Article
Critical Engagement in Public Life: Listening to Luther's Troubling Questions
Samuel Torvend
No. 35 · Spring 2012
Torvend narrates the medieval “spiritual/temporal” division and the neo-platonic devaluation of the body that shaped the world into which Luther was born, then traces the disruptive questions Paul’s letters provoked in Luther: about indulgences, the two estates, vocation, and the public reach of baptism. He argues that Luther’s reform — expressed in Kirchenordnungen, social welfare reform, public schools, and writings on lobbyists, usury, and monopolies — carries a “genetic encoding” of public engagement that Lutheran colleges should reclaim against the temptations of holy apathy and Christian nationalism.
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Editorial
Guest Editorial
Kristen Glass Perez, Richard Priggie
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Glass Perez and Priggie introduce the issue by recounting the campus conversations and the June 2014 Interfaith Understanding Conference at Augustana College that gave rise to it, framing the central question, “What does it mean to be Interfaith at a Lutheran College?,” as a living example of the praxis of being a Lutheran college in the twenty-first century.