As I was thinking of what I might say for this brief meditation, I stumbled on the realization that what we are doing here, right now, is a curious thing. How many communities, at least in this country, gather daily in an activity such as this? Why do we gather together in an activity like this? Why did you as individuals choose to come here to this place, now? What do you find here? While I’m not presumptuous enough to try to answer these questions for you, I will attempt to answer them for myself. And in the process, I would like to share a few perspectives on worship that I have adopted during my time at St. Olaf.
This place and this act of worship fill a need within me in a way I struggle to describe. It’s something spiritual, something emotional, something deeply human. And although I struggle to describe it, I know it has something to do with the totality of this experience. All of the elements around us are involved: the candles, the architecture, the stained glass, the music. Now, in this bit of rambling, I have conceptually combined two things—the deeply human and the manipulation of the physical world. And in my mental meanderings, I have found, in the combination of these two ideas, no better way to broadly define art—the expression of what is deeply human through the manipulation of the physical world.
But should we even be talking about the arts in worship? Given our Protestant history, this is a valid question. Christian worship and what are commonly thought of as the arts (especially music) have had an interesting and even antagonistic relationship. Church leaders have condemned the arts in worship at times, believing that our worship forms (liturgy or scripture reading) are specifically commanded by God. They believed these forms should not be polluted by human creativity.
As a committed humanist, I have to disagree with this interpretation of worship. I do not believe that worship is set on us from above as an obligation or duty—instead, it comes from deep within us as an expression of needs and experiences that touch the very core of who we are. And, if my definition of art has any value, then it should come as no surprise that our religious needs and experiences find expression in a worship that is infused with art—indeed a worship that is art. With architecture, stained glass, music, and on days with more qualified chapel speakers, eloquence, our worshipful response to God is art, and it flows through so many of the mediums in which our humanity has found expression. And for what greater endeavor could we use our artistic gifts than to proclaim the word of God’s saving grace?
However, my Lutheran tradition has always been very leery of allowing worship to look anything like a secular performance, and rightly so, for our worship should remind us of God’s kingdom—not our own. But this concern should not prohibit us from realizing that our worship is really an art form, and as such, it requires our best and most sincere efforts. For as Christians, we have faith that what we express here is of infinite importance, not only for our lives, but for all of creation. So let me repeat; this worship/this art requires our best and most sincere efforts.
And if I might, I have one more perspective to offer. I can only speak from my own experience, but I know there are times when the God we worship and the salvation we proclaim do not seem to be very near. And if our worship were only the bare proclamation of those ideas in, say, a confessional creed, Christianity would have at those times little to offer those of us with questions and doubts. But in artful worship, we are presented not with something we must believe against our intellect, but something real and tangible we can hold on to. Here power and truth can be known experientially, even if not conceptually. At least for me on my faith journey, this reality has been an infinite help keeping the faith, even if I have sometimes found my belief at an impasse.
Perhaps you are confident in your faith and knowledge of God—perhaps you are not. But no matter who you are, take heart in what we do here today. Seek to experience truth in what you see, hear, and say. For at its best, this communal experience in which we are engaged has the power to bring us a glimpse of God and of the kingdom. And as we now see in a mirror only dimly, worship has the power to bring us a glimpse of our salvation. Amen.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg celebrates the popularity of the previous issue—the first to draw on papers from the annual “Vocation of a Lutheran College” conference—and announces a new Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation grant that will fund the inaugural Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education, a two-week seminar at Harvard led by Ronald Thiemann on “Finding Our Voice: Christian Faith and Critical Vision.”
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson introduces the issue’s contents—papers from the 1998 Vocation conference by Cheryl Ney and Robert Scholz, a response by Jennifer Sacher Wiley, an interview with four Capital University faculty about Cuba, a meditation by St. Olaf senior Erik Haaland, and the journal’s first letter to the editor—and commends the Mount Mary College volume Wagering on Transcendence as a model of a faculty community sustained by Friday-afternoon conversation over a glass of wine.
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Article
Rooting Science in Empathy: Growing Towards a Sustainable Science Practice for the 21st Century
Cheryl L. Ney
Ney, a DNA biochemist turned feminist science educator at Capital University, traces her own search for the “grounding” of teaching from Ernest Boyer’s scholarship of teaching through Cathleen Loving’s Scientific Theory Profile, Evelyn Fox-Keller’s critiques of science as “truly masculine philosophy” and her biography of Barbara McClintock (“A Feeling for the Organism”), and Arnold Pacey’s definition of science as a web of technical, organizational, and cultural practice. Drawing on the Dutch Science Shops, the Loka Institute’s community-based research, and academic service learning, she calls for “sustainable science practice” rooted in empathy and asks whether Lutheran institutions have the courage to claim an institutional freedom of vision rather than reduce themselves to preparation for the job market.
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Article
How Can We Keep From Singing?
Robert Scholz
Scholz, professor of music at St. Olaf, responds to Tom Christenson’s “Freedom of a Christian” by walking through his own Nunc dimittis for the St. Olaf Christmas Festival, an Elderhostel choir of singers aged 60 to 95, and the four liberating arts (enablement and change, melioristic, embodying, and critical) as they shape conducting, composition, and music education. He defends the fine arts and folk traditions over “contemporary Christian” soft pop-rock and taped accompaniments, citing Luther’s preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae and the family of God’s need to interact in song against the virtual community of TV evangelism and the Crystal Cathedrals of the air.
