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Professor of Philosophy
Concordia College
Gregg Muilenberg
No. 15 · Winter 2002
Muilenberg, a non-Lutheran philosopher at Concordia, argues that self-consciously Lutheran colleges cannot make non-Lutheran faculty feel welcome through “institutional fit” rhetoric (he cites Concordia’s own hiring boilerplate) because identity must be sustained and developed, not preserved like a pickle. Drawing on Nikos Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco and the three marks of the “profoundly religious person”—commitment to the truth, to the power of the spirit, and to metousiosis through myth—he proposes that faith and reason are best understood as an unending struggle into which strangers must be invited as valuable and active participants, safeguarded by the strongest possible affirmation of academic freedom (citing Martha Nussbaum on Notre Dame and BYU).
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Muilenburg, chair of Philosophy at Concordia, surveys the four traditional models for faith and reason—conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration—and argues that the Lutheran dialogical model is insufficient for wholeness. Drawing on the post-foundationalist epistemology of perspective and Aristotle’s account of knowing as desire-driven action, he proposes that faith is an ultimate value (an assessment belief of the form ‘x is better than y’), that learning is desire-directed action, and that the core of Christian education is the education of Christian desire—requiring both reflection and commitment, both integration and diversity.