Agora

Agora

Luther College IN Conversation

Fall 2012 Luther College, Decorah, Iowa

LUTHER COLLEGE IN CONVERSATION

Peter A. Scholl, editor

FALL 2012 VOLUME 25, NUMBER 1

Judy K. Boese, production editor

Agora, an interdisciplinary journal grounded in the humanities, is a project of the Luther College Paideia Program. Paideia consists of many other activities and opportunities, including a three-course interdisciplinary core curriculum; performances and events, including an annual lecture series; library acquisitions; student writing services; networked computer classrooms; and a faculty development program that includes sabbatical grants and summer workshops. All these activities receive final support from the Paideia Endowment, originally established through National Endowment for the Humanities grants matched by friends of Luther College. For further information and archival issues on-line, see <http://www.luther.edu/paideia/agora>. The primary Agora contributors are Luther College faculty; writing is also solicited from other college community members and, occasionally, from outside writers. The journal was established in 1988 by then Paideia Director Wilfred F. Bunge, Professor of Religion and Classics. Mark Z. Muggli, Professor of English, was the editor from 1998-2004. Agora is distributed to five hundred on-campus faculty and administrators and to another five hundred off-campus friends of the college. Anyone wishing to be included on the mailing list should contact the editor. phone: (563) 387-1599 e-mail: schollpe@luther.edu

Contents Cover: Short-beaked Echidna (Spiny Anteater), Tasmania, 2011. Photograph by Tex Sordahl.

Essays and Occasions A Watershed Moment Shannon (Miller) Duval.........................................................5 Slow Beauty Carol Gilbertson.....................................................................7

2011-12 Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture Series: !¿Revolution?! The Garden of Adonis: Ancient Analogue for the Modern Agricultural Revolution Holly Moore..........................................................................11

2012-13 Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture Series: Can We Talk? “I Have Nothing to Say and I’m Saying It”: John Cage and the Musical Poetics of Noncommunication Brooke Joyce..........................................................................19

Sabbaticals Occupying Wald Street Nancy K. Barry....................................................................22 “Where Can I Find … ?”: Library Catalogs and Bibliography in the Twenty-first Century John Goodin..........................................................................25

Reflections on Wildlife Down Under in the Wild State and the Land of Birds Tex A. Sordahl......................................................................38 Music Publishing in Vienna, Then and Now John F. Strauss......................................................................43 One Fish, Four Graphs, Six Mugs of Coffee Jeffrey A. Wilkerson...............................................................48

Chapel Deregulating the Christian Monopoly on Grace (September 5, 2012) Todd Green...........................................................................53 Chapel at Luther: A Rare Gift (September 14, 2012) Mary Hull Mohr..................................................................55 United World College Chapel (September 21, 2012) Habibullah Rezai.................................................................57 Waiting for the Will of God (October 5, 2012) Jerry Aaker...........................................................................58 Reformation Chapel: From Conflict to Communion (October 26, 2012) Wanda Deifelt......................................................................60 What Does It Mean to Worship in the Spirit? (November 12, 2012) Katherine R. Narveson.........................................................63

Teaching Sustainability Right from the Start: Advanced Models in Germany and Norway Ruth R. Kath.......................................................................28 The Virtuous Nurse in Virtual Reality Jayme Nelson........................................................................32 Leveraging Industry Experience in Accounting Education Craig Rabe...........................................................................34 Supramolecular Photochemistry of Diazarines in Solid Zeolite Samples Olga Rinco...........................................................................35

Under the Serpent Sky. Print collage by David Kamm (2012)

Introduction

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can’t help leading off with a word about this issue’s cover, even though I’ve started this way many times before. But biologist Tex Sordahl’s photograph of a Short-beaked Echidna (a.k.a. Spiny Anteater) stands out from most of our covers since it is not an art piece and is in full color. In “Reflections on Wildlife Down Under in the Wild State and the Land of Birds,” you can read about this furry Tasmanian monotreme (egg-laying mammal) and Tex’s close encounters with the fabled Tasmanian Devil and other creatures—mainly birds—on his recent sabbatical leave. Where else might you find sentences such as this: “I confess that I found only eleven of the twelve endemic birds, whiffing on the secretive Scrubtit”? While this issue doesn’t have a main theme, several pieces treat the natural world and environmental concerns, including Sordahl’s piece—where he says “I cannot escape the feeling that Tasmania is an ark, possibly the last stand, for several native Australian animals that were formerly widespread …”—and Ruth Kath’s report on her visit to sites in Germany and Norway where “creative educators … are working within and outside of the formal educational system to open their future leaders already as young people to the issues of climate change and environmental devastation, as well as to possible solutions to those very alarming and pressing world problems.” Philosopher Holly Moore takes on Michael Pollan as she explores issues in modern agriculture, such as genetically engineered crops, in the context of the cult of Adonis in ancient Greece in her deliberately “provocative” essay, titled “The Garden of Adonis: Ancient Analogue for the Modern Agricultural Revolution.” Of course the pieces in this issue cover a wide range of topics, from Brooke Joyce’s exploration of the “musical poetics of noncommunication” (on composer John Cage), to Craig Rabe’s discussion of a new set of “accounting rules that is becoming the global standard for financial reporting”; from Nancy Barry’s quest to learn more about her ancestor Lillian Wald, a pioneer social reformer who The New York Times identified in 1922 as one of “Twelve Greatest Living Americans,” to John Goodin’s discussion of the nature, history, and complicated future of library cataloguing. And then there is a sampling of chapel talks, including those by professors of religion Todd Green and Wanda Deifelt; Kate Narveson of the English department; professor emerita May Hull Mohr; international student Habibullah Rezai; and Luther alumnus Jerry Aaker. I always add an illustration on the contents page and looking over the Luther art department’s faculty show this fall, I came across several print collages by David Kamm. They were in grayscale and so would reproduce well and I thought they were striking designs, but I didn’t know that Under the Serpent Sky and the other prints in long series of images that David Kamm created, incorporates figures from the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston. That sculpture was created at the end of the nineteenth century by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and is one of the most significant Civil War monuments in the country. I once supervised a senior paper on the monument in a seminar I taught on representations of the Civil War in art and literature. Many people are familiar with the story of Robert Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Volunteer Regiment through the 1989 film Glory, directed by Edward Zwick and starring Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington; the monument is featured in its closing frames. Kevin Jarre was inspired to write the screenplay after coming across the monument one day and realizing for the first time that black troops had taken such a dramatic part in ending slavery and winning the Fall 2012/Agora

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war. Robert Lowell wrote about the monument in his poem “For the Union Dead” (1960), and he altered the Latin motto on the statue so that it refers to the black soldiers and not just their white commander, Shaw: Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam (“They leave behind everything to save the Republic”). Kamm has used the figures from the monument—the mounted officer Shaw, a foot soldier, drummer boy, and the flying figure—in several linocut and woodcut prints, which in turn have been used as raw material for collages such as the one pictured on our contents page. Kamm began working with the monument and figures in 2008 while attending the Lutheran Academy of Scholars at Harvard University. While reading all of the pieces in Agora two and more times can sometimes feel like work, serving as editor is a labor of love since I am frequently thrown into subjects I know next to nothing about. That experience fits some people’s definition of learning in a liberal arts college, and I hope readers will feel the same about the contributions of Agora’s “knowledge creators.” (I’m writing just a week after a long election year and hearing about those “job creators.”) There are all sorts of rewards to this job. While I can’t say that I really understood much of what physicist Jeff Wilkerson reports about his research in astronomy and the graphs he obsessively produces, I did understand his histogram of the number of fish he has caught in each of the past twelve years. Indeed, I badgered Jeff about his favorite gear and fishing spots. After thinking he had recommended “Shadrach” lures, then switching in desperation to “shadwrap,” I eventually landed on the Rapala company, founded by “a hungry Finnish guy with a carving knife,” who developed the trade mark Shad Rap line of lures that imitate the action of a wounded minnow—a fatal attraction to bigger fish. The first time I pedaled out on my bike to Trout Run Creek, I caught three trout on four casts with a blue #7 Shad Wrap. You never know what rewards will come from reading and getting to know our authors.

Peter A. Scholl Editor

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Essays and Occasions

A Watershed Moment A speech delivered at the groundbreaking for Luther’s Aquatic Center, May 11, 2012

Shannon (Miller) Duval, a second-generation Luther student, majored in English and political science and graduated in 1995. She holds an MA from Indiana University in Education Administration and served as Dean of Student Life at Coe College. She is President of the Mercy Foundation, an extension of health-related institutions associated with the Sisters of Mercy in Des Moines, Iowa. She by and DeLane Duval are parents of two sons, Miller and Keifer Duval. SHANNON

M. DUVAL

development team, and certainly my parents— hoped that the Miller Challenge Gift [which invites alumni and friends of the college to pledge $1 million in gifts to the aquatic center fund to secure the $500,000 challenge commitment] would provide that momentum—and “make some waves!” Luther faculty, staff, alumni, and friends have responded generously—bringing us to this watershed moment, six months Shannon (Miller) Duval speaks at the earlier than projected! dedication of the new aquatic center, There were three May 11, 2012. simple yet profound elements in “making waves” and establishing the Miller Challenge. The first, embracing competition—is something my father has always relished; the element of the challenge gift was incredibly powerful. Dad always says there are three options in addressing a project: “Do it, delegate it, or ditch it.” In this case, Nike would be proud—as the Miller Challenge led to the “Just do it” mentality. And here we are today—shovels in hand, ready to do it! A second element that was important to my parents was the opportunity to pay tribute to Luther and the way it “grows” young people. My dad reflected: “Through our support, we hope to honor great mentors and coaches of Luther’s history. Coaches like Edsel Schweizer and Kent Finanger encouraged us to do everything we can to ‘make things better’ as we go through life—to take the abilities and gifts we’ve been given and use them to make the world a better place. It’s our hope that this gift will provide another world-class environment for that kind of growth and development.” It is this legacy of growing young people—and the timelessness of this revered craft—that da Vinci refers to in this passage: “In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed, and the first of that which comes.” The interconnectedness of the Luther family flows strongly through the

KIRK JOHNSON

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n behalf of the over 300 donors to this magnificent aquatic center and my parents, David and Pat Miller, I am thrilled to be here to mark this watershed moment in Luther College’s history. That’s really what this day is all about—the vital and life-giving qualities of water! Webster’s dictionary has a simple definition for the word watershed: “A crucial dividing point, line, or factor: A TURNING POINT.” This is a watershed moment not only for those who will utilize the aquatic center, but also for the growth of philanthropy supporting Luther’s transformational mission. Like all of you, our family is excited to imagine the countless individuals who will benefit from this state-of-the-art facility. From athletes to community members, from students in adaptive physical education to children learning to swim, from patients receiving physical therapy to championship swimming and diving teams, this facility will touch thousands of lives each year. The investment in the Aquatic Center—officially, The David E.G. and Patricia Miller Natatorium—is emblematic of Luther College’s commitment to nurturing the whole person—mind, body, and spirit. This is truly a hallmark of a Luther education. Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Water is the driving force of all nature.” For those of us raised in the Christian tradition, water’s symbolism is strong and compelling. In Holy Baptism, we not only put our sinful selves to death—but we are adopted as children of God, making us members of the Body of Christ. The waters of baptism are a life-giving force, indeed. Water in the secular world is clearly important, as well; without hydration, all living things are left to wither. While we all agree that water is a life-giving force, and that this project was a priority in Luther College’s strategic plan, the aquatic center seemed to be slow to gain traction. It needed a dose of momentum. President Rick Torgerson, the

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faith have been my parents’ priorities, and they have invested their time, talent and treasure in the areas they view as “the main thing.” Finally, this is a watershed moment not only in the future of Luther’s swimming, diving, and wellness programs. It is also a watershed moment for philanthropy, as the college nears completion of the Sesquicentennial Fund campaign. Being in the development profession myself, I know it is too early to “declare victory.” However, on this day, in this hour, in this moment—we should celebrate the amazing growth in Luther’s ability to plant seeds and water the garden, yielding an exponential increase in the culture of philanthropy. This will have a transformational impact on students, faculty, and staff for generations to come. So let’s plan a pool party—summer 2013—we will anticipate that watershed moment—and look to the water to buoy Luther’s life-changing mission. Soli Deo Gloria

The David E.G. and Patricia Miller Natatorium (architectural illustration).

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OPUS DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION

history of Luther College. Truly, these faculty and staff mentors are “transforming the journey” of Luther students. Our graduates, in turn, are changing the world. Jack Welch former CEO of General Electric, talks about this type of mentoring, saying “My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener, providing water and other nourishment to our top people.” Oh, how the garden continues to flourish at Luther College! And of that, we can be extremely proud! The third and final inspiration for this gift was a simple phrase that was drilled into our heads as young people in the Miller Household: “Keep the main thing.” The Main Thing. For my parents, Luther College is the main thing. Luther is a faith and learning community that has shaped two generations of Millers—soon to be three, fingers crossed. I’d like to introduce Miller Duval, Luther College class of 2028; and Kiefer Duval, class of 2030. Family and

Slow Beauty The Ruth A. Davis Memorial Lecture, Phi Beta Kappa Induction Ceremony, April 14, 2012

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ou have probably never heard of Benvenuto Cellini. A master goldsmith in sixteenth-century Florence, Cellini wrote one of history’s most colorful autobiographies in an era when biographies were rare. I remember struggling through its detailed pages in my Western Civ class in my first year at Augustana College in South Dakota. And yet it was thrilling that an ordinary eighteen-year-old Midwestern girl could read the actual words of a person who lived over 500 years before. I had read nineteenth-century novels and Shakespeare plays, but never a complete work from an authentic historical voice. By contrast, at Luther you had the benefit of reading more than one primary source—already in Paideia you heard such voices as Chinua Achebe, Rigoberta MenchÚ, Sophocles, Harriet Jacobs, and Ba Jin. And now, a few years later, you know the transformation such education brings. You are here today because you excel as students: you know how to practice, observe, record, read, research, analyze, figure, compute, write, perform, create, and compose. You probably had a knack for the theories and skills of your chosen major, but you would not have been elected to Phi Beta Kappa if you had not learned something larger. Our full college program is more crucial than our majors will ever be. You will not live your sociology major or even your career as a high school teacher or a software engineer—you will live a whole life. And for that you have been given the tools in your liberal arts education. College textbooks, monographs, classrooms, and labs helped me gain the factual information and ideas I needed to interpret the world. I vividly recall slicing into my first lab frog and carefully drawing what I saw; I can still see the diagram of a neuron’s leap across a brain synapse. I remember by Professor Emerita of English, Carol retired

CAROL in 2011 after teaching at Luther for fortyGILBERTSON three years. She taught and has published

on John Milton but also on twentieth-century poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. She was honored as Jones Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in 2002-04, and her recent election to Phi Beta Kappa recognized her achievements in scholarship and literature. Carol publishes her poems in a range of journals and her chapbook of poems, From a Distance, Dancing was published in 2011. She founded The Vibrant Word: The Lutheran Festival of Writing.

the challenges of advanced French grammar, the satisfaction of finishing an intellectual monograph like Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique or George Simpson’s The Meaning of Evolution. I mused on Spinoza’s idea that God is a substance of infinite attributes; and I remember marveling at the beauty of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant language. Like you, I learned facts, puzzled over concepts, and thrilled to new ideas. But I want to talk today not about facts or ideas or even knowledge. I could hold up some of the larger essential human values, including justice, truth, faith, and goodness. All these are important, but in order to live with wholeness and integrity, we also need to turn our eyes toward another Platonic ideal: the idea of Beauty. Beauty is not a high value in our culture, where educational experts stress technical skills and productivity. Still, we all recognize beautiful things. We marvel at amazing 3-D effects; we ogle the sparkly gowns on the red carpet. We give a thumbs-up to a long-shot basketball whispering through the hoop; we say “Cool!” when we see a sleek car or a complete rainbow; and we find Adele’s voice “awesome.” Some of these are worthy triggers for pleasure, but many are quick flashes, fleeting sparks rather than enduring fires—the equivalent of fast food rather than a gradual, nutritious meal. Even in academic circles, beauty is not a trendy term. In the liberal arts, we learn how to analyze beauty, though I suspect the word is rarely used in classrooms. We have courses in philosophical aesthetics, and courses in understanding form, design, and style in paintings, symphonies, and novels. A chemistry experiment might be called elegant, a computer program masterful. Because the arts are strong at Luther, some of you have developed even more sophisticated antennae to appreciate beauty. Exquisite musical performances remind us how melody, harmony, and text can transport us. Those of you who create art and compose stories have trained your sensibilities to recognize the beautiful, and those of you who play or sing are attuned to how profoundly music enters the soul. So I may be preaching to the choir here, but let me be your choral conductor and push the concept a bit more. When you leave this place, you will need to think not of particular educational challenges but rather of your posture toward the world’s everything. Your commitments will no longer be prompted by a professor or a student service organization, or the need to make your resumé stand out. Your values will emerge from your inner reflection on what happens. You will dedicate yourself to various things, but I am asking you for an act of will: to commit yourself to beauty. I am convinced that being keen to deep beauty humanizes us and gives us richer life. Fall 2012/Agora

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I want to use some of my own poems to get at what I am arguing—not because I have a model life or because, as a poet, I have mastered the perfect blend of elegant words and humane sensibility—but because I realize my poems most often attempt to lead readers to ponder what to value. And in doing that, I am always, again and again, reminding myself to observe, to meditate, to admire, and thus, to cherish. Poets remind us how, despite greed, war, pollution, and injustice, the world can still be loved. My poetic speakers help me discover how. Perhaps that seems odd, but when I begin a poem, I usually have in mind a phrase or an image—the dirt-pile where we buried our cat; a daughter leaving for grade school in the rain; a flock of cranes taking flight; a news photo of an Abu Ghraib detainee. But my created speaker’s voice takes over, and it becomes the speaker’s meditation and not my own. When I begin, I cannot anticipate what my words will discover—only that it will somehow involve beauty. Let me give you an example of a poem that led me to its own destination. Before I retired last spring, I drove daily up Broadway Avenue toward Luther for forty-some years, and I was always jolted out of my auto-pilot haze when I saw the fall maples lining both sides, their incomparably yellow leaves shimmering. Here’s the poem: October Maples on Broadway1 Despite the asphalt stained dark by hours of rain, trees stand on either side like generous hosts to offer armfuls of yellow, yellow, yellow, as if to say Here, you will need this, you will need this in coming days— store up gold against that which you cannot know. And I look down the tunnel of my darkening. We know the aging body’s track, consider how to hold erosion back. But how does a faltering mind assess itself, how calculate what to calibrate as words depart, as tasks escape, and though you cup your hands as always, you now look down to see that reason, what you thought you held, is slowly leaking out. Case in point: as I write this, I mistype: store up god, store up god. You will need this yellow, yellow, yellow. As I write, I hope to nudge the reader to recognize the exquisite in my subject. For me, a successful poem uses apt words to point to something worthy of wonder. In other words, beautiful language capturing a beautiful thing—the medium is the message. When I started writing “October Maples,” I had no idea the poem would lead me to the metaphysical. But 8

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the avenue of trees suddenly became a metaphor of my future life journey, “the tunnel of my darkening.” And with old age an inevitable phase of that trip, I had to consider senility as a probable way-station. In this case, I really did type lower-case “god” instead of “gold,” and it was a resonant typo. From a conventional image of beautiful fall leaves, the speaker is led to meditate on beauty even in a vision of aging and death. And don’t we all long for a divine presence as we face the unknown future: “store up god, store up god. / You will need this yellow, / yellow, yellow.” Even heartache can edge into a transforming vision. During the year after my father’s death, I traveled with my husband and children to Greece at Easter. The rugged mountains, incomparably blue water, vast valleys of olive trees, and scent of orange blossoms—it was serene and restorative. And since it was Holy Week, all the Orthodox churches were full of candles, magically lighting up the historic streets. Still mourning my father, and thus wondering about life’s meaning as I was surrounded by that accumulating beauty, I wrote this poem: Hercules2 We landed in Athens after midnight, the children with us. If you hadn’t brought us, we’d never have come. It was Easter. My father was dead. We were exhausted, and the cab driver had a mind of his own. In the morning the Parthenon sang white above us. Lambs roasted on small spits in the courtyard. I bought a round loaf with a crimson egg in the center for Ellen’s seventh birthday. She told us she was keeping a journal. What made it all so holy? Candles in the plaka, the calls to prayer, grottoes at the roadside with flowers, the man who offered us bread. The girls made sandcakes on the beach. You peeled ripe oranges and handed us sections one-by-one. My father was gone. You told them Hercules stories and one night, as you tucked them in, I heard Ellen’s sleepy voice: “I can remember ten of the labors, but I can’t think of the other two.” Each day falls into the dustbin of the past. Do we remember, I wonder, what we are, what we’ve made— do we remember the little labors of our life? The poem reaches for beauty through juxtaposition—of small gestures against large questions, of death placed starkly

Train tracks inside Birkenau Concentration Camp, adjoining Auschwitz, with entrance gate in background.

CAROL GILBERTSON

against youth and Easter resurrection. It asks how we judge our daily deeds, even if we don’t all have twelve specific herculean labors to perform before we die. Poets aim to transform the mundane, the routine, the shocking, and the tragic into beauty—of phrasing, yes, but of thought—how dissimilar things, placed side by side, can startle and enlighten us, an effect that is simultaneously aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual. It’s what Martin Luther King manages in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, where he repeats powerfully lyric phrasing to lay harsh segregation’s hurts next to a nation’s healing beauty, reminding us that we can “hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope” and “transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

Back to my freshman year: I didn’t tell you Cellini’s whole story—he deeply understood how his craft could produce beautiful goldwork, but he was also a brawler, an embezzler, and even a murderer. I had never considered that an artist of the highest order—dedicated to creating exquisite art—could also be an unethical person. If Hannah Arendt had written a book about Cellini, she might have titled it The Flamboyance of Evil. Narrow attention to one kind of beauty, then, is not enough for a life of integrity. I mention Arendt because you were assigned her text Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in second-semester Paideia. You remember that Arendt reported on the 1961 Jerusalem trial of Adolph Eichmann, the director of logistics for the Nazis’ mass deportation of Jews to death camps. Arendt argues that evil does not always emerge in remarkable circumstances but rather often occurs because of the tendency of ordinary people to conform to mass ideology and to mindlessly follow orders. When we do not see the beauty in human life, we elide the nuance of character and reduce people to caricature. Though six million is a number too big to comprehend, each of those tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of people was an individual of particular character. I thought about this when I toured the Holocaust death camp at Auschwitz—near Krakow, Poland—in 2007. On our tour, the Polish guide made an

unnoticed slip of the tongue as she pointed to the crematoria. Later, I wrote this poem: On the Train from Krakow3 Outside the window herds of white birches unleafed, skeletal. I remember Yellowstone after the fire—hill, valley, hill, valley— thousands of pine trunks standing scorched in mid-summer like wartime photos of ghost bodies staring from camp fences. At Auschwitz the guide, in memorized English, detailed the scope and efficiency of the demolition. Pointing to one crematorium and then its twin across the road, she did not notice her slip: These two are miracle images. The trains left indelible tracks which still end abruptly at the heart of the camp as did their hordes of terrified passengers, each one bearing a singular name. At Josepha Synagogue the walls seemed papered with an intricate design. I wanted to touch but leaning in close discovered finely-lettered script, name after name in rows—each miraculous life-line mirroring the next— like tiny cars on a track. My poetic speaker makes no explicit thesis-driven judgment of the mass murder of Jews, Poles, and homosexuals. But the guide’s misspeaking of the word “miracle” when she meant “mirror” throws the anomalous notion of the miraculous into this heinous historical narrative. For the speaker it’s a catalyst: each person’s “singular name” is miraculous, and the artistic line after line of handwritten victims’ names on the synagogue wall reminds her of car after railway car dumping their human cargo, queues of unique individuals shoved en masse toward the gas chambers. The recognition of beauty even in such catastrophe leads us to wonder, and perhaps toward wiser judgment. Other thinkers have suggested that a robust apprehension of subtle beauty is a path to a moral life. The contemporary spiritual guru Deepak Chopra calls this posture, which the modern world has lost, an “expanded awareness.” The early nineteenth century British poet William Wordsworth suggests that those who are deeply attuned to the natural world are not only more spiritual, but also more humane. For Wordsworth, sinking deeply into nature’s beauty makes us more sensitive, more spiritual, more ethical. Slow beauty’s effect on us is something like Martin Luther’s argument that simply accepting God’s grace impels us to act toward others in love, as inevitably as iron heated in a fire is transformed so that by its nature, it gives off light and heat. Some current environmental writers echo Wordsworth—in Fall 2012/Agora

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BRITTANY TODD LC ’10 PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRITTANY

Harland Nelson (left) introduced Carol Gilbertson as an Honorary Member and Wilfred F. Bunge (right) introduced James Limburg as an Alumnus Member at the Phi Beta Kappa initiation April 14, 2012.

losing touch with nature’s ecological beauty, we’ve lost sight of our moral obligation to the earth and its future inhabitants. Though Trout Fry may be a quick, fun fix of conviviality in a natural setting, it is those solitary walks to Dunning Springs that actually shape your character. Take your time, then, take your time slouching toward wisdom. It takes intentionality to do that, just as you commit to regular trips to the gym. Not everyone needs to write poems. But we can all have our beauty-binoculars at the ready as we move through life. Nourish your soul-sight. Nothing wrong with munching on quick, pretty appetizers, but it’s so much more nourishing to relish a long, slow meal of beauty, which you savor and digest, whether it’s learning enough to care about war crimes in Sudan or listening reverently to Fauré’s Requiem. Information is important; knowledge is crucial; service, as our mission statement reminds us, is our vocation. But wisdom is what we are all aiming for. Let a glimpse of beauty lead you to a deeper, fuller gaze. We don’t have to walk barefoot on an idyllic beach or work in a homeless mission to imbibe slow beauty, though those might be good things to do. But just to prove my point let me end with a poem about the supposedly unremarkable prairie that surrounds us here in Iowa. The poem’s speaker observes each precise detail in an ordinary Midwestern scene as night gradually comes on. My hope is that it will lead you to wonder at how each unremarkable specimen serenely plays its part in ecology’s intricate puzzle. I will end with this poem, asking you to let its words and images enrich your own remembered experiences of slowly rising beauty—beauty that inspires the kind of reflection which can lead us to wisdom and love. Night Rising4 We call it nightfall, as if someone in an overhead booth abruptly dimmed the spots and darkness dropped like a velvet curtain.

