The Long Pilgrimage of 2020-21

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.

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.

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.

Learning from Luther on Covid-19

Carl Hughes

Reading Martin Luther’s 1527 treatise “Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague,” Hughes finds practical and spiritual guidance for a pandemic age: serve the neighbor, follow medical experts, honor those whose vocations put them at risk, and trust that even when we fail, God will not abandon the community.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seeing in a New Way: A Meditation

Kara Baylor

No. 50 · Fall 2019

Baylor, the only Black campus pastor in the NECU, weaves Psalm 25, the parable of the Good Samaritan as re-read through Lenny Duncan, and the “crimson thread of divine justice” from Allen Dwight Callahan into a meditation that closes with the invitation she offered at the 2019 conference — to tie a crimson thread around the wrist as a symbol of collective commitment to moving beyond privilege toward inclusion and equity.

Currents

Jaime Schillinger

No. 25 · Spring 2007

Preached in St. Olaf chapel on March 29, 2005, Schillinger reads three “currents” pulling on her hearers—Minnesota spring, the academic year’s final stretch, and Holy Week’s passion and resurrection—against poetic voices from ee cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, before turning to the Song of Songs to suggest that this nexus calls students into the rhythms of love, awakened desire, and an elusive, unresolved promise that animates academic, spiritual, and vocational search alike.

Committed to Paradox

Caryn Riswold

No. 60 · Fall 2024

Riswold lifts up paradox — saint and sinner, lord and servant, Rooted and Open — as a distinctive Lutheran root that lets institutions honor the complicated truth of who their students are and embrace the messy, ever-reforming work of access and accessibility as a theology of the cross.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

No. 3 · Summer 1997

Christenson explains that this issue breaks from the first two issues’ single-focus pattern to feature three principal papers on the environment, the education of desire, and hiring and personnel policies, plus two poems and a piece of reflective bemusement. He then commends George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford, 1997) and challenges Lutheran scholars to articulate how the particulars of their faith inform their scholarship—in conversation with Calvinist work like Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and Art in Action—rather than remaining silently complicit in the view that faith has no place in the academy.

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.

Modeling Virtue: In Which a Social Psychologist Decides He Can Do Good Without Freely Choosing It

Chuck Huff

No. 9 · Summer 2000

Huff, recalling his 1975 sophomore disillusionment with a sterile introductory psychology in South Georgia (and Danny Saunders’s question from The Chosen), defends a scientific psychology as model-making rather than meaning-finding, traces the collapse of Lawrence Kohlberg’s totalizing theory of moral development into chastened mini-theories, and presents William Damon and Anne Colby’s interview study of twenty-three “moral exemplars” whose lives were marked by self-good unity, constant self-examination in community, a felt inability to have done otherwise, religious grounding, and genuine happiness. Following Aristotle on virtue as learned habit and the Christian tradition of the “slave for Christ,” he concludes that goodness flows from the choice of constraints rather than from the lone free-will hero of fairy tales, complicating C. P. Snow’s two-cultures divide. Originally the 1998 Mellby Lecture at St. Olaf.

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.