Agora Fall 2023 by Luther College

Agora

THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE

A Life in the Liberal Arts at Luther College

THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE

Martin Klammer, editor

FALL 2023 VOLUME 36 NUMBER 1

Bonnie Tunnicliff Johnson, production editor

Agora, an interdisciplinary journal grounded in the humanities, is a project of the Luther College Paideia Program. The Luther College Paideia Program encompasses many activities and resources for students, faculty members, and the broader community. It includes an annual lecture series, library acquisitions, student writing services, a faculty development program that includes sabbatical grants and summer workshops, and Agora: The Liberal Arts at Luther College. All these activities receive financial support from the Paideia Endowment, originally established through National Endowment for the Humanities grants matched by friends of Luther College. The Paideia owl logo was designed by Professor of Art John Whelan. LUTHER COLLEGE

PAIDEIA Seeking Wisdom in Community

The primary Agora contributors are Luther College faculty; writing is also solicited from other college community members and, occasionally, from outside writers. Agora was established in 1988 by Paideia Director Wilfred F. Bunge, Professor of Religion and Classics, who edited the journal from 1988-1998. Other editors include: Mark Z. Muggli, Professor of English, 1998-2004; Peter A. Scholl, Professor of English, 2004-2014; and Martin Klammer, Professor of English, editor since 2014. Agora is distributed to on-campus faculty and administrators as well as to off-campus friends of the college. Anyone wishing to be included on the print copy list or donate to Agora should contact us at (563) 387-1153 or email agora@luther.edu. To see the current issue and archival issues online, go to www.luther.edu/paideia/agora.

Contents Essays First Year in a Box: Rediscovering My Introduction to the Liberal Arts Lori A. Stanley (’80)................................................................................................ 3 Liberating Wisdom and the Liberal Arts Jonathan Strandjord (’74)...................................................................................... 10

Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture "Without the Muffle": Byron, Boxing, and the Authentic Life Amy Weldon........................................................................................................... 15

Sabbatical Reports Cuba's Persistent Food Crisis Alfredo Alonso Estenoz........................................................................................... 20 Piano Wellness and Injury Prevention Xiao Hu................................................................................................................ 23

Chapel Talks If You Don't Know Where You're Going, Any Road Will Take You There ( July 16, 2023) Nancy Barry.......................................................................................................... 25 The Hope to Face Each Day (September 13, 2023) Melissa Bills.......................................................................................................... 28 Coming Home to Luther College's Liberal Arts (October 8, 2023) Katherine A. Shaner (’98)...................................................................................... 30 Celebrating Latinx Heritage Month (October 11, 2023) Xavier Andrade (’24)............................................................................................. 33 My Cup Runneth Over (October 13, 2023) Jenifer Ward.......................................................................................................... 35 A Race Worth Winning (October 20, 2023) Jonathan Struve (’02)............................................................................................ 37 Following the Offbeat Songs of My Heart (October 25, 2023) Cassandra Norton (’24).......................................................................................... 39

Cover: Lori Stanley enjoying chai with Mama Musa, Eluwai village, Tanzania, 2013. For the past decade Mama Musa has hosted Luther College January Term groups at her rural village. See story on page 3. Photo courtesy of Musa Kamaika

Introduction

by MARTIN KLAMMER, Professor of English, Editor of Agora

That larger world includes various courses and experiences, including, for example, 2024 J-Term courses in Asia, Africa, Europe, Central America, New York and the Pacific Northwest. US News and World Report ranks Luther second nationally in the percentage of students who study abroad.

indoor and outdoor spaces, and energy efficiencies and sustainability. As part of the unit, students watch a video of a lecture by Snøhetta co-founder Craig Dykers titled “Learn to Design with Empathy.”

But students in Paideia 111 only had to travel down College Drive one day this November to learn about the larger world in the design of the new Vesterheim Commons by Snøhetta, an architectural firm based in Oslo, Norway and New York City. The visit to the Vesterheim Commons, which opened to the public in September, was part of a Paideia The oculus at Vesterheim Commons 111 unit titled “Built Spaces and the Common Good.” Founded in Oslo in 1989 by Dykers and Paideia’s interest in Snøhetta began well Kjetil Thorsen, Snøhetta has designed before construction of the Vesterheim stunning projects throughout the world, Commons started in March 2022. Andy including the Alexandria Library in Hageman, Professor of English and now Alexandria, Egypt, the Norwegian director of the Center for Ethics and National Opera and Ballet in Oslo, and Public Engagement, recommended that the National September 11 Memorial Paideia 111 include a unit on Snøhetta Museum Pavilion in New York City. in fall 2019. Paideia 111-112 has always The Snøhetta website lists more than focused on reading, analyzing, and writ100 projects completed since 2021 or ing about primary texts, and in recent under construction. years texts have come to include film, The 7,600-square-foot Vesterheim music, art, and now architecture. Commons is the largest and most recent In this unit students are asked to think renovation of Vesterheim, the National about how the design of buildings and Norwegian-American Museum and spaces reflects the values and ethics of Folk Art School. The Snøhetta project a place, the “common good.” Snøhetta’s began with the landscape re-design of approach is based on the common good, Heritage Park, the outdoor space which emphasizing teamwork and collaborahouses the immigrant structures that tion, innovative design, integration of were once part of the Luther campus. 2

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My Paideia 111 section and two other sections—about 50 students—were taken on a tour of the Vesterheim Commons by staff members Jennifer Kovarik (’95) and Andrew Ellingson (’03). After our visit, students wrote about their favorite space in the museum and how the design of the space demonstrates some of the values of architecture for the “common good” that we discussed in class. Students were understandably impressed by the massive wooden awning in front and the large oculus above the common space on the first floor opening onto the second. But they were also impressed by the smaller spaces—a classroom, a display room, and even a corner of a wall bordering onto an older Vesterheim structure, representing, as one student wrote, “all that Snøhetta is seeking to accomplish . . . how one element of the building maintains remembrance of what the old building was and the history of the place.” PHOTO BY AVA JOHNSON ('27)

he Luther College mission statement affirms that “As a liberal arts college, Luther is committed to a way of learning that moves us beyond immediate interests and present knowledge into a larger world.”

I was struck, too, by this photo taken by one of my students. It looks professional, the eye of the oculus open to view the person below. For many years Paideia students visited the Vesterheim as part of a unit on Norwegian immigration. When Paideia transitioned from a case study approach to reading individual texts, that unit was dropped, and so was the museum visit, which felt like a loss to me. It was good to be back to the Vesterheim, connecting students to the wider world just down the hill and across the bridge into town.

First Year in a Box: Rediscovering My Introduction to the Liberal Arts Editor’s note: Lori Stanley gave this talk on May 20, 2023, as the Ruth A. Davis Memorial Lecture at the Phi Beta Kappa initiation ceremony.

ood afternoon and congratulations Phi Beta Kappa initiates, and welcome to all who have gathered here to celebrate our students’ achievements. Thank you, Professor Kildegaard, for your generous introduction, and thanks to my faculty colleagues for electing me to membership in Phi Beta Kappa and inviting me to give the Ruth A. Davis Memorial Lecture. It’s an honor to be here. I have been asked to reflect today on what liberal arts education has meant to me. I have spent my entire adult life steeped in the liberal arts, first as a Luther College student in the late 1970s and for the past 40 years as a member of the Luther faculty. Perhaps because liberal education has defined my life, it’s not easy to capture in a few minutes the ways in which it has shaped me and how deeply important it is to me. But I’ll give it a try by going back to what I think of as the beginning of it all, and I hope you’ll indulge me as I tell a few stories. A few weeks ago I undertook the daunting task of sorting through bins and boxes of old records and personal belongings that my spouse Dave and

First-year student ID card

I had stashed away in the storage area of our home. In the process of digging through our past I encountered a long-forgotten cardboard box containing an array of artifacts from my first year as a student at Luther College. When I lifted the lid, there on the top of the heap was my 18-year-old self smiling back at me from my very first student ID. Beside it was a cracked and faded Polaroid photograph of me and one of my first-year roommates, Esther Menn, unpacking our belongings in West Brandt on move-in day.1 Beneath the photo was a handwritten note from my other roommate, Kate Thronson, informing me that she hadn’t had time to do laundry so she’d worn one of my outfits.2 That Lori Stanley with Maasai “son” Leboy Oltimbau. Leboy has happened a lot that year! As I dug deeper I discov- served as a cultural guide and translator for Luther College groups visiting northern Tanzania since 2005. He also initiered old canceled checks for things like purchases at ated and was a collaborator on the Maasai Medicine Project the Luther College Book in the early 2010s. Shop, an electric typewritthe life of a first-generation college kid, er, and my $50 Luther College enrollbut important insights into the person ment deposit. I also came across records I would become and the role that my revealing that Luther’s annual comliberal arts education would play in my prehensive fee that year was academic and personal development. I just shy of $4000, my federal saw in those notebooks, course readings, loan was a whopping $300, term papers, and exams evidence of my and my work study position evolving academic interests and growin the Modern Languages ing intellectual curiosity. I saw how I Department paid one dollar was learning to become a more critical and ninety cents per hour. thinker and a better communicator; how As I continued to sift ethical and moral positions I held were through the contents of the sometimes affirmed, but often chalbox it dawned on me that it lenged; how academic disciplines were contained not just amusing valuable constructs but also limiting, mementos from one year in and that learning to make connections Fall 2023/Agora

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

by LORI A. STANLEY ’80, Professor Emerita of Anthropology

program in Mexico, one of the only short-term international experiences that Luther offered at that time. The course was led by two faculty members who would become important mentors to me, Spanish professor Dennis Magnuson, who had been my teacher in the fall, and anthropology professor Clark Mallam. For four weeks our group traveled together by van, train, and bus as we studied the modern-day, historical, and archaeological Mayan cultures of Mexico, while also improving our With roommate Esther Menn (right) in West Brandt on Spanish skills through move-in day, August 1976 immersion in the language. It was an amazing introduction to interacross disciplines was intellectually disciplinary experiential learning, one of exciting and led to much richer underthe hallmarks of the liberal arts. standing. It also became clear to me That first-year January experience that what I experienced in that incrednot only improved my language skills ible first year of college led to wonderful and confirmed my desire to major in opportunities and laid a strong foundaSpanish, but it also introduced me to tion for life-long learning. anthropology–a field I had never heard I can’t begin today to lay out all the of before arriving at Luther–and that evidence for each of these revelations, encounter changed the course of my but I’d like to share a few examples that life. Upon returning from Mexico I illustrate what a liberal arts education entered into conversations with my and a career at a liberal arts college have advisor about taking courses in anthromeant to me. I do this for the students pology, and before long I added it as a in the auditorium, in the hope that it will get each of you thinking about your own journey up to this point, where the road might lead you from here, and how you will use your knowledge, time and talents as you proceed along the path of life. So let’s dig into that cardboard box. Prominent among the materials I found there were class notes, worksheets, and written papers from my Spanish classes. I had arrived at Luther having taken two years of high school Spanish and having just completed an intensive summer language program in Mexico. I loved learning Spanish and there was no question that I would continue to study it in college. What I didn’t realize at the time was how many doors my passion for the language would open. For example, in my first January Term I was able to participate in a study abroad 4

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major. That August I participated in an archaeological field school led by Professor Mallam, and the following year, as a sophomore with only a couple of anthropology courses under my belt, I traveled to Central America to do Mesoamerican archaeology. Thanks to professional contacts made through Professor Mallam, I spent the spring semester and early summer with the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History) doing field work in northwestern Honduras at the site of a previously unexcavated Mayan ceremonial center called Currusté.3 For five months I lived in a tiny camper van parked on the archaeological site, spending every day excavating large pyramidal mounds and stone plazas and chatting in Spanish with the other crew members, all of whom were local Hondurans. In the evenings and on weekends I sat amongst the ruins making journal entries, reading about Mayan archaeology, writing papers in longhand, and doing my Spanish lessons, all so that I could earn credits in anthropology and Spanish from Luther. It was a rather unconventional form of study abroad, even in those days. And unfortunately the almost complete lack of communication I was able to have with my family for nearly half a year caused my parents endless worry. But it was an amazing period of deep learning and personal growth that enhanced

First-year study abroad experience in Mexico with professors Dennis Magnuson (far left) and R. Clark Mallam (taking the photo), January 1977. Lori is standing sixth from right.

PHOTO COURTESY OF LUTHER COLLEGE

anthropology, and about a year later I social inequalities, returned to the Decorah area with my and some of the husband Dave, also a Luther College challenges facing anthropology graduate, with the intent migrant laborers in that we would start an archaeological the United States. consulting company. Most people with Gradually academic whom we shared our aspirations simply theories and classshook their heads in bewilderment, and room discussions undoubtedly most thought this goal from my college would never be realized. Neverthecourses took on a less we went ahead with our plan, and whole new meaning, though it wasn’t easy we accomplished and by the second what we set out to do. After a few years summer I was finally I was no longer involved in the firm’s beginning to underday-to-day operations or field investigastand something one tions because I had begun teaching at of my anthropology Luther and then relocated to Missouri professors said to for a time to study for my Ph.D. But me when I first told Dave ran a very successful and highly him I was taking this regarded business until 2017 when he summer job in order retired and sold the company–Bear to “help” the migrant Creek Archeology, Inc.–to one of his workers. “No,” he longtime employees. The new owner said, shaking his and CEO, Derek Lee, is another Luther head, “whatever you anthropology graduate and former end up doing there student of mine, and he just happens won’t help them. to be the parent of two current Luther But go. See what students, CJ Lee ’25 and Emma Lee ’26. you learn.” What I learned was that I Lori with her Honduran friend Copán in 1978 I offer this example because neither needed to know more Dave nor I had any coursework in busiabout history, geopolitics, economics, my problem-solving skills, increased ness management or related fields; no and social systems in order to begin to my confidence and my independence, one had taught us how to run a small grasp the root causes of the challenges and reinforced my belief in the value of corporation, much less start one from that migrant farmworkers faced, let combining hands-on experience with scratch. But our Luther education had alone imagine possible solutions. In the kind of learning that takes place in provided many tools that were useful to other words, what those experiences the college classroom. us in this undertaking. I’m convinced reinforced for me was the great value that it was our broad-based coursework; Returning to that musty old box, some of liberal learning for understanding our problem-solving, critical thinking, of the artifacts found there reminded the world in which we live, for solving communication and research skills; and me that my early college coursework real-world problems, and for good and our strict adherence to ethical prinand experiences led to other important responsible citizenship. ciples in our dealings with employees, learning opportunities and outcomes clients, agencies, and Native American The strong liberal arts foundation that beyond Luther. For example, thanks was so important to to my language study and intermy intellectual and est in the social sciences, during my personal developfirst two summers in college I found ment throughout my employment with a Lutheran social college years continservices organization. My role was ued to serve me well to conduct outreach among Mexican after I graduated from and Mexican-American migrant farm Luther, even prior to laborers working seasonally in the sugar my role as a full-time beet-growing region of northwestern member of Luther’s Minnesota. Over the course of those faculty. I’ll illustrate two summers I developed close relawith a couple of extionships with many migrant families, amples. and I stay in contact with some of them to this day. I also began to develop In 1981 I completed an awareness of power and privilege, a master’s degree in Lori in her Koren office, ca. 1987 Fall 2023/Agora