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And it does seem to descend on the city, where the sun slips behind brick walls and shadows incise triangles under balconies. Urban dark moves down through jungle gyms, falls into the hoods of men blanketed in store entries. It drops onto laps waiting at bus benches, sending shadows from bags and briefcases. Night falls, filling dumpster covers, settling under parked cars and drawing dark compass rings beneath streetlights. But on the plains darkness rises from the long land, the soil slowly cooling underfoot, releasing blackness beneath the green quack grass, the poison ivy leaves, the stalks of little bluestem and crested wheatgrass. It deepens the blue undersides of flowering flax, the purple berries of the buck brush. The evening spreads upward along rows of hanging sunflower heads. It ascends the cornstalk and traces a sharp line under each arched leafblade. Beyond fenceposts, pheasants startle up from muted underbrush, and shadows outline the fringe-ends of mane-hair, the teats and sagging udders. Twilight slides in under headlights, along the ditchline. In farmyards men stride dark paths from barns as dogs bark at the emerging night. And large-eared deer lift their silhouettes against the sky’s last bloom as the dark earth reaches up to nudge the crescent moon into its dim position. Endnotes 1. First published in From a Distance, Dancing (Finishing Line, 2011). 2. First published in Flyway (Summer 2007); winner of Flyway’s Sweet Corn Poetry Contest, 2006. 3. First published in The MacGuffin (Winter 2010); Honorable Mention (2nd place), 2009 MacGuffin Poet Hunt.

4. First published by Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose (May 2005); finalist for 2004 Annual Dogwood Poetry Award.

The 2011-12 Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture Series: !¿Revolution?!

The Garden of Adonis: Ancient Analogue for the Modern Agricultural Revolution

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his essay is meant to be provocative. It aims to be a means for thinking more deeply about the relationship between our agricultural practices and our cultural norms. By the end, if I have made you uncomfortable with something that you either believe or didn’t know you believed, I will have accomplished my goal, for, as most of you have perhaps heard many times before, most likely in your Paideia course, “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human.”1

by

HOLLY MOORE

Moore earned her PhD at DePaul University, where she wrote her dissertation on the concept of analogy in Plato’s thought. She joined Luther’s philosophy department in 2010 as an assistant professor and teaches courses in ancient and contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, feminist theory and logic. Her research primarily addresses the metaphysics, methodology, and rhetoric of Plato’s dialogues, with interpretations oriented by the continental critical tradition. She and a colleague are developing a proposal for an edited volume on the ethical and cultural role of gardens in contemporary life.

DESIGN BY A.J. PERLING

I. The Conditions of Human Cultivation The notion of cultivation intersects with manifold aspects of our lives, with agriculture, education, ethics, matters of taste, and class. Cultivation stitches together so much of what it means to be human that it seems important to think through those connections a little more deeply—in particular, the relationship between agri-cultivation (the cultivation of land) and social cultivation (the cultivation of humans and human organizations). Those who tell the story of human history have long posited that agriculture is the sine qua non of “civilization,” and although nomadic life too has bred rich and varied cultures, there is something about agriculture that is especially conducive to the formation of social institutions and the cultural norms and practices that embody them. Part of the reason for this is the fact that human choice binds both agricultural and cultural practices more generally. If we look at the way social institutions are related to human choices, we may also see a similar relationship in agricultural practice. While social institutions are built upon

individual human choices, those choices are also always mediated by the institutions they make possible. For example, when I make a choice at the voting booth, I, an individual, contribute in an important and direct way to the representative bodies that constitute my government. But it is also important to note that the kinds of things I can vote for or against, the specific candidates for whom I may viably vote, and the very fact that I have the right to vote, are all things that have been decided in advance of my individual decision; these are all things that condition and restrict the range of my decisions before I even think about what I might “freely” endorse with my choice. Fall 2012/Agora

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Applying this insight to agricultural practice, we can see that, while human choices structure agricultural practices, those practices also inform the character of human choices as well. And if both cultural and agricultural practices condition human choices, we ought to be able to trace just such conditioning across both spheres. Indeed, it is my aim in this paper to demonstrate that the character of our agricultural practices, in particular our extensive use of genetically modified organisms, not only represents but serves to further institutionalize certain restrictions on our cultural self-expression. In order to offer some support to my initial claim regarding the relationship between agri-cultivation and cultural norms and practices, I will first offer a brief analysis and critique of Michael Pollan’s thesis in The Botany of Desire. From there, I will expose a dialectic present in ancient Greek culture represented by two opposed femininities: that of the mother-grain-fertility goddess Demeter and that of the sexually libertine Aphrodite. This dialectic not only helps us to make sense of the sterile and decadent ritual gardens of Adonis but also provides an interesting lens through which to view the normalization of practices of genetic modification in agriculture as well as certain cultural practices that relate to the norming of difference more generally.

II. Pollan-ation Michael Pollan’s thought-provoking 2001 bestseller, The Botany of Desire, “blossomed” from a thought experiment he conducted while gardening. He focused his curiosity by asking himself, “What existential difference is there between the human being’s role in this (or any) garden and the bumblebee’s?” (xiii).2 Imagining the perspective of the bee as it plunders the flowers’ golden treasures, Pollan concludes that the bee would think of the flower simply as the object of his pollen harvest, but that we know better than that. The bee’s narrow view does not recognize the larger ecology of the garden, nor does it recognize that the bee is serving the flower at least as much as the flower is serving the bee. Pollan applies this perspective then to us as humans, saying that we make the same mistake when we think that all we do when we garden is make choices about objects. He makes the strong claim that when we make choices about plants, plants are also making choices about us. That is, in a co-evolutionary relationship such as ours with cultivated plants, “the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors” (xiv). Pollan’s thought experiment in The Botany of Desire is not unlike Immanuel Kant’s thought experiment in the Introduction to his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant identifies this turn of thought as original to Copernicus, the Polish astronomer who literally upended the entire Western worldview. All astronomical models of Copernicus’ time put the earth at the center of the universe, but Copernicus had the audacity to question that fundamental assumption, asking perhaps this way, “What if instead of everything revolving around us, we revolve around something else?” Kant takes this perspectival inversion as a model for questioning a fundamental epistemological assumption of his time—namely, that we come to know space and time because they are in fact out there in the world to be discovered. Kant questions 12

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this principle, wondering whether the reason we discover these things in the world is instead because all our empirical knowledge is already conditioned by them. That is, what if we can experience things only through the lenses of space and time, such that space and time are not in things so much as space and time are in us as conditions upon experiencing the world in the first place. This is what Kant calls his Copernican Revolution: rather than assuming that we as subjects are at the center of all knowable things, Kant conceives of our empirical knowledge as conditioned first and foremost by the twin suns of space and time. Perhaps I am confusing him for a philosopher, but I think Michael Pollan aims to perform just such a turn of thought as well. According to Kant, critique, at its heart, requires that whatever principles are adopted by a position must be rigorously applied to that position itself. On this view, we see that Pollan’s approach, too, is critical. In the case of Pollan’s thought experiment about the bee, he supposed that the bee was short-sighted, seeking its own fulfillment, assuming that the flower is its object alone, never considering that the bee might be the flower’s object as well. When we notice this about the bee, we are obliged to investigate in what way our own perspective might be short-sighted, and this is exactly what Pollan does. In one of the strongest restatements of his thesis, Pollan claims, “Though we self-importantly regard domestication as something people have done to plants, it is at the same time a strategy by which the plants have exploited us and our desires … to advance their own interests” (Botany of Desire 81). I have some serious reservations about the rhetoric of Pollan’s claim. Primary among them is the fact that Pollan seems to rely an anthropomorphic view of evolution. By saying that Pollan relies on an “anthropomorphic view of evolution,” I am referring to Pollan’s use of vocabulary and imagery that suggests that plants, animals, even whole ecosystems have agency and make choices. While I have no interest in defending the speciesist claim that only humans can have agency, I think Pollan depends upon the assumption that humans do have agency, even if it is in support of a thesis that goes some distance to undermining that very claim. I am resistant to this approach because if we rely on the playful fiction that “plants make choices too,” we fail to see that the primary issue involved is not choice but the conditions of choice. In fact, if Pollan is right (and I think that the heart of his insight is), plants’ “choices” are just such conditions upon us. Moreover, if we reject the agency basis of Pollan’s argument, we are no longer forced to pit plants’ (or animals’, or “Nature’s”) agency against our own, and are instead able to recognize other beings’ material claims upon the world within which we exercise our agency. In spite of my critique (which is actually meant to amplify rather than deaden the force of Pollan’s argument), I like Pollan’s main point: we do not make our choices about agricultural practices in a vacuum; those choices have evolutionary consequences beyond those we explicitly intend as well as consequences for our own evolution. If this were not so, we would have no need for ethics. However, since our choices are not made in a vacuum and do affect other people,

life forms, environments and ecosystems, we are responsible for understanding those interactions. Yet we do not have to give all these things their own set of choices in order to “understand” or “empower” them. We need only consider the fact that our choices are never solely or simply ours. They arise in a context, in an environment, in conjunction with other people and with living and non-living things, as well as with cultural institutions and beliefs. All of these condition what we do, and, similarly, all we do is a condition upon them. There is a reciprocal, “co-evolutionary” relationship between us and everything that we act upon. In the end, this is the version I prefer of Pollan’s argument: when we cultivate plants, we are cultivating the conditions of our cultivation of ourselves. And whether those conditions are expressed from the vantage of the plant, the soil, the ecological environment, the social institutions, or ideologies of which I am a part, they are all part of what conditions any way I might understand myself and make choices about who I am and what I do. As a result of this, I think that what we do in our cultivation of other beings is not simply reflective but more importantly formative of who we are able to be. Now, in order to shed light on the relationship between agriculture and cultural norms, let us investigate the intriguing ritual of the garden of Adonis of ancient Greece.

III. The Garden of Adonis: Cultivating Failure

The Origins of the Greek Myth of Adonis The most colorful and dramatic telling of the Adonis myth is surely that of the Roman poet of the late first century BCE, Ovid. Ovid tells the tale of Myrrha, a girl whose forbidden love for her father is consummated by means of a trick devised by the girl’s conniving nurse. While her mother is absent from the home for several days during a summer festival for Demeter,3 the nurse advises Myrrha to take advantage of the dark nights surrounding the new moon. Inebriated, aroused, and with eyes dimmed by the moonless night, Myrrha’s father greedily accepts the nurse’s offering of a young woman, whom the nurse says is the same age as Myrrha.4 Unaware of her identity, the pair commits incest. After many consecutive nights of this ruse, Myrrha’s father discovers he has been having sex with his daughter all along and violently chases her from their home. Myrrha flees for her life, running east as far as she can—for nine months, in fact, until her distended belly brings her to a stop in Arabia (the source of the finest myrrh in the ancient world). Myrrha begs the gods to deliver her from the human world but also from the world of the dead. Zeus takes pity and turns her into a tree (hence the story’s presence in Ovid’s Metamorphoses). As her skin turns to bark and she is relieved both of her humanity and from the pain of death, the baby boy, Adonis, is delivered from her womb by attending nymphs, overawed by his beauty. Adonis is beautiful—so beautiful he comes to occupy the role of Aphrodite’s attendant, almost unseating the god Eros, erotic love, himself. Adonis is so compelling that Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual desire, is enchanted by Adonis’ beauty, devoting all her time and attention to the youth. She even abandons her abode on Mount Olympus, preferring the shade of the wild woods and the bright light of Adonis’

seductive charms. In other late accounts,5 Aphrodite entrusts the child Adonis to Persephone, goddess and daughter of Demeter, goddess of fertility, marriage and the harvest.6 But when Persephone sees the child, she is similarly rapt by his beauty and refuses to give him back to Aphrodite. Zeus, the king of the gods, mediates the dispute, deciding that Adonis’ year shall be split into three: one part for Aphrodite, one for Persephone, and one for himself. But Adonis gives his portion over to Aphrodite (demonstrating his preference for her seductions over the harvest daughter’s legitimate love). Adonis’ life is one of simple hedonism, the carefree pleasures of Aphrodite’s voluptuousness. He has no need for a social life beyond his relationship with the goddess, and he hunts or forages for his food from the flora and fauna of the forest. The myth includes Aphrodite’s warning that Adonis not risk his life while he hunts; she specifically counsels him to avoid any animals who have their own means of defense. While hunting, however, Adonis’ hounds chase out a wild boar, and Adonis pursues it. He is gored for his trouble, and the prescient Aphrodite is unable to save him.7 To honor Adonis’ untimely death and Aphrodite’s mourning, those who practiced the cult worship of Adonis took on the role not simply of mourners but also gardeners. We now turn to examine both their identities and their practices in more detail. The Cult of Adonis and the Ritual Gardens of Adonis The female worshippers of Adonis in Greece were called the Adoniai. Although there is evidence that women from all walks of life took part in the Adonis rituals,8 in the ancient Athenian popular imagination, the Adoniai were notoriously associated with the Athenian hetairai, or prostitutes. In the Lysistrata, the Athenian comedian Aristophanes repeatedly appeals to the generalized male fear that otherwise respectable women may indulge in the lamentations of Adonis, thereby debasing themselves by aligning themselves with the followers of Aphrodite, i.e., prostitutes. Though their social stations may have been different, the Adoniai were unified by their reverent practices. To memorialize their cult hero, the Adoniai tended potted gardens, which were called gardens of Adonis. Making their crop’s bed in shallow pots or simply pot sherds (broken clay pots),9 the women, as Socrates derisively puts it in Plato’s Phaedrus, “played” at cultivation, raising in only eight days time what it takes Demeter eight months to produce.10 Taking advantage of the height of summer, the women would tend their crop archipelagoes, which yielded tender yet hale plants in a very short time. On the final day of the ritual, the women would gather their green prizes and place them on the roof of their home (often a brothel), lamenting in ritual mourning11 as they watched the fragile, succulent plants wither in the hottest sun of the year,12 leaving behind no offspring or seed, drying up as if they had never been at all. The plants’ almost miraculous vivacity, followed so quickly by their ecstatic demise poignantly summarizes the exuberant life and sudden death of Adonis. The Adoniai’s ritual thus mimicked Adonis’ life and honored Aphrodite’s loss. Fall 2012/Agora

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An Ancient Dialectic undermine the dominant order of sanctioned sexualities (both What can we take from all this, both the myth of Adonis and heterosexual and homosexual), each subject to its definition the cult in his honor? First, let us note some important points according to social class.13 In addition to her role alongabout Adonis: 1) he is irresistible, even as a baby, perhaps reside Dionysus in periodically sanctioned sexual libertinism, flecting the desire that drove his mother Aphrodite has another legitimate face. to violate one of the most universal social Aphrodite is worshipped as the deity who taboos; 2) the beloved of Aphrodite, the facilitates legitimate, state-sanctioned goddess of lust, Adonis is also adored by sexual unions. But far from this rendering Persephone, daughter of Demeter, who Aphrodite the goddess of marriage, this is the goddess of grain, harvest, fertility, demonstrates the way that Aphrodite is motherhood, and legitimate marriages; yet again subsumed under the order of and, finally, 3) Adonis lives in the forest, Demeter: being the mother goddess, it eating only what he can hunt and forage. is Demeter who sanctifies the offspring Each of these represents a point of resisof legitimate sexual unions. Aphrodite, tance to ancient Greek social norms. Beon the other hand, is responsible for all cause he is the wild child of sexual license, kinds of conceptions, both legitimate and both in origin and in his all-consuming illegitimate. And, although coupling itself affair with Aphrodite, Adonis’s own is most properly Aphrodite’s province, the nature stands as hostile to social norms. offspring of any human coupling is always His birth itself is a challenge both to the in one way or another subject to the norm distinction between human and plant life of the state-sanctioned domestic union, as well as to the social restrictions governreigned by Demeter. ing sexual self-expression. Adonis’ socially Let us turn now to consider some transgressive nature is only amplified in of the agricultural applications of this his extra-social lifestyle. His choice of Pelike. Plouton with a cornucopia and Demeter-Aphrodite dialectic. If we were Aphrodite over Persephone makes his Demeter with a sceptre and plough. By the to assign it a mythological cause, certain story an endorsement of promiscuity Orestes Painter. 440-430 BC. National wild botanical reproduction would seem over domesticity, and his life in the forest, Archeological Museum, Athens. to be a result of Aphrodite’s influence, where he neither cultivates the nature that occurring through non-intentional, often surrounds him nor reproduces his own nature in offspring, random disseminations.14 Just watch a field of dandelions in shows Adonis as resistant to stability and preservation in any April: uninhibited, they heedlessly spread their seeds wherever form. In sum, Adonis troubles the common Greek notion the wind takes them! In principle, domestic farming stands that human life is constituted through its communal nature. in opposition to this form of reproduction, subordinating Let us consider in more detail the Greek cultural norms the carefree exuberance of a dandelion’s pollination to a reand principles that are suggested (and, as I maintain, impleproductive regimen that aims to maximize crop quality and mented) by the oppositions and relations involved in the myth efficiency. That is, the tasks of the domestic crop farmer are of Adonis. First, I find that there are two norms of feminine organized by the aim of orderly fruition, measured as yield in sexuality represented in the opposition between Demeter/ bushels or pounds. Demeter governs that order, which dictates Persephone and Aphrodite/Adonis. The order of the feminine the natural restrictions and prudent recommendations that according to Demeter is that of propriety: seasonal, juridical, ensure agricultural productivity. The “disorder” of Aphrodite, marital, and social. Above all, order dominates. Here the on the other hand, has no such aim, or, worse still, seeks to feminine is mother: the source of new generations and their disrupt reproduction—consider the arts of contraception that measured flourishing. With her command of both human and allow prostitutes, whose patron is Aphrodite, to maintain a the earth’s fertility, Demeter is not only the source of but also consistent income. the sustainer of human life. In addition to this, Demeter also Our portraits of Demeter as mother and Aphrodite as creates and maintains society by means of conformity and hetaira (prostitute) suggest two forms of femininity, one fecund propriety. Standing opposite Demeter’s order of the feminine and nurturing and the other profligate and irrepressibly sexual. is Aphrodite (and Adonis), both symbolic of unrestricted But what of the sexuality of Adonis? With his rather ignoble copulation and dissemination, mating irrespective of the order death, having been gored (in some tellings, through the groin) of the seasons and outside of the exchanges pre-ordained by by the tusk of a wild boar, Adonis is the failed huntsman, the social contracts, marital or otherwise. In human unions, Aphtoo-beautiful, sexualized male,15 a perfectly passive sexual rodite and Adonis represent the free-spirited, unconcerned object, who is thereby necessarily self-defeating in action. exuberance of pleasure-seeking. From this tale we receive a portrait not simply of a femininAphrodite’s opposition to Demeter, however, is not as ity that competes with Demeter’s but of a masculinity that is clear-cut as it might seem. After all, the Greeks (and the Rofeminized. Adonis, then, is suitable for the trivial adorations of mans after them) were especially fond of festivals that allowed women and men but suspect as anything other than youthful, for sexual leave-taking. But these orgies were always under the wasteful, unserious masculinity. In his influential structuralist auspices of civic festivals, functioning to preserve rather than reading of the Adonis myth,16 Marcel Detienne supports this 14

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Nicolas Poussin. Venus and Adonis (c. 1628-29). Kimbell Art Museum. position by reference to the fact that in idiomatic Greek, the gardens of Adonis became synonymous with frivolous and fruitless action as well as with sexual impotence.17 In summary, while Demeter is the agricultural/domestic reproduction goddess par excellence, Aphrodite represents coupling heedless of its consequences. As the product of incest and bearing, even as an infant, a preternatural sexuality, Adonis focuses Aphrodite’s desire as heedless to social norms but also shows himself as a feminized male. And even though Aphrodite is implicated in Demeter’s order, she is not entitled to rule within it. Indeed, were Aphrodite’s pure dissemination to rule in agriculture (that is, the human negotiation of natural limitations) it would risk becoming a garden of Adonis: fruitless, rootless, and, ultimately, sterile.

IV. The GM Revolution: A Cult of Cultivation

A Very Brief History of Genetic Modification Technology in Agriculture In 1996, agriculture in the United States experienced a revolution: commodity crops like soybeans, corn, and cotton, grown from genetically modified (GM) seeds, were commercially introduced into the US agricultural system. Only three years after their introduction, in 1999, the USDA Economic Research Service reported that GM herbicide tolerant (HT) soybeans represented over 50% of the US soybean planted acres. Within the same time frame, GM HT cotton occupied just over 40% of the US cotton acres planted; GM insect-resistant (Bt) cotton held just over 30%, with Bt and HT corn trailing in the twenties and teens in their respective markets. As of July 1, 2011 (last growing season), the USDA reported that HT soybeans dominated acres planted at 94%, followed by Bt and HT cotton at 75% and 73%, HT corn at 72% and Bt corn at 65%.18 Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have not simply revolutionized US agriculture, they have completely taken it over.19 The Effects of Genetic Modification in Agriculture Today The trend toward GMO dominance in the commodity crop seed market has been acquired fairly easily because of GM biotech companies’ patent rights. Non-GMO farmers have

few options to inhibit the contamination of non-GM crops by cross-pollination with GM crops from nearby fields. Early on in the introduction of GM seeds to the market, the agritech company Monsanto sought to sell “terminator” seeds, which would limit the reproducibility of the crop by sterilizing the seeds produced by a given generation. This would have indeed eliminated the concern that genetic property could be collected and re-used by non-GM farmers. In response to public outcry,20 however, in 1999 Monsanto pledged not to institute such technology and instead required farmers who purchased their seed to sign a pledge not to save any seed, agreeing also that if they did save seed, they would be liable for patent infringement. As a result, the practice of seed saving has largely become de facto illegal, and any non-GM farmer who attempts to save seed is subject to patent-infringement lawsuits.21

GM technology serves to further retrench the order of Demeter, but it does so by means of Adonian methods, such as terminator seeds. What used to be called “terminator” technology has now become known as the more broadly defined Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT). This research field is expanding quickly and includes a wide variety of biotechnologies that aim to control “transgene escape,” the transmission of patented genetic material to wild populations and to non-GM populations. Given that transgene escape is responsible for the majority of environmental concerns as well as patent-infringement disputes related to farming with GMOs, it would seem that GURT would be in the interest of both patent-holders as well as GMO and non-GMO farmers, since the aim of GURTs is to restrict the ability of patented biological materials from contaminating both wild and non-patented species. Let us look a little more closely at these technologies. “The molecular GURTs fall into two general categories: methods which prevent plants that have cross-bred with GM varieties from producing viable offspring either with each other or hybrids with wild type plants and methods which prevent hybrid offspring from surviving to reproduce in the wild.”22 In addition to seed sterility (“terminator” seeds), male plant sterility has been pursued as a method of ensuring that no pollen would be produced, eliminating the problem of wind-born genetic contamination. A more targeted sterility procedure has also been researched, whereby an applied chemical acts as a trigger for continued plant success. In the absence of the application of this trigger, a “wild” hybrid GM plant would not be able to survive.23 Although all these technologies are meant to eliminate the possibility of patented GM biological material escaping into wild and non-GMO populations, they also all require significantly more investment on the part of the farmer, which, in combination with the inability to save seed, has recently contributed to a significant increase over the past ten years in the debt to income ratio of US farmers. 24 Fall 2012/Agora

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Perhaps GURTs will eliminate the proliferation of patentto Demeter’s civilizing ends. In the GM agricultural model, infringement lawsuits, but only at an as-yet unpredictable Demeter rules, even—maybe especially—through its use of cost to individual farmers. gardens of Adonis. Taking a step back from the particularities of GM agriculture, I would now like to draw some analogies to the V. Modifying Cultural Practices gardens of Adonis. Clearly, GURTs and the infamous “terBased on my analysis of the GM agricultural revolution, we minator seeds” are an engineered failure not unlike the single may affirm that rather than having moved beyond the sphere generation of quickly flourishof Demeter’s order, we have ing and quickly failing crops simply become more perfectly that the Adoniai themselves obedient to it in the mode of raised. They are meant to our appearing to have rejected produce non-viable offspring it. With GM technology or none at all. What does it we do not honor but rather mean that GM technology, master Aphrodite: subjecting in the service of agricultural her exuberant genetic profliproduction, has had to seek gacy to a highly systematized out a way of undermining the agricultural order. Let us very principle of reproduction now further contextualize it is meant to exploit? How this conversation within a is it that in order to produce broader spectrum of cultural crops, we now need to design norms of modification and species that cannot reproduce manipulation, in particular in themselves? The answer seems practices of body modification fairly simple: we have moved and in the quest for political toward a model of agriculture Adoption of Genetically Engineered Crops in the U.S. recognition by those with where reproduction is ideally a non-normative sexualities. matter of human choice. Yields in GM agriculture are meant Plastic surgery is surely not a new phenomenon, but it to become less and less dependent upon the vicissitudes of has recently become far more common, especially among the environmental and biological exigencies such as heat, drought, upper classes and the nouveau riche, to the extent of constitutblight, etc. Even if such independence is not yet quite the ing a social norm among those classes and even spawning the reality of GM agriculture, it is clearly the dream of those who class-aspirational TV shows, Extreme Makeover, The Swan, push forward in GM research. I cannot say this is a bad thing and the seven (yes, seven) Real Housewives of … series. Even for agriculture in general, but it is most certainly different, and among the upper middle class, Botox injections have become its proliferation means a much deeper institutionalization of common practice, extending beyond its stereotyped use by the human-generated constraints in our lives. vain, middle-aged woman to the newly minted character: the Given the similarity of some GM technology to the “practically-minded business man.” Add to this the explosion ritual gardens of Adonis, I think it worth considering how of “spray-on tanning” products and services as well as other we might employ the dialectic between Demeter and Aphsemi-permanent beauty products—for hair (e.g., extensions, rodite that I set out earlier in order to better understand the braids, feathers, dyes, straighteners, dread-locks), for skin (e.g., implications of these novel agricultural practices. In many permanent and semi-permanent tattoos, branding, scarring, ways, it should already be clear that GM technology serves piercing), not to mention trends in lashes, nails, etc.—almost to further retrench the order of Demeter, but it does so by every part of the body (with most targeted at the feminized means of Adonian methods, such as terminator seeds. While body) can be altered to fit quickly-changing trends.25 We even this might seem ironic, I believe it maintains the ancient count it a sign of progress that not simply female-identified dialectic as well as Demeter’s dominance within it. In the women subject themselves to such modifications but also dialectic I originally set up, the Adonis cult represented unmale-identified men: the so-called “metrosexual,” a novelty restricted desire, unrecognizable within the order of Demeter. “sexuality,” which is actually a class-based gender norm of However, we also noticed that the rituals themselves were a urban upwardly-mobile masculinity. way of recognizing and legitimating, however privately, that We can read all these modifications as quick fixes, the which falls outside the dominant order of rational agriculture, illusions of health and beauty, the shallow roots of an insupstate-sanctioned unions, and fruitful procreation. As a result portable fiction. These are not new, but then again, neither we see that the Adonis cult too is a form of culture, rather are the gardens of Adonis. What do these new products—or than simply an opponent of it. Similarly, GM agriculture uses “options”—for we increasingly “free” consumers mean? These selective genetic manipulation (as if serving ourselves at a products and “experiences” are what I have been calling culbuffet of genetic variation) in order to limit non-intentional tural practices, and they produce the feeling of freedom, often genetic dissemination and differentiation. Thus, what appears at the expense of actual choice. They present themselves as antithetical to agriculture turns out to facilitate its most strict refusals to follow Demeter’s strict prohibitions and limitaapplications, and even anti-social Adonis is made the means tions on our lives (and our bodies), and as if it were the only 16

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alternative, we conceive of new forms of self-expression, a buffet, not of genetic traits but of social ones, of facial hairstyles, body sprays, iPhone skins—a new app for every new you. But this feast is in defiance neither of our purported “nature” nor of the social conformity represented by Demeter’s constraints. Just as the selection of a lucrative genetic trait in GM agriculture simply perfects the limitations upon biological free-expression, in believing we have made a choice from the menu, we too enact our own enslavement to even deeper (because self-chosen) forms of social constraint, as if we are free because we get to choose a tastefully backlit subway tile for our jail cells.

the entire ecology. Similarly, if a resistant political identity seeks to protect itself from the dominance of the norm, the solution cannot simply be to normalize itself into a kind of monoculture but instead to amplify its multiplicity of forms. Let me be clear: what I have said here does not function as an argument against gay marriage. I support the right of all people to assert themselves as political agents through politically recognizable relationships, including but not limited to marriage. I am opposed to gay marriage not as an institution or as practiced by individuals, but as the univocal political agenda of non-normative genders and sexualities, because it threatens the political viability of those who remain external to the norm.