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Reflection
Some Personal Reflections on the ELCA Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, 1998
Jennifer Sacher Wiley
Sacher Wiley, a Unitarian Universalist with one Jewish parent and a first-year music faculty member at Susquehanna, reflects on common-ness and other-ness at the 1998 conference—Tom Christenson’s weaver’s warp and Charles Ives’s essay on American music—and proposes four markers of group identity. Against the fear of secularization expressed by some attendees, she suggests that “Christian” might be defined less by belief in Christ as Savior than by living a vocation as Jesus lived, with Cheryl Ney offered as an example of a “working prophet,” or “little Christ,” regardless of specific belief in the Trinity.
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Article
The Face of the Neighbor: An Interview with Four Capital University Faculty About Their Recent Visit to Cuba
Brian Forry Wallace, Michael Yosha, Reg Dyck, Susan Narita
Four Capital University faculty—political scientist Brian Wallace (returning to Cuba a third time after the 1994 boat lift), English professor Reg Dyck, ESL teacher Susan Narita, and political scientist Michael Yosha—recount their summer 1998 trip with Pastors for Peace, describing Cuban priorities of education, health care, and military (in that order), the cultural richness of Havana from sixteenth-century cloisters to Miramar, the Cuban Foreign Service’s vision of a Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, the counter-productive U.S. embargo (including its effect on kidney dialysis machines), Castro’s 1991 reconciliation with religious communities, and a recurrent image of a little girl named Marguerite singing at a school for amputee and terminally ill children. The interview was conducted by Capital senior Jessica Brown and Tom Christenson.
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Institutional Focus
Letters to the Editor
The journal’s first letter to the editor: Pastor John L. Vaswig of Spokane, a Pacific Lutheran University alumnus and member of the PLU Board of Regents, writes after reading James Tunstead Burtchaell’s The Dying Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches to ask whether church-related institutions, in their effort to be open and tolerant, have abandoned a compelling word of hope and forgiveness in Jesus Christ.
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Article
Leading Students to Distinguish Between Career and Vocation: Reflections from a Lutheran Law School
Steven C. Bahls
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Bahls, writing as former dean of the Capital University Law School, argues that most law students and many legal educators confuse vocation with career—asking “what kind of lawyer do you want to be?” rather than “who do I want to be?” Drawing on John O. Mudd’s five attributes of a well-prepared lawyer and Susan Daicoff’s empirical research on lawyer dissatisfaction and the “amoral professional role,” he turns to Ernest L. Simmons’s and Darrel Jodock’s articulations of Luther’s understanding of vocation and proposes five steps—reflection, assessment, vision, integrative thinking, and reassessment—along with explicit leadership from law school deans, engagement of career services offices, and leadership within the profession (illustrated by Capital’s joint venture with the Columbus Bar Association).
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Christenson opens with an invitation for reader submissions to balance the conference-paper format of the first two issues, then asks how college and universities can turn students positively toward learning. Drawing on Aristotle’s claim that study is loved for its own sake (which students greet with disbelieving laughter) and Neil Postman’s The End of Education, he argues that students lack narratives within which learning makes sense and proposes four Lutheran mega-narratives—stewardship of creation, the freedom of the Christian, the sacramental presence of the transcendent in the concrete and ordinary, and vocation—that could inspire learning at the 28 ELCA colleges and universities.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 24 · Fall 2006
Selbyg situates this issue in the ongoing ELCA conversation about education that began with the 2005 conference and is feeding into the second draft of the ELCA Social Statement on Education, previews the 2007 conference (“The Vocation of a Lutheran College — Engaging the World”) at Augustana College, Rock Island, and lifts up Luther’s insistence that the church and its members contribute to their wider communities rather than retreat into self-centered enclaves.
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Reflection
Shelter in Place: Reflections from March 22, 2020
Jason A. Mahn
No. 53 · Spring 2021
On the fourth Sunday of Lent in 2020, Mahn meditates on the etymology of “shelter” (from shield) and on an email from a former student in Boston whose mutual-aid organizing models a Lutheran understanding of vocation: the upending of ego by divine love that frees us, finally, to see and serve the neighbor.
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Article
Ethical Leadership for a Changing World: A Shared Calling from Cradle to Career
Cory Newman, Janelle Rozek Hooper
No. 62 · Fall 2025
5 min audio
Hooper and Newman recount how an ELCA Barna survey on early childhood education sparked the realization at VLHE 2025 that ELCA colleges and the 1,200 Lutheran schools and early learning centers share identical challenges — and an untapped potential to form ethical leaders across the full educational continuum from cradle to career.
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Article
Reforming Our Visions of City Nature
Lea F. Schweitz
No. 46 · Fall 2017
Through a Chicago story of Canada geese at North Pond, Schweitz takes up two Reformation-era ways of reading the “Book of Nature” — Konrad Rosbach’s moral readings and Philip Melanchthon’s scientific ones — and proposes a third: Luther’s sacramental principle that the finite is capable of the infinite, worn as “reading glasses” for an urban planet.