PHOTO COURTESY OF YOG RAJ GAUTAM

January Term group with Nepali guides, Torikhola village, Nepal, 1995 stakeholders that enabled us to build a business from the ground up and keep it operating successfully for four decades. Now consider an illustration of the value of my education that is of a rather different sort. While working on my doctorate in the late 1980s and early 1990s I became part of a team at the University of Missouri that launched a long-term research project in Oklahoma working with the last speakers of a Native American language called Chiwere. Chiwere is the heritage language of members of the modern-day Iowa Tribe and Otoe-Missouria Tribe whose ancestors once lived right here in eastern Iowa and southeastern Minnesota. The kind of research we were engaged in requires a multidisciplinary approach, and I was able to draw on my background in languages, archaeology, cultural and linguistic anthropology, history and more as our team recorded this largely undocumented language, worked out features of its grammar, and explored the fascinating connections between the language and the culture of its speakers. Sadly, the last full-fledged speakers of Chiwere have now passed on. But today the Iowa and Otoe-Missouria people are using the audio and video recordings, lexicon, grammatical sketches, and other data that we produced all those years ago in their own efforts to revitalize Chiwere. As I watch the tribes reclaim the language that outsiders once 6

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endeavored to take away from them, I’m grateful that my liberal arts education enabled me to contribute in useful ways to this effort. Finally, when it comes to my four decades on the Luther faculty I could describe countless ways in which my undergraduate education was foundational for my life as a teacher-scholar. Since you’d all like to get to dinner eventually, however, I’ll give just two last examples. The first relates directly to my early studies in Mexico and Honduras, and

my subsequent participation in a January travel course to the Pueblo region of the American Southwest during my junior year in college. Largely as a result of those undergraduate experiences, as a member of the Luther faculty I had a long-standing commitment to off-campus study and other forms of experiential and community-based learning. In the early 1990s when Luther set out to expand its January Term offerings abroad, I was fortunate to be among the first to develop a new program. In 1992, at the suggestion of study abroad director and professor of economics Mark Lund, who had many contacts in Nepal as a result of the development work he had done there years before, he and I co-taught a course on global issues in the context of the Himalayan region in Nepal. Over the next decade that course evolved into an anthropology offering that introduced students to the peoples and cultures of rural Nepal and examined the effects of tourism and development projects on their mountain communities. From 1992 until 2023 I led or co-led 23 international programs: five to Nepal and Thailand, one to Guatemala, and 17 to Tanzania. I also joined my Education Department colleague Professor Deborah Norland for four Luther College summer-school programs on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. These off-campus courses were intense, all-consuming teaching experiences, but also some of the most rewarding ones of my career.

Eating roasted goat with Maasai hosts, Monduli District, Tanzania, ca. 2002

PHOTO COURTESY OF MARK LUND

host communities we have found ways to reciprocate, typically by collaborating with our hosts to achieve goals that they themselves have defined. For example, when Leboy Oltimbau, a Maasai colleague in Tanzania, asked me how he could “make a book” about his people’s extensive knowledge of their traditional plant-based medicines, knowledge that was disappearing, my students and I worked with him to come up with a plan. With generous support from Luther in the form of student-faculty collaborative research grants, over the course of three summers five students and I assisted Oltimbau and other Maasai colleagues in identifying medicinal plants and documenting how they were used to treat illnesses and injuries. We then produced an illustrated guide to Maasai traditional medicine. Copies of the guide were distributed to community members and to their rural secondary school for use as a textbook for their Indigenous Knowledge course.

Curious sloth bear cub, Nepal, 1995 And always in the back of my mind was the belief, grounded in personal experience, that each course had the potential to be life-changing for the students. Indeed, many participants said at the time, or in some cases years later, that their educational travels had a major impact on their career path, or the effort they put into learning about the rest of the world, or their view of themselves as global citizens and the personal choices they made as a result.

Other projects in Tanzania involved supporting efforts to build rural schools and churches, constructing water collection and sanitation systems, and developing economic diversification programs. In one Maasai village that hosted us annually from the first year of the program, we worked side by side with community members to prepare the foundation for the concrete block church they were building near the site of their original wattle and daub church. For two days we mixed concrete by hand and moved it by bucket brigade to construct the foundation. Another year we helped to build a wattle and daub dormitory for a rural school, and we regularly contributed school supplies and teaching materials to a preschool that is preparing Maasai children for success in primary school. One of the economic diversification programs that Luther students and faculty collaborated on involved distilling essential oils from local plants for making soap to sell to tourist lodges. In order to support women’s development projects we regularly brought glass beads and other supplies to a beading cooperative and to several independent beaders, and we happily purchased the women’s beautiful creations for our family members, our friends, and ourselves. We also worked with Tanzanians in their efforts to establish non-governmental organizations,

I was always grateful for the many positive ways in which those travel courses influenced my students, but I also wanted our presence in the places we visited to be about more than just what was gained by the students and their faculty leaders. I felt strongly that the people who welcomed us and made our learning possible should benefit as much if not more than we did. I did my best to convey this conviction to my students in the hope that they, too, would strive for mutuality in their relationships with the people they met. I’ll be the first to admit that this ideal is easier expressed than achieved, but by observing and listening to people in our

Building a church at Mbarangati, Tanzania, 2010. Luther students and community members form a bucket brigade to pour concrete during construction of the foundation. Fall 2023/Agora

or NGOs, that supported grassroots human rights and human development work, typically with an emphasis on women and children. Finally, in the spirit of reciprocity and with Luther’s generous support, we brought seven Tanzanian colleagues over the years to campus as visitors in residence, hosting them in our homes and introducing them to our culture, just as they helped us to learn about theirs. These are all examples of how liberal education–my own and my students’–provided the mindset, the value system, the skills, and other means for tackling big problems and taking seriously the responsibility of global citizenship. For my final example, I’ll return one more time to my box of treasures. Among all the other mementos, I came across readings, notes, handouts and term papers from the year-long common course called Freshman Studies that all first-year students were required to take when I started at Luther. The syllabus for this course describes Freshman Studies as “an interdisciplinary course designed by the faculty of Luther College to serve as an introduction to the Liberal Arts.” It goes on to say that “the course will acquaint you with the kind of resources education can make available to you…; it will stress the value of judgments that…individuals and societies must make to constructively [use] these resources; and, hopefully, it will suggest ways in which your work at Luther might become a meaningful whole.”

Liberal education provided the mindset, the value system, the skills, and other means for tackling the big problems and taking seriously the responsibility of global citizenship. The syllabus reminded me that during the fall semester of Freshman Studies we read contemporary works like Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and an anthology called China: Yesterday and Today, as well as classics like the 8

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Athenian tragedy Antigone, Dante’s Inferno, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and works by Plato in a collection titled The Last Days of Socrates. In the spring we had units on the African American experience, Scandinavian immigration to the US, and Native American history and culture. Between the reading, the writing and revising, and the expectations set for critical thinking and discussion, this was the hardest course I had ever taken. Believe it or not, my friends and I sometimes complained about it! And yet it was exciting for the way Sylvie Hall ’11(left), Leboy Oltimbau, and Kia Johnson it opened up whole new ’11 documenting Maasai medicinal plants, Eluwai village, worlds for me. Best of Tanzania, 2010 all, the course exemplified what I had learned in the process of liberal learning, of to love about college within just the first doing what we want our students to few weeks on campus–it integrated my do–on their own and in conversation learning experience, demonstrating the with others–for the rest of their lives. I connections among the texts and across am incredibly grateful to have had that time, space and cultures. It was incredopportunity during the last years of my ibly challenging, but oh so liberating! teaching career. During that tough but exhilarating year in Freshman Studies, I never imagined that precisely 42 years later I would be teaching a version of that course, first-year Paideia, and would continue to teach it until my retirement and beyond. I had thought taking the course was hard, but I discovered that teaching it was even harder. And intimidating at first! After all, every instructor of firstyear Paideia must teach texts most, if not all, of which are outside their own discipline, something most academics never do. But that’s also what makes this course so intellectually invigorating. We become learners alongside our students. Of course we prepare in advance to teach texts that are new to us, but we spend a lot of our time in class figuring things out with our students as members of a close-knit learning community. We are all engaged together

There’s no time today to talk about calculus or computer science or introduction to weight training or concert band or some of the other courses and experiences represented in that old cardboard box. Suffice it to say, every single one of them enriched my understanding of the world, fueled my desire to learn, and in some way influenced my life beyond that year and beyond Luther. I feel so lucky not only to have spent four wonderful years in a rich and nurturing liberal arts environment, but also to have recognized the value of the pursuit of knowledge and to have embraced life-long learning. For me, a career in academia was the context for much of that ongoing learning, but no matter what your career path or where you live or what your interests are, each of you has what it takes to actualize the Phi Beta Kappa motto by making love

of learning your guide, now and in the future. Students, today and in the days and weeks ahead, please reflect on all those moments, remarkable and ordinary, that you spent in the lab, in the library, in classroom discussion, in late-night reading sessions, in internships and study away, in rehearsals, practices, performances, and competitions. Where will they lead you? How will the knowledge, skills, and experiences from your time at Luther shape your life? What opportunities might present themselves? What sorts of challenges are you prepared to meet? What kind of citizen will you be? You are truly privileged to have acquired a liberal arts education, an education that will serve you well in work, in leisure, in service to others, and in home and family life. Please cherish it and make the most of it. Thank you. Author’s note: This talk is dedicated to my late parents, Peter and Lou Ann Van Gerpen, for their unconditional love and unwavering support throughout my educational journey; to my earliest Luther College mentors, Dennis D. Magnuson and R. Clark Mallam, for expanding my horizons and demonstrating to me the value of the liberal arts; and to all the students who have been learners alongside me over the decades.

Lori Stanley with Musa Kamaika (back right) and Leboy Oltimbau, longtime cultural guides and translators for Luther groups in Tanzania, at Palisades Park, Decorah, 2017

Notes 1. Esther Menn is currently Dean of Academic Affairs and The Ralph W. and Marilyn R. Klein Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. Esther is married to Bruce Tammen (‘71).

2. Kate (Thronson) Seitz is retired from a career in early childhood education and as a registered nurse. Her daughter Audrey is a 2010 Luther College graduate.

3. In December 2008 Currusté became Honduras’s fifth archaeological park. Due to political turmoil in the country, the park was closed the following year and remains so to this day.

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Liberating Wisdom and the Liberal Arts by JONATHAN STRANDJORD '74

Introduction

’m honored to have been invited by Professor Marie Drews on behalf of Luther’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter to spend a half hour or so reflecting on the intersection of faith and learning at Luther College. I’ve read (with pleasure!) the current version of Luther’s mission statement. I very much appreciate: • its Lutheran yet non-parochial character (focusing on grace and freedom); • the understanding of the college’s calling (seeking truth, examining faith, and caring for all); • and this school’s commitment to liberal arts “as a way of learning that moves us beyond immediate interests and present knowledge into a larger world”—disciplining minds and developing whole persons who can “understand and confront a changing society.” Good stuff !

How might this mission be summed up in one word? I nominate Wisdom (with a capital W). Now this may seem like an unlikely choice. 10

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For in modern ears the word “Wisdom” can have a dull, conservative ring to it that triggers concern (especially among the young)—concern that the future is not open but hedged in by old knowledge, understanding, and values. I hope to show that Wisdom is more about serving a livable future than repeating some real or imagined version of the past.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Editor’s note: The following talk was given as the Phi Beta Kappa Homecoming lecture on October 7. Strandjord earned his Master of Divinity degree from Luther Seminary and his PhD in Religion from Vanderbilt University. After serving as co-pastor with his wife Jeanette at two parishes in Wisconsin and lecturing in ethics and theology at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Strandjord served as the Director of Theological Education in the ELCA Churchwide Organization, based in Chicago, from 1998 until his retirement in 2018. Jonathan and Jeanette’s daughters are Luther graduates Sarah C.S. McLaren (’02) and Erika C. Strandjord (’06).

Today in American culture, we do sometimes see the Wisdom of other cultures being celebrated—but all too often exoticized and appropriated as a status-enhancing luxury good. I hope to show that Wisdom (with a capital W) can and must include serious engagement between living wisdom traditions. Finally, the word “Wisdom” can conjure up the image of that irritating know-itall, a walking-talking Wikipedia who’s apparently impossible to mute or turn off ! Wisdom necessarily does involve having considerable knowledge. But the word also has a long history of pointing to the importance of having a good sense of how best to handle knowledge in pursuit of life-giving ends. That good sense includes, of course, knowing when to speak up and when to keep silent! To everything there is a season—a kairos. Wisdom is embodied, contextual, and practical, shaped by and for life in concrete human situations. It operates not only at the level of clear reflective consciousness but also in the background as an ensemble of assumptions, memories, hopes, practiced skills, dispositions of attention and habits of interpretation that together orient understanding, action, and judgment. Education (that is, not only formal and informal but even accidental teaching and learning) continually shapes and reshapes Wisdom. In so doing, education (in keeping with the word’s etymology) draws or leads out the learner to some

Jonathan Strandjord

fuller reality—that is, to a wider field of understanding and action. In this centrifugal movement, we see the tight connection between education and liberation—and between both of these and salvation, most directly expressed in the Hebrew word yasha' which pictures a deliverance from imprisonment or slavery and movement to an open space. All three words, education, liberation and yasha', point to the fact that education is not just one more activity among others, valuable to some people at some times, but something fundamentally important for genuinely human existence: indeed, a matter of life and death. The stakes are always high regarding education: in our own time, particularly so. For, as I’ll try to clarify, wisdom is not simple and stable but rather has multiple aspects which easily create competing educational projects. And in a time when human powers for good and ill are so great, when competition for resources is acute, and when the accelerating pace of economic innovation/dislocation and social change heightens anxieties about

the continued survival of any particular community and its body of wisdom, education naturally becomes a central focus of intense conflict. Florida comes immediately to my mind. But the fact is, we’re all living in such a time.