I am opposed to gay marriage not as an institution or as practiced by individuals, but as the univocal political agenda of non-normative genders and sexualities, because it threatens the political viability of those who remain external to the norm.

VI. A Cultivation of Liberation Earlier I suggested that we have taken up our cultural practices, whether those of genetic modification, body modification, or sexuality politics, as though they were our only option. I have found the dialectic between Demeter and Aphrodite useful in analyzing human cultural practices, but I used it not because it describes all possible paths to cultivation but because it seems to describe what we conceive of as our options. If we were to imagine another path to human self-cultivation, what might that look like? In some sense, I think we are always already on a third path between the two poles, for we are never entirely within the grasp of the order of Demeter, of social constraint and the rigors of legitimacy, nor are we ever as wholly free as our Adonian aspirations would have it. What this forces us to realize is that, while our nature is to determine ourselves, that determination is not yet given. If we recognize that our choices are never entirely free, that they are conditioned by a network of cultural and environmental limitations, we are also free to recognize that those choices are what institutionalize limitations. The third path requires a better understanding of the conditions upon us, not so that we overcome them toward “pure” freedom but so that we may effect those conditions such that they become more liberatory. By focusing on what is liberatory, we make human freedom a collaborative end, but we also put it more within our reach, since it is a condition of living rather than some intrinsic state. The primary advantage of taking a view of culture as the construction of conditions is that we can stop spinning our wheels trying to decide between nature and nurture, between ultimate determinism and ultimate freedom, and instead find our freedom as our nature and thereby breed a culture of human possibility.

If the somewhat superficial cultural practices of body modification have this structure, let us now consider something even more personal, something most of us believe is not a matter of choice, yet certainly of freedom: sexual self-expression. As sexual liberty in our culture has increased over time, so too has self-expression of variations from the traditionally enforced norms of identity with regard to both gender and sexuality. These identities are instances of an Adonian influence—that is, of multiplicity, variation, and diversity for its own sake. However, in the presence of the continuing dominance of an order that refuses to admit pure freedom, that which has no aim of its own will be rectified as having a place within the aims of that dominant order. Evidence of this, I submit, comes in the form of the decision that gay marriage be the LGBTQ community’s primary political agenda. This choice has not come without resistance from within that community itself, especially those less-empowered individuals who would either be unrepresentable within that agenda or who reject the notion of an agenda outright. Because the LGBTQ community is defined as a diverse variety of identities and as exterior to social norms of sexuality and gender, to define the interests of that community according to the interests of only some of its members in order to acquire social legitimation is an auto-immune act, a sort of suicide of the community’s inherent multiplicity. Although this community cannot be defined by a single social and political norm such as the right to marry, given its definitive inclusivity, it can yet abide that identity within itself, making room for gay married couples as one among its many, so long as this does not become the univocal meaning of that plural identity. We see exactly the same problem with the dominance of monoculture in agriculture. Monoculture threatens to eliminate the genetic variation essential to evolutionary fitness, thereby making it possible for a single outside force to topple

Endnotes 1. Plato, Apology 38a, my translation.

2. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2002).

3. Ovid, of course, refers to Demeter by her Roman counterpart’s name, Ceres. 4. Metamorphoses X, 441.

5. Despite not returning until Late Classical renditions of the story, the original Akkadian Dumuzi myth features a similar rivalry Fall 2012/Agora

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between Inanna and Erishkegal, goddess of the Underworld. See Joseph D. Reed’s “The Sexuality of Adonis,” Classical Antiquity 14, No. 2 (October 1994): 333.

6. The parallels and gaps between Persephone and Adonis’ stories are interesting. They are both separated from their mother, forced to spend a portion of time in the underworld, and renowned for their beauty. But whereas Persephone is torn between the love of her rapist-cum-husband, Hades, and her mother, Demeter, Adonis’ drama has nothing to do with his mother, who rather recedes into the background. In fact, besides the origin myth, Adonis appears in a way not even to have a mother, certainly no longer a human mother. Instead of being torn between the love of marriage and the love of the original family, as Persephone is, Adonis’ fate is bound to his choice of one lover over another. Adonis’ bond to Aphrodite is purely sexual, whereas Persephone mourns her fate as an object of lust, yearning always instead for her life as a daughter. 7. Ovid’s myth concludes with another metamorphosis, this time of Adonis into the anemone, or wind-flower, fragile and red. Though Adonis’ story is originally that of both dying and reviving, in the Adonis cults of classical Greece, the rituals are exclusively mournful and seem not to include a revitalization. 8. See Reed, 333.

9. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), 177. 10. Phaedrus 276b.

11. Another reason for the resistance to foreign cults, like the Adoniai, the festival of Bendis and the worship of Sabazius, which are all suspect in Aristophanes’ and other comedies of the classical period, is that they encourage unbounded emotional displays, often of mourning, but also because of their suggestion of the centrality of female sexual desire.

12. Some ancient sources set the date of the ritual at the “dog days,” the hottest days of the year, when the dog star, Sirius, and the sun are each at their zeniths. 13. An exhaustive account of both sanctioned and illegitimate homosexuality in Greece is offered by Kenneth Dover in his essential Greek Homosexuality, 2nd ed. (Harvard, 1989).

14. Notably, there is an enormous diversity in mechanisms of botanical reproduction. While the dandelion is the most “promiscuous,” other species have far more complicated reproductive lives, making them appear far more systematic and organized. While these complicated interactions ought not to be confused with intentional structures, they do reveal the subaltern complicity between Aphrodite and Demeter. I would like to thank both Professor Eric Baack and Matt Holcomb for their helpful feedback on this section. 15. Reed’s conclusion is that Adonis is in fact the homosexual male ideal of the paidika, with ripe sexuality, virginal affect, and effeminate beauty (342-345). 16. The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology, translated by Janet Lloyd (Princeton Univ. Press, 1977).

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17. Ibid., 102.

18. As of 2009, Monsanto reported market penetration rates of 94.5% for GM soy, 81.1% for GM corn, and 78.1% for GM. For more on Monsanto’s GMO commercial dominance, see GianCarlo Moschini “Competition Issues in the Seed Industry and the Role of Intellectual Property,” Choices: The Magazine of Food, Farm & Resource Issues 25, no. 2 (2010): 6.

19. USDA Economic Research Service. “ERS/USDA Data— Adoption of Genetically Engineered Crops in the U.S.,” July 1, 2011. <http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/BiotechCrops/>, accessed April 28, 2012. 20. Diana Pilson and Holly R. Prendeville argue that the public concern that an “escaped” terminator could cross-breed and thereby terminate a non-target, wild species is unfounded because the unfitness of such crops’ offspring makes such a scenario impossible: “Ecological Effects of Transgenic Crops and the Escape of Transgenes into Wild Populations,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 35, no. 1 (December 15, 2004): 149-174.

21. “Monsanto controls patents in 94% of soybean seed planted. For a farmer not planting Monsanto brands, it is statistically likely that all of their surrounding neighbors do. Drift and cross-pollination would be highly likely under these circumstances, and therefore, patent infringement is also likely. Biotech firms have entered into many legal battles with small farmers over patent infringement. Seed cleaning and saving formerly was a viable and essential part of rural economies; however, the legal risk involved in this practice has closed this area of the market in most places.” Philip Marty, “Aspirations and Realities Surrounding Genetically Modified Organisms,” unpublished research report, March 29, 2012. 22. Jacob Wittman, “Methods for Preventing Transgene Escape from Genetically Modified Crops,” unpublished research report (March 29, 2012).

23. Viktor Kuvshinov, Kimmo Koivu, Anne Kanerva, and Eija Pehu, “Molecular Control of Transgene Escape from Genetically Modified Plants,” Plant Science 160, no. 3 (February 5, 2001): 517–522. 24. Jim Monke, Congressional Research Service, Agricultural Credit: Institutions and Issues. <http://www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/crs/>, .pdf “RS21977,” accessed April 29, 2012. This report repeatedly measures its judgments of both net farm income and debt-to-income ratios against the depths of the farm crisis of the 1980s, yet market variability has consistently increased since 2007, as have government subsidies (though not at the same pace as the share of market-based income). Both farm debt and total assets have increased steadily since 2003, although the report purports that farms are not nearly as leveraged as was the case preceding the farm crisis of the 1980s. 25. Notice that many of these practices also coincide with increasing globalization and cultural appropriations both within and without the US context. These, I submit, are not simply coincidental with our expanding global agricultural dominance both as producers of commodities themselves, but more importantly with the US as a pre-eminent global manufacturer of GM biological products.

The 2012-13 Texts and Issues Lecture Series: Can We Talk?

“I Have Nothing to Say and I’m Saying It”: John Cage and the Musical Poetics of Noncommunication This lecture was presented as the first event in a celebration of John Cage’s centenary, “CAGE 100,” that featured musical performances and activities throughout the day on September 5, 2012. Video and audio documents of that day are posted at <johncage100.blogspot.com>.

I don’t mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don’t understand. —Sir Edward Appleton Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing. —John Erskine The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, “Is there a meaning to music?” My answer would be, “Yes.” And “Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?” My answer to that would be, “No.” —Aaron Copeland I consider that music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.… If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion, and not a reality. —Igor Stravinsky Music expresses, at different moments, serenity or exuberance, regret or triumph, fury or delight. It expresses each of these moods, and many others, in a numberless variety of subtle shadings and differences. —Aaron Copland

Music is, in fact, “extra-musical” in the sense that poetry is “extra-verbal,” since notes, like words, have emotional connotations.… Music functions as a language of the emotions. —Deryck Cooke Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. —Laurie Anderson

Can We Talk? The 2012–13 Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture Series

I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It: John Cage and the Musical Poetics of Noncommunication Tuesday, September 4, 2012 CFL Recital Hall; reception in Qualley Lounge Brooke Joyce, associate professor of music and composer-in-residence, Luther College

BROOKE JOYCE

Luther College’s composer-in-residence, Joyce joined the faculty in 2005. He earned his PhD at Princeton and his interests include music theory, composition, orchestration, electronic music, and music history. In spring 2013 Joyce will be at work on an outdoor sound installation with composer Harvey Sollberger. A CD of his chamber music is available on the Innova label.

The Most Trusted Stranger in America Tuesday, September 25, 2012 CFL Main Hall; reception in CFL lobby Frank Warren (invited Distinguished Lecturer), Founder, PostSecret Project

All lectures begin at 7 p.m. in the Center for Faith and Life; a reception will follow each presentation.

Politics, Democracy, and the First Amendment Tuesday, October 9, 2012 CFL Recital Hall; reception in Qualley Lounge John Moeller, professor of political science, Luther College

DESIGN BY MICHAEL BARTELS

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Don’t Just Say Something, Sit There: How Contemplative Practice Can Reshape Our Communication and Our Communities Tuesday, February 19, 2013 CFL Recital Hall; reception in Qualley Lounge Amy Zalk Larson, campus pastor; Sheila Radford-Hill, executive director of Diversity Center; Sundhya Purohit Caton, interfaith coordinator, all of Luther College

Beauty is in the Ear of the Listener Tuesday, April 9, 2013 CFL Recital Hall; reception in Qualley Lounge Laurie Zaring, associate professor of linguistics and French, Luther College

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imagine that Cage’s work is the result of taking the elements of “Old Abram Brown” and submersing them in a deep lake, such that the ghost of Britten’s music still hovers but its musical sounds are suspended in time.

A performance of Cage’s “star chart” composition, Atlas Eclipticalis—part of the Cage 100 celebration on the campus, September 5.

MICHAEL O’BRIEN

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hen I recently asked a group of thoughtful, Luther College community members to complete this sentence, “What I love about music is its ________,” the answers were many and various: “back beat,” “community,” “imagery,” “feelings,” “melodies.” And when I then proceeded to play two different choral works (available at <johncage100.blogspot.com>), the reactions were equally varied and thoughtful. When asked whether or not these pieces seemed to be communicating something, it was difficult for the group to reach any kind of consensus—some felt that one piece was more communicative than the other; some felt that both pieces were too “abstract” to communicate anything specific, and some people suggested that music can’t really communicate anything. The first piece, entitled “Four2,” was composed by American composer John Cage in 1990; the second piece, entitled “Old Abram Brown,” was composed by British composer Benjamin Britten in 1936. Cage’s work, composed for a high school choir in Oregon, draws its vocal sounds from the word “Oregon,” while Britten’s is a setting of a nursery rhyme. The performers (which featured members of my music 231L ear training class) used solfège syllables so as to neutralize the text and more closely mirror the vocal sounds heard in both pieces. I chose to use these two works to begin our conversation for a variety of reasons: Britten was an exact contemporary of Cage, born one year later; both composers’ music is tinged with theatrical elements (although often with very different intentions); both composers loved the English language and the sounds of words; and each composers’ music is often cited for its austerity. The differences between these two choral works are stark: Britten’s setting is strictly rhythmic while Cage’s is rhythmically free, almost without rhythm. Britten’s work is decidedly melodic, with a preponderance of step-wise motion, while Cage’s is essentially a series of drones. Britten’s work is carefully calculated to produce certain harmonies as the voice parts begin to sing in canon, while Cage’s music treats time flexibly, such that each performance will produce a different harmonic result. In fact, Cage does not provide a complete score for the piece, but, harkening back to the Renaissance era, he creates individual parts for each section of the choir. These two works also come from very different periods in each composer’s life. Britten wrote his setting of “Tom Tiddler’s Ground” at the age of twenty-three as part of a series of pieces for children’s choir. Cage’s work comes in his so-called “number” period, where the titles of his pieces usually indicate the number of performers or performing parts required. “Four” is for string quartet, “Four2” for SATB choir. Cage began writing these pieces in the last five years of his life and in many ways, they represent both a new direction in his artistic output as well as a subtle distillation of many key ideas he had developed over the previous decades. But if we step back from the differences we see and hear on the surface, these two musical works share some important commonalities: both use similar scales, or collections of pitches, and both sustain single ideas throughout their duration (though the ideas themselves are quite different). When we remove the text from Britten’s piece, the sound worlds of these two composers come a little closer together. We might

Let’s return to the question of communication, however, which is the topic of this presentation and the theme for this year’s text and issues series. Why does one of these pieces seem to communicate to us more directly, and more specifically, what is being communicated? The more general question of whether or not music is even capable of communication has haunted listeners for centuries. The quotations you see at the start of this article represent only a few of the many words written on the subject. Let’s let John Cage weigh in. In the final year of his life, Cage was interviewed for a documentary on his music, and in the space of just over one minute, he provides a perfect snapshot of his musical philosophy: When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings or about his ideas, of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic here on Sixth Avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking, I have the feeling that a sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound. What it does, is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower. And it gets longer and shorter. I’m completely satisfied with that; I don’t need sound to talk to me. (From Miroslav Sebestik’s Écoute) Cage’s first statement is subtle but crucial: “When I hear what we call music….” Here, he is acknowledging that his definition of music may differ from the average person’s, but by using the pronoun “we,” he also allows himself the possibility of finding agreement with that definition. He goes on to describe sound purely based on physical sensory perception: loud vs. soft, high pitch vs. low pitch, long duration vs. short duration. The implication, though he doesn’t state it explicitly in this interview excerpt, is that his description of traffic sounds mirrors his description, more broadly, of music.

The problem with Cage’s description of music, for many listeners, is that it doesn’t include many of the words we listed earlier, such as community, feelings, imagery, etc. If such sentiments are deemed essential to our love of music, how can we accept a musical philosophy that seems to reject them? Is Cage asking us to fall in love with such sterile concepts such as time, duration, pitch and volume? How clinical and cynical a view of music is that? As it turns out, Cage’s musical view is much larger and broader: [S]ound doesn’t have to be the communication of some deep thought. It can be just a sound. Now that sound could go in one ear and out the other, or, it could go in one ear, permeate the being, transform the being, and then perhaps go out, letting the next one in. ( John Cage and Morton Feldman, Radio Happening no. 1) There are two rather beautiful and radical ideas expressed here: first, that sounds (and, to be more specific, musical sounds, such as a melody or a harmonic progression) do not have to be the communication of a deep thought; they can simply be sounds. This liberates all parties in a musical scenario— composer, performer, and listener—from having to wonder what the music means. It might not mean anything; it might simply be a collection of sounds. But again, it’s important to listen to Cage closely: he says that sounds “do not have to be the communication of a deep thought,” which allows for the possibility that, in fact, they could function that way. We can debate whether or not we believe such an intention to be possible, and it certainly appears that Cage believed that sounds cannot be purveyors of thoughts. Nevertheless, Cage does not intend to eliminate the possibility that music could be, potentially, a communicative art. The second idea we should ponder is the notion that sound, aside from whatever its creator intended as its purpose,

can be experienced in a passive way by a listener; or, as Cage says, “sound can go in one ear and out the other.” But sound can also be transformative, to “permeate and transform the being.” This transformation is not so different from a romanticized, nineteenth century vision of music as a powerful source of emotional outpouring (consider Frederick Delius’ statement that “Music is an outburst of the soul”). What’s different in Cage’s world is the lack of a composer at the helm, a situation that puts him in direct confrontation with the nineteenth century narrative of the composer as hero (à la Beethoven). It’s not the composer or creator who causes us to feel moved—it’s the sounds themselves. And in this way, Cage leaves us with a mystery. We don’t know how music permeates and transforms our beings, but we know that it happens. It doesn’t always happen because a composer had a deep thought and passed it on to us through a sound. And, as Cage reminds us by using traffic sounds as an example, those transformative sounds could come from any sound source—even a source that many people might regard as noise.

He wants sounds to be treated purely as physical phenomena, yet he wants these sounds to have the power to transform our lives. This is one of the delightful, if confusing, conundrums that flow throughout Cage’s work and ideas. He wants sounds to be treated purely as physical phenomena, yet he wants these sounds to have the power to transform our lives. Many of his musical compositions share this same contradiction—as Cage tries desperately to remove himself from the creative process, whether through the utilization of random processes, by using non-traditional sound sources, or by eliminating intentional sound altogether (as in his famous work “4:33”), he finds that his thumbprint is always there.

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Sabbaticals

Occupying Wald Street

by

NANCY K. BARRY

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Nancy teaches writing and literature courses, is head of the English department and serves as assistant to the dean for writing and academic support. She joined the Luther faculty in 1990 after teaching at the University of Iowa, and still returns to Iowa City most summers to teach in the University’s Summer Writing Festival. Her essays have appeared in Iowa Woman, the Chicago Tribune, and the Baltimore Sun. Her “Lessons from Cancer College” (2010), a one-woman play, was performed in Decorah, the Commonweal in Lanesboro, and also in St. Paul.

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from playgrounds to the Progressive Movement. Although contemporary readers are more widely familiar with the legacy of her friend and confidante, Jane Addams, Lillian Wald is still recognized as one of the great pioneers of social reform and assimilation working during the historical moment when the massive influx of new citizens was creating a more diverse America than the Founding Fathers would ever have A young Lillian Wald in nurse imagined. uniform, ca. 1900. All this fame notwithstanding, it might puzzle some readers why an English professor from Luther College would spend the good part of a sabbatical year researching her life and writings. The answer lies (as it often does) with family, and the intellectual curiosity that arises in our blood as much as our brains. Lillian Wald is an indirect ancestor of mine. She never married nor had children, but her nephew—her only sister’s son—was my grandfather, on my father’s side; in other words, my father was her great nephew. My family was never very boastful about her work or her fame; indeed, I can remember only a happenstance conversation when I was twelve years old with my father’s parents about Lillian Wald. While rummaging around their bookshelves at a summer cabin, I noticed two thick, truly leather-bound books entitled The House on Henry Street and Windows on Henry Street, both formally inscribed by the author. When I asked what they were about, my grandmother told me I was probably too young to find them of much interest, but that I should be very proud that “Alfred’s maiden Aunt Lillian” had written them, explaining the stepping stones of family history that seemed remote to my adolescent life. But it did help me to understand, finally, what the “W.” stood for inside my grandfather and father’s name, and why in fact my oldest brother was called “Wald” by all of us. Many years later, long after my grandparents’ death, I was flabbergasted to learn a more specific signifier that the name “Wald” implied. I mentioned to a friend, a native of New York

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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lthough few people beyond the fields of social work or nursing recognize her name anymore, at the time of her death in 1940, Lillian D. Wald was a well-known American, particularly in New York. She came into that fame through an unlikely source—working with the immigrant poor in the Lower East side of Manhattan in the early decades of the twentieth century; but her understanding of what those newly arrived citizens needed in terms of health care, education, and social assimilation was revolutionary. In 1922, the New York Times listed her as one of “Twelve Greatest Living Americans”; a few years later, the New Yorker magazine published a profile of her entitled “Rampant but Respectable.” In 1934, an article in the New York Evening Journal claimed: “New York has its patron saint of social reform and her name is Lillian Wald.” When she died in 1940, thousands of people mourned her passing with two very different memorial services: one at the Henry Street Settlement House that she had started in 1893 to begin her outreach work to the poor; the other at Carnegie Hall, where the first telegram read was from President Franklin Roosevelt, who said “Lillian Wald became one of the outstanding social workers of this country because she had discernment and vision, a heart overflowing with compassion, and indefatigable industry.… I was privileged to call her friend.” By the end of the twentieth century, she had been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and her portrait hung in the National Gallery. Her life and work have been the subject of three different biographies and a stage play, as well as countless encyclopedia articles on everything

City, my relationship to Lillian Wald; she responded with knowledgeable enthusiasm about who she was, and when I murmured that I had recently discovered that the Wald family was Jewish, but wasn’t certain about it, my friend explained, “Of course they was Jewish!” The detail seemed intriguing to me—that Julia, my grandfather’s mother, was Jewish—contradicted what I had assumed had been a completely Catholic legacy on the Barry side. Finally, one day I asked my father, “Is it true that grandfather’s mother Jewish?” He paused, mumbled something like “I suppose so, maybe,” and then made a remark about the fact that our neighbor’s car hadn’t been moved for almost a month, and did that mean anything? The older I got, the more it puzzled me. It wasn’t that Lillian Wald’s life was shrouded in any kind of secrecy or mystery; it seemed simply that the generations had moved on past her. The fact that her sister Julia had married into a very prominent Irish-Catholic family in Rochester, New York was never thoroughly discussed. To discover more of who Lillian Wald was, and how to understand her decision to leave a very comfortable life among the Jewish professional class in Rochester, New York in order to work with the poorest of the poor in lower Manhattan, I had to leave my own comfortable middle-class and professional life in Iowa for New York City. For one thing, I wanted to see the original house on Henry Street that Wald used to begin the visiting nurses program, and I was delighted to find the building still standing, 119 years after Wald moved into the space with a fledging crew of women nurses. In fact, by 2012, the entire operation has expanded well beyond the walls of 265 Henry Street, and now includes a day-care center, an arts building, and a bustling senior center that on the day I visited showed the daily menu and activities posted in three languages: English, Spanish and Chinese. In addition, I went to New York City because Lillian Wald left a large repository of letters and papers to the New York Public Library and Columbia University, so most of my days were spent hunched over what felt like a very old-fashioned microfilm machine, or reading the thin-lined paper scrawl of Wald’s massive correspondence file. The finding aid which catalogs her letters reads like a veritable “Who’s Who” of twentieth century politics and culture, with correspondents including everyone from Jane Addams to Emmeline Pankhurst; W.E.B. Dubois (one of the first meetings of the NAACP occurred in the Henry Street parlor) and John Dewey; Amelia Earhart, Willa Cather, and John Galsworthy. Twenty-first century scholars can do many things without physically placing themselves inside an archive, but there are vast collections of primary material that haven’t been digitized, which is what necessitated my travel to New York to unearth whatever I could about Wald and her relations with her sister and in-laws. As I felt the daily thrill of trekking past the twin lions of “Patience” and “Fortitude” at the New York Public Library, I thought about what library research would look and feel like fifty years from now, when there might be little occasion to travel to distant buildings, because material had all been somehow flattened into paperless zip drives that could appear magically on anyone’s computer screen at any moment.