Education, liberation and yasha' point to the fact that education is not just one more activity among others, but fundamentally important for genuinely human existence: indeed, a matter of life and death. Four basic aspects of wisdom—four liberating movements In this next part of this presentation, I’ll sketch four fundamental ways wisdom presents itself in human life. These four ways are not necessarily separated from each other. Indeed, I argue that Wisdom (with a capital W) only happens when all four are in play. But, as I’ll try to show, these four aspects also come apart very easily. And so they can and do each show up as dominant in distinct, more or less self-contained and even mutually hostile forms of wisdom. Sketching these distinctions and exploring these conflicts may be useful as a way to prepare to take up the topic of the final part of this presentation: the relationship between the Liberal Arts and Liberating Wisdom. In the meantime, I’ll sketch the basic concern of each aspect of wisdom, the educational project it entails, what sort of liberation it accomplishes, and how it easily results in new forms of bondage and confinement that call for fresh liberation through deeper, wider education. 1. Wisdom as power (reaching, grasping, using) Human beings are desiring, vulnerable beings with multiple capacities, including remarkable abilities not only to learn and imagine but also to plan, invent,

and construct. Our experience and knowledge are not passive and merely receptive but active and thoroughly interested. And so human wisdom is naturally concerned with power. I want something, so I employ my wisdom to make or otherwise get hold of it. I fear something, so I employ my wisdom to avoid or destroy it. In both want and fear, if my existing wisdom is not adequate to the task, I’m a highly motivated learner. If wisdom is then increased by this learning, my power likewise expands. The history of the development of human wisdom is the story of an extraordinary expansion of power. And over the past several centuries, intentionally educational activity that serves this expansion has grown at an accelerating rate. In region after region, formal, structured education has moved from being something reserved for a small elite toward being a universal expectation (if still far from a universal reality). Educational institutions, research programs, guilds, degrees, technologies, and information systems have multiplied both in number and type. Educational requirements have expanded for even very common occupations. These educational enterprises have not focused exclusively on raising the level and expanding the range of technical understanding and skills that contribute directly to the material improvement of life. They have also increased capacities both for imagination, expression, enjoyment of and participation in culture, and resourceful participation in local, national, and global politics. But even in this more humanistic educational work, it has largely been the power aspect of wisdom that has been in view. The primary aim has been empowerment. Wisdom as power is not evil. It is absolutely essential for human life. And the liberation that comes with expanding this aspect of wisdom is obvious to anyone who through learning steps out into a wider field of potential action. But this liberation is also limited—and even deeply ambiguous. For it cannot free us from fear, and can in fact heighten it because having greater power can make one (whether as an

individual or part of a group) the object of others’ resentment, fear, and attempted manipulation. And, of course, even though an increase in the empowering wisdom of others can make them more useful as our collaborators or teachers, we can worry about them knowing even more than we do—and what power that gives them over us. What’s more, as the power-enhancements that come with education become greater, the sharper the competition over access to excellent education. And as knowledge and understanding become more thoroughly identified with power, the greater the incentive to control access to and use of them by others. A world in which we crave more and more knowledge for ourselves and fear it in others is not a happy place. And so, it’s no surprise that this first sort of wisdom is accompanied everywhere and always by its contrary, a wisdom which seeks to reduce craving, aiming to replace hot desire with cool detachment. This second form of wisdom interrupts desire’s movement to grasp, possess, and act with skeptical questions: Is this object really worth seeking? Is this action truly worthwhile? How can one be sure this won’t have the consequence of reducing future freedom? Might this move be a mistake—or even a trap? Let’s turn our attention to wisdom that refrains from grasping, preferring the freedom of being empty-handed. 2. Wisdom as suspense (refraining from grasping and using) All collections of proverbial wisdom go beyond practical teaching concerning how to effectively exercise and expand one’s power. They also give considerable attention to the importance of caution, questioning, and restraint. Much of this counsel is straightforwardly practical and prudential, warning how power fails and desire is disappointed when a person or group does not pause before acting, first gathering and assessing all the relevant information about the situation. But sometimes cautionary, critical wisdom goes much further, focusing on the importance of avoiding becoming either the prisoner of one’s own desires or the pawn of power systems. Fall 2023/Agora

This form of liberating wisdom knows that freedom is not simply having the power to act in accordance with one’s desires. For desires can and do conflict, with the result that satisfying one desire results in the frustration of others. Moreover, a single desire can become so powerful that it becomes an imprisoning compulsion. And in a world in which many desiring subjects vie for the power to act, competing power systems come into being, each trying to recruit support by promising fulfillment to all who come under its banner (“ You’re going to win so much you’ll get tired of winning!”) and threatening frustration—or even destruction—to all who oppose it. Wisdom as suspense is suspicious of both desire and power; it seeks to liberate through the creation and preservation of critical distance. To deal with the inner contradictions and compulsions of desire, it proposes some set of bodily, social, and intellectual disciplines that give order to life, thought and action. These include not only techniques for simplifying and moderating desire but also a core disciplined habit of reflective self-examination. The freedom of the self is advanced through self-suspicion. To deal with the external threat of domination by power-systems, an individual (or community) takes a posture of skeptical questioning, declining to take for granted that reality is structured as the incumbent powers would have one believe, probing for overlooked and suppressed information, for illusion and deception. Wisdom-as-suspicion is as thoroughly related to matters of power as is wisdom-as-empowerment; only here the issue is not how to enhance one’s own power but rather how to get loose from entangling powers. The goal is not to move into the world to grasp and possess something else but to elude capture, withdrawing from all that would ensnare, achieving self-possession. Human desire, in addition to being powerful and complex, has no intrinsic limits. And as human power has expanded throughout history in scale and scope, greatly extending the range of imaginable experience and action, desires have been enabled to grow and 12

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multiply, increasing their complexity and ability to conflict with each other.

3. Wisdom as generosity (releasing, handing on)

In this age of unprecedented 24/7 interconnection, our attention can at any time and in any place be drawn in almost any direction. In such a time, radical disciplines that tremendously simplify desire—or even attempt to suspend it—become deeply attractive to many of the most thoughtful and sensitive. The self becomes more acutely selfconscious, more continuously a project, more thoroughly engaged in critical questioning, an endlessly open subject.

Wisdom always presents itself as in some important sense given, as something not simply produced by the self. Even when a feature or dimension of wisdom is seen as something innate to the structure of human being (or being itself ), that human structure is most naturally treated as itself something given, a gift.

This subjective radical skepticism and openness has an objective parallel. For as the same powers that have multiplied desires have grown and organized into enormous systems, the capacity of these systems to create self-justifying narratives, ideologies, and other symbolic frameworks has grown in tandem. In reaction, increasingly radical forms of criticism have emerged, employing multiplying critical tools to unmask hidden agendas, expose pretentions and contradictions, and reveal supposed freedoms as forms of systemic bondage. Remarkable new literatures have grown up and educational efforts expended to foster the freedom of always being able to think and act otherwise. The liberation delivered by critical distance is real, but it is also severely limited, and by itself limiting. For just as there are no intrinsic boundaries to desire and power, there are no bounds to criticism’s suspicion. And to the degree that criticism approaches being a thoroughly consistent posture—a criticism that never quits, an absolute detachment, a physical and intellectual asceticism with no positive use for power—it closes off the springs of action, ironically leaving incumbent power systems effectively unopposed. But neither can power and critical distance form a natural, balanced pair; one always tends to undo or co-opt the other. Wisdom as power and wisdom as criticism by themselves can form only very unstable compounds. They can be held together, however, if neither is dominant as both are held together by a third, even deeper and more liberating aspect of wisdom.

When we examine the experiential wisdom that comes to be through our ordinary sense experience and everyday life in the world, we find it is freighted with the sense of inheritance, as coming to us from outside us. And when we consider the wisdom that comes to us through teaching activity (whether formal or informal), it presents itself as a living inheritance, a gift that carries the momentum of generosity. Coming from elsewhere and from others, such wisdom can move to us—and then through us to those others who could use it; each learner called to become a teacher. This flow of wisdom does more than move particular knowledge, skills, habits and understanding from one person or group to another. At the same time, it digs channels of enduring connection through which more wisdom can flow in the future. A gift community forms that both sustains and is sustained by this handing-on, this tradition. The most obvious reason such wisdom traditions persist is that the communities which have them enjoy tremendous survival advantages through their transgenerational accumulation of knowledge of how things are in the world, how change can be effected, and how deception and destruction might be avoided. Beyond this, wisdom traditions through narratives, ceremonies, songs, dances, observations, interpretations, and practices help communities to become and remain alert to what is good, true, and beautiful in the realms of present experience, memory, and the imagination. This not only makes individual lives richer and more interesting, it also provides more material for gifting, more opportunity for generosity’s flow. In every tradition, this survival advantage along with this move toward life

abundant create in every tradition a powerful drive to extensive and intensive educational activity. The educational project of wisdom as generosity, while wide-ranging in every tradition and variable between them (and within each tradition over time), consistently centers in “traditioning.” In, with, and under its communication of a body of knowledge and the cultivation of some set of skills, orientations, and attitudes, wisdom as generosity aims to encourage the cultivation of the practices of participation in tradition: that is, learning and teaching. It seeks to foster a receptive, teachable spirit in all potential learners; and it works to motivate and make possible more generous teaching. This makes education far more than a means to certain ends; education here is constitutive of human ends.

Genuine generosity stations us before the other, a position in which we are called to be thoughtful in both senses of the word: both “thinking hard” and “taking thought for someone else.” The liberation achieved by generosity’s traditioning is profound. Indeed, it amounts to an ecstasy (in the literal sense of “standing outside oneself ”). For finding ourselves participating in the flow of generosity—receiving tradition’s gifts while at the same time “dispossessed” by the needs of vulnerable others who could use at least some of those gifts— we can find ourselves drawn out of the captivity of self-concern. This is an ecstasy which takes us out of ourselves—but not out of the world. Quite the contrary, the earthy mysticism that is genuine generosity stations us before the other, a position in which we are called to be thoughtful in both senses of the word: both “thinking hard” and “taking thought for someone else.” In such thoughtfulness, wisdom as power and wisdom as suspense can cohabit

and even cooperate as both are essential in effective generosity to a vulnerable other who can use the benefits of empowerment and critical distance along with traditioning in order to enjoy the freedom of living effectively, reflectively, and generously. To use theological terms, this radical liberation can well be said to be a sort of reversal of the movement of incurvatus in se (Martin Luther’s characterization of the centripetal vector of sinful being), generosity’s traditioning achieving a sustained movement of exodus. But this freedom is also unstable and corruptible and so it too can result in a return to bondage. For even inside a particular tradition, we stand before more than one other person, indeed before many others, each with particular possibilities and vulnerabilities, not all of which are congruent, therefore pulling the responsive, responsible self in multiple directions. And each tradition, precisely to the degree it is a rich resource for life abundant, is far from simple, bearing within itself a wide variety of resources for shaping lives that can have conflicting answers to questions of what is true, good, and beautiful. And so, every actual tradition is always already internally conflicted and contested. The tensions and contradictions multiply when we encounter others who have been shaped by a different tradition’s particularities. These tensions tempt us, not only as individuals but also as tradition-bearing communities, to “solve” the tension by privileging our folk, being thoughtful in relation to them while treating the rest as inferior, less deserving, or even less than fully human. Once dehumanization of “those people” is in motion, this social form of incurvatus gains energy and a perverse and (potentially deadly) moral force. And so, in our experience of liberation achieved through generous traditioning, we see it can easily result in only a very partial and interrupted ecstasy, a limited circle of concern hedged in by hostility, fear, and conflict with those outside the circle while at the same time internally threatening to fall apart should any members deviate from some

norm: an ambiguous good shot through with frustrations and dangers. We turn to consider how yet another aspect of wisdom opens the possibility of fuller generosity, more enduring ecstasy. 4. Wisdom as Love, Hope, and Faith (and a Feast!) In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, we find one of his most popular oneliners: “Faith, Hope and Love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is Love.” I’m reversing the order here, in part because I’m a fan of the Johannine literature “For God so loved the world,” “God is love,” “Love one another.” More importantly because Love is life-generating—and all fully Liberating Wisdom is motivated by Love. Love is far from being limited to being an emotion. Genuine love shows up in the world as genuine generosity. • Love gives gifts and doesn’t try to control how and when those gifts are used, not used, returned to sender, or regifted. • Love does not insist on recognition or reciprocity. • In generosity, Love flows out and forward for the sake of a lively, livable future beyond our own lifetime. Generous Love without limits looks to the future with Hope. A hope not just for “our folk” but all humans, all creatures, all things. Such a grand Hope is sustained by Faith that we are not in this alone, that Love has the last word, that living wideawake, thoughtful lives of generous love for one another (and all creation!) is not foolish, not in vain. Wisdom’s Feast at Luther College: Some closing remarks on how Luther College’s Liberal Arts Program supports Liberating Wisdom (and Vice Versa) “Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table. She has sent out her servant girls, she calls from the highest places in the town, Fall 2023/Agora

“You that are simple, turn in here!” To those without sense she says, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the ways of insight.” (Proverbs 9:1-6) I was very impressed (and happy) when I reviewed the materials on Luther’s website that describe your degree requirements, majors, minors, courses, research opportunities, campus-wide conversations, events, and away-fromcampus opportunities. You set a very expansive table for fostering Wisdom! The menu is both rich and varied, giving students the ability to dig deep into a particular field while also gaining from other disciplines. And learning in community creates significant opportunities for cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural table talk that sparks new understanding, imagination, and collaboration. One of the primary virtues of the liberal arts is that they are plural and diverse. And there is no master discipline, no “all-purpose-intellectual-tool,” no “theory of everything,” no “One Ring to Rule Them all.” This doesn’t mean there’s a perfect perpetual peace between the departments (we are human beings after all!). But everyone gains, especially the students, when they can experience the value of multi- and cross-disciplinary teaching, learning and research. For one thing, your students can have a head-start in developing the rhetorical skills needed to translate some important knowledge, theory, process or tool from their own primary field’s jargon into language that can be understood by folks in adjacent and even distant fields (e.g., sciences-engineeringmanufacturing-medicine; historyreligion-economics-sociology-political science-rhetoric-psychology-the artsbusiness). More generally, education in every individual field of learning (at least all I can think of ): • enhances the effective power of those who study it, 14

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• increases the capacity to raise important questions and exercise critical reason (both internally as an individual and publicly as a citizen), • increases the ability to pass knowledge and skills on to others who could use them. So, when students engage deeply and broadly in the life of this liberal arts community, a more truly and fully liberating wisdom is likely to grow. And when they move out into the world, they can carry that wisdom with them to the communities where they will live out their callings—and can foster Wisdom’s flow. Wisdom’s Feast at Luther College is a movable feast.

“Without the Muffle”: Byron, Boxing, and the Authentic Life

pants, headed to a boxing gym to learn (at least in theory) what it’s like to hit someone. Because I was stuck on one odd fact: George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), the Taylor Swift of the Romantic period, trained with a boxing coach. A womanizer, world traveler, and lover of boys at a time when sex between men could be punished by death, he distilled his own experience into his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818), an overnight bestseller. He married surprisingly, divorced scandalously, then fled England for good to settle eventually in Venice, hometown of the famous lover Casanova (whose life just overlaps with his.) But Italian life, too, got boring, so, in 1823, he sailed for Greece to fight the Turks. With typical sarcasm, he joked about his mistress’s fears that he might die. “‘I hope it may be in action,’ he remarked, ‘for that would be a good finish to a very triste existence.’”1 Unfortunately, he didn’t get his wish: six months later, he died of fever in a tent at Missolonghi, aged 36. Until the end, he kept writing, seeking something always just out of reach.

i, y’all. This lecture is from Chapter 1 of my book-inprogress called A Thing of Beauty: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire. My main idea tonight is this: the famous Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, frenemy of Mary Shelley and the Taylor Swift of his time, had a lifelong interest in sports, including boxing. Like his lifelong writing practice, this was a way to live with two things we still fear in our super-online, AI-driven age—mortality and meaninglessness. Boxing and writing are both, I think, ways to feel real. And when I trained at a South London boxing gym, at age 45, I got a taste of the multiple meanings Byron might have found— and we still find—in this complex and fascinating sport. Even a way sports might build our capacities to do hard things, like work for the common good.

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON

The story starts on a sunny morning in March 2019, when I stepped out of Southwark Underground Station in London, bracing myself to climb into a boxing ring for the first time. I was 45 years old, an English professor in yoga

George Gordon, Lord Byron

In person, I doubt Byron and I would’ve liked each other much. Now, approaching the 200th anniversary of his death next year, I can’t stop circling him, one hand raised to jab—or touch. My world is burning; so was his. Torn between irony and grief, we’re both navigating a world of swelling wealth gaps and shrinking resources and an infuriating mix of boredom and anxiety as we struggle up the staircase of midlife, grasping the banister of writing. But Byron had an energy source I didn’t: boxing, which in his time meant some things people wouldn’t expect him, or me, to care about. What did a brilliant pansexual man with a lame leg find in the shadow world of flash coves and former slaves and bloody unbowed courage that was London’s boxing

AGORA PHOTO, LUTHER COLLEGE

by AMY WELDON, Professor of English

Amy Weldon

world? What kinds of life, endurance, freedom did that social ecosystem support? And could I—an American woman going gray and soft, a little too comfortable—find it too? As a young man, Byron trained with boxing celebrity and part-time model John Jackson, to whom I like to refer as “the Marky Mark Wahlberg of Regency England.” “Now there is a man,” Prince George remarked on seeing Jackson. His tomb in Brompton Cemetery still bears the faded letters -aestus, which makes me call him “Byron’s Hephaestus.” The God of the Forge—not a bad epitaph for a boxing trainer. For young Lord Byron, “Jack” was trainer, factotum, and fixer. He called him “my old friend and corporeal pastor and master, John Jackson, Esq., Professor of Pugilism.” This tweaks the Anglican catechism’s phrase urging obedience to “spiritual pastors and masters.” A joke, but there is indeed a “pastoral” feel to the trainer relationship: priest to novitiate, Virgil to Dante, Hephaestus to anvil: you submit yourself, in trust, to be forged. Reforged. Created. Fall 2023/Agora

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

The Battle between Crib and Molineaux, unidentified artist, 1811

I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one,

Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, 2

The age discovers he is not the true one;

Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan— 16

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We all have seen him, in the pantomime, Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.

In a gossipy, hilarious, wicked-uncle voice much like Byron’s own, the narrator continues to spin the yarn of Juan’s adventures, interrupting his own story to complain about the weather, pretend to be scandalized, and head off moralistic grumbling in advance. Here’s where boxing shows up directly, a description of a rainbow as seen by shipwrecked sailors (Canto 2, Stanza 92): It changed of Course; a heavenly Cameleon,

The Airy Child of Vapour and the Sun,

Well – Well, the World must turn upon its Axis,

And all Mankind turn with it, heads or tails, And live and die, make love and pay our taxes,

And as the veering Wind shifts, shift our sails;

The King commands us, and the Doctor quacks us, The Priest instructs, and so our Life exhales,

A little breath, love, wine, ambition, fame,

Fighting, devotion, dust – perhaps a Name. – Here and throughout Byron’s life, poetry and athletic discipline keep him moving through a life otherwise threatening to collapse into chaos and absurdity— some of which, of course, was his own fault, but which I think would’ve made him quite a fan of Albert Camus (more later). Poetry, like boxing, issues a continual challenge that Byron continually accepts, and that I continually issue to myself and my students: take yourself seriously. Try harder. Make something that lasts. This is advice for writing and life. Like a boxing ring, that small space on the page reveals inescapably what you can or can’t do, how much practice you’ve put in, and what you are/not willing to confront. Ottava rima, the mockheroic form Boccaccio introduced and Byron perfected, canters (or “cantos”) the reader along on a rocking rhythm

Brought forth in Purple, cradled in Vermilion, Baptized in molten Gold, and swathed in Dun,

Glittering like Crescents o’er a Turk’s Pavillion,

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Like the great boxer Muhammed Ali 150 or so years later, Byron was something of a rhyming jokester, as we see in my favorite poem of his: a 750-page rhyming epic called Don Juan. (JOOone is how he makes you pronounce it.) The poem’s hero is Don Juan (correctly pronounced hwAHN), the dashing playboy of legend. In Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1787), Don Juan is a defiant rake who’s dragged screaming to hell. Thirty years later, Byron’s Don Juan is a handsome, dopey clown who’s bounced from woman to woman (all smarter than he, and often older), shipwrecked, purchased as a slave by a Turkish empress who disguises him as a girl to sneak him into her chambers, and drafted into the Battle of Waterloo before fetching up in Piccadilly (Byron’s own world) to become a duchess’s boytoy. Here’s the first stanza of the whole thing:

flip to rueful bittersweetness, as in my favorite (Canto 2, stanza 4):

And blending every Colour into One, Just like a black eye in a recent Scuffle (For sometimes we must box without the Muffle.)

“Muffles” are gloves, which were used in training but not, always, in fights. But the lightness and speed of Don Juan can

Byron's muffles (boxing gloves)

What’s behind this race to the edge, this drive for extremes? Perhaps it’s a way to reassure yourself that you are real. To feel something you might call authentic amid absurdity and ennui and the encroachments of mortality. “The excellence of every art is its intensity,” writes boxing fan John Keats in December 1817. “The great object of life,” Byron wrote to his future wife Annabella Milbanke on September 6, 1813, “is Sensation—to feel that we exist— even though in pain—it is this ‘craving void’ which drives us to Gaming—to Battle—to Travel—to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.” Especially if you’re Byron, this is how you get from Gaming, to Battle, to Travel, to Boxing. In Byron’s time, boxing was a shadow world of mostly (but not entirely) men, ranging across classes and races, sharing a complex slang and a complex fascination with a technically illegal sport. Americans and women adopted its language too. British boxing of Byron’s time was an intricate community, with a variety of scrapping, sparkling life that would’ve been irresistible to Byron’s magpie imagination, always intrigued by odd characters, random detail, and forbidden knowledge. Its fans, a network of slumming lords, working-class blokes, writers, and more, called themselves “the Fancy.” Technically illegal, matches were kept secret until shortly before they were due to begin, prompting “the Fancy” to rush to the venue, hitching rides and exchanging tips as they went. The sport’s protean quality shapes William Hazlitt’s wonderful essay “The Fight” (1822) and what could almost be an early graphic novel, even a proto-silent film: a marvelous panoramic drawing by Robert Cruikshank, “Going to a fight: the sporting world in all its variety of style and costume along the road from Hyde Park Corner to Moulsey Hurst,” published in London in 1819. (This is a distance of about 20 miles.) Now in the collection of the Yale Center for

British Art, it’s a single strip of paper, fourteen feet long and exactly the width of a sideways-turned iPhone. To view it, you hold its round wooden case in your left hand and unroll it slowly with your right, “reading” the long procession as it literally moves across your field of vision. A man leads his bull for dogbaiting (a sideshow to the human fight). There are scuffles on the road and horses for sale and even a guy on a bike. Finally, we reach the fight itself: Jack Randall (“the Nonpareil,” whom Keats saw just after his brother Tom’s funeral) vs. Richard West (“West Country Dick”) on April 3, 1817. The great sportswriter Pierce Egan, author of the multivolume Boxiana, is hunkered by the ring, taking notes. At the center of this world is American ex-slave Bill Richmond (1763-1829), an anchor and exemplar of its rich diversity. Born on Long Island, New York, Richmond retired from a successful fighting career in England to become a promoter and trainer of other fighters, including several American ex-slaves like Virginia-born Tom Molineaux (1784-1818). Jewish champion Daniel Mendoza (1764-1836) would have heard Byron’s “Jew-one” as a familiar slur; nevertheless, like Richmond, he parlayed his success in the ring into ownership of a pub. So did two-time English champion Tom Cribb (1781-1848), who founded a pub bearing his name that still stands on Panton Street in London. As ever in Britain, class was the real divide. After Byron dined at Cribb’s house in 1813, he notes: “Tom has been a sailor—a coal-heaver—and some other genteel profession […] and is now only threeand-thirty. A great man! Has a wife and a mistress, and conversations well—bating some sad omissions and misapplications of the aspirate.” (Meaning aitches, which working-class Brits don’t pronounce.) Nevertheless, becoming His Lordship’s amusing toy was risky. Richard “Hellgate” Barry, 7th Earl of Barrymore, one of the Regency’s most notorious rakes, married the daughter of a boxer (herself a sometime fighter, she later became a prison matron at Bridewell) and died at 24. Caricatured by James Gillray as a skinny, pouting dude in boxing gloves, “Hellgate” liked to start fights,

COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON D10726

that makes the form’s discipline look easy. Byron appreciated a good horse. And a good boat. Because he was always on his way somewhere, always worried he was running out of time.

Bill Richmond then call in his pet boxer, Bill Hooper, “the Tinman,” to bail him out. Originally from Bristol, Hooper turned from making “sausepans” toward the high life, then was abandoned when the fun wore off. “The swell tinman, Hooper,” Pierce Egan relates, “was one of those ‘playthings’ of the great; and, sheltered under the wings of nobility, he became pampered, insolent, and mischievous.” When Hellgate tired of Hooper, he turned him out to succumb to drink and disease. Eventually Hooper “was found insensible on the step of a door in St Giles” and “on inquiring who he was, he could only very faintly articulate, ‘Hoop – Hoop.’” Luckily Hooper was “recognized as the miserable remnant of that once powerful pugilistic hero” and “humanely taken to the work-house, where he immediately expired.” Could Egan have seen “The Wizard of Oz” more than a century later, I’m sure he’d hearken to the pathos of the technicolor Tinman, slumped and rusted in place, longing for a heart. This colorful, dangerous, inherently multiple and diverse world would’ve been irresistible to Byron, who would have grown up quite “multiple” himself: a queer, limping boy with the knowledge that “sodomy” between men was a criminal offense. Six hangings for “convicted sodomists” were carried out in 1806 alone, when Byron was an eighteen-year-old Cambridge student. Cruising the Mediterranean in 1811 with his servant Robert Rushton, Byron could work on Childe Harold’s Fall 2023/Agora

Pilgrimage and carry on multiple affairs with boys: his letters to his Cambridge friends were full of joking references to “Plen. and optabil.—Coit,” a coded reference from Petronius’ Satyricon to a phrase meaning “as much full intercourse as one could wish for.” Not in England. Definitely not beyond the wink-wink shelter of Harrow, Cambridge, and classical studies. Maybe not anywhere. Interestingly, instead of attending his mother’s funeral, he chose to box with Rushton in this room (see photo at bottom right) at Newstead— before the present renovation. While training at The Ring in Southwark during the spring of 2019, I experienced boxing’s multiplicity for myself, encountering, from a dozen fresh angles, a city and a life I thought I knew. The first wave of Extinction Rebellion was blocking traffic in Parliament Square, and climate change, housing crunches, Russian billionaires, and Brexit were biting deep into the texture of daily life. Property developers cruised past the gym’s doors. Naively, it hadn’t occurred to me that this beloved place, with its foot-scuffed boxing rings and laughter and worn speed bags might be under threat from those forces of market and gentrification that are abstractions until they come to your front door. The neon-bright stickers of Extinction Rebellion sharpened the point with its razor-edged hourglass: Because we are so very nearly out of time. Time is churning at the bedrock and buildings and streets of London, this city I love, and at the Alabama acres I love back home. Yet our gym stayed. So did our community. So 18

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Despite his pose of aristocratic ease, Byron believed this too. In Canto XII of Don Juan, he mocks writers’ belief that we’re preserving cultural memories “for posterity: “Why, I’m posterity and so are you,” he writes, “/And whom do we remember? Not a hundred” (st. 19, l. 1-2). Mocking his own importance, he nevertheless insists, “I’m serious; so are all men upon paper. / And why should I not form my speculation / And hold up to the sun my little taper?” (st. 21, l. 1-3). But by the time he died, a year and a half later, he’d written five more cantos of Don Juan, with no signs of stopping, in addition to other poems and plays. If poetry is only a “little taper,” why would he have kept writing? In the profane, but apt, advice of my trainer: You can’t fuck about. Take yourself and your one life seriously, even amid the absurdity, the sadness, your fears for the future, all the rest of it. Engage with the world in all its delight and variety. Be curious. And keep on pushing. Otherwise, what are you really doing here?

that is absurd. Literally absurd, since “a gap between appearance and reality” is the definition of irony, Byron’s favorite mode. He would have recognized in his own life and work the rueful freedom that comes when you accept this reality, steadily clearing your vision of habit and illusion. Especially as you reach middle age, and reckon with “the whole thing,” Don Juan’s phrase for sex and for life— mistakes, self-sabotages, gifts, regrets, desires, ridiculousness, and all. Maybe irony itself is a “muffle,” a glove to shield yourself in the inevitable business of giving, and receiving, blows. When you lift your gloves and face your opponent, there’s freedom in that. And, in a word very important to Camus, there is something authentic. So if life (particularly in the twenty-first century) is struggle and absurdity, how then shall we live? Perhaps counterintuitively, Camus offers a positive role model: the mythical figure of Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a heavy boulder up a hill only to watch it crash back to the bottom, then repeat the process – eternally. But to Camus, Sisyphus is not pitiful, but admirable: At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock. (…) The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the

One hundred twenty-five years later, in the midst of the Second World War, a tubercular, womanizing French soccer goalie picked up this question on the path where Byron dropped it: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” This is the writer Albert Camus (1913-1960) in the famous opening of his first philosophical treatise, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), began during the German invasion of France and published two years later, in the depth of war. Byron would have loved his main idea: it’s not human desires that are absurd, nor the world itself, but the eternally uncrossable, irreconcilable gap where the two Newstead Abbey boxing room meet, or fail to meet. That gap: now

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COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON

Tom Cribb

does art. Art can lift what we love above the flood. It can cut through the ennui, the fear, the straight-up bullshit. So can commitment, and practice, and work. I believe this. So do artists, trying to move themselves and their craft ahead against the oncoming flow of time. So do the boxers I met. (Somebody ask me about them in the Q&A!)

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

reality. Maybe this is how you grow up. You find and do your thing. You act (in Hannah Arendt’s sense) to make something rather than nothing. In spite of everything.