I was conscious about how decidedly (and delightfully) oldfashioned it felt to sit in a dusty cubicle and crank through reels of microfilm, or stare for hours at letters written by a woman whose handwriting seemed polite and restrained but who, from what I can tell, wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone. I must confess that reading this handwriting from 100 years ago proved more bewildering than I ever imagined. Mostly, though, I marveled at the way Lillian Wald’s work, spirit and overall graciousness came through in her prose. She was the kind of woman who could write you a letter full of bad news and still make you feel good about things by the end because of how she phrased it. She was the brain trust, the administrative genius, the fund-raiser, the human resource manager—in short, the visionary for the Henry Street Nurses and Settlement operation—and according to all the biographical portraits and her own prose, she was tireless about the whole enterprise. In a different world, in a different age, and of course, if she had been born a boy, she might have turned out to be a captain of industry, or a general in the army if called to war; perhaps a bishop or rabbi in the church. But the truth is, none of those sectors would have suited her well because she was only interested in wealth insofar as it could be used for bettering the lives of other people. She was completely against the War to End All Wars, and told Woodrow Wilson so repeatedly; as for church, she adopted a stance of “universal brotherhood,” even designing a symbol for it, that graces her grave. In a way, her nurses’ training was exactly the space where she had the freedom to engineer her own nonprofit outreach and tend to the thousands of immigrants who had started being processed at Ellis Island in 1892, only to find themselves living in fivestory tenement buildings housing twenty different families and—if they were lucky—three privy stalls in the courtyard at ground level. I thought about her as I encountered someone almost every day in New York who asked me for money. The New York Public Library may be a fabulous place to read, but there is no place inside it where someone can unpack a sack lunch, which I fixed each morning to save funds. So I would wander out to Bryant Park and huddle in a small chair for twenty minutes eating my sandwich. One day a woman in a red coat approached me. There was something slightly off about her—the way her eyes wandered past my shoulders and beyond me into the street. My wallet was deep inside my backpack, and her stare began to frighten me just a bit, so I told her “no,” and walked away quickly. That afternoon four men got on the subway and sang a blues version of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” They made me smile, and by then I had change in my pocket, so I tipped them. What was that about? If someone gives me something like art, I’ll pay them back, but a wayward crazy woman with nothing to show but her blank stare gets nothing? Some days I kept dollar bills handy, resolved to give one to whomever asked. Once when I reached inside my bag, I pulled out a protein bar, so put that into the hat of the stranger huddled in the subway. I would walk along Fifth Avenue, where the shopping brigades were legion—hoards of people buying things and more things, stuff, and more stuff ! Surely they were all not members of the one Fall 2012/Agora

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manufacture eyeglasses and microscopes with great success after the Civil War. The Barry’s had found a home in Rochester because an Irish immigrant from Belfast answered an advertisement by a German horticulturalist to invest in a nursery business in the Genesee Valley in 1860. The “Mt. Hope Nursery” founded by Ellwanger and Barry began as a modest enterprise of five acres on the outskirts of Rochester. Within thirty years, they owned 750 acres and were known throughout the world as leaders in plant and fruit cultivation and sales. Jens Jensen, when he was employed by Frank Lloyd Wright as the landscape architect for Taliesin, ordered fruit trees from Ellwanger and Barry; in the archives of the business (housed in the Rare Book Collection at the University of Rochester), there is an unpaid bill to prove it. This was the family that Julia Wald married into, and Lillian’s future was tied to theirs because it was during Julia’s first pregnancy that Lillian moved in with her sister to help the nurse employed to see the young mother through the delivery of her first child, my grandfather’s sister. According to her own account, Lillian was so inspired by the nurse that she decided to leave Rochester and head to New York City for medical training, first as a physician, where she bristled at the sexism of the doctors, and then as a nurse. It was an education, in the often-quoted words of Frederich Buechner, that led to the “world’s greatest need” encountering her “greatest talent.” It felt strange to move from the grittiness of New York City to the lush river valley of Rochester, although it’s clear that the northern city had fallen on hard times, even before the bankruptcy of Eastman Kodak. In New York City, I was beholden to the subway; in Rochester on many days all I needed was my bike. Dogwood trees and cherry blossoms adorned the campus where I went to read in the archives, while on weekends I would wander through Highland Park and Mt. Hope Cemetery, mystified at the many uncanny connections between my own life and the history I was discovering. Would you believe that the captain of the very first boat that brought Norwegians to America in 1825, the sloop Restoration, is buried in the same cemetery as Lillian Wald and her sister? C e m e t e r i e s The headstone for Lillian Wald’s burial speak in a differ- plot at Mt. Hope Cemetery in Rochent language than ester, N.Y. Note the symbol which she archives filled with interpreted as meaning “universal brotherhood.”

NANCY K. BARRY

percent, but I still marveled at the money they had to spend, the way they carried the shopping bags like gladiators. Some days, the poor would come toward me, or I would pass the poor, and give nothing—was this because I had nothing or because I couldn’t be bothered? The ghost of Lillian Wald admonished me for being so bound up inside my own little worries and anxieties that I could not countenance the needs of others. Is it selfishness, indifference, or simple fear that keeps us from answering those whose needs are so vast they make our safe and plentiful lives seem small? Nowadays, the slightest nod toward higher minimum wages or universal health insurance earns the catcall of “Socialism! Socialist!” Actually, they called Lillian Wald that too, but that didn’t keep her from working toward things that one century later we take as commonplace: child protection and labor laws; a woman’s right to vote; the guarantee that milk, when it is sold, will not be swill. Why are some who have so much so afraid that those who have nothing might get just a little? What began as a pilgrimage to understand the vagaries of a small family legacy was quickly transformed into an unrestrained sense of admiration for the woman described so demurely in my family as “Alfred’s maiden aunt Lillian.” The cultural and biographical forces at work to nudge her nephew’s family into diminishing her achievements rather than celebrating them are too intricate to detail in the space of this essay. As amazed and empowered by what I learned about the fearlessness of Lillian Wald, I was also keenly disappointed to realize that there was no long-lost key hidden in the archive to explain the puzzling detail of how Lillian’s sister Julia ended up marrying Charles Patrick Barry, and whether the alliance between the prominent Catholic family and the Jewish in-laws was spotty or strained. The letters between Julia and Lillian demonstrate a deep and abiding affection between the two sisters, but the correspondence focuses more about the superficial details of travel and health, rather than any emotional depth or revelation about family heritage. These were the years when people would write a letter to invite someone to dinner, or to thank them afterwards; any traces of family quarrel, disapproval or angst is simply not stated. Here too I marveled at the revolutionary shift from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century in the rhetoric of what we say about ourselves and our families in public. In our age of Facebook and Full Disclosure and Dr. Phil, it seems almost quaint to imagine adults who surely entertained the same anxieties, anger and distrust about the actions of siblings and parents, but who abided by the fundamental rule that people should not speak them out loud, let alone preserve them for future strangers to read. I still thought that it would be helpful to do some digging into the Rochester, New York heritage of the Wald family, and so my last trip during the sabbatical was to the “Flower City,” just in time to witness everything in bloom. The Wald family had first settled in Ohio when they immigrated to the United States (Lillian was born in Cincinnati in 1867), but by 1879 the family had moved to Rochester, New York, presumably because the father’s business of selling eyeglasses would take better hold in the city where the Bausch and Lomb company had begun to

letters and diaries, but each tombstone is a manuscript all its own, and someone like me can wander through them as easily as the stacks of any library. On the day I went to Mt. Hope to find Lillian Wald’s grave, I had a plot number and a rough map, along with what have I come to call my “geographical dyslexia.” Truly, even if the heavens were tattooed with signs pointing NORTH, SOUTH, EAST and WEST, I could find some method to get lost. But on this day, for some reason, maybe because I had spent so much time walking past “Patience” outside the New York Public Library, I gave myself time and time again, to find the Wald family plot. I had walked for over an hour, checking the plot number, checking the map, checking the signposts at the intersecting roads in the massive cemetery. It was the first Saturday in May, and the air was unseasonably warm. Within minutes, I had exhausted my water, looking high and low among the stones for a “W,” for the Star of David, for any signifier that would help me recognize her. Discouraged, defeated, I gave up after ninety minutes. But when I got back into my car, something in me wanted not to speed away, so I drove slowly, very slowly, toward the main road; en route I saw a gravestone with a massive wreath covering it, and stopped dead in the middle of the street

when I realized that was Lillian Wald’s grave. Her ashes were buried next to her sister Julia, along with her parents and her brother Alfred, who died tragically in his early twenties. My grandfather, I realized, was named after him—Alfred Wald Barry. The symbol engraved at the top of the headstone was designed by a Chinese calligrapher she met during her travels in Asia in 1910. It is a rendering of the Chinese character bao, which means brotherhood, and which Wald then interpolated to mean “universal brotherhood.” In addition to her grave, the design is cast into a decorative tile on one of the original fireplaces at the Henry Street Settlement. I stood for many minutes staring at the stones, letting all these old ghosts talk to me in any voice they chose. I was mystified by the flowers on Lillian’s grave, and couldn’t for the life of me imagine who placed them there, or why. It wasn’t the anniversary of her birth, or death, or anything else that I could tell. I laughed to think that they had somehow come about from Lillian herself, nudging someone in Rochester to dress up the grave for a family visitor, saying to me in that spirited voice: “Keep looking. Stop fussing and get to work. There are children needing rescue, and thousands without hope. If you tell my story, make it less about me, and more about them.”

“Where Can I Find … ?”: Library Catalogs and Bibliography in the Twenty-first Century

Q

uestions My entire thirty year career in librarianship has been spent working with library catalogs. At Indiana University in 1980 I worked with a card catalog but the cards themselves were ordered using one of the earliest online networks, OCLC, Inc. (originally formed in 1967 as by

JOHN GOODIN

John came to Luther in 1994 and is an associate professor who heads the Technical Services Department of Preus Library. He is in charge of cataloging and acquisitions. John is also an accomplished mandolinist and composer. His interests as a librarian and composer/musician overlap, as he has, for example, digitized the Mandolin Journal. His most recent CD, Notes from the Farm with Erik Sessions (violin), features several original tunes and his arrangement of James Oswald’s sonata “The Junquill,” released in 2012.

the Ohio College Library Center). Later in the 1980s, at Western Kentucky University, I worked with a microfiche catalog. Finally, at Indiana University Southeast, and later here at Luther, I have been responsible for the care and feeding of wholly online catalogs. All of these catalogs have been created by fairly complex, and expensive, software, and constant change has been the norm. I have been involved in evaluating and recommending software packages that have cost large sums of money to purchase and require similar large sums to maintain. At the same time, more and more of the content that these catalogs describe is shifting from print to digital format. The whole purpose of a catalog and the cataloging process is called into question when the catalog links to the actual information that it previously only described. While we in the cataloging community are considering the future of our catalogs and the complex rules that create them, the World Wide Web is creating its own approach to discovering, creating and sharing information. The vendors who have provided libraries with specialized integrated library software systems are struggling with challenges from new competitors: open source library software options on the one Fall 2012/Agora

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The creation of bibliographies and the construction of library catalogs require human intellect and dedication. Today, thanks to the work of thousands of bibliographers, catalogers and indexers throughout history, we can ask our machines to search the World Wide Web and generate lists of books (and articles and websites and blog entries and tweets, etc.) for us. These lists may be good enough for some uses but they are no replacement for a careful search of scholarly bibliographies and library catalogs. One of the main results from my reading in the history and practice of bibliography through the centuries was a renewed faith in the utility of such work. In our world of nearly instant information-seeking gratification it is easy to feel like detailed bibliographical work is of marginal importance, but by using various kinds of tracking software I can see that my original Communal Studies Bibliography is visited several times Actions a day by people from literally all over the world. While interMy search for answers naturally involved careful reading esting, this can seem trivial compared to the huge numbers of relevant texts, both recent and venerable, concerning the of people who visit the latest viral video or visit the Decorah history and possible future of library catalogs and the work eaglecam site. But those individuals who visit my online bibof bibliography. Early on, I completed a project begun durliography will find a collecing my previous sabbatical. tion of citations focused on Using current technology recent research in the field I was able to digitize the of communal studies (the first twenty-two years of the study of intentional comMandolin Journal, the newsmunities, past and present, letter of the Classical Manand historic communal dolin Society of America sites) that cannot be easily and make it available to the assembled by any online membership of the CMSA. search. I also conducted a trial of an On the other hand, I open source music catalogcome away from this sabing tool, IN Harmony, with batical with a different view an eye towards its possible of what the future might use in a future digital music hold for library catalogs. A preservation project for the turning point in American organization. I improved the library history occurred in content of my twenty year Librarian Andi Beckendorf explains the mysteries of the lost card cataold online Communal Studies log to student Alexandra Robinson in the basement of Preus Library. 1855 when Charles Coffin Jewett resigned as librarian Bibliography and I created a of the recently established Smithsonian Institution. Jewett Communal Studies Bibliography 2.0 blog as a “sandbox” for had advocated—but failed to convince Congress—that the experimenting with new approaches to the bibliography of Smithsonian library should become the national library for literature and research in the field. Finally, I took a careful the country and that, as a national library, the Smithsonian look at current alternatives (open source and library services should create and maintain a union catalog of the books held platform options) to our current legacy online library catalog in the major libraries of the country. in the light of my reading and thinking. Jewett had enlisted the maverick Josiah Warren (the founder of American philosophical anarchism, musician, Thoughts inventor and founder of communal villages based on his Historically a bibliography was a list of books and a library principle of “individual sovereignty”) to work on a project to catalog was a list of books held in a particular library. The produce a national catalog using Warren’s potentially revoscope of a bibliography could be large or small but the library lutionary process of stereotyping plates that could be easily catalog typically aimed to list all of the physical items in a updated and used to print catalogs for libraries around the library collection. Both types of lists were created primarily country at very low cost. Although this General Stereotyped to help imagined readers find books. Catalogue was de-railed, the idea of a great catalog persisted. Bibliographers might sometimes try to include informaThe Library of Congress became our national library and tion about where books could be found. Librarians, over the Preus Library still holds a copy of the 754 volume National centuries, have developed increasingly complex methods of Union Catalog, pre-1956 imprints, that was eventually printed cataloging and classification in their attempt to help readers a century after Jewett’s proposal. discover and locate the books they seek within their libraries. JENNIFER RIAN

hand and emerging next-generation systems from organizations like OCLC and Serials Solutions on the other. Just as the digital world is affecting how we think about and use the library catalog, the utility of creating and maintaining scholarly bibliographies is being called into question. In some ways a bibliography has always been a narrowly focused catalog of materials. But when the list of materials is linked to the actual content of those materials then something has changed. What is a library catalog in 2012? What is a bibliography? How does one approach the work of bibliography and the related, but different, work of creating and maintaining a library catalog in the early twenty-first century? To what end? These were the key questions that occupied my thoughts and guided my projects during my recent sabbatical.

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Card catalogs replaced printed book catalogs and, thanks largely to the members of the OCLC library cooperative, online catalogs replaced card catalogs. All of these catalogs were primarily attempts to help readers find what books and journals were physically held by individual libraries. As the OCLC database grew and the World Wide Web emerged it became possible for individuals to search OCLC (now titled WorldCat) on their own, without the assistance of library staff. WorldCat can now indicate not only whether a particular library holds a copy of a book but also what other libraries hold copies.

The whole purpose of a catalog and the cataloging process is called into question when the catalog links to the actual information that it previously only described. It may be that the day of individual library catalogs is nearly past. OCLC’s WorldShare Management Services is based partly on that premise. While it is still necessary, for a number of reasons, to be able to determine what physical items reside in our library and what digital books, journals and other collections our patrons can access, it may no longer be necessary to maintain a separate online catalog of those items apart from the larger OCLC database. Almost all of this information already exists in WorldCat because we, as members of the OCLC collective, provide it. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that we don’t need to continue cataloging materials and striving to make it easier for our patrons to discover the information they seek but the new “library services platform” model promises to make that discovery process both more effective and more comprehensive. We are very close to the day when our readers will be able to find books, articles and previously hidden treasures from archives and manuscript collections as the result of a single search. Already many catalog searches lead to not just

a description of an item but to the full text of the book or article. This trend will only increase.

Conclusion In some ways, the more interesting challenge for librarians and archivists in the coming years will be our part in deciding what objects, physical or digital, will be cataloged and preserved. Our role as guardians of the cultural record is more important today than ever before. We are uniquely qualified to sift through the massive quantity of digital information and sort out which items are culturally significant and which items are more ephemeral. We are fallible, of course, but since Demetrius of Phaleron in ancient Alexandria, librarians have strived to serve the future by preserving and making available the cultural work of the present and the past. Librarian Jesse Shera put it this way back in 1961: The aim of librarianship, at whatever intellectual level it may operate, is to maximize the social utility of graphic records … if librarianship is to serve society to the fullest extent of its potentialities it must be much more than a bundle of tricks for finding a particular book on a particular shelf for a particular patron with a particular need. To be sure, it is that too, but fundamentally, librarianship is the management of knowledge.1 For someone who has spent over thirty years building and managing library catalogs this sabbatical has provided a valuable opportunity to re-evaluate the meaning and purpose of the work that I have done. I come back to my office in Preus Library with a renewed excitement about my future work and the continuing importance of library catalogs and scholarly bibliographies in higher education. Endnotes 1. Jesse Shera, “Social Epistemology, General Semantics, and Librarianship,” collected in: Shera, Jesse H., Libraries and the Organization of Knowledge (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1965), p. 16.

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Teaching Sustainability Right from the Start: Advanced Models in Germany and Norway

G

ermany and Norway are widely acknowledged to be among the earliest and most successful ecological pioneers in the world. Following the oil embargo of the 1970s, both countries became leaders by carefully planning to free their nations from dependence on foreign oil, each in its own effective way. Far ahead of the US, Germany and Norway have become world leaders in the development and utilization of alternative energy sources. Wisely, their efforts have long included the crucial element of sustainability education, which begins with its very youngest citizens and takes place in both curricular and cocurricular venues. Through concerted public effort aimed at shaping and then supporting such pervasive sustainability education, awareness of the precarious state of the planet has come to saturate all levels of society in these countries, a deciding factor in the success of environmental efforts in that part of the world. The educational systems in both countries are helping to produce innovators who are steeped in nature, as well as familiar with and totally committed to solving the energy problems not only of these two countries, but also the rest of the earth. Having gained modest familiarity with some advanced educational models in preparation for the Paideia II study abroad course that I co-teach, Green Germany: Advanced Models of Sustainability, I became intrigued with the way that creative educators in both countries are working within and outside of the formal educational system to open their future leaders already as young people to the issues of climate change and environmental devastation, as well as to possible solutions to those very alarming and pressing world problems. During the sabbatical leave, I committed to deepening my knowledge of these educational processes through an extended residency of a month, including one full week at each of four by

RUTH R. KATH

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Ruth Kath is a professor of German who came to Luther in 1979. In addition to her PhD in German, she holds a masters in theology and served as the program director of the Sense of Vocation program (2002-2011). She is the author of Called to Ecumenism: A Sense of Vocation at Luther College (2006) and a co-author of The Letters of Gerhard Marcks and Marguerite Wildenhain, 19701981: A Mingling of Souls (1991).

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venues we frequent during our Green Germany Paideia II course in alternate January terms. I hoped that the experiences and observations I would have would at least begin to benefit American primary, secondary, and post-secondary educators just beginning to consider national and international ecological issues and, also help them meet the pedagogical challenges of teaching about them at every level. We American educators need to learn much—and quickly—from our colleagues throughout the world if we are to help young people here, beginning with the very youngest, gain an understanding of and make headway against the crucial national and global problem of climate change and ecological destruction.

The educational systems in both countries are helping to produce innovators who are steeped in nature, as well as familiar with and totally committed to solving the energy problems not only of these two countries, but also the rest of the earth. The one-month study tour I undertook to Germany and Norway produced abundant learning, even far beyond what I had hoped or expected. The trip began in Quickborn, just outside of Hamburg, Germany. For a week, I was able to stay with and shadow Dr. Astrid Wasmann-Frahm, Biology teacher at the Elsensee Gymnasium. Since being recommended several years ago by the Educational Superintendent of the state of Schleswig-Holstein, Dr. Wasmann-Frahm has been in partnership with us for a significant part of the Green Germany course, with always generous and outstanding outcomes. She and her students, who also provide homestays to our Luther students, regularly lead our group on a tour of a nuclear power plant nearby, an activity that nuclear facilities do not permit in the US. That visit, facilitated and arranged by Wasmann-Frahm, is always among the highlights of the study tour. Wasmann-Frahm is renowned in the entire country and beyond for her textbook series on environmental education, as well as for her role as the lead mentor on sustainability to teachers of the entire region. I took advantage of my time with her to explore her work as a teacher of sustainability in her school, among her upper level students. For several days, I was able to attend her classes at the Gymnasium and follow her work with student researchers, as well as with teacher-

RUTH R. KATH

mentees who came one afternoon to attend a workshop she “selling” flat stones as “pizza” for the cost of leaves and twigs, conducted at the school. for example. Still, the play had an undeniable creativity to it: The Elsensee Gymnasium is a state-funded preparatory when one of the children “purchased” something, she got not school for elite students who will attend the university after only the purchase, but also all her “money” back! their school-leaving examinations in the last year of their As I learned during my stay, the older of the two teachers schooling. The pressure is enormous on the students who begin holds certification expressly for Forest Kindergarten teachthere relatively early in their lives, and the learning they do ing; it is considered a pedagogical endorsement in Germany must be of high quality, consistent, and exact. The students and required specified courses at the university that prepare a that I observed are in their final two years at the school, a student teacher for specialized daily teaching in forested areas time of great learning, but also particularly high stress, for of the country. The other teacher for the day was a teacher’s both students and their teachers. assistant, with that particular specialized credential, but Despite the academic pressure, or rather because of with special practical training for the forest teaching of little it, students at the school, especially in Wasmann-Frahm’s children. This kind of specialized training and the pedagogiclasses, have become highly knowledgeable about environcal endorsement seem to be one of the major reasons that mental issues and unusually engaged in figuring out their Germany can boast of such high educational achievements in causes and possible long-term solutions to them. Wasmannsustainability among all its public and private school teachers, Frahm is a very experienced instructor with a long career particularly in Schleswig-Holstein, one of the leading states in several similar schools. The respect accorded her by her in this field. fellow teachers, as well as by the principal of the GymnaTeaching about sustainability begins in this culture with sium, but most of all by her the very youngest students, students says volumes about and, in about ten percent of her standing in the academic the German kindergartens, community and in the entire happens right in the forest, state of Schleswig-Holstein year-round. This kindergarin the area of environmental ten, like all the others, is an education in the secondary investment of the town in schools. which it is located. The chilPrior to my visit to her dren who pass through this Gymnasium, however, Waskind of learning situation do mann-Frahm facilitated a enter “regular” school at the very different educational end of their time outside, experience for me the first but carry the experience of day of my stay with her: a forest learning with them visit at a Forest Kindergarten for the rest of their lives, as a few miles away. It was here studies have shown. Beyond that some of the most valutheir familiarity with the able and surprising learning Figure 1. Young boys at work in the German Forest Kindergarten outdoors, these children also occurred for me during the in Schleswig-Holstein. exhibit stronger self-esteem research trip. There is no and far less conflict and agclassroom or building in this school. Instead, the children gression than their counterparts indoors. It stands to reason between three and six years old, gather each morning at the that there is simply no need for feelings of confinement if edge of the forest, help their teachers pack a small garden cart one is able walk about to be alone for a time, to climb trees, with the day’s supplies, and then hike together to the forest or breathe fresh air all the time. In my case, it may not have clearing that has been the home of the special kindergarten been scientific data, but I had become surprisingly relaxed by for the past ten years. On this particular day, there seemed to the end of the day in the forest kindergarten too. be relatively comfortable fall weather, but the fifteen children One blond boy, who was much smaller than the others, were appropriately dressed for the cool forest in insulated pants was revealed to have a congenital condition. When I wondered and rubber boots, as well as caps and mittens. quietly to the teacher whether sending him into such a setting The children were encouraged to collaborate and play was prudent, she told me that his parents had wondered the together, rather than direct their focus on the teachers, the same thing, but then concluded that no one knew how long traditional authority. One child was very new to the group he has to live, and so, as his parents, they wanted to give him during my visit and not yet on track with this method, so the best life they could—and this forest kindergarten was a kept trying to gain the teachers’ attention. One sensed that he large part of that “best life.” A marvelous parental decision, I would soon learn, as had the others earlier. It was particularly thought, as I watched him happily working away on a little interesting to observe the form of interchange that the chillog with his tiny saw (see Figure 1). Childhood doesn’t get dren chose for their free play. While many interacted with the any better than out in those beautiful woods. objects of nature around them as objects of nature, one group From the Hamburg area, I traveled north to spend a fashioned the same objects into articles of adult commerce, week in Husum, Germany, located about one hour south of Fall 2012/Agora