Amy Weldon in the London boxing gym same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. In accepting his fate, that “his rock is his thing,” and tackling it mentally and physically, Sisyphus surmounts what would seem to be tragedy with a dignity Camus regards as quintessentially human, with a nobility of which only humans are capable. He just keeps trying. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,” Camus concludes. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” And perhaps this is where Byron meets Camus meets me, on the page and in the boxing ring. Maybe this is life: accepting and laboring continually in the gap between ideal and reality to make something where nothing was before, to build a muscle of a mortal body or set down a stanza of a poem that may never be published, to “labor upward toward futurity,” as William Blake says. Maybe this is an answer: to “do your thing,” in the words of Camus and of Isaac Hayes, is to be human and to be happy. Maybe this is how you live in

Byron’s thing is writing, which keeps him on the path he, and we, need to walk, threading between what we should be and what we are. And the endlessly-onward-cantering form of Don Juan is the form, and the practice, Byron makes to contain and examine it all. Writing down “all of this” and shaping it into art visibly matures the mad, bad boy into a rueful, reflective man. Writing from Pisa to his friend Thomas Moore, he warns:

The truth is, my dear Moore, you live near the stove of society, where you are unavoidably influenced by its heat and its vapours. I did so once – and too much – and enough to give a color to my whole future existence. As my success in society was not inconsiderable, I am surely not a prejudiced judge upon the subject, unless in its favor; but I think it, as now constituted, fatal to all great original undertakings of every kind. I never courted it then, when I was young and high in blood, and one of its ‘curled darlings;’ and do you think I would do so now, when I am living in a clearer atmosphere? One thing only might lead me back to it, and that is, to try once more if I could do any good in politics; but not in the petty politics I see now preying upon our miserable country. (Ironically, it’s this Moore, “influenced” by fear of scandal, who puts Byron’s posthumous memoirs in an actual stove—burns them, unpublished.) Substitute “social media” for “society” and you see Byron deciding to do what many middle-aged public intellectuals in the Elon Musk era are doing: quitting Twitter and the “stove” of online

life to turn to action in the world. For Byron, this was political action: lending his money and his celebrity presence to the cause of liberation for Italy, then for Greece. Approaching age 35, which he would have known as Dante’s midlife crisis point in Inferno, he wrestles in private writings with what happens after life ends. “Of the Immortality of the Soul—it appears to me that there can be little doubt—if we attend for a moment to the action of Mind. – It is in perpetual activity,” he writes. He can’t quite believe in the Biblical book of Revelation, though: “when the World is at an end—what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?.... Man is born passionate of body—but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good in his Main-spring of Mind. – But God help us all! – It is at present a sad jar of atoms.” Nevertheless, he kept living his life—and writing about it. So what do sports and writing have to do with each other, and authenticity? “I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit,” said the late Southern writer Harry Crews. “If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we’ll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can’t do it—you can’t bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.” Like sports, writing is a practice that helps us keep trying, no matter what. It helps us seek truth, alone and in community. It builds our capacities to do hard things. It helps you make the choice in the moment to keep working, to keep leaning in, because few things worth doing in this world of ours are easy. And it may help you arrive at a vision of how to live your life in relationship with others, a common good worth working for. Thank you! Now let’s talk.

Notes 1. Fiona McCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), p. 463 2. Yes, he does make you say a Very Bad Word in his very first stanza. (Sort of ).

Fall 2023/Agora

Cuba’s Persistant Food Crisis by ALFREDO ALONSO ESTENOZ, Professor of Spanish

“Now you’ll see how Fidel’s cattle are going to run loose,” said my grandfather as he entered the kitchen. Fidel was Fidel Castro, the leader of the revolution that had taken power in

1959. “His cattle” were either his supporters or the general population of an island that had lived through a radical transformation of its economic and political system. My grandmother never specified what her husband meant by that term. It was late March 1962. A few days earlier, the government had implemented a ration card that was going to regulate how much of certain food staples each person would receive: six pounds of rice once a month; four eggs per week; one can of tomato sauce each month; ¾ pound of beef every nine days . . . . For a country where rice is the main source of carbohydrates, this was not even close to actual demand, since a person may eat over half a pound every day. My grandfather had made his first purchase with the ration card. Like many people in Cuba at the time, he thought that every economic setback the country experienced would move it closer to the fall of a system of government many disagreed with, but few raised their objections in public.

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“Yeah alright,” my skeptical grandmother replied. “Just sit and wait.”

Cuban ration card and Pinocchio figurine 20

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In the end, my grandmother was right––not only did the government not collapse, but the ration card is still in use in Cuba today, 61 years after it was implemented. Let’s think about that for a moment: the Cuban ration card––so ubiquitous that when someone says la libreta, the notebook, everybody nods in acknowledgement––is older than many historical events that shaped the world as we know it today. It survived even the fall of

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y grandmother told the story many times. My grandfather had come back from the grocery store and was unloading the alforjas, the big saddlebags he carried on both sides of his horse. The family lived on a farm, in the middle of Matanzas province, in central Cuba, a land of sugarcane and subsistence agriculture. What they did not grow or raise on the farm had to be bought at the nearest grocery store, a few kilometers away in the town of Unión de Fernández, a decaying group of houses built around a sugar mill that had been dismantled decades ago.

Alfredo Alonso Estenoz

socialism in most of the countries that implemented this political system and had to issue ration cards during various periods of their histories. The libreta has outlived countless crisis in Cuba, and it is still there, as a reminder of the Revolution’s aspiration of broad social justice (whatever little food we have should be distributed equally) and the economic failure of a system that promised, upon cementing its power, a material wealth with no precedent in the country’s history. Why did this happen? How? Not a single explanation accounts for the reality of food scarcity in Cuba during the six decades of the Revolution. Yet some persistent questions remain: how is it possible that a tropical island whose fertile lands can be cultivated allyear round has faced so many difficulties in maintaining an adequate food supply for its population? Can the answer be attributed to the well-documented inefficiency of the socialist economy the country adopted? What role does the US economic embargo toward Cuba

For the sake of these notes, I will focus on one reason that explains, at least in part, the food scarcity that has dominated Cuban life for over six decades: the connection between sugarcane (or, more broadly, the reliance on a dominant source of income) and the dependency on food imports the island established long before its independence from Spain (1898), at least a century before Fidel Castro appeared on the world stage. This dependency is inseparable from the problematic relationship Cuba has had with the United States. For the first two years after taking power, Fidel Castro denied he was a communist or that he was planning to install a socialist system in Cuba. “The Revolution is green like the palm trees,” he repeated, referring to the color of the uniform his army wore during the twoyear war against Fulgencio Batista, who had ruled the country as a dictator since 1952. The Cuban royal palm–la Palma Real–is the country’s national tree and symbolized the national character of the revolution, as opposed to the symbolism of red for communism. However, Fidel Castro’s rapprochement with the Soviet Union started soon after January 1––that same year both countries signed an agreement to sell over 400,000 tons of sugar to the Soviet Union. This type of commercial operation was not unheard of––the nation at the front of world socialism had already purchased sugar from Cuba in the mid-1950s and had traded with other Latin American countries. Most of the sugar produced in Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century was sold to the United States at preferential prices. The so-called “sugar quota” was Cuba’s greatest economic asset and one of the most contentious points of its relationship with the United States. It allowed the country to enjoy a fairly stable market for its main economic output. The majority of the cash obtained from this favorable agreement was destined to purchase most of the food the Cuban population consumed. This reality created a dynamic

that characterized Cuba’s economic life for over a century: it was cheaper and less arduous to import food than to produce it on the island. “Sin azúcar no hay país” (Without sugar, there is no country), repeated the people and the politicians who supported the industry.

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play in this situation? Has food scarcity been a tool employed by the Cuban government as a means of political control?

A 1950s Cuban ad for Arroz Tio Ben. The ad emphasizes how much Uncle Ben's Rice expands when cooked, a measure of quality for Cubans. On the other hand, the United States government––not only the executive branch, but members of Congress that represented specific interests––used the sugar quota to pressure Cuba to comply with their demands. An example of this occurred with rice. As mentioned before, rice is the main source of carbohydrates in the Cuban diet, a staple without which a meal is considered incomplete, no matter how many other dishes are served. In 1950 the United States provided Cuba with over 85% of the rice it consumed. By 1954 that number had come down to 39%. The difference was due to a plan Fulgencio Batista designed to increase national production. Rice varieties grown in Cuba enjoy the favor of the population and possess a distinctive taste, but the facilities to process the grain back then were inadequate. Consequently, the final product was as free of debris and broken grains as the one imported from the United States. As Louis Perez Jr. recounts in his book Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political

Economy of Food in Cuba, the expanding Cuban industry represented a competition for the large rice producer of the southern United States. American rice growers pressured senators and congressmen to maintain and increase the quantities of the grain sold to Cuba. Their negotiating strategy exploded Cuba’s vulnerability: the need to renew the annual sugar quota. Batista had no other choice: by 1956 American rice exports to the island had increased even beyond previous levels, to the detriment of the national industry.1 As this example shows, the diversification of Cuba’s agriculture, a need even US lawmakers and agricultural experts recognized, was not only a matter of political or economic will. Besides rice, Cuba bought from the United States a third of its total food imports. It included curious items like lard, the main cooking fat back then and until the 1990s––85% of it came from Chicago. Even beans and some root vegetables that are considered essential to the Cuban diet were cultivated here for the Cuban market. The poultry industry depended on the day-old chicks and the fodder bought in the US. Most of the agricultural implements and heavy machinery in Cuba bear US manufacturing stamps. Cuba’s dependency on foreign markets transcended economic considerations, as it was also a matter of national identity––what a country grows in its territory is not only a source of nourishment but of national pride as well. It would be almost inconceivable that corn in Mexico, potatoes in Peru, rice in China or wine in Spain would be purchased by these countries somewhere else. After the Cuban government signed the first trade agreements with the Soviet Union and nationalized several American companies that controlled electricity, communications and oil refinery, the United States suspended the Cuban quota. Shortly after that, in 1962, around the same time the first ration cards were issued, president J.F. Kennedy declared a total embargo on Cuban imports. The consequences were devastating for the island, but the Cuban leadership never sought a compromise: confrontation with the United States Fall 2023/Agora

was on their agenda, at least in Fidel Castro’s, and the US actions reinforced his positions. This turn of events could have been an opportunity as well. For the reasons illustrated with the rice story, the Cuban Revolution sought to eliminate dependency on food imports and on a single crop. The leadership bashed monoculture as one of the evils of neocolonialism and developed a plan to diversify the country’s agriculture. Sugarcane, the largest crop in the island since the Haitian Revolution, was, in their eyes, the symbol of that dependency, of decades of exploitation, low wages and unemployment, since the sugar harvest required a vast labor force, but only for four or five months a year. However, Fidel Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and other leaders soon realized that such an aspiration was difficult to achieve in a short period of time. The country was running out of cash at a fast rate, and the only way to obtain it was to return to sugar production. This time the main economic partner was much farther away, but it soon began to act in the same way the United States had done for decades: the Soviet Union committed to acquire Cuban sugar at preferential prices and in exchange for favorable trade agreements that included large subsidies to the embattled Cuban economy. Fidel Castro did a complete reverse. He set out to produce the largest sugar harvest in the history of the country: 10 million tons of sugar in 1970 (during the 1950s the average annual production was around 5 million). The effort, which many experts considered impossible (even some inside the country who were punished for doubting the leader’s economic vision), fell short: the country managed to produce a record amount of sugar (8.5 tons), but once again it neglected other crops. It took almost a decade for Cuban agriculture to recover, but it never reached the levels it had enjoyed before the Revolution and during its first years. One consequence of such effort was the increase of dependency on the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc. In 1972 Cuba formally entered the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the economic organization 22

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led by the Soviet Union. The island’s commitment to provide sugar to its new economic partners jeopardized once again agricultural diversification and re-cemented a dynamic characterized by the exportation of a single crop and the importation of most foodstuff and supplies for the national agriculture. With the fall of socialism in the early 1990s, a new economic crisis engulfed the island. It soon became apparent how every single aspect of Cuba’s economy was intertwined with the socialist bloc. Food, in particular, became scarce. At the end of 1991, Cuban physicians started to report the appearance of a rare disease that caused people to lose their vision and experience pain in their joints. It took over a year for the government to recognize an epidemic whose causes were apparent to Cuban physicians who treated patients directly, but which they could not address in public. The government invited international specialists to study the condition. Doctor Gustavo C. Román, then chief of the neuropathology branch of the National Institutes of Health, summarized the work of the commission: “All the available evidence pointed to nutritional deficiency as the material culprit in the Cuban epidemic. The deficiencies ranged from protein caloric malnutrition to lack of B-group vitamins, sulfur amino acids, lycopene, and other microelements” (Román 189). The Cuban government distributed free vitamin supplements, a decision that ended an epidemic that affected over 50,000 people, “making the outbreak arguably the largest documented epidemic of a neurologic disease in the twentieth century” (190). Today Cuba is in the middle of yet another food crisis. The sugar industry has been decimated: the 2021-2022 harvest produced 480,000 tons, a number that is only comparable to nineteenth-century outputs. Where does the cash to import food come from today? A recent source of revenue has been the export of medical services to over 60 countries. Some of them, like Venezuela and Mexico, have been providing Cuba with most of the oil it needs to meet the island’s energy demand. Remittances from the ever-expanding Cuban diaspora

to their relatives on the island is also a major source of income. Despite the US embargo––to which the government attributes all the economic problems–– Cuba is purchasing from this country a significant amount of food. In June of 2023, it acquired 27,631 tons of chicken at a cost of $32,840,000, making the US the single largest supplier of chicken for the Caribbean island. Last year, Cuba even purchased sugar from the United States. Is food scarcity in Cuba a result of an inadequate economic system––the collectivization of food production––that was unable to surpass capitalist modes of production? Or, on the contrary, has this scarcity been in part artificial and created (or maintained) by the Cuban government as a means of social control, a form of biopower, to borrow Michel Foucault’s term? Without strong evidence that supports the latter claim, it is not possible to affirm this with certainty. Historians who have studied the great famines of the Soviet Union and China during the twentieth century have asked questions like this one. Most of them agree that the ultimate proof––explicit words from Stalin or Mao ordering that part of the population should starve to death––has never been found, but it has been demonstrated that food has played a role in securing political loyalty. Cuba has never suffered from malnutrition events of that magnitude, but the neurological epidemic of the early 1990s points to the serious problems of inadequate food supplies the island has experienced over six decades. NOTES 1. I have taken this information from the chapter “To Tremble in Fear” in Louis A. Pérez, Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba. Works cited Pérez Louis A. Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba. University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Román, Gustavo C. Cuban Blindness: Diary of a Mysterious Epidemic Neuropathy. Academic Press, an Imprint of Elsevier, 2015.