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RUTH R. KATH

the Danish border. This too is a favorite station of our Green groups of young people who know and love the garden, had Germany course, including our regular visit to the BUNDnever been in such a free place in nature before. They were Garden on the edge of the seacoast town. The BUND-Garden behaving like the city children they are, with learned phobias is supervised by long time volunteer Telse Ronneburger, a ceragainst insects they know within their much more confined tified co-curricular teaching partner of the state of Schleswigenvironment—and, in this case at least, revealing much of the Holstein. The garden was established and is maintained by the aggression against each other and everything else around them area branch of Friends of the Earth (Bund für Umwelt und that has built up in that environment, as well. Naturschutz Deutschland e.V.) and is designed for the children Though the destruction was a difficult scene to encounter of Husum, who have a standin this natural playground, ing invitation to play freely no other experience in my in the garden. It was the first time in Europe gave me of its kind in the Germany. a firmer sense of just how The children of Husum vital knowledgeably-staffed do come to the garden, with natural learning places like or without their parents. the BUND-Garden are to The gate that surrounds the modern children’s familiarmedium-sized garden area at ity with and understanding the edge of the town is left of nature. Children, and the unlocked during all the dayadults they later become, will time hours every day. Over not be inclined to preserve the years of its existence in and care for a nature they Husum, the BUND-garden do not know and love. The has become a welcoming smashed glass and dead bees place of sanctuary and adthat day offered vivid proof venture for area children and that city children now seem their families. The garden is to need much carefully conalso a regular destination for structed guidance in order primary school classes from Figure 2. Lillehammer Forest Kindergarten teacher Natalie Berge to learn to interact with the the region, that come with and two pupils sit on reindeer hides watching their vegetables on nature around them. Sadly, their instructors for a day the fire. such opportunities seem to of learning outdoors that no longer constitute a natucomplements and enhances the state-mandated classroom ral part of life as child, even in the outdoors of a traditionally instruction in elementary biology. nature-loving country as Germany. On one of the days I was present, a second grade class In marked contrast to the above encounter was the arrived in the morning and participated in several learning remarkable experience in the Forest Kindergarten (Naturba“stations” throughout the garden, all focused on the seven kinds rnehage) in Lillehammer, Norway. Like their counterparts in of snails that live in the region. The children were encouraged northern Germany, the three to four year olds who attend this to explore the garden to find snails that were living under the kindergarten/nursery school, spend the whole year in their leaves of the native plants and then to identify them and their forest area and accept as a part of daily living that they must habitat. At another station, children selected already collected be adequately dressed and open to their natural environment. large snails and observed them from all angles as the snails On my visit day, the children were under the trees, sitting on “raced” each other down a length of clear glass. At another, large logs covered with warm hides, cooking their snack (and two chaperones assisted children as they chose a small piece mine) over the large open fire they had built with their teachers’ of wood and, with little whittling knives, fashioned their own assistance (see Figure 2). The toddlers had harvested vegetables wooden snail models. The last station allowed the children from the garden they had planted earlier, then carefully cut to shape, decorate, and then bake bread-dough snails in the them up with little knives, wrapped them in foil, and placed garden’s own outdoor wood-fueled oven. The “snails” were them on the fire to cook. As we sat around the fire and waited shared with the other children and the adults as everyone for the snack to roast, the children and their teacher sang me gathered under the gazebo at the end of the day. a Norwegian song about magpies. Looking up into the tree As planned, it turned out to be a lively day of learning, but above, the excited children pointed out two birds—magpies! became an especially challenging one for the director. As usual, A bit later, another of their teachers, sat by the fire and told she had encouraged the children to explore the whole garden them the famous Scandinavian tale of the Three Billy Goats and to experience fully the nature in it. Only after the noisy Gruff. Instead of puppets or pictures, however, she used three group of thirty children had departed for the day did she see rocks for the goats, another larger rock for the bridge, and a that a group of the bigger boys in the group had discovered large piece of moss for the gruff troll, all materials borrowed the precious bee-viewing case and beaten on it with sticks, from about a foot away out there in the woods. killing many of the bees and driving the queen from the colony. The Forest Kindergarten is part of the city school system Clearly, this particular group of children, unlike most of the in Lillehammer. As many as fifteen percent of Norwegian 30

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children attend such a school, in which they learn not only to grow and cook their own snacks, but also to count and read as they play in the woods and hike or ski through the area, which was once the Olympic Village of the 1986 Winter games in Lillehammer. This particular school was started completely independently some twenty years ago by its director, Kari Husby, who believed in the concept of teaching children in natural surroundings year round and took a chance that parents of the area would be attracted to the concept, too. Interested parents did respond, and now generations of children have experienced the Three Billy Goats Gruff by the fire they learned to build themselves. Within the last year, the Norwegian government has recognized the growing benefit of such schools and has turned to innovative teachers like Kari Husby for advice and direction on how to establish outdoor kindergartens as a standard part of the national school system. The recognition has come because of the Norwegian government’s increasing attention to environmental education for all its citizens, even the very youngest of these. With the ever-increasing pressure on natural resources and rising evidence of climate change in Norway and throughout the world, strong governmental support for this kind of natural education and its innovative curriculum is both welcome as pioneering effort with international implications—and long overdue. At the end of the month-long research trip, I returned to Decorah to continue to read, do research, and process the learning I had experienced and to work on ways to incorporate them into the next Paideia II Green Germany: Advanced Models of Sustainability course in January 2013. The BUND-Garten in Husum is already one of the highlights of the course, and will again offer our participants an invaluable chance to interact about nature-learning

outdoors in the cold and snow with young children (they already speak passable English by the fifth grade in Germany!). One of the new pieces we will introduce to the revised course is a day-long guided visit to the Multimar Museum in Tönning, just outside of Husum. This aquarium and interactive learning center will enable our students to explore the oceanic nature of the Husum area, an essential element to their understanding of the region, but a piece we had not been able to access well enough before because of our winter schedule there. At the Multimar, they will receive hand-on experiences of high- and low tide, essential environmental concepts that we have discovered many of our students do not grasp automatically since they live in the landlocked Midwest. They will also get to experience, in safe but realistic models, the consequences of the dreaded “Blanker Hans”—the devastating storm floods that occur multiple times each year in this area of the world. Because of climate change, these storm floods have been increasing in intensity in recent years, an awareness we want to impress upon our students in this course about the ethics connected with the environment. The other new piece will be a day-long visit to the Forest Kindergarten in Lillehammer, where we anticipate being able to go cross-country skiing with the toddlers. Norwegian children’s familiarity with the winter sport is legendary, and it is said, “they were born with skis on” and learn to ski practically before they learn to walk. Judging by the toddlers’ skill at harvesting, cooking, and learning outdoors that I observed in late September 2011, I am fairly certain that the little Norwegian skiers will be the ones leading the Luther students and faculty of the Green Germany course in our winter adventure, providing our young adults with a particularly sobering experience of international environmental education.

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The Virtuous Nurse in Virtual Reality

D

uring my spring sabbatical (2012) I worked on a project that integrated ethics and virtual reality. My interest in bioethics originated from many years of working as a critical care nurse in the arena of organ transplantation. There were many instances where profound ethical dilemmas were discussed and debated and ultimately dealt with by patients, their families, and their clinicians. Those experiences were foundational in the development of my understanding of the “paradigm practitioner” and the moral exemplar. In the world of medicine, the patient’s bedside becomes the “trenches” and decisions are made with as much information as possible, but often in a setting of emergent need for resolution. In the world of emergency medicine, lengthy reflection and esoteric discussion are luxuries as life and death decisions often press upon the clinician and the patient’s family. My sabbatical project commenced with participation in the thirty-seventh Kennedy Institute of Ethics. The Kennedy Intensive Bioethics course was a six-day course filled with intensive research opportunities at the Georgetown University library, and included presentations by some of the major scholars in Bioethics as well as small group sessions led by faculty and staff at the Kennedy Institute. The Institute uses a “principle” approach with particular emphasis on autonomy, beneficence and non-maleficence, and justice. In addition to presentations on the major bioethics principles, presentations occurred on global justice and environmental health, the moral life and mental illness, the ethics of clinical research, and the euthanasia debate. Complementing the extensive study and scholarly research was a series of small group discussions. A Georgetown faculty member facilitated each session, and these groups were instrumental in targeting research interests, discussion about by

JAYME NELSON

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A 1987 graduate of Luther College, Jayme Nelson has taught at Luther since 2000 and is currently an associate professor in the nursing department. Jayme is a registered nurse and adult nurse practitioner. Her area of scholarly interest is health-care ethics, with special interests in both genetics and the allocation of scarce resources. Her report focuses on virtue ethics and how this topic can be explored through virtual reality experiences.

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plenary sessions, and targeted on our individual research interests. Our group was comprised of several faculty members from across the US and Australia, and including a Jesuit priest from the Philippines, an environmental lawyer, a chaplain, a Norwegian editor from a research journal, a palliative care director from Johns Hopkins, and several bedside clinicians from the fields of nursing, social work and respiratory care. This interdisciplinary group worked though and discussed such challenging topics as moral agency, androcentrism, the intersection of religion and health care, and the cultivation of virtues.

I have developed close working relationships with the disabled community, a community with an enormous presence in virtual reality. It was discussions on the theory and practice of virtue that most keenly held my interest. It was an honor and a privilege to hear ninety-one-year old Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, an iconic figure in the field of bioethics. Dr. Pellegrino’s message of practical wisdom and the intrinsic morality of the practice of nursing and medicine have informed my own practice as a teacher at Luther College. A clinical instructor for twelve years now, I am well aware of the tremendous responsibility inherent in the character formation that occurs in clinical education. Dr. Pellegrino’s assertion is that the “aim of a good teacher is that the student can do it without you.” It was exciting to discuss Luther College’s Paideia program with renowned professionals in this field and to discuss how our interdisciplinary work targets moral and ethical reflection and development. Members of my small group were amazed at our college’s mission and vision and commitment to our student’s lifelong learning. It may seem paradoxical to link virtual reality and virtue ethics. Virtue ethics is concerned with the actions of the paradigm person. In our era of increasing technological advancement, it is often difficult to truly determine the actual identity of an acting agent. We have all heard tales of unethical, inhumane and immoral actions taken by those who hide behind a veil of anonymity on the Internet. Some of the predators captured by federal investigators are said to have acted “out of character” and in fact were those considered to be moral exemplars in their “real” life. Scholars have struggled with gaining understanding into how anonymity and the Internet can seemingly obliterate one’s norms or “virtues.”

self ) in virtual reality and to be assisted by those who are in real life blind, deaf, or wheelchair bound.

“Welcome to Virtual Ability Island ”—conference venue in “Second Life.”

JAYME NELSON

Scholars have called for continued study as to whether students of nursing can actually learn to be virtuous. How virtue ethics can be incorporated more widely into nursing curricula is an area that needs further scholarly work. Much of my research has occurred in the virtual reality world of “Second Life.” Second life is a technologically sophisticated on-line three-dimensional virtual reality community. Members develop virtual representations or “avatars,” and they use them to interact within a vibrant virtual world. There are virtual hospitals with “virtual patients”; virtual churches hold worship services, and there are ongoing opportunities for communal, “virtual” ethical decision-making with people across the country. While anonymity clearly provides challenges to the virtuous life, it is also an arena where virtuous behavior can be fostered or even tested. It could be postulated that the effort to be a virtuous agent when one is anonymous may in fact habituate virtuous tendencies. Perhaps it says something about one’s character if one can be virtuous in action to a mere representation of a human. During the fall semester of 2011, senior level nursing students explored virtual reality through a series of interactions and “field trips.” Students had the opportunity to visit a site where victims of posttraumatic stress disorder receive assistance. Students are able to experience through simulation what it might “feel like” to experience PTSD sustained through battlefield experiences. Students also had the opportunity to visit a site that created the experience of having auditory and virtual hallucinations. Throughout these experiences, they interacted with others also inhabiting this world. My project has provided many fruitful opportunities for research and study. I have developed close working relationships with the disabled community, a community with an enormous presence in virtual reality. The disabled community has been highly supportive of my work with nursing students and has expressed keen interest in the professional and moral development of students. My students have visited virtual reality sites dedicated to the disabled population and have interacted with many people in this world. Members of the disabled community have reached out to mentor students (and myself ) and to facilitate our work in this setting. It is an enlightening experience to have had the experience of struggling to manipulate one’s avatar (a virtual representation of

Plans are well under way for the first annual “Spirituality in Nursing Practice” conference in Second Life, scheduled for February 16, 2013. This conference will unite nursing students from ELCA schools across the country for a conference held in cyberspace. Luther College nursing students (with the support of Academic Administrative Assistantships [AAA] funding from the Dean’s office) will facilitate breakout sessions and/or panel discussions and will lead “field trips” to various sites. Participants will be invited to submit a virtual poster presentation and will present their posters to participants at this virtual conference. I will provide the keynote address providing a historical perspective related to nursing and religious practice (with a particular emphasis on our Lutheran heritage). In gratitude for the kind support offered to me by the disabled community, I have been working closely with this nonprofit group and will be presenting a serious of topics relevant to health care professionals and those dealing with chronic disabling health conditions. My sincere thanks to former Dean William Craft, the Faculty Interests Committee, to H. George Anderson and Jutta Anderson, and to Luther College for supporting my scholarship in the field of Nursing. Your support was invaluable and has provided many exciting opportunities for scholarship and research in the field of nursing education.

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Leveraging Industry Experience in Accounting Education

A

n old joke argues that accountants aren’t boring people, rather they just get excited about boring things. Over the past several years, accounting regulators in the United States have been contemplating a significant change in the accounting standards used in the preparation of corporate financial statements. This potential change has many accountants very excited! International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is a set of accounting rules that is becoming the global standard for financial reporting. These standards, promulgated by the London based International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), have been adopted by approximately 120 countries since their inception in 2001.1 The United States continues to be the significant exception, continuing to delay even the decision whether or not to adopt the IFRS. In 2006, the IASB and the lead United States accounting standards body, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), issued a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that established a work program for the bodies’ joint work toward the goal of a common set of high quality financial reporting standards for use by corporations both in the US and abroad.2 While the timeline established in the MOU has long since passed, the FASB and the IASB continue to work together in pursuit of the goal of a common set of high quality accounting standards. Much of that work during the past two years has centered on the joint development of new standards related to how and when companies recognize sales revenue and how they account for leases. In this environment of significant potential change in accounting standards, I spent my sabbatical year working in the Corporate Finance function at Rockwell Collins, Inc. in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Rockwell Collins designs and manufactures electronics for use by their aerospace and defense customers. by

CRAIG RABE

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After graduating Phi Beta Kappa at Luther in 1992, Craig earned an MBA and a CPA, and worked in a variety of industries, including Carlson Marketing Group, Inc., before joining Luther’s business and economics department in 2004. He teaches a variety of accounting and other courses and is interested in developing case studies for business courses and in researching the economic issues of major sporting events, especially the Olympic Games.

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The company operates in twenty-seven countries and their communication, navigation and other products can be found on the flight decks of nearly every major aircraft platform in use across the globe.3 More specifically, I worked full-time in the External Financial Reporting department, which among other things is responsible for assessing changes in the accounting regulatory environment for their impact on the company’s accounting processes and financial reporting practices. For example, I was a member of the team responsible for reviewing the lease accounting standard proposed by the IASB and FASB. This cross-functional team developed a detailed understanding of the proposed standard and then applied that understanding to the company’s worldwide real estate, automobile and equipment leases. Under current lease accounting standards, lease payments are generally treated as an expense on the income statement but the legally binding obligation to make payments through the end of the lease term is not considered a liability on the balance sheet. Effectively, leases are currently treated as “off balance sheet” financing in most circumstances. In contrast, the proposed standard will require that Rockwell Collins and other financial statement preparers recognize the leased asset and future payment obligations on their balance sheets. This represents a massive change in the composition of corporate balance sheets and may even cause some corporations to fall out of compliance on the covenants they have committed to their lenders. Despite the fact that economically nothing has changed, the application of new accounting standards could present significant challenges for some financial statement preparers. This sabbatical experience has informed my teaching and scholarship in several important ways. Having spent my corporate career with a large family owned business, working for a publicly traded company was a new experience. The scrutiny placed on public companies by the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators dramatically increases the importance of accounting standards and their application within the firm. Further, working in a researchoriented position, exploring detailed accounting standards and writing opinion papers regarding the application of those standards within the firm is completely different experience than I gained in any of my previous positions. Based upon this experience, I am more qualified to teach a broader range of courses in the accounting curriculum. The knowledge I have gained regarding IFRS and other emerging accounting standards, and my experiences in applying those standards in a real-world setting, will be a great asset when those teaching assignments emerge.

My time at Rockwell Collins provided a rich set of experiences that I will be able to leverage for creation of teaching case studies. I have committed to develop at least two case studies in the coming year. Case studies are often used in accounting courses to bridge the gap between theory as described in textbooks and application in the real world. Further, the relationships I have developed at Rockwell Collins are likely to yield additional case studies in future years. Finally, I’m hopeful that this experience is the beginning of a strengthened relationship between Luther College and Rockwell Collins. There is a small but growing cohort of Luther alumni working in accounting and finance roles at Rockwell Collins. In addition, Luther students have been placed there in a few summer internships over the past several years. Based upon my experience, I’m confident that Rockwell Collins represents a fantastic opportunity for our accounting students to begin and build a career.

I am thankful to both Luther and Rockwell Collins for providing the opportunity for this sabbatical experience. The opportunity to spend a year in a research-oriented role during a time of rapidly changing accounting standards will pay dividends for many years to come. Endnotes 1. <http://www.ifrs.com/ifrs_faqs.html#q1> accessed on 9/24/12.

2. <http://www.fasb.org/cs/BlobServer?blobkey=id&blobwhere=1 175819018778&blobheader=application%2Fpdf&blobcol=urldata&bl obtable=MungoBlobs> accessed on 9/24/12. 3. <http://www.rockwellcollins.com/Our_Company.aspx> accessed on 9/24/12.

Supramolecular Photochemistry of Diazarines in Solid Zeolite Samples

T

he main goal for my sabbatical was to learn some new research techniques (and strengthen skills I have learned in the past) in a new setting, to re-immerse myself in research, and ideally have a productive working semester leading to scientific publication. I was interested in working on an environmental chemistry project within my area of expertise, as the environment is of growing global concern and chemists are starting to be leading players in the field. I ended up working on a more basic, fundamental research project (with difficult sample preparation), while also helping to supervise three undergraduate research projects focusing on similar chemistry (with simpler solution preparation) that by

OLGA RINCO

Arriving at Luther in 2004, Olga Rinco is currently an associate professor of chemistry, teaching Organic Chemistry, Essentials of Chemistry, and Women in Science. Among her professional articles she is most proud of “A fluorescence study …” (2009) that she researched and wrote with seven Luther students. She feels fortunate and proud to be a Canadian, a resident of Decorah, and a member of the Luther community where teaching and scholarship are so intertwined.

addressed the environmental questions in the lab I joined. All in all, it was a productive and successful fall semester. During September through December 2011 I was fortunate to work on host-guest supramolecular photochemistry in the laboratory of Professors Frances L. Cozens and Norman P. Schepp at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Supramolecular photochemistry has been the focus of my research career since entering graduate school in September of 1997. At Luther College my lab is well equipped to carry out fluorescence research and supporting chemical analysis (UV- Vis spectroscopy and product analysis by HPLC or GC-MS). The Cozens/Schepp group at Dal is also equipped with a nanosecond and femtosecond laser flash photolysis systems as well as having equipment for advanced organic synthesis and vacuum systems for the preparation of extremely dry solid samples. Supramolecular structures occur by having two or more molecular structures that are held together by non-covalent interactions. In much of my research, I am interested in studying the effect a large molecule (host) can have on the photochemistry of a probe molecule (guest). This host-guest system is an example of a supramolecular structure, and the interest in supramolecular structures in general is that they are capable of changing the outcome of chemical reactions or of having functions that cannot be achieved by the individual components of the system.

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Host System: Zeolites The host systems of interest in the Cozens/Schepp research group are zeolites. Zeolites have received considerable attention for their ability to participate as host materials in photocatalytic processes, including the photocatalytic degradation of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and commonly used herbicides and pesticides. Zeolites are well-known crystalline aluminosilcate materials with an open framework structure that contains corner-linked [SiO4]4- and [AlO4]5- tetrahedrans. Every aluminum present in the framework donates a negative charge, and must thus be charge-balanced by a cation.1, 2 These assemblies lead to interesting topologies with varying sizes of pores, channels and/or cavities. The periodic arrangement of pores and cavities allows for efficient incorporation of many organic molecules within the zeolite framework. Having the negative aluminum framework with the balancing positive cation allows the zeolite to be amphoteric, acting as both a Lewis acid and a Lewis base. The amount of acid/base character has been shown to be somewhat dependent on the counter ion used in the cavity.3 Probe or Guest Molecules The guest or probe molecules of interest in the Cozens/Schepp research group are molecules chosen based on the products they give when excited by light. In other words, it is the reactive intermediates that are of interest, not so much the starting molecule itself. In the studies I was part of, we were interested in two different reactive species: 1) Reactive oxygen species, mainly hydroxyl radicals, and 2) singlet carbenes. Reactive Oxygen Species In many degradation processes highly reactive oxygen species such as the hydroxyl radical (HO•) are used to achieve degradation of the organics, and some modified zeolites have been developed as photochemical agents for HO• production and organic degradation. However, little is known about the chemistry of HO• within zeolite cavities, especially the lifetime of this radical and its absolute reactivity with organic materials. Since these are important parameters that may influence the design and performance of zeolite-based devices for HO• generation, the one goal in the research group is to carry out a detailed investigation on the absolute reactivity of hydroxyl radicals generated within zeolite cavities. Carbenes The behavior of singlet carbenes within the cavities of zeolites4,5 may also be of interest, because these reactive species can, in principle, display both electrophilic and nucleophilic character.6 Thus by examining the reactivity of a series of singlet carbenes within different zeolites, it ought to be possible to obtain information such as the relative importance of the Lewis acid and the Lewis base properties of zeolites in determining the chemistry of these incorporated guest molecules. In the fall of 2011, I worked on the carbene/zeolite project and helped supervise undergraduates who were synthesizing the precursors (molecules) that would allow the study of hydroxyl radicals in zeolites. 36

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Project Summary and Outcomes The carbene/zeolite project was housed in my sub-discipline of expertise (host-guest photochemistry) but also allowed me some new opportunities like carrying out organic synthesis in a research setting, working with solid samples, and working on a LASER system after an eight year absence. These three different segments were the focus of my lab time, along with helping undergraduates with organic synthesis to help with their honors undergraduate research programs. Organic Synthesis The first step in my project was to synthesize a series of chloropyridyldiazirines. I had not previously performed synthesis in my own research and I was interested to try a more complicated synthesis after eight years of teaching synthesis technique at Luther. The reaction I was trying had been previously performed, but students in the research lab had been unable to repeat the synthesis in the last couple of years. It was a three step reaction with column purification as seen in Scheme 1 in the appendix of this report for those who may be interested. It is the third step, the Graham reaction that is light and heat sensitive and somewhat tricky to master, as well as the column purification. I successfully synthesized a series of three diazarines (Figure 1). This would allow us to study whether the position of the nitrogen in the pyridyl ring of the carbene (upon excitation) plays a role in the chemistry within the zeolite.

A B C Figure 1. Structures of diazarines synthesized: 3-chloro-3-(2pyridyl)diazarine (A), 3-chloro-3-(3-pyridyl)diazarine (B) and 3-chloro-3-(4-pyridyl)diazarine (C).

Sample Preparation Normally, one would not discuss sample preparation. Suffice it to say that making zeolite samples, properly loaded with the “guest” of interest and being completely dry (necessity for the work) is quite a process. Preparing a sample takes at least forty-eight hours, and thus this work is much more meticulous than the standard solution chemistry I was accustomed to. In addition to doing research I was exposed to new procedures including two different types of vacuum systems used to dry samples and working in an oxygen and moisture free environment-inside a glove bag (Figure 2). LASER experiments After an eight year absence, it was nice to return to working on a nanosecond laser flash photolysis system. This type of instrumentation allows one to study a very short lived excited state species (such as the singlet carbenes of interest in this study). We were able to study spectral characteristics of these excited species as well as their kinetics. A carbene is a molecule containing a neutral carbon atom with a valence of two (forming two single bonds) and two unshared valence electrons (a lone pair of electrons). The singlet carbene is

RYAN TILLEY

Figure 2. Olga Rinco preparing zeolite samples in a moisture and oxygen free environment. formed on irradiation of the synthesized dizarines with light, cleaving the C-N bonds, and releasing N2 gas. When excited by light the singlet state (electron from the highest occupied molecular orbital of the ground state being excited to the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital of the first excited state without a spin flip) is the original species formed. The spectral characteristics allow us to hypothesize how the singlet carbenes are reacting with in the zeolites, and whether in fact the same species are being formed in all cases. The study looked at the three carbenes generated by excitation of the diazarenes outlined in Figure 1 within Y-zeolites. Na-Y zeolite was exchanged with Li, K, Rb and Cs, yielding a series of five different zeolite samples (with the varying alkali metal counter-ions) to study. Thus, in total fifteen different samples were analyzed (each diazarene in each of the five zeolites). The results are complicated to explain in this brief report. But in summary, the differences in behavior were noted for the varying position of the nitrogen in the pyridyl ring, within zeolites. Furthermore, there was also quite a difference in chemistry noted based on the counter cation present in the zeolite framework. A paper for a peer reviewed journal containing the full results of this study is currently being prepared and I hope it will be published by the end of 2012.