Piano Wellness and Injury Prevention

by XIAO HU, Associate Professor of Music

the possibilities of developing playingrelated injuries and pain.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

In my research, I focused on learning about the Taubman Approach. It was developed by Dorothy Taubman in the 1950s on the belief that healthy piano technique is based on using the most efficient and coordinated movements of our body. It focuses on the natural alignment of one’s hand, elbow, and arm moving around the keyboard as a whole unit. When we learn to apply our hand, elbow, and arm in a coordinated way, we avoid finger isolation, and twisting, curling, or stretching of our hands, which are some of the common root causes for injuries if done in a repetitive and prolonged manner. Two of the most intriguing aspects of the Taubman Approach for me are the forearm rotation and the in-and-out motions on the keys. When we play the piano, we first think about pressing down the keys in order to make a sound. By pressing down, we are thinking about finger motion alone. In the Taubman Approach, fingers are best moved as a result of forearm motion, and forearm rotation can ensure that the finger is always supported by the hand and forearm. The in-and-out motion refers to movements into the black key area and back out to the white key area. When we play a sequence of notes, we inevitably run into a combination of black notes Xiao Hu works with Tara Rajanesan (’26) on the Taubman and white notes. technique as Kyle Pido (’26) looks on.

AGORA PHOTO, LUTHER COLLEGE

s a pianist and music educator, I have long been interested in the topic of piano wellness and injury prevention. This sabbatical allowed me time and energy to research this topic by reading and learning the Taubman Approach, and by taking body mapping lessons. Playing the piano involves complex and coordinated movements of many intricately related body parts. It also requires many hours of doing highly repetitive motions on the instrument. It is not difficult to imagine that playing-related injuries are common among pianists. In order to perform well and to avoid injuries, we need to develop a better understanding and awareness of the body and how it is designed to work. When we learn to apply our body with more insight and understanding of how joints, bones, tendons, and muscles relate to each other, we can benefit from playing with more ease and efficiency, therefore decreasing

Xiao Hu

Rather than letting the fingers do all the work alone, we raise the whole arm unit slightly higher and move inward towards the piano board to reach the black key areas more comfortably, then back down to the white keys by subtly lowering the whole unit. These in-andout movements prevent the curling and twisting of the fingers and hands, creating a nice buoyancy and gentle circular motions of the arm unit. The Taubman Approach has helped many injured pianists learn to play in better cooperation with their body and return to playing with a tension-free technique. I studied and followed the videos of The Taubman Techniques, taught by Edna Golandsky, who is a world-renowned piano pedagogue, the leading exponent of the Taubman Approach, and the founder of the Golandsky Institute in New York City. In these videos was valuable footage of Dorothy Taubman teaching masterclasses and talking about her approach. It was amazing to see how quickly she could help solve the pianists’ technical challenges. Often after a few tries, the pianist would make some transformative improvements on the spot. In these Fall 2023/Agora

videos, Ms. Golandsky also gave lengthy, detailed, and analytical explanations of the basic principles of the Taubman Approach, along with her own demonstrations on the piano. Learning the Taubman Approach gave me insight into a new, healthy piano technique, and new ways to approach the keyboard by thinking in coordinate motion that is generated from the forearm. In my online work with Lisa Marsh, a certified body mapping instructor in the Portland area, she gave me some excellent suggestions and feedback on my playing from a kinesthetic point of view. Lisa pointed out where I tend to hold tension and offered strategies from the anatomical perspective for more efficient ways to approach the keyboard. She talked about sensing the support of the sit bones from the piano bench, which bears the weight of the upper body, and the floor underneath, which bears the weight of the legs. When we become aware of these supports, we create a sense of balance in our body. Lisa also talked about being aware of the movement of the collar bones and the sternoclavicular joint, which is the point of attachment of the arm structure to the rest of the body. One thing that was really interesting was her mentioning of the sensory nerves vs. motor nerves. Sensory nerves carry signals to our brain to help us touch, taste, smell and see. Motor nerves carry signals to our muscles to move and function. Oftentimes, we are not as tapped into our sensory nerves as we could be when we produce sound on the instrument. Lisa encouraged me to be more aware of feedback from my own sensory cues. Even though my sabbatical is over, my journey of learning about piano wellness and somatic techniques will continue. I incorporated newly acquired knowledge into my teaching both in the studio and in the classrooms at Luther, and presented a guest lecture on piano wellness at Gustavus Adolphus College this fall. I hope that students will develop a better body map, play the piano with more ease and efficiency, and become more proactive in injury prevention in their future careers as music educators.

Agora/Fall 2023

If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Any Road Will Take You There by NANCY K. BARRY, Professor Emerita of English

he title for this worship service, “Traveling Mercies,” is taken from the great writer Anne Lamott, whose words I am borrowing to help get us focused. What does it mean to travel with mercy? What does it mean to travel with grace? The title of the talk: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there,” is indebted to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, one of the more famous quest stories out there. I’m offering both these thoughts this morning for all of us who are now in the thick of summer travel, those trips both gentle and rollicking that we plan for ourselves and our families when the days are long and we think the only thing we need to pack is a bathing suit. Oh, we think, if only it were as simple as the author of Proverbs tells us in chapter 3:

“My son, do not let wisdom and understanding out of your sight, preserve sound judgment and discretion; 22 they will be life for you, an ornament to grace your neck. 23 Then you will go on your way in safety, and your foot will not stumble. 24 When you lie down, you will not be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet. 25 Have no fear of sudden disaster or of the ruin that overtakes the wicked, 26 for the Lord will be at your side and will keep your foot from being snared.” 21

Oh, we think, as we load our destination into Google maps, if only it were that

simple. I recently completed a road trip all the way from Iowa to Pennsylvania and Maryland, and then back again. I was keenly intimidated by the trip because it started with a drive to Chicago, which I dreaded. I have lived in Decorah for 33 years now, and I have definitely become what everyone would recognize as a small-town driver. That is to say, I lift half of my right hand from the steering wheel in a wave to other drivers stopped at a four-way intersection; I rarely go over 25 miles per hour; I’m happy to let someone sneak into my lane if they have mistakenly stayed in the left-hand turn lane at the intersection of Heivly and College Drive. In short, I am the opposite of what anyone would call a city driver, and for that reason, the trip into downtown Chicago made me very afraid. So I did what modern travelers do: I entered my destination days before into Mapquest and I printed out the directions, and I saw clearly how they took me through Madison, Wisconsin; even though I didn’t memorize the route, I did study it on paper. And just to be doubly sure I would get there safely and on time for my late lunch date, I decided to plug the address of that restaurant into my phone app for Google Maps, assuming it would echo my printed instructions that took me through Madison. That’s when I fell into the rabbit hole of artificial intelligence. Instead of leading me to Madison, my Google Map app took me into the wilderness of southern Wisconsin. I was headed east, but way south of Madison, and the road was winding, circuitous, and up and down many steep hills, which always confuses my sense of direction. As my anxiety about where I was going began to rise—maybe I had plugged

AGORA, LUTHER COLLEGE

Editor’s note: Nancy Barry gave this sermon as a guest preacher at the Decorah United Church of Christ. She is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

JULY 16, 2023

Nancy K. Barry in the wrong address to the restaurant? Maybe the GPS didn’t really know where it was taking me? I decided to pull over and hit the reset button. I stopped the car, turned off the phone and turned it back on again, only to have it tell me, “no available signal.” I could almost hear the phone laughing at me at that point. I sat there for several minutes, imagining Alice and NOT Proverbs, so distraught by the confusion I completely forgot I had an old-fashioned MAP of WISCONSIN sitting in the side panel of my driver’s door. That’s the first thing that happens to us when we travel with high anxiety—we forget the very resources we have. I decided I needed more human intelligence, so I found an old-fashioned truck repair shop, where I got out and asked like a child: “How can I get to Chicago?” “Chicago!” the mechanic exclaimed, as if no one in their right mind would ever want to go there. But he pointed out a reasonable route I could understand—continuing east through Galena. I followed his directions, abandoned the Fall 2023/Agora

car GPS, and eventually did in fact get to Chicago, where I had to pick up the pace and keep vigilant and, somehow, with traveling mercy, got to a downtown parking garage where I left my car for two days.

Of course, there was a moment in that lost episode when I really did think: Nancy, this is what travel is all about—if you could stop worrying so much, you might be able to enjoy this. But my anxious soul would not relent. There was a branch of wisdom out there, but I could not locate that. It’s probably my worst trait as a traveler: letting the anxiety about the trip take away from the imaginative anticipation of the journey. When I was a child, I lost someone keenly important to me, and ever since then, I have been vulnerable to a state that psychologists call “separation anxiety,” a mindset as familiar to me as packing a toothbrush. It means that before I go on a trip I have to spend my time saying goodbye to all the people that I’m leaving—you never know, the worrisome traveler in me laments, you never know about the return. Thinking about return trips makes me remember the story about a famous trip our national voyagers we call astronauts took in 1969–in fact, this week is the anniversary of their landing that fragile module on the moon on July 20. I was 14 years old that summer and I can recall a lot about that night–how we huddled around the TV in our pajamas, listening to Walter Cronkite talk about the old ideas regarding the man on the moon, playing cartoons and outdated sci-fi movies to pass the hours before the module touched down.

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WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

So one lesson I want to stress this morning about traveling: trust the new-fangled machines if you must, but always help yourself by looking at an old-fashioned map. The maps have something the AI map apps don’t have: CONTEXT. The big picture. The capacity to really know where you are in relation to the whole state. That is the beginning of wisdom and it’s important that we not surrender it too quickly to a gadget that soothes us with a calming voice that says to “turn left in 600 hundred feet,” as if to prove it is smarter than we are.

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin attending to the lunar lander while on the moon, July 1969. What I did not know, until 25 years after the fact, is that the White House speechwriter, William Safire, had created a completely different narrative in the event that the landing, or the subsequent departure from the moon, didn’t go so well. NASA evidently was staffed by engineers sufficient in their intelligence to know we have never gone to this place before and come back safely home. They had to be prepared if the module crashed when it landed, or worse yet, couldn’t rise up from the lunar surface when it was time to go. Safire, the wordsmith, had scripted a farewell service for the astronauts and the country watching that trip turn into a tragedy. Only when we were celebrating the 25th anniversary of the successful landing and return did he write about that alternative narrative, but when I read about it, oddly enough, while on a plane ride, did its significance make my blood turn cold and catch me without breath for a few minutes. The other odd thing about that plane ride—a safe one, to be sure—that I will

never forget is that I was seated next to what looked to me to be a very young child, traveling solo. His name was Joseph, and something about the way he fudged his age made me think he was in fact not supposed to be travelling by himself on the plane. He said he was 12 but I didn’t believe him for a second, partly because of how much he squirmed. So there I was, reading about a 1969 space trip that could have ended badly, and next to me was Joseph, wriggling his way to see out of the window. I was relieved when the flight attendant came to check on him, but I still worried most of the flight about where he was going and how in the world would he manage the trip. We played “rock, paper, scissors” for awhile and then I told him I was probably going to fall asleep. “You can sleep on a plane?” he asked in astonishment. “Pretty much,” I replied, wondering if the astronauts ever slept on that moon mission. When Joseph had to wait for

the attendant to take him off the plane, I waved goodbye to him like an old friend, and wondered if he were now landing at his home place or the setting for some grand adventure. You never know, I reminded myself, you never know. I kept looking for the map for this traveling stranger inside my heart, to trace what we owed one another in the big picture, as I worried that no one would be there for him after landing. Which is another way of saying, traveling can be hard on our imaginations, and even when we think we’re on a solo voyage, invariably strangers, like Joseph, or the mechanic in southern Wisconsin, meet us on the trip. Once, while driving through downtown Cincinnati, I saw a huge, flashing neon sign lighting up a bank building, which presumably was named Central Bank and Trust. The only problem was, the letter “e” was missing from that first word, so I immediately thought the message might have been saying CONTROL & Trust company.

means we must put our hearts on the trust meter, rather than the control quotient. We must welcome the kindness of strangers, say Amen to the unpredictable and unexpected. Sure, go ahead, put the address into the map app on the cell phone, but keep an old-fashioned big picture map inside your head too. The journey is what matters—it IS more than simply a route to get us from one place to another. Instead of panicking when the directions falter, give yourself a gentle reminder that you’re not headed to the moon, and keep your eye out for a mechanic or a young child. We will find ourselves back home, and we will be made different by the journey. We will voyage out and then return, with something in our psyche re-arranged for all our trouble. Between the flash of control and trust, divinity is shaping our travels and the best we can do is to pay attention, rapt attention, because if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will lead you there.

Traveling mercies have everything to do with trust and control. We can’t be fools, we should bring maps, but we do need to surrender ourselves to the journey. We need to admit our directions could be flawed. We need to ask for help or company when we need them, and we must remember that all the surprises along the way may in fact be a source of delight. We don’t need to grimly script a funeral service every time we set out—I worry about such a sad story told to a congregation dead set on their travel plans in the middle of July. Indeed, we should remind ourselves those astronauts made it back from the moon, and Joseph was delivered safely to his family, and those scripts we write worrying it will all turn tragic are hardly ever needed. If we plotted all the tragedies that might befall us whenever we ventured out, we would never go out. Somehow, someway, in the midst of becoming adventurous, we must inhabit the kind wisdom of Proverbs and Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies and soothe the anxiety with trust. It’s foolish to imagine we will never be anxious, but somehow we need to trust that the very journey will teach us what we need for getting back. To travel this pilgrim life Fall 2023/Agora

The Hope to Face Each Day SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

by MELISSA BILLS, Campus Pastor

“Hope” is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops - at all

What is your image of hope? Does it have feathers? Does it look like a rainbow in the sky? Does it feel like a sense of calm, deep within your soul? Does hope feel so close that you could reach out and touch it? Does hope feel dim and distant, a shadow just out of reach? I think a lot about hope these days, and about what it means to have hope, and what hope looks like and feels like and sounds like. More than a decade ago, in an interview that would set things in motion for me to take a call to a congregation here in Decorah, a bishop asked me to talk about hope. 1 Peter 3:15 says, “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you,” and so there I was, asked to make such an accounting. And so I made my accounting. Here is what I said: I am incredibly sensitive to the needs and the griefs of the world. I am keenly aware of the ways that this world does not (yet) reflect God’s hopes and dreams. And when I read the news each day, I have a choice. I can choose despair or I can choose hope. I persist in faith because I need to be able to choose hope. 28

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Nothing about this statement has changed for me in the last decade except for the intensity. The world is more intensely difficult than it was ten years ago, I am more intensely sensitive to need, injustice, and grief in the world, and I am also more intensely invested in the work of hope, as a counter to despair.