My sabbatical work has allowed me to broaden my thought for the future of my research program at Luther College. Though Dalhousie University is too far away to consider ongoing collaborations, I have been exploring possibilities for collaboration with colleagues who have LASER systems closer to Luther, in order to expose Luther students to these types of opportunities. I am confident that one such collaboration will work in the near future. I am also planning on designing new research projects at Luther which may contain a synthetic element making it easier for me to present more research opportunities to students in the future. My thanks to Luther for the opportunity to re-invest in my research, and all those at Dalhousie University who helped make it a reality. References Breck, D. W. Zeolite Molecular SieVes: Structure, Chemistry and Use; John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1974.

Rabo, J. A., Ed.; Zeolite Chemistry and Catalysis; ACS Monograph; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 1976.

Moya-Barrios,R. and Cozens, F.L., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2006, 128 (46), 14836-14844. Kupfer, R.; Brinker, U. H. Liebigs Ann. 1995, 1721-1725.

Kupfer, R.; Poliks, M. D.; Brinker, U. H. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1994, 116,7393-7398. Moss, R. A. In Carbene Chemistry; Bertrand, G., Ed.; Marcel Dekker: New York, 2002; p 57-101. Appendix Supplemental Scheme (synthesis)

Scheme 1: Synthesis of 3-chlor-3-(4-pyridyl)diazirine

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Reflections on Wildlife Down Under in the Wild State and the Land of Birds

Tex Sordahl graduated from Luther in 1973 and returned to teach in that department in 1980. He is currently professor and head of the department, teaching courses including Ornithology, Animal Behavior, Environmental Conservation, and Biodiversity. He often referees articles in his field and served recently as associate editor of The Journal of Field Ornithology, a leading journal, and he is the author of fortyfour professional publications. Recent local research has dealt with Turkey Vultures, by and resulted in two publications with stuTEX A. dent coauthors. SORDAHL 38

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this trip. So I went to Tasmania and followed with a visit to the uniquely avian islands of New Zealand.

LINDA NUTTALL

M

y four sabbaticals have followed a successful template, and 2011–12 was no exception. I engaged in professional and scholarly activities, and traveled to study in a new and exotic place during a full-year’s leave. As a professional ornithologist, I was invited to participate in a few regional events. On 18 June 2011, I was the “Special Guest Expert” at the First Annual Turkey Vulture Festival, sponsored by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Iowa City Bird Club, at Coralville Reservoir. On 26–28 August 2011, the Iowa Ornithologists’ Union held its fall meeting in Decorah; I led local field trips for participants. And on 3 March 2012, I served as a judge at the hooting contest at the Tenth Annual International Festival of Owls at Houston, Minnesota. Throughout the year, I worked on research and Hoslett Museum projects at Luther. I initiated the changeover of the museum’s database to a new operating system and worked with LIS to enable daily back-up on a server. From two long-term research projects, I produced two as yet unpublished manuscripts, titled “Distribution of Color-Morphs of the Eastern Screech-Owl in Iowa” and “Spring Arrival Dates of Migrant Birds in Northeastern Iowa: A Thirty-one Year Study.” In addition to those technical papers, I wrote a two-part series on spring bird migration for the Decorah newspapers (Sordahl 2012a, 2012b). I also undertook an unexpected research project when my graduate school mentor died in March and I was asked to write a professional memorial (Sordahl 2012c). The big event of my sabbatical was a trip to Tasmania and New Zealand during late September–late November (austral spring). During two previous sabbaticals, I had spent four months exploring four widely spaced sites around the coast of Australia (Sordahl 1998, 2005). What remained for me to have a thorough exposure to the Australian fauna was to see the great interior and to visit the island state of Tasmania. I reckoned that the interior was more than I could manage on

Tex Sordahl aboard the Milford Mariner in New Zealand, 2011.

The Wild State (Tasmania, Australia) Tasmania has a greater percentage of land allocated to national parks and reserves (41%) than any other Australian state (Atkinson and Mocatta 2011). Hence it promotes itself as “the wild state” and “the natural state.” Not only does Tasmania have many endemic species (i.e., found nowhere else), but it has many species which are endangered or have disappeared from mainland Australia. I cannot escape the feeling that Tasmania is an ark, possibly the last stand, for several native Australian animals that were formerly widespread—including its most iconic animal, the Tasmanian Devil. I first flew to Hobart (population 212,000), via Melbourne. It was early spring (October) and the weather reminded me of cool rainy springs in Decorah. However, I was prepared for cool wet weather, which had the benefit of reducing the activity of Australia’s famous “nasties,” all of which are ectothermic poikilotherms (i.e., cold-blooded). Consequently, in a month I encountered just nine land leeches, one scorpion (in my bedroom, which reminded me to dump out my boots in the morning), four colonies of giant stinging ants, and one snake. The endemic vertebrate animals of Tasmania consist of seven species of reptiles (all of which are skinks), four mammals, and twelve birds. The weather being cold, lizards were inactive, so I saw only one of the skinks. I saw two of the mammals, including the eponymously named devil, and eleven of the birds.

GEOFF KING

Upon first stepping outside at the airport, I saw two life birds (Musk Lorikeet and Forest Raven), a promising beginning. The waterfront and city parks yielded a few more species. Looming over Hobart is 1270-meter Mount Wellington, which has an extensive trail system. A city bus goes to the little settlement of Fern Tree, where the trailheads begin. This area provided a nice introduction to the native avifauna. From Hobart, I made arrangements to visit my two targeted field locations, the northwest coast and Bruny Island. First I took a bus from Hobart across the state to the northwest coast. I met Geoff King, fifth generation farmer turned wildlife conservationist, at the bus stop in the town of Smithton. Geoff would be my guide for one of my best wildlife adventures ever. We drove to the settlement of Marrawah and out to the coast where he owns a wilderness property. Geoff has government permission to bait Tasmanian Devils to his rustic fisherman’s hut five days per fortnight, thereby providing opportunities for people to see this charismatic nocturnal mammal in the wild. He has made a reputation among both scientists and the general public for his work to promote the welfare of devils. At the property entrance, we were joined by a Danish journalism student. Geoff staked a road-kill Bennett’s Wallaby to the ground in front of the hut’s window, gave us some instructions, and then left as evening fell. We spent most of the night watching three devils devour the carcass. A microphone in the vegetation enabled us to hear the gory details of crunching bones, tearing tendons, and howling devils on a speaker in the hut. As a bonus, we had an early visit shortly after dark by a rare Spotted-tailed Quoll (sometimes called the Tiger Cat). It was frightened away when the first devil appeared. The devil (Figure 1) and the quoll (Figure 2) represent the two largest living marsupial carnivores. I noticed that the devils, despite being the largest living carnivore in Tasmania, seemed nervous at the carcass. Experts attribute this to a “genetic memory” of a larger predator. That would be the Thylacine (or Tasmanian Wolf ), which is thought to be extinct since 1936. If the Thylacine still exists, a hope some people cling to, it would be in the wilderness of Tasmania. The appearance of a Tasmanian Devil is reminiscent of a Black Bear cub with one or more blazes of white fur (the

GEOFF KING

Figure 1. Tasmanian Devil at a wallaby carcass, Marrawah, Tasmania, Australia.

pattern varies among individuals). Devils are carrion specialists, occupying a niche similar to Wolverines in the Northern Hemisphere and hyenas in Africa (Owen and Pemberton 2005). As such, they have large teeth and one of the most powerful bites of any animal, capable of crushing the bones of their prey. The name “devil” seems to derive from the loud unearthly vocalizations they make in the darkness. There are many frightening myths about the devils. I watched with fascination as they interacted over the wallaby carcass. To “gain a place at the table” they vocalized, softly at first, then escalating to an astonishing amplitude. They performed openmouth displays of their impressive teeth. Finally, they came face to face and both animals snapped their jaws rapidly, first on one side and then the other, of their agonist’s cheeks. These displays were highly ritualized and I never saw any actual biting, though the scars on some devil faces suggest that biting sometimes occurs. As carrion feeders, Tasmanian Devils are attracted to road-kills and are highly vulnerable to becoming road-kills themselves. Despite the devils’s fierce reputation, Geoff told me that dogs can use their superior quickness to kill them. (Note: Dingoes do not occur in Tasmania.) But the greatest current threat to devils is a fatal and communicable disease called Devil Facial Tumor Disease (DFTD). DFTD may have been present historically in devil populations, but its prevalence now (up to 75% of the wild population) is so great that experts fear it could threaten the species with extinction. The issue was first brought to public attention in 2003 (Owen and Pemberton 2005). As an icon species of the state, the Tasmanian Devil ranks with the Giant Panda of China, the Indian Tiger, and the American Bald Eagle. Consequently, much effort is being put into research on DFTD. According to Geoff King, one of the most hopeful signs is that, although DFTD has devastated populations in eastern Tasmania, the disease has not been found in western Tasmania, giving researchers hope that natural resistance exists in some wild devils.

Figure 2. Spotted-tailed Quoll, Marrawah, Tasmania, Australia. My Danish roommate departed at dawn. I had another entire day to roam the property on my own. The scenery was spectacular. Just behind the hut was wild, rocky coastline. In Fall 2012/Agora

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Figure 3. Short-beaked Echidna, Marrawah, Tasmania, Australia.

front of the hut was a highland scene with an ethereal, otherworldly quality. My most memorable animal encounters were with three Short-beaked Echidnas (also called Spiny Anteaters). Echidnas in Tasmania are noticeably more furry than those on the mainland, presumably due to the colder climate. Echidnas’ round pin-cushion appearance, beady eyes, and snorkel-like snout make them a peculiar sight (Figure 3). I found them shy but approachable (after seeking cover, they seemed to forget why they were hiding within a few minutes). Interestingly, males have an ankle spur similar to, but lacking the venom gland of, their fellow egg-laying mammal, the Platypus. Next day, Geoff King picked me up for morning birdwatching. He then transferred me to his friend, Bill Walker, who would be my guide for the next few days. Bill is an environmental lawyer who works in government and has a getaway shack on the edge of Rocky Cape National Park. One evening, Bill and I sat shivering on a beach west of the small city of Burnie watching for Little Penguins. As dusk turned to darkness, I saw thirteen Little Penguins in a tight group trudging up the sand beach from the ocean to their nest burrows one hundred meters away. The smallest of the world’s eighteen penguin species, the aptly named Little Penguin is bluish gray (hence sometimes called the Blue Penguin). Because roadways often parallel the coast, wandering penguins are road kills waiting to happen. No one wants harm to come to penguins, so “Penguin Crossing” signs are common in Tasmania (and New Zealand as well). In Burnie, there is a long one-foot tall fence on the ocean side of the highway to deter wandering penguins. Dogs are strictly prohibited from penguin beaches. Tasmania has three species of fearsome ants, and by this time I had encountered all of them. These ants have long jaws, powerful stings, measure about two centimeters in length, and are quite common. The Bull Ant (usually called the Inchman for its size) is half reddish and half black, the Tasmanian Inchman is mostly black with a little reddish, and the notorious Jack Jumper is black with yellow-tipped antennae and tarsi. A high percentage of people are allergic to Jack Jumper venom, and people take them very seriously. I learned that these aggressive ants can jump about a third of a meter! After my exploration of the northwest coast of Tasmania, I returned to Hobart to organize my visit to Bruny Island, where all twelve of Tasmania’s endemic bird species occur. I took the Bruny Island Coastal Wilderness Cruise to reach the 40

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island; the highlight of the boat trip was a colony of Australian Fur Seals. At the dock, I met a guide from Inala Nature Tours, who drove me into the hills where I spent a few days bushwalking on the Inala property. Birdwatching was excellent there, though I confess that I found only eleven of the twelve endemic birds, whiffing on the secretive Scrubtit. Night-time spotlighting yielded the highlights of my stay at Inala. With guides Sean and Bob, I visited a mixed colony of Little Penguins and Short-tailed Shearwaters. Both of these marine birds nest in burrows in the sand. The shearwaters, which spend their lives at sea except when breeding, were amusingly inept at landing on terra firma. Thousands of them glided in and crash-landed around us as we stood in the moonlight. At the colony we discovered a large snake (about 1.5 meters long) crossing the road. Its cross-band pattern identified it as an Eastern Tiger Snake. It was likely checking the nest burrows for chicks to eat. We were disinclined to disturb the third most deadly snake in the world. While nightlighting, we encountered nine Eastern Quolls. These agile little marsupials were much smaller than the Spotted-tailed Quoll I had seen at Marrawah. Most of them were chasing moths that were concentrated along the sun-warmed road. Five were black color morphs (black fur with white spots) and four were pale morphs (tan fur with white spots). This rare species has disappeared from mainland Australia and is therefore making its last stand in Tasmania (Menkhorst and Knight 2004).

The Land of Birds (New Zealand) Returning to Hobart by boat, I flew to Melbourne and on to Auckland, New Zealand. I saw parallels between Tasmania and New Zealand. Both are Down Under (Hobart and Christchurch are at the same latitude) and the climates are similar, though with austral spring progressing, I found New Zealand somewhat warmer than Tasmania. Both are islands with fascinating endemic biotas that have been devastated by habitat alteration, hunting, and introduced species. In a sense, both live in the shadow of mainland Australia. However, as New Zealanders were quick to point out, Tasmania (population 0.5 million) is just a little state and New Zealand (population 4.4 million) is a whole country. Accordingly, in order to maximize my chance of seeing a large proportion of New Zealand’s birds, I participated in a seventeen-day tour with Field Guides, Inc. of Austin, Texas (which conducts birding tours worldwide), leaving myself time before and after the tour to explore on my own. New Zealand is separated from Australia by 2400 kilometers of Tasman Sea. It had only three native land mammals (all bats, one of which became extinct in 1973). In the absence of mammals, birds evolved to fill the ecological niches typically occupied by mammals. The result was a fantasy-world avifauna. Many species were flightless. There were ten species of Moa, one of which was the tallest bird that ever lived at nine to twelve feet (it weighed over 500 pounds). The Giant Moa may have been the ecological equivalent of a giraffe! Haast’s Eagle, the likely Moa predator, had talons the size of tiger claws, weighed thirty pounds, and was the largest bird

invasives in New Zealand. Thus these birds perpetuate nonnative plant communities. The tour group consisted of twelve Americans and two Canadians, all experienced and well-traveled birdwatchers. Our guides were George Armistead, an associate of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, and Andrew Crossland, a New Zealander with years of experience in government service and wildlife research. We criss-crossed the country by bus, boat, and airplane.

TEX SORDAHL

of prey in the world when it lived. Many people ask me why, of all the places in the world I could pursue my ornithological interests, I traveled to New Zealand. I say to them that New Zealand is known as “The Land of Birds” (Fitter and Merton 2011). New Zealand is the last major land mass discovered by humans. Polynesians reached “Aotearoa” (“Land of the Long White Cloud”) in 1250 CE and developed a distinctive Maori culture. Twenty-eight species of endemic landbirds became extinct in the ensuing 400 years. The causes were habitat loss (the Polynesians reduced native bush by 25%), hunting, and introduced species (dogs and the Pacific Rat or Kiore). Then the Europeans arrived—Dutchman Abel Tasman in 1642 and Englishman James Cook in 1769. First came whalers and sealers, then many settlers. In the 200 years following European settlement, twenty-three species of endemic landbirds became extinct. The last extinction was the Bush Wren in 1972. Several species are in dire jeopardy today. The causes of the European wave of extinctions have been habitat loss (further reduction of 50% of native bush and 90% of wetlands drained) and introduced species (stoats, cats, Brown and Black rats, mice, Brush-tailed Possums, rabbits). New Zealand was originally 80% forest-covered, but is now reduced to 20% forest. Even in forests that are largely intact, niches once held by extinct birds seem eerily vacant. Native birds that are flightless and nest on the ground have little defense against predatory mammals. However, a few native birds are capable of mounting a defense against invasive predators, even such formidable ones as cats. The Weka (Figure 4) is a large flightless rail that is doing well even though it lives in open habitats. Wekas have a feisty attitude. They actually prey on mice and rats. And they can hold their own against a cat. I think I would like to see a Weka beat up a marauding cat. Kiwis, at least the adults, are said to be similarly capable of repelling cats. By the late Twentieth Century, New Zealand had become a leader in controlling invasive pests. Many of its special birds would disappear quickly if they were not intensively managed. The successful method has been to establish sanctuary islands where invasives are systematically eradicated. When I visited some of these islands (Tiritiri Matangi, Stewart, and Ulva), my backpack, clothing, and boots were searched for stowaway mice, food, or plant seeds. On the islands, there are active trapping and poisoning programs for mice, rats, and stoats. It was sobering to learn that the total world population of many of the endemic birds is in the low hundreds. At the same time, it was a privilege to see them. The impact of introduced species can be subtle. In both Tasmania and New Zealand, I was struck by how the most common bird community resembled that of a European countryside. Each yard had a complement of European birds: European Blackbird, Song Thrush, Chaffinch, European Goldfinch, Greenfinch, European Starling, House Sparrow, Rock Pigeon. At first glance, these seem like nice birds to have around. The Blackbird, for example, is the counterpart of our American Robin. However, there is a dark side to it beyond its color. Being European, it is co-evolved to be a dispersal agent for the seeds of European plants, which are undesirable

Figure 4. Weka, Milford Sound, South Island, New Zealand. We indulged in the world-class marine life with seven pelagic trips, including a night on-ship in Milford Sound, where we visited a colony of Fiordland Crested Penguins. At one point on a small fishing boat off Stewart Island where we were baiting seabirds with cut up fish, we all paused and took a collective deep breath. Around us at close quarters on the water, were an estimated 500 albatrosses of at least four species, including the Southern Royal Albatross, the largest in the world with a wingspan that can exceed eleven feet. None of us had ever seen such a sight. We observed nesting by Southern Royal Albatrosses and three penguin species (Little, Fiordland Crested, and Yellow-eyed). Our pelagic trips also brought us close encounters with marine mammals: Sperm Whales, Hector’s Dolphins (a New Zealand endemic), Dusky Dolphins, Common Bottlenose Dolphins, and New Zealand Fur Seals. At the end of the trip, our guides asked each of us what our three favorite birds were. Although it is difficult to choose just three, mine are the Black Stilt, the Southern Brown Kiwi, and the Takahe. The Black Stilt was my personal grail bird. An elegant black shorebird with red legs, it is endemic to New Zealand and is so rare that the current estimate is eighty intensively managed individuals. We found one bird. Black-necked Stilts and American Avocets were the subjects of my PhD research, and I studied this family of birds (Recurvirostridae) for thirty years. Kiwis are the unique, bizarre, endemic symbol of New Zealand. Of the five recognized species of kiwi, the Southern Brown Kiwi is the species we saw. We watched them on the beach at night eating sandhoppers (amphipod crustaceans), at the same location on Stewart Island where David Attenborough filmed them for his acclaimed series The Life of Birds. Fall 2012/Agora

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The Bottom Line In the end, I saw ninety-four species of birds, eleven mammals, and two reptiles in Tasmania. That brings my total Australian vertebrate list up to 383 birds, 38 mammals, 25 reptiles, and seven amphibians. I’ve seen approximately 49% of Australia’s avifauna. In New Zealand, I saw 128 species of birds (about 39% of the entire avifauna) and eight mammals. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. Why should a biology professor from Iowa go Down Under? Because the fauna is unique, diverse, relatively accessible, well-studied, and disproportionately represented in textbooks as exemplars of evolution, ecology, and behavior. My first-hand experience will benefit all the courses I teach at Luther: Ornithology, Vertebrate Natural History, The Life of Birds (Seminar), The Life of Mammals (Seminar), Animal Behavior, Environmental Conservation, and Biodiversity (Paideia II).

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Acknowledgments I thank Samantha Stykel for excellent assistance on my research and museum work. I am grateful to the Paideia Governing Board and the Dean of the College for supporting my international travel with a Paideia Endowment Sabbatical Leave Supplemental Figure 6. Wrybill specimen, Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, South Grant. Island, New Zealand. Literature Cited Atkinson, B., and G. Mocatta. 2011. Tasmania, 6th edition. Lonely Planet, Oakland, California, USA. Fitter, J., and D. Merton. 2011. Birds of New Zealand. HarperCollins, New York, New York, USA. Menkhorst, P., and F. Knight. 2004. A Field Guide to the Mammals of Australia, 2nd edition. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Owen, D., and D. Pemberton. 2005. Tasmanian Devil: A Unique and Threatened Animal. Allen and Unwin, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Sordahl, T. Fall 1998. Of birds and biodiversity: Field studies in Australia. Agora 11(1):30–33. ———. Fall 2005. Adventures of an ornithologist Down Under: From the Nullarbor to the Rainforest. Agora 18(1):46–50. Sordahl, T.A. 2012a. Part I — The phenology of spring bird migration in Northeast Iowa. Decorah Public Opinion 147(11):A-1 & A-4. ———. 2012b. Part II — The phenology of spring bird migration in Northeast Iowa. The Decorah Journal 147(11):A-1 & B-6.

———. 2012c. In Memoriam: Keith L. Dixon, 1921–2012. Condor 114:675–676.

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LINDA NUTTALL

Our boat captain and other local folks shared their memories of Sir David, who by all accounts is a “great gentleman.” A giant flightless rail, the Takahe has a thick red bill and plumage with an exquisite blend of blues and greens (Figure 5). For me, it symbolizes the giant flightless birds of New Zealand that are now extinct. This one still exists in small numbers and I got to see one in the Figure 5. “Greg” the Takahe, Tiritiri wild. His name was Greg. Matangi Island, North Island, New Honorable menZealand. tion on my favorites list: Wrybill — This small endemic plover is the only bird in the world whose bill bends sideways. It always bends to the right (Figure 6). Wrybills use that unique bill to probe around rocks for their invertebrate food.

Music Publishing in Vienna, Then and Now

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t was last spring, while visiting the music rooms of the Palazzo Aldini Sanguinetti in the university city of Bologna, that Virginia and I began to think about our thirty years of music editing in a broader historical context. Music publishing, from its humble beginning in early sixteenth century Venice, has always been a tenuous and cut-throat business, subject to the vagaries of political fashion and changing musical taste, a tardy and reluctant participant in technological innovation. Some stretches of history have been particularly turbulent, and some have seemed to repeat each other. As we walked through the palace we were struck by an extraordinary coincidence: The transformations in music publishing which we have experienced during the past three decades, for example, seem to recapitulate the wrenching changes which occurred in the last two decades of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth centuries, the period during which our two composers, Johann Baptist Wanhal (1739-1813) and Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831), were most active. Both their times and ours were characterized by rapid technological change, intractable challenges to copyright law, and the collapse of older economic models for the production, storage and distribution of printed music. The Palazzo Sanguinetti is home to the International Music Museum and Library, a collection founded by Padre Giambattista (Giovanni Battista) Martini (1706-1784). Padre Martini was an erudite composer, theorist, music historian and inveterate collector of music, books about music, prints, John has taught piano and served in college administration at Luther College since 1975. He majored in English and music at Oberlin and earned his Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Texas, Austin. He studied by piano with second generation Liszt pupils JOHN F. Morton Estrin and Charles Rosen, and with STRAUSS Paul Badura-Skoda. In collaboration with his wife, violinist Virginia Fattaruso Strauss, he has researched and prepared critical performance editions of late eighteenth century Viennese Classical chamber music for publication, primarily with Musikverlag Doblinger, Vienna Austria. During their spring 2012 sabbatical leaves they completed an edition of the 1791 Trios by Ignaz Pleyel.

portraits, and instruments. Among the pupils he prepared for the entrance exam at the Accademia of Bologne were Nicolo Jommelli, Johann Christian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Among his more than 300 portraits of prominent contemporary musicians were those of George Frederic Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, J. C. Bach (painted by Thomas Gainsborough), Joseph Haydn, and Johann Joseph Fux—whose musical exercises are still used by Virginia Strauss to teach counterpoint at Luther College. The English historian Charles Burney (whose portrait is of course in the collection) estimated that the collection already numbered at least seventeen thousand volumes when he visited in 1770. To this day the Palazzo Sanguinetti remains one of the most important places to study the early history of hand copied and printed music. Beginning in the late Middle Ages and continuing through the middle of the eighteenth century, most music which was considered worth preserving was copied by hand, usually by performing musicians or by specialized music copyists. The earliest examples of printed music, appearing as illustrations in liturgical texts and theoretical treatises of the fifteenth century, were produced by means of woodcuts. Although Johannes Gutenberg’s Mazarin Bible was printed between 1450 and 1455, movable type was not used for music printing until the 1470s, and then only for liturgical music and in very limited editions. Printers quickly discovered that music was far more difficult to print than text, requiring between three and six separate imprints and presenting special problems of alignment. Ottaviano Petrucci’s Harmonice musices odhecaton, published in Venice in 1501, was the first anthology of music successfully printed with movable type. Like Aldo Manuzio’s collection of Latin literary classics published in the same year in Venice, it was elegant, durable and affordable, and became a model for future publishers. Despite Petrucci’s success, the old woodblock printing and the new movable type printing continued to co-exist as competing technologies for the first three decades of the sixteenth century, and most music in circulation was still reproduced by hand. The next important development in music publishing was copper plate engraving, a technology which was still in use when we began editing music for publication in 1983. Although engraving was used in Italian cartography as early as the late fifteenth century, it was seldom employed in music printing even a hundred years later. The earliest examples of copper engraved music appeared in England in the second decade of the seventeenth century and in France in the 1650s. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, copper engraving was becoming common in London and Paris and would soon migrate to the German speaking cities of Europe. Fall 2012/Agora

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For collectors of Viennese Classical manuscripts like us, the most important publishers not located in Vienna are William Napier and John Preston in London; Jean-Georges Sieber, Char les-Georges Boyer, and Antoine Huberty (who sold out to Sieber) in Paris; Johann Julius and Bernard Hummel in Amsterdam; Johann Breitkopf Austrian Composer Ignaz Joseph Pleyel in Leipzig; Johann (1757 - 1831). André in Offenbach; Bernhard Schott in Mainz; and Nikolaus Simrock in Bonn. The principal Viennese publishers were Antoine Huberty (who sold out to Sieber in Paris, moved to Vienna and then later sold out to Artaria); Christoph Torricella (originally from Swizerland); Carlo and Franscesco Artaria (originally from Italy); Franz Anton Hoffmeister (originally from Rothenburg, who sold out to Artaria and later became a partner of Kühnel; Ambrosius Kühnel (originally from Leipzig); the Viennese composers and publishers Leopold Kozeluch, Josef Eder, Anton Diabelli, and Ignaz Pleyel (who established his publishing company in Paris); and Giovanni Cappi (originally from Italy, whose nephew Pietro merged the family business with Anton Diabelli’s publishing house in 1818). As the preceding list suggests, music publishing came to Vienna relatively late and was introduced, for the most part, by non-Viennese publishers. A reason why has been suggested by Alexander Weinmann, Wanhal scholar and author of Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alt-Wiener Musikverlages (Contributions to the history of old-Viennese music publishers). For many years it seems, Viennese music copy shops, which had long held a monopoly on music reproduction and distribution, effectively prevented music typesetters and engravers from gaining royal permission to establish businesses. Huberty, for example, who had tried to settle in Vienna in 1770, and who had been publishing Wanhal, Haydn, and Ditters in Paris since the late 1760s, eventually was able to move to Vienna and begin engraving on copper, but only in 1777. By the 1780s music publishing was well-established in Vienna: the technologies of typography and copper engraving competed successfully with hand copying; art dealers, book sellers, and music publishers in Vienna competed with one another and with the other principal publishers of Europe. Composers, of course, tried to insure that their music was circulated and that they were paid for their work, a daunting task in an era of weak copyright protection. Although a piece might be published in Paris Avec Privilege Du Roi (A.P.D.R.) for example, a publisher in Amsterdam or Vienna was under no compunction to acknowledge the privilege, or even to represent titles or opus numbers accurately. 44

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Music was in fact often falsely attributed by careless or unscrupulous publishers. Paul Bryan, in his monumental Johann Wanhal, Viennese Symphonist (Pendragon Press, 1997) writes bluntly at the beginning of his chapter on authenticity and dating: “Approximately 140 compositions cited as ‘symphony’ or a variant of that spelling have been attributed to Wanhal. I judge that he probably composed seventy-seven of them.” Apparently, Wanhal, like Ditters, Joseph Haydn, and Pleyel, was so esteemed during the last decades of the eighteenth century that his name on a title page guaranteed success for any publisher. Not all publishers were unscrupulous and occasionally prolific composers lost track of their own compositions. It is now well-known, for example, that the two trios claimed by Joseph Haydn (originally piano sonatas with violin obbligato) and listed as Hob. 3 and 4 were actually composed by Haydn’s pupil, Ignaz Pleyel. Recent scholarship suggests that Pleyel also composed the Overture to Haydn’s marionette opera Die Feuersbrunst during his time at Esterhazá. As Paul Bryan explains, To understand the need for a numbering system it must be understood that there was no system of registering compositions such as present-day copyright, and, furthermore, that composers wrote an enormous amount of music with an eye to the present rather than the future. Theirs was a day-today existence, and few apparently felt the need to keep count of their own musical offspring. On the other hand, some kind of accounting was necessary for the continuing existence of publishers who sought a supply of new and attractive compositions and needed to know that their competitors were not issuing the same works at the same time. The problem of maintaining exclusivity was greatly exacerbated by the sudden rise of the size of the market and the rapid influx of publishers. Later in the book, while describing Parisian business practices, Bryan writes: “Both the gaps and the duplications of numbers tell the story of the contenders’ attempts to rush works into publication without investigating the numbers being assigned by other publishers, or to outguess or deceive each other.” Our work with eighteenth century manuscripts suggests that Viennese publishers of the 1780s and ’90s practiced the same petty deceptions as the Parisians. Of course, composers were well aware of the problem. In 1797 Pleyel took out a notice in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden (Weimar) announcing the opening of his store in Paris: No copies will be issued without Pleyel’s signature; this blanket rule is necessary not so much for the publisher’s interest, as for music dealers and amateurs, who for some years and especially in the last months have been shamelessly deceived by pirating printers, who sell under the name of Pleyel many works which are supposed to be by this author; and when many of them were shown him in Paris, he did not recognize them and explained that they were false and not his compositions.

A more plaintive acknowledgement of the composer’s dilemma can be found on the title page of Wanhal’s three sonatas (Weinmann XIII: 7-9) published by J. Bland in London (1783/4?): “Not a Spurious Work! Three Solos for the Piano Forte and Three Sonatas for the Harpsichord with an Obligato Accompanyment for a Violin, Composed by J. Vanhall. NB. This is the real Second Set by the above Author.” Bland does not mention that the sonatas had already been published by Artaria in Vienna.

Two hundred years later, during the thirty year time span in which we have researched, edited, and published modern editions of late Viennese masters like Wanhal and Pleyel, the music industry has again experienced rapid technological change, cut-throat competition, a failing business model and wide-spread violation of copyright protection. The thirty year period after 1777, during which Huberty, Torricella, and the Artaria brothers settled in Vienna and began to successfully challenge the music copy shops, was extremely turbulent for the music publishing industry. The competition between the technologies of hand copying, movable type printing, and various forms of engraving, especially copper plate engraving, was fierce. The principal means of distributing music began to shift from copy shops and art dealers to book dealers and music publishers. Popular composers were shamelessly pirated; competing numbering systems and titles for the same compositions were common; and false attribution was rampant. Many feckless attempts were made by composers to control their work. Wanhal, for example, tried working directly with publishers, offering them ostensibly exclusive printing rights. Pleyel offered limited contracts to several music publishers and attempted to bring out new works simultaneously in several cities. Composers like Leopold Kozeluch, Josef Eder, and of course Pleyel established their own businesses in order to both publish and control their own works. As a pre-emptive measure, Pleyel also published various arrangements of his own music, a practice later emulated by the young Ludwig van Beethoven. None of these efforts was entirely successful. Two hundred years later, during the thirty year time span in which we have researched, edited, and published modern editions of late Viennese masters like Wanhal and Pleyel, the music industry has again experienced rapid technological change, cut-throat competition, a failing business model and wide-spread violation of copyright protection. Our editions, which were first engraved on copper plates and later typed with a mechanical music typewriter, are now set with several music processing programs on the computer. The responsibility for what is now commonly referred to as “computer engraving” has shifted from the publishing house to the editor. The

sale and distribution of printed music has moved decisively from music stores to mailorder houses. In addition, customers have begun to order music on-line, or to down load “free” music from questionable sources, and international copyright conventions are casually and commonly violated by all but the most scrupulous. We could not begin to imagine these Johann Baptist Wanhal ( Jan Krtitel developments thirty Vanhal) (1739 - 1813). years ago when we first began to search for Wanhal’s music in often poorly catalogued archives, libraries and monasteries. We collected assiduously for several years, made our first proposals to various publishers, and received our first contract from Musikverlag Doblinger for the Wanhal Concerto in C für Violine, Cembalo und Streichorchester in spring 1983. Using eighteenth century hand copied parts, we produced a twentieth century hand written score and submitted it to the general editor in Vienna, who in turn sent it to South Korea to be engraved on copper plates, using techniques that had been perfected in the early nineteenth century in Paris. Due to no fault of our own, the first proofs came back with a serious mistake—the note heads of the solo parts were too small—and had to be returned to South Korea for correction: a very expensive mistake! Doblinger began experimenting with less expensive methods of printing music in the 1990s. One of our editions, Drei Sonaten für Klavier also by Wanhal, was set by a professional free-lance type setter on a mechanical music typewriter, and then reproduced by photo off-set technology. Music typewriters were already outmoded curiosities in 1998, the year our sonatas were published, and Doblinger soon abandoned them altogether. In the middle 1990s we became interested in Walter Rabl, a protégé of Johannes Brahms, and decided to approach A-R Editions in Madison Wisconsin with a proposal. We were interested in A-R Editions, publisher of the Recent Researches in Music series, in part because they had developed their own music engraving technology. In 1995/1996 we researched and edited the Complete Instrumental Chamber Works of Walter Rabl for A-R, a project which led to several other publications including an entry in the latest edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. As we look back today and compare A-R to Doblinger or Henle editions, they appear inelegant and surprisingly indifferent to the visual details and page turns expected by performing musicians. While Doblinger seeks to produce easy-to-read performance editions, A-R is primarily interested in producing study scores. Our next four Doblinger editions, the Georg Friedrich Fuchs Trio Concertant in g-Moll and the Drei Sonaten für Fall 2012/Agora

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Violine und Klavier op. 30 by Wanhal, were out-sourced to specialists in Finale computer engraving. Although Finale was quickly becoming the acknowledged leader among several competing music engraving programs, our old-fashioned publisher, still located in its carefully preserved nineteenth century building, had been reluctant to adopt it. Quite suddenly in 2003, the management team at Doblinger retired and was replaced by a computer-literate generation, which clearly hoped to modernize the business. We were told that our next editions of the Wanhal Klavier Quartetten op. 40 would be the first in-house, computer en46

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VIRGINIA STRAUSS

A sample page of a Pleyel score computer engraved by Virginia Strauss.

graved volumes in Doblinger’s Diletto musicale series. We were also assured that the new volumes would be indistinguishable in appearance from earlier volumes in the series. The learning curve must have been steep for the Doblinger team, judging by the three or four rounds of corrections we had to make before each edition went to print. During our 2004-2005 sabbatical leaves, Virginia learned the craft of computer engraving with the Finale music notation program, using Doblinger’s house rules and standards. When we proposed our next project, an edition of the Ignaz Pleyel 1791 Trios to be brought out on the 250th anniversary of the

composer’s death, she was invited to engrave the trios herself. Beginning with the Trio in B-Dur B.440, all of our editions for Doblinger have been computer engraved by Virginia. If, as we think, we now live in an era as challenging to music publishing as the era of Wanhal and Pleyel two hundred years ago, the Internet revolution is at least partially to blame. Today almost all music, indeed almost any printed material or visual image, is readily available on-line, free to download, reproduce and share. Although free access to printed material is considered a birthright by our students, it is of course perceived as an existential threat by the publishing world. Not only have publishers been forced to consolidate or declare bankruptcy, famous recording labels like RCA and Columbia and famous music emporiums like Patelson’s Music in New York have completely disappeared. Those publishers that have managed to survive, like Doblinger in Vienna, have become smaller and more highly specialized. Much of the nineteenth century building in Dorotheergasse, for example, has been rented out; archives of copper plates and vast inventories of printed music have been moved to warehouses; the distribution center has been shifted to centrally-located Munich; the Antiquariat, as much of an institution in its day as Patelson’s in New York, has disappeared; the publishing branch of the business has been severely down-sized; and the task of engraving has been shifted to the editors. Doblinger, a nineteenth century publishing house, is trying hard to find its place in the twenty-first century world. At the same time, another model for music distribution in the Internet age is tentatively emerging. Following the lead of Internet publisher H. Anderle (for whom we have edited several volumes of Wanhal and Johann Nepomuk Hummel), the International Pleyel Society (IPG) has announced the publication of an open-source, collected edition of the works of Ignaz Pleyel. Study scores are to be made available in a free, downloaded format, while bound volumes or parts for performance are to be made available for purchase directly from the IPG.

One year ago, we attended a conference organized by the IPG in Ruppersthal, Austria, in which a small group of scholars laid the groundwork for what may be the first large-scale project of its kind. In the course of the weekend conference we agreed to edit the Symphonie concertante (Benton 115) for the IPG edition. Whether this ambitious publishing experiment, which may offer unwelcome competition to publishers and music sellers like Doblinger, will be economically viable is of course an open question. Another interesting question is whether the music publishing industry, after a turbulent thirty year period of collapsing business models and rapid technological changes, will again achieve equilibrium as it did once before in the middle nineteenth century. The question is becoming urgent. A crucial question, underlying all others in our opinion, is whether intellectual property and copyrights can be protected in the age of the Internet. The International Music Museum at the Palazzo Aldini Sanguinetti does not raise these questions, let alone try to answer them. The display rooms proceed chronologically, concluding with a middle-twentieth century portrait of the composer, Ottorino Respighi, who so famously recast the eighteenth century music of Jean Philippe Rameau in the form of twentieth century suites. Despite several rooms devoted to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the true core of the museum remains the magnificent collections of Padre Martini, now nearly a quarter of a millennium old. As we walked through the palace and relived the early history of music publishing, we could not help but recall our own thirty year history as editors. Had we not, in retrospect, lived in times which in many ways mirrored those of Wanhal and Pleyel? The more we thought about it, the more apt the comparison seemed. We returned to Vienna where Virginia finished engraving our Pleyel edition and where I began a speculative essay on music publishing in Vienna, then and now.

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One Fish, Four Graphs, Six Mugs of Coffee

I

have mentioned to a few of my colleagues that I don’t read as much as I might like because I can’t read to wind down at the end of the day. Whatever I read, even the silliest magazine article, triggers my brain too much for reading to ever be relaxing. No, if I want to idle my way through an hour, I am much better off fiddling with data—making histograms, curve fitting, normalizing, etc. I felt it safe to open this report of my sabbatical activity with that observation because the likelihood that one of the half-dozen people I mentioned this quirk to is also one of the six people reading my report seems exceedingly low. If I have erred in this calculation please forgive me and please keep reading, if for no other reason than to find out what other stories you might encounter for a second, or even a third, time. Given the calming influence data analysis has on me I have designed projects that keep me awash in data. For example, since 2003 I have been working with research students on projects arising from images I take of a particular field of the sky each clear night from February to October. So far we have acquired nearly half a million images of this patch of sky that covers an area about the same as a quarter of your fingernail held at arm’s length. Each night, each image, we track what some 1600 stars are doing. I found my calling I suppose. During the regular flow of life, we barely find time to stay on top of the routine image processing that consists of image calibration, frame normalization, image alignment and stellar signal extraction—you know, the stuff that allows one to find an hour of peace at the end of a day. Of course, astronomy is only one branch in the flow of life and there is so much to measure beyond the celestial sphere. A sabbatical offers the opportunity to spend more time looking at what we are learning on this drift down the river of data. by

JEFFREY A. WILKERSON

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Professor of physics and head of the Luther department, which he joined in 1997, Jeff regularly teaches a variety of physics and astronomy courses and spends a lot of time in the on-campus planetarium and at the Luther College Remote Observatory. In addition to his professional publications, Jeff’s vita lists dozens and dozens of research projects conducted with Luther students, many of them presented at conferences. When he is not collecting graphing data, he is often fishing or hunting upland birds.

Agora/Fall 2012

Reflecting on the year, I rummaged through the file directories on my computer to see if I could deduce how many graphs I had made from June 1, 2011 to June 1, 2012. Something just north or south of 1400 turned up. These are graphs I made myself—none automatically generated by computer. This number is an estimate because some graphs were saved as files while others were placed into documents without being saved separately, a history not worth tracing. Some graphs get made repeatedly as new data arrive and these are only included once in the total. Here, I share a very small sample of these graphs, sorted into three broad categories, with a little bit about why I find them interesting. If at the end of reading this report your thirst for graphical presentation is not sated, let me know and I will gladly find more for you.

Designing the perfect experiment to answer a specific detailed question is key to scientific progress. But there is also a place for taking data broadly to see where it leads. We have found six eclipsing binary star systems in our field. One was previously known (Pjomanski 2002); five are newly discovered. These systems consist of two stars in mutual orbit with an orientation such that, as seen from earth, the stars periodically eclipse one another. The graph in figure 1 shows the progression of an eclipse over about three hours for the partially eclipsing system we know affectionately as Star 166. We find the time of minimum light, mid-eclipse, by fitting lines to both eclipse ingress and egress and determining the time when these lines cross. A sample fit is shown in figure 2. The relative signal at mid-eclipse is subtracted from the average signal before or after eclipse to determine eclipse depth—the fraction of the light that went away. Figure 3 shows the measured eclipse depth averaged over each February to October data campaign. Stellar-signal counting statistics in the star signal and weather-related normalization variability limit the precision with which any single eclipse depth can be measured, leading to the sizable error bars—one standard deviation for those who care—seen in this graph, even after averaging six to fifteen eclipses. Our observations are consistent with the eclipse depth being constant with time but they’re also consistent with cyclical depth variations with a period of about three years. Such variability might be caused by an orbital plane wobble induced by an unseen third star in the system.

Eclipsing Binary Stars

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

If the system does hold a third star, that star might be periodically pulling the eclipsing pair nearer us and further away. When the pair is further away it takes longer for the light to reach us and we see the eclipse occur later. Figure 4 shows the average observed time of mid-eclipse minus the expected time using a period of 0.2727529695 days. Each plotted value is an average over a single data campaign. Note that these values imply that the eclipse averaged about three minutes early in 2007 and about three minutes late in 2008. Once more we see the hint of a three-year period of variation but just a hint. Both figures 3 and 4 are consistent with the presence of a third object orbiting in the system with a period of three years but we lack sufficient data to be confident in such a claim. This system is particularly interesting because the amplitude of the wobble, if real, suggested by the lower left graph is several times larger than standard theories would predict. If all goes well, we might have this system pinned down by 2015, give or take a year or two.

Most of the stars that have shown variable brightness during our nine years of observing have varied as a result of pulsation. We have detected this type of variability in fifty-five stars. Fifty-four of these are newly detected variables; one was previously known (Samus 2011). The curve in figure 5 shows our measured signal vs. time for one of the more regularly varying stars in the field. The curve in figure 6 shows measured signal as a function of time for a star varying more erratically. The brightness is measured in magnitudes. A change of one magnitude is equivalent to brightness changing by a multiplicative factor of 2.5; lower numbers represent brighter stars. The time is measured in days relative to the start of the calendar system. It appears that the larger amplitude, more regular stars are oscillating in a single harmonic, while many of the lower amplitude, more erratic stars have two harmonics excited simultaneously, like the overtones on a plucked string. In agreement with the few previously published results (Kiss Fall 2012/Agora

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Pulsating Stars

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7 1999; Percy 2008), we have found that most of our pulsating variables have multiple harmonics excited. Built upon the data analysis work of student Donald Lee-Brown, the graph in figure 7 is a log-log plot of the longer period over the shorter period versus the shorter period in days. The multiperiodic stars appear in distinct bands with most stars exhibiting a period ratio between 1.5 and 2.1—i.e., the long period is about 1.8 times the short period. Figure 8 is a histogram of our measured amplitudes of variability. The multiperiodic stars are typically low amplitude, with nearly all of them falling below the observed break (amplitude ~ 1) in the distribution. The singly periodic stars all fall above the break. It turns out that stars are more complex than strings and we can’t even say with certainty which two oscillation

Figure 8

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modes these periods represent. Other things we don’t know: whether stars evolve from multiperiodic to singly periodic; whether stars evolve from one period ratio band to another; whether the relative amplitudes of the different harmonics are stable or if the amplitudes vary, perhaps with some harmonics disappearing completely and reappearing or being replaced with other harmonics; why some stars are multiperiodic and others are not. We are just now approaching a data set with sufficient duration to allow study of harmonic mode stability within a given star. The next decade should be an exciting one. From two offerings of Introduction to Astronomy, one hundred students took a post-course standardized exam designed to measure their understanding concepts related to light and spectroscopy. While the exam is referred to by astronomers

Assessing Student Learning

Figure 9

as a conceptual exam, some questions require students to reason while others can be answered correctly by the recitation of facts. I identified the truly conceptual questions by applying the following rule: A concept is an idea that can be applied in multiple contexts to explain and/or predict outcomes (Wood 2008). This analysis resulted in thirteen questions categorized as factual and thirteen as conceptual. A statistically meaningful correlation between performance on the conceptual questions and student year in school was observed. No such correlation was seen for the factual questions. Not all students beyond the first year showed the same improvement in performance on the conceptual task they were given. One of the graphs I generated while thinking about what might influence a particular student’s gain appears in figure 9. The fraction of post-course questions answered correctly is plotted against ACT score for second, third and fourth-year students. The dots are for factual questions and the open squares for conceptual questions. The three solid curves are best-fit regressions to the conceptual question data: a line, a power law and an exponential. The data are quite scattered around the fits and none of the three curve fits represents the data better than the other two. I used the linear fit to predict the fraction of conceptual questions each student should get correct given the student’s ACT score. Next I took the actual fraction the student answered correctly, subtracted the predicted fraction given by the linear fit and plotted the resulting difference (O-C) against predicted score. This graph appears in figure 10. Students in the top half of the graph performed better than predicted and students in the bottom half performed worse than predicted. An interesting feature appeared when I attempted to correlate student performance with student demographics. The rectangle in the lower left of the figure encloses those students who (i) had the lowest predicted scores on the conceptual questions and (ii) generally underperformed relative to the predicted score. The dots on the graph represent students who

Figure 10

graduated or were still at Luther when the transcripts were printed one or two years after the course offering. The squares represent students who left Luther without a degree in that same time. Some symbols represent multiple students with the same score. Outside the rectangle, 1 of 51 students left without a degree. Inside the rectangle, 9 of 32 left without a degree. These numbers suggest that, in this one instance, students were more likely to leave Luther after enrolling for the second year if they had an ACT score of 26 or below and they failed to perform on the given conceptual task at the level predicted by their ACT scores. Students with ACT scores below 26 who performed at or above the level predicted by their ACT score showed no evidence of being more likely than students with ACT 26 or above to leave without a degree. As with the stars, this data set is not yet sufficient to make any broad claim.

Conclusion The projects discussed here were well underway when my sabbatical started and all will continue as we keep learning a little bit at a time. I hope. These projects share other features as well. They are data heavy so that many avenues of exploration exist. Also, we acquired the data with no specific target in mind. Without a doubt, designing the perfect experiment to answer a specific detailed question is key to scientific progress. But there is also a place for taking data broadly to see where it leads and what unforeseen questions arise. Too often these days it seems that scientists are convinced that only the former approach is valid. I suspect this attitude comes from the expensive nature of many experiments; they cost too much to simply go fishing. The tenure process might play a role. Young faculty members likely feel compelled to go after specific targets early in their careers. Whatever the case may be, I am left with plenty of room to swim in the data sea. I leave you with one of the last graphs I made during the year (Figure 11), a histogram of the number of fish I have caught in each of the past 12 years. There is a sudden jump in 2011 when I caught 404. I started Fall 2012/Agora

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this report by looking back at the 1400 graphs I made in the past year. One fish per day, four graphs per day. That seems like the perfect prescription for happiness. References Kiss, L.L. et al. “Multiperiodicity in semiregular variables.” Astronomy & Astrophysics, 1999: 542-555. Percy, J.R. e tal. “Further Studies of the Photometric Variability of Bright Pulsating Red Giants.” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2008: 523-530.

Pjomanski, G. “The All Sky Automated survey. The catalog of Variable Stars II. 6h-12h Quarter of the Southern Hemisphere.” Acta Astronomica, 2002: 397-445.

Samus, N.N. et al. General Catalog of Variable Stars (GCVS database, Version 2011Apr). April 2011. http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ W3Browse/all/gcvs.html (accessed May 2012).

Wood, W.B. “Teaching concepts versus facts in developmental biology.” CBE - Life Sciences Education, 2008: 10-11.

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Figure 11. Number of Fish Caught Over 12 Years

Chapel

Deregulating the Christian Monopoly on Grace Text: Ephesians 2: 4-10 But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

W

hen Pastor David Vasquez e-mailed me this summer asking me to consider doing a chapel talk on this passage from Ephesians, my response was something along the lines of, “Really? Could you have given me a more Lutheran passage? I mean c’mon, saved by grace through faith?” While I recognize that biblical scholars debate the authorship of Ephesians, if I didn’t know any better, I would say that Martin Luther himself wrote the book. This passage alone seems to be evidence of that, right? O.K., seriously, this is a Lutheran college, so it is certainly my duty to justify that big statue of Martin Luther by

TODD GREEN

An assistant professor of religion at Luther since 2008, Todd teaches courses on European and American religious history. His book, Responding to Secularization: The Deaconess Movement in NineteenthCentury Sweden, was published by Brill in 2011. Much of his research concerns Islamophobia and the challenges facing Muslims in Europe and the U.S., and he publishes frequently in The Huffington Post.