PHOTO COURTESY OFTHE AUTHOR

was an English major in a different life, and so today we begin with a little Emily Dickinson, the opening to one of her most famous poems:

The writer of Hebrews will tell us that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (11:1) and also tell us to “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for [God] who has promised is faithful” (10:23). Hope, as it turns out, is closely related to faith. Faith is the act of believing, hope is the substance of our belief. Hope requires trust, curiosity, imagination, and creativity. Hope is what gives voice to our deepest longings, and what binds us to God’s future promises. Hope is created when we give space to name the world as it is and to then construct a vision of the world as it could be; hope gives us permission to believe that this vision of the world is not just a thought exercise, but rather a reality that has yet to be manifested among us. I love talking about hope. Hope is what connects me to God’s promises of reconciliation, resurrection, justice, mercy, peace, provision. On my good days, hope looks a lot like naive optimism. On my good days, hope feels like cheerfulness, delight, excitement for the future. On bad days, hope looks much more like grit. Like defiance; setting my jaw and clenching my teeth, grasping at hope to be the thing that gets me through. Sometimes, hope and cynicism fight for dominance.

Melissa Bills Artist and author Jan Richardson writes that “Hope is not always comforting or comfortable. Hope asks us to open ourselves to what we do not know, to pray for illumination in this life, to imagine what is beyond our imagining, to bear what seems unbearable. It calls us to keep breathing when beloved lives have left us, to turn toward one another when we might prefer to turn away. Hope draws our eyes and hearts toward a more whole future but propels us also into the present, where Christ waits for us to work with him toward a more whole world now.” Whether you can wrap your head around the mechanics of resurrection or not, this central image in Christianity of life emerging from places of death, of rebirth and surprise, of the worst things not being the final things—it is an image that gives us something to hang our hopes on. It gives us a promise that the world can be more and better than this, stirring in us the hope to face each day.

This summer, I had the great privilege to be part of the cast of our local community theater’s production of the musical, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a refashioning of the Disney film from a bunch of years ago. At a particularly despairing moment, the characters Esmerelda and Phoebus, facing imminent execution, sing not of their fear or their grief, but of their continued and undying hope for the future of the world. Their song offers up a challenge to the audience: that we might be the ones not only to keep the flames of hope alive, but that we also might be the ones to create the better world for which we long. I invite you to receive the words of this song as a closing prayer: Someday when we are wiser When the world’s older When we have learned I pray someday we may yet live to live and let live Someday life will be fairer Need will be rarer And greed will not pay God speed this bright millennium on its way And let it come someday Someday our fight will be won then We’ll stand in the sun then That bright afternoon, ‘Til then, on days when the sun is gone We’ll hang on We’ll wish upon the moon. Let it come One day, Someday soon. With God’s help, may it be so. Amen.

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Coming Home to Luther College’s Liberal Arts OCTOBER 8, 2023

by KATHERINE A. SHANER, ’98

atthew 21:33–50 (NRSV)

"Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. 34When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. 35But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. 36Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. 37Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ 38But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’ 39So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. 40Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ 41They said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.’” 33

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: 42

‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes?’ Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you 43

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and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. 44The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. 46They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.” 45

In so many ways this is a super weird text for a Homecoming worship service. I mean, there’s not exactly a happy homecoming in this text, neither for the tenants, nor for the land-owner, nor for his son, nor for the slaves whose demise foreshadows the son’s death (see I still know a little bit of that English major vocabulary!). Indeed, this is not a happy homecoming story in this morning’s gospel reading. So why did I agree to preach at my 25th reunion Homecoming worship service on this text? Perhaps it was hubris. In my scholarly life as a professor at another institution of higher learning that cannot compare to Luther—unless you have a Luther degree and want to come do an M.Div. or a D.Min. at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, in which case, let’s talk!—in my scholarly life, I just sent off an article on the use of enslaved labor in exactly this parable (along with several others) with the hopes that my peers will deem it acceptable to publish.1 In other words, I have been thinking about and even writing about this parable for the better part of a year. So, when Pastor Melissa Bills invited me to preach, and I realized that the lectionary appointed this text for this Sunday, I was actually thrilled! What better way for a scholar/ pastor who got her start right here on this campus, heard her call to ministry in this building, deepened it in this

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Editor’s note: The Rev. Dr. Katherine A. Shaner (’98) is Associate Professor of New Testament at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, NC. She is the author of Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is also a pastor in the ELCA, a spouse to Rev. Dr. John E. Senior, and a human to Karl Bark, a schnauzer who, she tells us, “is mildly Facebook-famous.”

Katherine A. Shaner very space, learned leadership from that organ bench, and on this stage—what better way for this scholar/pastor to get to share the Gospel than to preach on a parable from her research? And after an entire year of thinking about this parable, researching its history and context—after an entire year of what seemed like exhaustive work, I’ve got to be honest with you and say: when I sat down last week to write this sermon—I had no idea what to preach! Then again, this befuddlement seems like the classic dilemma of liberal arts education. We know so much in a broad sense, but the struggle to enact problem solving out of critical thinking is often our dilemma. How do we craft realworld praxis out of classroom theory, healing advocacy out of data analysis, proclamation out of scholarship? What does my Luther education have to say about this confounding parable in this morning’s gospel reading? Well, let me fall back on my English major to start with. First of all, this parable is a great piece of storytelling. It’s got everything, detailed description,

narrative drama, even a bit of apocalyptic pessimism (if you’re into that kind of thing). And in addition to this literary analysis, biblical interpreters and theologians often read this parable as an allegory that identifies the vineyard builder as God, the tenants as God’s people, the slaves as the prophets, and the son as the Christological symbol—as Christ. At the end of the story Jesus inserts still another allegory to reveal the moral or lesson of the story: Christ is often understood as the stone that the builder’s rejected that eventually becomes the cornerstone of the church.2 But there’s something that doesn’t seem quite right about this usual allegorical interpretation of this parable. If the vineyard builder is God, why does God go away to a far-off land? I learned right here, in the CFL and on this campus, just how close God’s presence is in our world. Then, if the vineyard builder in this story is God, why is God, of all characters, a slave master who sends enslaved people into violent and potentially deadly situations? I learned here at Luther to ask questions about our histories of human exploitation not just in the United States, but in world history. I learned that God’s compassion and justice dwell in solidarity with those suffering under the weight of oppression and violence.

The shadows on Plato’s cave can’t explain everything about the real world; this parable as an allegory has its limits, too. Then there’s the way that the usual interpretation has been used for Christian supercessionism—a fancy way of talking about the idea that Christians replaced Jews as God’s special people. This interpretation posits that the vineyard was given to Christians when Christ, God’s only son, was rejected by the Jewish builders. Given what I learned in my “Introduction to Biblical Studies” course and my “Jews and Judaism” class and my “Greek New Testament” classes here at Luther, such an idea sounds very strange—and dangerously like the hate-

speech that allowed genocide among other atrocities to be part of Christian, indeed, Lutheran near history in World War II.3 Finally, Luther College also taught me the limits of allegory. Remember Plato’s cave from Paideia I? Dante’s Inferno? Allegories help us think about our world through different images, sometimes revealing something about our world, our society, or ourselves that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. But just as the shadows on Plato’s cave can’t explain everything about the real world, this morning’s gospel parable, as an allegory, has its limits, too. By now, my critical liberal arts sensibilities are in high gear. So I’m going to go back to the biblical text and look even more closely—a practice that was part of my education here at Luther, too. While taking this closer look, I began to see just how many unanswerable questions this parable raises. For example, the tenant farmers don’t hold up their end of their lease. Why not? They torture and kill not only the land-owner’s slaves, but also his son. Do they think they’ll get the son’s inheritance? That’s some really flawed logic—and I didn’t even take business law or accounting classes! We could say that they were simply ungrateful and greedy tenants. Then again, their landlord was nowhere to be found—AND we know from the history of the Roman Empire in the Middle East that during this time period farmers were often forced into selling their land to wealthy Roman aristocrats, who then leased the same land back to them under terms that were defacto debt-slavery. Were these tenants protesting a system that was unjust and dehumanizing? Especially since we know—thanks to my Paideia II class and the ethical foundations of the education system—that such systems often (if not inevitably) lead to violence? Then there are the slaves. The vineyardbuilder sends two different retinues of their own slaves—by my count more than half-a-dozen. These human beings, who work for no pay are expected, in this case, to suffer torture and die for their master over what? Some baskets of grapes and a few jugs of wine? Even if one is willing to accept that slavery was

part of the historical world of the parable, this just seems like a bad use of the vineyard builder’s resources. Why did the vineyard builder not go talk to the tenant farmers in person? This seems like a Social-Work 101 situation— never triangulate in situations involving money. And let’s not even begin to talk about the trauma that the slaves experienced seeing their colleagues tortured and killed or the unspeakable grief the vineyard builder must have experienced at losing a beloved, precious child in this conflict.

I began to see just how many unanswerable questions this parable raises. The entire system in this parable seems flawed—infusing greed, violence, chaos, grief, and trauma into the lives of everyone involved—everyone. That’s another thing that I learned how to see from my Luther education. I learned how to see systems at work and to identify the ways that even those who seem to benefit from systems that oppress others also experience grief and suffering from those systems—grief and suffering that is often plowed back into these same systems. Why not use our failings as a tool of solidarity and compassion? Then it hit me. While my Luther College liberal arts education is the perfect critical thinking education—an education that helps me see all the issues and all the problems in this parable—it is also the education that taught me that such critiques are NEVER the end of the story in our lives as educated, values-driven people, let alone in our lives as people of faith and life in Christ. All of my critical questions about this parable from my scholarly life, all of these critical questions need one more lens. We need to read this parable—this story that Jesus tells us—we need to read this parable with faithful imagination and courageous hope. Because you see, in the larger context of the Gospel of Matthew, the issue that Matthew’s community wrestles with Fall 2023/Agora

is how a group of first century Jewish people who believe Jesus was the Messiah live together in a community with compassion, justice, and love for God’s creation at its center.4 What this parable describes is the opposite of that. It is a system where violence perpetuates itself because everyone—from the vineyard builder to the tenant farmers to the enslaved messengers to the son—experiences grief, frustration, and violent rage. And that violence radiates beyond the characters to their families and friends, too. Indeed, this parable is the opposite of God’s hope for our world.

stone, not because it is the only stone that matters, but because it needs to be buried, entombed in the foundation out of which will rise a more hope-filled construction of and for communities seeking ways to thrive. The cornerstone needs to be buried in order for a new building to rise. Death. Burial. Resurrection. That’s a cycle that is familiar to us—familiar to Lutheran Christians especially. That’s a cycle that is, in fact, supposed to be more central to our lives of faith than any other cycle I know.

In fact, the story seems to hold up a mirror to the sin-filled system of the unjust, unmerciful, self-perpetuating cycle of violence at work daily in Matthew’s community—maybe even in our own communities. You see, in the lives of the early Christ-followers this cycle of violence was part of their everyday lives—and that system inevitably crushes anyone on whom it falls and breaks to pieces anyone who falls on it. Through this parable we see our own world refracted and simplified, in ways that are tragically real and devastatingly clear. But what if this refraction is the stone that the builders have rejected?

The cornerstone needs to be buried in order for a new building to rise.

Here’s where we need one last bit of Luther College learning to help us see this parable more clearly. In our contemporary world, we often think of a cornerstone as the last stone laid in a building at its dedication. There are songs and speeches, lots of pomp and circumstance and celebration for the building’s completion. Just look outside this building at the CFL’s final cornerstone, and check the archives for the dedication and placement of it. These ceremonial cornerstones are sometimes decorated so that everyone walking by in the future will mark that celebration. But in the ancient world, the cornerstone was literally the first stone laid in a building to mark where its corner begins. An ancient cornerstone was laid in a trench, dug deep into the ground, and would not have been seen once the building was finished. So now we start to see something new. The rejected stone of this parable’s unjust system becomes the cornerstone not because it is the most beautiful 32

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You see, faith-life, life as God’s people in the world, is not about perfection in our obedience or suffering as our due. It is not about suffering as others’ inevitable plight. Faith-life is not even about getting what we deserve. Faithlife, life as God’s people in the world is about the trust that God’s grace, God’s presence, God’s promise of abundant life can redeem even the most corrupt and hopeless systems through the cycle of death and resurrection. And with each cycle, with each reminder that resurrection is present in our world, we can try again. We can use our creative, constructive, and faith-filled liberal arts skills to build our communities and our world anew—to participate in resurrection with the richness of creation’s gifts and the thriving of each person at the center. AND that is God’s doing. May it be marvelous in our eyes!

NOTES 1. Katherine A. Shaner, “Enslaved Labour and the basileia of the Gods,” Religion at Work: Jewish and Christian Experiences of Labour in the Roman World, special issue of Religion in the Roman Empire (edited by G. Anthony Keddie and Michelle Christian): forthcoming. 2. For one influential version of this interpretation see Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (trans. S. H. Hooke, revised edition; London: SCM, 1963), 70. 3. The charge to preachers to shift away from an anti-Jewish reading of this parable comes from Louise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus (trans. Linda M. Maloney; Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), 15–28.

4. See Warren Carter and Amy-Jill Levine, The New Testament: Methods and Meanings (Nashville: Abington, 2013), 36–38.

Celebrating Latinx Heritage Month OCTOBER 11, 2023

by XAVIER ANDRADE ’24

Religion has been enmeshed into our culture, as Catholicism and Christianity were brought on the Spanish ships that the Spaniards used when they colonized Latin America centuries ago. We can acknowledge that there were atrocities that colonization brought to Latin America during that time. However, throughout the centuries, Latinos, Latinas, and Latines have prevailed and created magnificent cultures that need to be shared with the world. Religion may have been forced upon us by the Spaniards, yet we still found a way to make it our own. For example, one of the many prominent religious figures around the world is Virgin Mary. But we created our own portrayal called La Virgen de Guadalupe, which is one of the most popular images throughout Latin America. This resembles a part of our culture that is so beautiful.

PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

I come from a multicultural background; one side of my family is Guatemalan and the other is Mexican and Ecuadorian. When I think about the significance of Latinx Heritage month, I think about my culture and the appreciation I have for the heritage that was passed on to me from my parents and my grandparents. All four of my grandparents are immigrants who left their home countries to seek better opportunities here in the United States. Each left behind friends, family, and all that they knew, just like the many Latinx immigrants that migrate to this country

La Virgen de Guadalupe

At a very young age I was taught to be proud of being Latino, but I became even prouder when hearing how my grandparents wrote their own stories. Unfortunately my grandfather Miguel Andrade passed away a month ago. He migrated from Ecuador in his twenties and built a foundation for our family in California. It has been very difficult for my family and me to cope with the pain of losing him. But what has made it easier for me is remembering him for the loving, hard working person he was and the stories he left me with about his immigrant experience, which I will cherish forever. There are many stories I could tell you that he has shared with me, like the time after he bought his first TV and had to carry it on the bus with him the whole way home; the time where he formed an adult soccer league

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

each year. On their journeys all that they relied upon was the trust in the coyote that accompanied them or the cross that dangled from their necklaces.

uenos dias. Good morning. My name is Xavier Andrade. I am a senior here at Luther and the Latines Unides president. I would like to thank Pastor Melissa Bills for allowing me to share the significance of Latinx Heritage Month, as it comes to a close this Sunday, October 15.

Xavier Andrade from scratch with the Latino brothers and sisters that he had met within a couple of years after migrating to the United States; or the times where he worked multiple jobs day and night to scrape up enough money to purchase his first house with my grandma. It is stories like these that exemplify how our community continues to write our own stories through the face of adversity. Yes, it is easy to get down when there are negative stereotypes or labels that are put on our Latinx community. But when I encounter these harmful portrayals, I refer to a quote by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda that states, “You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.” Overall, Latinx Heritage Month should be about celebrating all of the accomplishments and contributions that our Latinx community brings. Our community brings in trillions of dollars through Latinx businesses, chefs, musicians, and other professions to this country each year. In our culture we cherish hard work, Fall 2023/Agora

sacrifice, unconditional love for one another and most importantly partying and dancing. As I continue to write my own story I will forever be grateful for the sacrifices that my grandparents have made and the examples they have set that make me so proud of being Latino. With that being said, I hope that you all have learned how our Latinx community continues to write our own stories as we continue to celebrate Latinx heritage month. Thank you.

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My Cup Runneth Over

OCTOBER 13, 2023

ood morning, and welcome to chapel on this Founder’s Day 2023. I especially want to welcome members of our Board of Regents who are on campus for their fall meeting, and I want to thank Norskkor and our instrumentalists for their gifts of music today.

cup to run over. We tend to associate it with abundance–we have more than we need, without any action on our part; or we are surprised at unanticipated riches—but I’d like to ask us instead to think about how simply taking the intentional step of altering the size of our own cup can lead to abundance.

There were three selections to consider from today’s lectionary for today’s chapel talk—one from Isaiah, one from James, and Psalm 23. I considered the first two, but the mourning and wailing in those passages are being played out everywhere we turn in our world. Russia and Ukraine are still at war. And now we have the heartbreaking news of incredible violence and death in the Middle East and the declaration of yet more war. Peace seems so far away.

As Provost Chamberlain knows, my chemistry knowledge is woeful, and yet I am fascinated with Charles’ law. One of its tenets is that a gas will expand to fit the size of the container it is in. I quote this all the time in any number of ways, most of them likely misinterpreting the law altogether: a meeting will take up whatever time you schedule for it, for example. An ego will take up whatever attention you give to it. A college student’s stomach will expand to accommodate however much Mabe’s pizza is available!

So on this day, in our Center for Faith and Life, close your eyes in prayer or reflection with me and hear these words from the Psalmist: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. Amen. I want to spend my time with you talking about that one phrase: my cup runneth over. I’ve been thinking a lot about this phrase and about what it takes for one’s

Valuing only what we lack devalues the abundance of what we hold in our hands right now. But “need” is not a gas. And a cup of need, a cup of want, or a cup of desire–if the size of that cup is too vast–will feel empty and unfillable. I wonder how big the cup of need was for Norwegian immigrants coming by ship to the United States in 1825. I can imagine it was pretty small: let there be no storms. But let there be wind. Let the sails hold up. Let the food last. Let no one fall ill. Let us reach shore. And for the founders of Luther College, who went from St. Louis to Halfway Creek, Wisconsin to Decorah, appointing Reverend Laur Larsen as professor

PHOTO COURTESY OF LUTHER COLLEGE

by JENIFER WARD, Luther College President

Jenifer Ward of Norwegian, facing the reality of the Civil War, growing from an initial three students to five to sixteen by 1861, and adding a professor, F.A. Schmidt, the cup of need was small. Sixteen students. Two colleagues. Relative to the three that he started with, Reverend Larsen must have been astonished with sixteen students. And how glad he must have been to have a fellow teacher. Here was his little cup of need: a beautiful valley amid hills and bluffs, with the Upper Iowa River flowing through it, sixteen students hungry for learning, and the companionship of a fellow scholar, pastor, and teacher. I don’t know how big Luther’s cup of need is in 2023. I know there are lots of things we want: some renovated buildings, maybe more singers in our ensembles or more players on a sports team, or bigger enrollment in our courses. And we certainly do need some of these things and should continue to work for them. But there is the “meantime” to consider, where valuing only what we lack devalues the abundance of what we hold in our hands right now. When Fall 2023/Agora

I think about the students hungry for learning in this space today, they are not less than. The colleagues and Regents who have taken time to come to chapel to reflect on Founder’s Day contribute to our abundance. When Norskkor “sings jubilee” as they do every year on Founder’s Day, they are connecting to the abundance of a long choral tradition at Luther, and to a hymn text penned by another Luther luminary–Ulrik Koren– who reminded us that we are the sheep of God’s pasture and need not fear our death, as the Psalmist reminds us. For all of these things, I give thanks for how you fit into my own perfectly sized cup–which runneth over–at least for today. May your cup be small, as well, so that you recognize abundance in your life and in your work for Luther College on this Founder’s Day 2023. Amen.

Agora/Fall 2023

A Race Worth Winning by JONATHAN STRUVE ’02, Instructor in Music and Paideia

24 Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it.

Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one.

So I do not run aimlessly…

but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.

I guess I could say I am a runner, though truth be told, I feel a bit like an imposter saying that. If my high school PE teachers were here, they could tell you how much coaxing it took to get me to run the mile for our physical fitness tests. Though I will say I did it. Slowly. They’d probably be shocked that almost thirty years later, I would be running several times a week, and that I’d sit across a table from Professor Mike Johnson as he convinced me that I should run the Chicago Marathon with him. And so I stand before you now, having recently completed my first marathon. And today I want to share with you some of the lessons I learned. First, training starts small. Running a marathon is training endurance. When I started training, I could run a 5k and I could walk. I started there. Training takes a long time. It takes perseverance and commitment. You have to do it, because there’s no way to fake it. At first, training seemed pretty easy, but once the runs got to be 10, 15, 20 miles, the runs could take up to four hours. That was hard. Training isn’t all progress. Some days just don’t work, and your body is not able to make it happen, and it’s always

best to listen to your body. There are often setbacks. Slowing down is sometimes the answer. You can’t run a marathon at the same pace as a 5k. It seems logical, but it takes discipline to maintain a slower pace.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

irst Corinthians, Chapter 9:

OCTOBER 20, 2023

You cannot do it alone. I became dependent on a network of people who helped me understand what strategies would work, and having people encourage me along the way was invaluable. You must take nourishment—goo is gross, gummies are good. Walking counts. I used to stop tracking my run if I had to resort to walking. I don’t do that anymore. Finishing is an accomplishment, but so is trying. I read the passage from Corinthians to start this talk in part because I’m curious about what it means to win. The winner of the Chicago marathon, Kelvin Kiptum of Kenya, set a world record, finishing in 2 hours and 35 seconds, and Sifan Hassan of The Netherlands ran the second fastest women’s marathon of all time, finishing in 2:13:44. These are elite athletes, the ones truly competing for the “wreath.” And yet, if the goal is only to win the race, what is it that attracted 48,000 people to run the Chicago Marathon? What is the motivation? What are the rewards, aside from a medal for all finishers and a few days of stiffness? I finished less than half of the marathon in the time that Kiptum took to finish the whole race. And of 48,000 runners, I came in something like 27,000th and 2800th in my age group. By these measures, I did not win this race. But I’d argue that there is merit to setting a goal, to working hard, to accom-

Johnathan Struve, holding his medal for finishing the Chicago Marathon in October, 2023 plishing something that most people don’t do. I think one thing that is so memorable from this race is this: people from the neighborhoods in Chicago showed up to encourage and cheer on everyone running. For the majority of us, finishing is the goal and trying is what matters. And, knowing that we are capable of so much more than we thought possible and having confidence in our own abilities is valuable. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that it’s okay if those attempts sometimes fall short too. Not everyone is able to cross the finish line. But showing up and trying matters. I’ve been thinking about the lessons of marathon training in connection with recent events. Isn’t this kind of a privileged sort of thing to do, one that has little to do with the problems in this world full of violence, injustice, and dehumanization? For my Paideia open unit, we read The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, a collection of essays reflecting on daily observations of joy and delight which he wrote over the course of a year. In Fall 2023/Agora

his essay, “The Sanctity of Trains,” Gay argues that it is human nature to care for one another. He writes: “In almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first…This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always” (Gay 135). It is these small gestures, Gay argues, that reveal our true nature and that we do see and recognize the value of one another when we are free from the equally human tendency to vilify people out of power, fear, and mistrust. But in a world that shows a powerful tendency to dehumanize one another, what can we do? It seems like a race that we can never win. Listening to stories about Israel and Palestine, it is clear how much the conflict depends upon dehumanization. One leader of Hamas strikingly noted that Israel should not exist, calling it an “occupation of over 70 years” in reference to the very foundation of the country, and an Israeli official scoffed at deaths in Gaza and the West Bank, dismissing them as though suggesting that killing justified more killing. And yet, I’m also struck that neither Israeli or Palestinian representatives took responsibility for the deaths of innocent people. It makes one wonder why retaliation is the default response, why violence breaks out in the wake of desperation, and why dehumanizing others makes such gruesome choices possible. However, there is, I believe, a glimmer of hope in this abdication of responsibility—no one wants to be seen as a monster, and all parties, I think, actually do see the deep wrong, the deep sense that dehumanization and harm is not meant to be part of our nature, and they actually do not believe the lie that we are not all meant to care for one another. And so, perhaps if marathon training has something to teach us about how to live in this world, it is this: It takes small kindnesses and care for one another to prepare us to make bigger decisions 38

Agora/Fall 2023

about recognizing the humanity of our neighbor, especially in the wake of deep-seated divisions that have been created, often as a means to control one another—lies that we have been fed that keep power structures of injustice and mistrust in place. But we have to start with small things to accomplish big things, and that means starting by seeing the humanity in those we encounter each and every day. We cannot do it alone. Overcoming long established dehumanizing institutions and power structures will require us to unite against them. We can do hard things. If we can hold the door for strangers, what might we do if that stranger becomes a friend, an ally, and someone we value? We can celebrate and encourage one another. We have to understand that we are all better when we lift one another up. It’s not going to be an easy path, and there will be setbacks. Doing hard things also means recognizing that the path forward can be treacherous. But that doesn’t mean we quit doing the thing that is good or that the race isn’t worth running.

Following the Offbeat Songs of My Heart

verything commands us to give. Give our time, our energy, our bodies, our lives to a cause. Though the supposed cause may change based on the context we hear the request in, the insinuation is the same: you are not complete unless you are fully giving of yourself to something. The realm of religion is especially guilty of institutionalizing this demand. There are countless Bible excerpts that instruct followers of God to deny the self and give to others as the way to become holy. This isn’t to say that the desire is wrong, but simply made two-dimensional. The self and its holiness are not focused on. In a typical church setting, mission work and volunteerism are heralded endlessly as the building blocks to modern faith. Knowing your limits and learning to say no, not so much. The causes for self-sacrifice are often quite noble, but they also cause a great deal of harm in convincing many to devalue the self and their own wants. My home church growing up was exemplary in all these regards, having a rigorous mission life and a subtext of extreme self-humility that left me to feel that I was meant to be wholly living for others and not for myself. Yes, I should meet my basic needs, but never more than that. Excess is sinful, we were told, so the simple solution as a young misunderstanding child was to give everything away, no matter what that looked like. I should put others before myself, I thought: socially, financially, physically, emotionally. If what I wanted was at odds with the wants of someone else, it was my responsibility to yield. Growing up queer complicated this internalized belief. A part of me always knew I didn’t belong, and yet a voice in my mind blotted that voice out, subconsciously demanding I give that weird part of me away because it was

not what my family or my home church wanted. I had to live for others, even if that meant ignoring myself. The selfsacrifice became a sacrifice of the self, the true self anyway. This was true to the extent that it took me a particularly long time to come out, just within the confines of my own mind. Once I was old enough to consciously be aware of the world—particularly in learning what queer people were and what that meant under the culture I lived in—I first resigned myself to not having an opinion. When I couldn’t stay ignorant any longer, I asserted to myself, and others, that I was a mere ally. The only reason I went out of my way to befriend obviously queer peers was because I wanted to spread God’s love to them, “save them somehow,” I said. By high school the whole topic made me uneasy. I could tell something was wrong, but I wasn’t sure just what. I wrote poetry, pleading to God for answers. If I loved my friends so dearly and believed them such good people, how could one simple fact like sexuality doom them to hell? Didn’t they deserve to be happy like any straight person? They were made by God, so were they only made queer as a means to suffering? Whether they denied themselves in life and went to heaven or encouraged their love in life to go to hell later, suffering was ingrained in their identity. God couldn’t believe that right, right? It was several years of this questioning that lead to eventual decision making. I said to myself that my God would not encourage suffering in any capacity, so queerness had to be by intelligent design. With this shift, I finally allowed myself to hear the offbeat songs of my heart. Regardless, the resolve to hide prevailed, not so much out of fear as obligation. Why should I indulge and be happy when it would make people who were important to me sad? Shouldn’t

PHOTO COURTESY OF LUTHER COLLEGE

OCTOBER 25, 2023

by CASSANDRA NORTON, ’24

Cassandra Norton I prioritize their happiness? Isn’t that what God would want me to do? My new beliefs about God and his creation of queerness came to a T with the images I was familiar with about self-sacrifice. My willingness to be “generous” won over and I told myself I could be alright on my own. At the time, it made perfect sense to deny myself and what I wanted in order to promise to myself and God that I simply would never fall into a queer relationship. I would just live on my own with countless cats and books to keep me entertained. Who needed love? Of course this wasn’t a sustainable way to live and my bubble got burst, forcing me to confront my views of God once again. But instead of doing that work, I took a break from God. My time at Luther forced me to confront God again, but in a fresh way. The work I’ve done for academics has evolved into a type of spiritual work, catalyzing my analysis of self and my growth back towards a healthier God. Introductory religion courses validated my doubts in the organized church and taught me to read the Bible as a piece of literature, not as pure fact. Fall 2023/Agora

Other interactions with faculty encouraged me to talk about religion and my concerns, something I had never really been able to do before, engaging with other students’ perspectives far and near to my own. More recently, I’ve had the privilege to approach theology from a primarily identity-focused lens, encouraging a fundamental re-understanding of sin: that sin can look like self-denial and an excess of self-sacrifice. For the marginalized person, good religious standing incorporates the need to assert for themselves in a world that tries to limit them. This is to say that for some, the real love and glorification of God comes through love and glorification of the self. By putting ourselves first, we create space to connect to a higher being and a higher purpose, finding holiness in who we already are along the way. Once the work is done on the self, then, and only then, are we truly capable of helping and giving ourselves to others.

Agora/Fall 2023

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ou can read the current issue of Agora online, and you can also find and search all back issues by going to our webpage: www. luther.edu/paideia/agora.

Changing your address? Want to stop receiving Agora? If you do, please email or write us. Contact Agora at agora@luther.edu or write Agora, Main 215, Luther College, 700 College Dr., Decorah, IA 52101. The image at left illustrated early issues of Agora. The journal was established by the Paideia Program, and paideia translates as education. The image shows a teacher with his tablet on his lap and stylus in his hand.

Agora

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