September 5, 2012

on campus and to preach on this very Lutheran passage. But I’ll warn you up front that I view this passage very differently than classic Lutheranism has. Folks like Martin Luther used passages like this as a weapon, a polemical tool to draw a sharp dividing line between true Christianity and the “false” teachings of the Catholic Church and the antiChrist (i.e., the Pope). Why? Because Luther was convinced that Catholicism was all about saving yourself and justifying yourself through good works. Catholics didn’t rely on faith alone, grace alone—the very things that this passage seems to be encouraging us to do. Let me be clear. I love to take shots at Martin Luther. I have no qualms taking him to task on a variety of things. But I also must confess that I really do admire his emphasis on grace. If by grace we mean that which puts us into relationship and communion with the divine, with God, with Ultimate Reality, then Luther is to be praised for his insistence that our connection to God is not our own doing but rather is God’s doing. God alone bestows grace. God alone is responsible for enabling us to be in communion with God’s self. My problem with Luther is not that he emphasizes grace too much. My problem with Luther is that he is so incredibly stingy with grace. Of all the people in all the times and places that have lived in the world, only a relative few really have received grace and had true communion with God. Those who received grace were primarily those born in Europe (preferably northern Europe) who accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and who embraced Luther’s specific interpretation of passages like this from Ephesians. But in all fairness, Luther is not the only stingy theologian in the history of Christianity. The specific doctrines may vary, but most Christian theologians for most of history have confidently concluded that Jesus Christ is the only vehicle of grace, and that to receive this grace, one must explicitly confess faith in him and become a member of the Church. The Christian religion alone has a monopoly on grace. This position is better known in theological circles as exclusivism. Exclusivism is the belief that Christians alone receive grace and are in communion with God. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists—these are lost peoples who have no connection to Ultimate Reality, who lack any understanding of the sacred, and who will be damned when all is said and done for their failure to accept Christ, or to be even more blunt, for their failure to have been born in Europe or North Fall 2012/Agora

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My problem with Luther is that he is so incredibly stingy with grace. Until the late twentieth century, most Christian theologians could not bring themselves to contemplate this possibility. Luther certainly couldn’t. But we must bear in mind that Luther’s own world was fairly limited. He had very little personal interaction with people of other religions. He had a few conversations here and there with Jews, but he never really approached Judaism or Jews as a religion or a people that might have grace or truth. On the contrary, toward the end of his life, he called for the burning of synagogues and the confiscation of Jewish texts.1 As for Islam, he had no personal interactions with Muslims, and he engaged in no in-depth explorations of the sacred texts of Islam. He did manage to get his hands on a Latin translation of the Quran toward the end of his life, but it certainly didn’t help him gain respect for Islam or even to appreciate the common ground shared between Islam and Christianity.2 Beyond these two traditions, Luther knew next to nothing about other religions. We live in a different world, one in which globalization, mass media, migration, and immigration have brought the religious “Other” close to home. Muslims, for example, are no longer “those” exotic peoples in the Middle East or North Africa. They are our doctors, our teachers, our students, our coworkers, our next-door neighbors, and our friends. This is true for practitioners of many other religions as well. Can we honestly say that the Buddhists, Sikhs, or Muslims we meet in our lifetimes are lost simply because they were raised in the wrong family, wrong neighborhood, or wrong country? Can we damn them because they have been reading the wrong (sacred) books? If grace really is free, if it is something that humans don’t earn, then we must really think long and hard about whether an exclusivist approach to it really makes sense. My own belief on this topic has been influenced by the twentieth-century Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner. Rahner argues that

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God bestows grace on all human beings simply because they are human and are created in the image of God. To be human is to be graced. It is never something we have to go out and find. It’s not something we receive “freely” only after we have recited the correct Christian creeds. And it’s not something that falls into our lap simply because we were born in the past 2,000 years in some region already dominated St. Paul. Byzantine ivory plaque, seventh century. Musée National by Christianity.3 As we leave today du Moyen-Âge (Cluny), Cl. 13074 reflecting on this passage and on the nature of grace, I want to encourage you to take a page from Rahner and consider the possibility that you, like your sisters and brothers in the many different religious traditions around the world, are already graced. You don’t need to go out looking for grace, or figuring out how to connect with God or Ultimate Reality. You’re already plugged into the divine Matrix. To frame this another way in light of another religion, Vedic Hinduism teaches that we all possess an innate unity with Brahman or Ultimate Reality. The problem in Hindu philosophy is not that we have lost a connection with Ultimate Reality that we must restore. The problem is that we are ignorant of the connection we already have. The goal, then, is not to restore a broken connection but to become aware of the already existing connection with Brahman. If we take that insight with us and take a fresh look at the Christian concept of grace, what we are in a position to consider is that we are already graced, already connected to the divine, the sacred, God, Brahman, Ultimate Reality. The path before us is not one of finding out how to connect with God. The path before us is one of discerning and discovering how God is already, always connected to us.

Antiquité Tardive via Creative Commons

America during the time that Christianity has dominated these two continents. But is that true? Is it really the case that only those who have faith in Christ and who embrace certain Christian doctrines are in communion with the divine and thus able to be “saved”? This is where I think we must move beyond Luther and most theologians in the history of Christianity. If grace really is by definition that which connects us to God, and if Ephesians is right in maintaining that grace comes from God alone, then is it not logical to conclude that this gift really is one that has been given to many peoples of many different times, places, cultures, and religions?

Endnotes 1. Eric W. Griitsch, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism: Against His Better Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012).

2. Adam Francisco, Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in SixteenthCentury Polemics and Apologetics (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

3. See Karl Rahner, “Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 5, trans. Karl H. Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966), 115-34.

Chapel at Luther: A Rare Gift Text: Ephesians 4: 1-8, 11-13

T

he scripture for today is from the fourth chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians (4: 1-8, 11-13):

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift….The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of knowledge of the son of God, to maturity in the measure of the full stature of Christ.

As I was reflecting upon the theme of this chapel series: “Between Athens and Jerusalem: Reflections on the Letter to the Ephesians,” I recalled my first days at Luther College as a teacher. I came in the fall of 1963 when the predecessor to the Paideia program, The Core, was just beginning. For most of its years, my teaching in the English part of this program began with readings from early Greece: The Odyssey, Oedipus the by

MARY HULL MOHR

Professor Emerita of English, Mohr joined the faculty in 1963 and since retiring in 2000, she and her husband, Professor Emeritus of English Martin Mohr, continue to attend daily chapel. She was a leader in founding the Luther chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and was honored as the second Jones Distinguished Teaching Professorship for 1995-96 and was a leader in her department, in Paideia I, and in campus governance. She is a co-author of Transformed by the Journey: 150 Years of Luther College History in Word and Image (2011).

September 14, 2012

King, Medea, Plato’s Symposium among others. Since I taught sections at 8:00 and 9:00 o’clock, I followed my teaching by going to chapel (which then began at 10:00). Figuratively then, I went from Athens to Jerusalem. Or to put it another way—from a learning community to a faith community. In my English sections we discussed the gods, but in this learning community we talked about Greek gods and their relationship to characters in the literature that we read. Students also took a religion course as part of the core. It was not a Bible course but rather one in the “fundamental concerns of Christian thought,” to quote its description by the teacher who helped design the program. So the students in that class were asking questions such as “Who is man?” and comparing the answers in their Christian readings with the Greek heroes we were looking at in the tragedies and the epic. In chapel the speakers were almost all clergy, including most members of the religion department and occasionally an area pastor. They preached homilies on assigned texts for the day and we sang hymns much as we do today. Incidentally, the most unusual part of that first semester for me was that I walked from my classroom in Main building down the hall to another classroom where I went to chapel on a TV screen. There was a service with a real clergy person in the basement of Valders, a room that was used as our theater, but that room could not hold us all. Our chapel text for today is a short passage from someone who was probably a student of Paul’s. In chapter four the author is begging this young congregation to respond to God’s grace: the fullness of God’s love for them, which Pastor Blair explored on Wednesday. Live lives of “humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” says the letter. And I would think that the good news, the assurance that God loves and cares for his children would have encouraged them to live such lives. And there must have been many times when these new Christians experienced the joy of worshipping together, and, as our passage, says, “making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” But when I thought more about these words, I wondered what was behind them. Does the writer foresee problems for this community? One reality of living in both the community of learning and the community of faith is that people will disagree. They were human and so are we; and when asked to confront troubling issues, to be open to change, to actually listen to people with whom we disagree, it is very difficult to live out our faith. The fact that these early Christians lived among people who did not share their faith must have posed many Fall 2012/Agora

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challenges for them as well. One of the significant changes That work is various and campus ministry through its for people my age has been the experience of living among leadership has provided us with multiple opportunities to people who are not Christian. For many today that continues show compassion for others. And I would add that being to be very difficult as we experienced this last week with the the best student you can be—to fully engage yourself in the tragedy in Libya [On September 11, 2012 a heavily armed many opportunities which the learning community provides group executed an attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in which may include, to mention a few—being fully prepared for Benghazi, Libya]. class, conversing with another Today at Luther we are student about political issues, indeed fortunate to get to attending lectures—will enknow, both in the learning able you to be more ready and the faith communities, to contribute to your faith others who do not share our community as you leave this beliefs. I think we develop place. It is part of equipping a deeper understanding of the saints for ministry. our own Christian traditions I realized as I reflected when we are introduced to on this text that I am bethe richness of other religinning my fiftieth year of gions. And in our learning coming to chapel at Luther. communities we mature as Why do I continue to do so? humans as we discuss our This chapel period has been differences with each other or important to me in many begin to appreciate the amways. After a particularly biguities in a play or a novel. heated faculty meeting—they Just as the first part of the do happen—I would come to Ephesians passage encourworship and realize that there ages us to practice the virtues was a unity of spirit in this that will lead us to unity, the A chapel service in Preus Gymnasium, c. 1950s—before Mary place. I do not know many of second section leads us to the Hull Mohr came to Luther. you personally any more. But same place, but in a very difeven as I say that I recognize ferent way. Here the author discusses the diversity in the gifts that it is not true. I do know you. You are children of God, as of leadership that are necessary to answer the needs of this new am I, and as such you are my brothers and sisters in Christ. community, the acknowledgement that people bring different We are grounded here, reminded of God’s grace, and encourkinds of gifts to this new community of faith: “Some would aged to respond by “serving [as our mission statement says] be apostles, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers.” But with distinction for the common good.” And so I would add the goal of these differing leaders is the same: “to equip the another gift to the ones mentioned in our text—the chance saints for the work of ministry.” to regularly worship in chapel. It is a rare gift. Amen

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United World College Chapel

September 21, 2012

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of wellmatured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. (Isaiah 25:6:8)

And one of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your tongues and colors; most surely there are signs in this for the learned. (Quran 30:22) He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings... (A saying from The Buddha)

O

n September 11, 2001 I saw the bewildering images of an airplane flying into a tower. The events captured by those images have shaped our lives in ways we could not imagine at the time. I certainly couldn’t have imagined what they meant. I watched those horrifying images on my by

HABIBULLAH REZAI

Habibullah was born in Bamyan, Afghanistan, and is majoring in economics and management with a minor in French. Currently a sophomore, he is an alumnus of Li Po Chun United World College of Hong Kong and one of many UWC graduates studying at Luther. The Davis United World College Scholarship Program is the world’s largest privately funded international scholarship program for undergraduate education; UWC’s fiftieth anniversary was recognized at this chapel.

UWC alumni celebrating the fiftieth year of the United World College. neighbor’s TV—the only TV in my apartment building in Pakistan where I lived along with other Afghan refugees. It was a year later, when I turned twelve years old that I first learned to read and write. My family and I, along with other ethnic Hazaras, were able to return to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. I had been working since I was seven years old, but had never held a pen, owned a book, or sat at a desk in school. Because of my age, I was put in fourth grade. It was so hard that I repeatedly begged my father to let me quit school and go back to work. With seven kids, our family certainly could have used the money. But even though my mom and dad themselves never learned to read and write, they insisted I should be educated. Flash forward a few years to a Friday morning in winter of 2009. I had finished high school. I was home waiting to hear back about the admission exams I had taken for university, when a friend came by the house. He said he was going to take a test for a scholarship, and that I should come along. I had no idea what scholarship he was talking about but we got on our bikes and went to where the test was being given. I didn’t even have a pencil with me! Over the months that followed, I kept being called back for several more examinations, including the final one at the Canadian Embassy in Kabul. Then one day I got an email that I had been accepted to the Li Po Chun United World College in Hong Kong. I didn’t even know where Hong Kong was. A friend and I went to an Internet club in the city and he helped me find Hong Kong on a map! Everything in Hong Kong was different: housing, food, language, resources, people. I had grown up in a fairly homogeneous community where everyone sounded and looked like me. I was at first overwhelmed and I really felt out of place Fall 2012/Agora

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MARIA DA SLVA, LC PHOTO BUREAU

Texts: Isaiah 25:6-8; Quran 30:22; A Saying from The Buddha

as a kid from Afghanistan who had barely learned to read and write just a few years back, who spoke no English. And here I was thrown together with some of the brightest kids from around the world. I was surprised that while I had not even heard of most of the countries they were from, some of them knew about the particular ethnic group I came from in Afghanistan! A bicycle ride with no pencil to take a test for a scholarship gave me two years at the United World College and now I am starting my second year at Luther College. I have no words to describe how my life has been impacted by these opportunities. Of course, not everything has been easy or good. Every time I am able to talk to my parents on the phone, I must retrace the distance I have traveled—and I am reminded that I am far from the home of my childhood in more than physical ways. For example, my father, who pushed me to stay in school, is willing to sacrifice to help my brothers continue

their education, but we argue about the opportunities that should be given to my sisters. Like the images in the one TV in the apartment building where I lived as a refugee in Pakistan, the ever-present screens around us here at Luther carry narrow, limited images about life a world away. Yet with all this information coming at us I am sometimes surprised about the lack of curiosity we seem to have about what they mean. My experiences at Li Po Chun in Hong Kong and here at Luther have certainly been a total contrast to the images I—all of us—saw on television on 9/11. One set of images portrayed a world at odds, where difference means division. The other is filled with images that echo the words we just heard from the Quran, that the earth and the diversity of our tongues and colors are signs of God in the creation. This latter vision, of the possibility of a world at peace, is at the center of why the United World Colleges were founded.

Waiting for the Will of God Text: Psalm 130: 5, 6 I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.

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s we came into this beautiful building today those of the class of 1962 and before may have tried to orient ourselves as to where the old C. K. Preus gym and multi-purpose building stood—the one that burned down fifty years ago during my senior year. I think the floor of the auditorium stood almost exactly on this spot. It was the place where we attended daily chapel. Try to imagine about a by

JERRY AAKER

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A member of the fiftieth anniversary class of ’62, Jerry Aaker was the preacher at the 2012 Homecoming Chapel. Jerry helped establish and manage sustainable development programs on five continents through this work with Lutheran World Relief, Heifer International, Argos International, and Church World Service. He is the author of A Spirituality of Service: Reflections on a Life-long Journey of Faith and Work Among the World’s Poor (Pfeifer-Hamilton, 2012). He and his wife Judy now live in Montana.

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October 5, 2012

thousand folding chairs on that gym floor filled with students and faculty every day for chapel. I probably listened to about four to five hundred chapel talks during those years. I don’t remember any specific details of those meditations, but I do recall the deep commitment to faithfulness and the passion for service to church and society that was expressed by those many pastors and teachers who shared their knowledge, wisdom and life stories with us students. Memories of encounters with those and other caring and questioning mentors along the way influenced me then and continue to do so to this day as I have tried to live out my life of faith and service in the world. It was during those college days when questions about what to do with our lives and what kind of life we wanted it to be were spinning around in our heads. And, indeed, there seemed to be such a wide-open expanse of time and possibilities ahead. The question then was this: What is God’s will for my life? Certainly that question, the discernment of God’s will for my life, did not get resolved in one fell swoop! No, it continued on throughout my career and journey of faith and service and showed up in the most unexpected times and places around the world. And now we can hardly believe it—fifty years have sped by. And so I think back on and remember some of those I met along the way here at Luther and others whom God kept putting in my path to remind me to watch for the will of God. Some of those people on the path were long-term relationships—others were brief momentary encounters. Let me tell you of one such fleeting encounter many years ago.

JERRY AAKER

One sunny morning some years ago I was walking on Walking on up the path that morning I thought about a trail in the Cuchumatane mountains in Guatemala. As I waiting for the will of God in my own life, thankful for her walked through pastures and fields to visit farms and homes testimony, her reminder to me. And since that brief encounter of the Indian families who participated on the path up the mountain, her imin a sheep project that had been of much age and witness to me has come back benefit in this area, I came upon an old into my consciousness many time over woman sitting on a stone wall. Her the years, perhaps the prompting of deeply wrinkled and leathery brown the Spirit. face displayed the effects of many years The old Mayan woman had shown exposure to the direct sun of this high me her faith that morning and I am sure altitude. I was more enriched by her than she was “Buenas días, Señora, Como está by me in that chance encounter on a cool usted?” (Good morning, madam, how December morning. are you?), I asked. When I am on a trip, I am not alShe smiled, showing her few reways on the move. There are many pauses maining teeth. “Buenas días, señor! Estoy and stops along the way. Sometimes esperando la voluntad de Dios!” (Good I become impatient with the pace. I morning, sir. I am waiting for the will found this to be especially true in Latin of God), she replied. America with regard to time. Politeness I was curious about this greeting and relationships are more highly valued and stopped to chat. She told me that than promptness and the achievement she lives alone. “My husband died three of an agenda. Taking time to chat, to years ago, and I have no one to take care listen, to be quiet and to wait patiently A Mayan woman Jerry met on a mountain are important values. of me now.” trail in Guatemala. “What about your children?” This was not easy for me. But the “I have none,” she said. “I live up there,” as she pointed prayer of waiting for the will of God may be just that—sitting up the steep slope behind me, “on the other side of that crest.” still in the presence of God, allowing the Spirit of Jesus to And I could imagine the humbleness of her abode—very little pray within me—watching for the will of God. of the material things of this world, a dirt floor, a thatch roof, In writing about waiting prayer, Sue Monk Kidd said: adobe walls. She carried a piece of kindling wood and a small bag of [Waiting prayer] has little to do with petition food. She told me that she was out looking for food and I supand intercession and getting God to fix things…. posed that this old widow went around to her neighbors each We place ourselves in postures of the heart, in day asking for help in her old age. And surely her neighbors the stillness that enables us to become aware of would have shared with her, as is the custom in that Mayan what God is doing so that we can gradually say culture. yes to it with our whole being…. Attentiveness is As she spoke about herself and her life, tears welled up vital to waiting. The word wait comes from a root in her eyes. “I am 83 years old, and I’m waiting for the will of word meaning “to watch.” To wait on God means God,” she repeated. In Spanish, the word esperar means both to watch keenly for God’s coming. Watchers and to wait and to expect. I wondered for a moment if she was waiters were nearly synonymous.1 actually expecting to be called by God that very day—but I rather suspect that her attitude was just openness to the Spirit Earlier I said that I do not remember the specifics of all of God every single day of her life. those chapel talks I heard as a student here at Luther, but Then she looked right at me and said, “Dios es Grande!” that’s not quite true. I agreed—“Yes, God is Great.” I felt comforted and At the conclusion of each of his talks, campus Pastor assured that the Spirit was right there hearing her real and Gordon Selbo always finished with this question: “And what sincere supplication to God—to take her to be at God’s about you?” He wanted to bring the point of the message and side—or just waiting to see what was God’s will for her that the Scripture text right back to us and challenge us to ponder day, a habit of a life time. its meaning and application to our lives. I was warmed and touched by that brief and poignant So, I leave you with that same question. What about you? encounter on the path that day. Was it because her tears were What about you as you wait and watch today, these days, this so authentic and not intended to solicit my pity? She was not year and the years to come, for what is the will of God for asking anything of me—not begging nor preying on my guilt your life? and asking for sympathy. No, instead she was giving something to me—something deep within her—a simple and primitive campesina faith in the goodness of God. Endnotes As I departed I said, “May God bless you,” and she 1. Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits, San Francisco, Harper, responded—“And to you—Gracias.” 1992. pp 129, 130.

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Reformation Chapel: From Conflict to Communion October 26, 2012

Text: Romans 3: 19-28 Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

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n this coming Sunday, September 28 in 2012, we will commemorate the day in 1517, when Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg. Today’s scripture passage from by

WANDA DEIFELT

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Wanda Deifelt came to Luther in 2004 and she is a professor of religion and head of that department. Her research interests include contextual Christian theologies (particularly feminism and liberation), Reformation, ecumenism, interdisciplinary studies on embodiment, and interfaith dialogue. As she mentions in this talk, she is a member of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (from the Vatican) and the Lutheran World Federation, a group working on the next phase of the ecumenical dialogue.

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Romans has long been associated with the Reformation because it touches on the key issue addressed by reformers in the sixteenth century, namely, justification by faith. There is no way human beings can find righteousness through their own means or works, much less so with the purchase of indulgences. Because of our fallen, sinful condition, we can only understand and grasp the redemptive word of God through God’s grace, which reaches us in the wretchedness of our lives.

The 500th anniversary of Luther’s posting of the ninety-five theses … [in 2017] will be the first time in history that a centennial anniversary will happen in a world that is ecumenical, globalized, and aware of religious pluralism. Martin Luther was calling for a debate on these very ideas when he posted his ninety-five theses at the door of the Castle Church, in Wittenberg, on October 31, 1517, but he did not envision that it would eventually lead to the splitting of the church. It did. At its center this debate was ultimately not an academic exchange of ideas on the centrality of the Scriptures, the priesthood of all baptized believers, the theology of the sacraments, or the role of Christians in society. At stake was salvation itself. The Catholic Church deemed Luther a heretic and excommunicated him. Luther called the pope an ass and named him Antichrist. Two separate camps, Lutherans and Catholics, have been at each other for centuries, and the centennial anniversary of the reformation is a good indicator of that. In 1617, for example, the first centennial celebration of the posting of the ninety-five theses was used to unite followers of the Reformation (including here Lutherans and Calvinists) and strengthen their opposition to the Catholics, who were themselves engaged at the Council of Trent in pointing out the errors of the reformers. Lutherans spent the next centuries celebrating Martin Luther as the liberator from the Roman yoke; eventually they gave him the status of a German national hero in 1917, during the First World War. Although Luther seldom used the word reformation for this movement, in his “Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses,” he stated, “The church needs a reformation which is not the work of man, namely the pope, or of many men, namely the cardinals, both of which the most recent council has demonstrated, but it is the work of the whole world, indeed it is the work of God alone. However, only God who

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

has created time knows the time for this reformation.”1 The of the Christian faith, as it had been spelled out already in church under constant reform—ecclesia semper reformanda—is the Augsburg Confession. In 1983, on the 500th anniversary one of the tenets we inherited from Martin Luther as well. It of Martin Luther’s birth, the international dialogue between has inspired us to translate the message of God’s acceptance, Catholics and Lutherans jointly affirmed a number of Luther’s forgiveness, and transformation ever anew, making the Gospel essential concerns. The commission’s report identified Martin vibrant for each new generation. Luther a “witness to Jesus Christ” and declared: “Christians, In 2017 we will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the whether Protestant or Catholic, cannot disregard the person Reformation. In Europe there are preparations well underway and the message of this man.” since 2007, a decade before the actual event. The Lutheran This background information probably sparked your World Federation and the World Council of Churches have curiosity about the upcoming year of 2017, with the 500th anlaunched special programs. The town of Wittenberg in Gerniversary of Luther’s posting of the ninety-five theses. After all, many is preparing for waves of visitors. A special garden was it will be the first time in history that a centennial anniversary designed, with 500 trees planted by people from around the will happen in a world that is ecumenical, globalized, and world, following the blueaware of religious pluralism. print of Luther’s famous Since 2009, I have been rose. Based on centuries of part of a group of Catholics disputes, and sometimes and Lutherans appointed by even wars between Lutherthe Pontifical Council for Proans and Catholics, how do moting Christian Unity (from you think the 500th anniverthe Vatican) and the Lutheran sary of the reformation will World Federation to work be acknowledged? on the next phase of the ecuFortunately, since the menical dialogue. We have two sixteenth century, we have mandates: first, to elaborate a made significant progress in joint statement in preparation resolving our differences no for 2017; and second, to get a longer by war but through common understanding of our dialogue. Lutherans and theology of Baptism that will Catholics today enjoy greater lead to ecumenical growth and mutual understanding, cogreater cooperation between operation, and respect due, the two churches. in great measure, to a less In our very first meeting, belligerent attitude from the three years ago, we were very Lutheran side and also the excited about these possibilireformations that happened ties, and we started to prepare within the Catholic Church, for 2017. But whereas Luthersuch as the Second Vatican ans spoke of joyously celebratCouncil in the 1960s. We ing the reformation and all have come to acknowledge its merits and achievements, that more unites us than the Catholic side was more divides us. Woodcut of the pope selling indulgences, from Passionary of the restrained and talked about In 1999, we signed the Christ and Antichrist by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553). lamenting the breaking of the Joint declaration on the unity of the body of Christ. Doctrine of Justification. In it, Catholics and the Lutheran We tentatively settled on this title: “From Conflict to Commember-churches of the Lutheran World Federation (of munion: Lutheran-Catholic Common Commemoration of which the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is a the Reformation in 2017.” member) affirmed that the very issue which gave rise to so The fifty-four page-long, single-spaced document that is much animosity—justification by faith—was no longer a point currently being evaluated both in Rome and Geneva, will—for of disagreement. In fact, Catholics and Lutherans stated that the first time—tell the story of the Reformation together! It we share a common understanding of justification by God’s is our hope that this common history will be used in colleges grace through faith in Christ. With this declaration we also and congregations and serve as a base for better understanding agreed that mutual condemnations no longer apply, and that the history and context of the reformation. we can move forward to further cooperation and witness. Of course, this is not always simple or easy. There are still By now, we have nearly fifty years of continuous ecumany challenges ahead of us. The ordination of women is still menical dialogue between Lutherans and Catholics. Already an issue. We still go to each other’s services and cannot parin 1980, when we celebrated the 450th anniversary of the ticipate in communion. ELCA Lutherans have an open table Augsburg Confession, Lutherans and Catholics acknowland we welcome all who have been baptized and want to take edged a common understanding of the foundational truths part in the Lord’s Supper. But if I go the Catholic mass, or Fall 2012/Agora

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us the wisdom to see God’s call for unity and better understanding, so we can give witness to the world that “they all were one in Christ.” Amen! Endnotes 1. Martin Luther, “Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses,” tr. Carl W. Folkemer, in Luther’s Works, American Edition, 55 vols., ed. Helmut T. Lehmann and Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia and St. Louis, 1955-1986), 31:250. (= LW); WA 1; 62,27-31.

JERRY JOHNSON

a Catholic comes to a Lutheran service, we should cross our arms to indicate that we are there to receive at least a blessing, but we are not allowed to participate in that which gives us a foretaste of salvation. Issues of ministry and sacraments and biblical interpretation continue to be challenges for further ecumenical dialogue in the years to come not only between Lutherans and Catholics, but also among Lutherans, who do not always agree on everything. During this Reformation week, one of the many important lessons we can learn is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ requires us to stand up for what we believe. But it also gives

Participants in the celebration of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification held in the Center for Faith and Life, Luther College, 31 Oct. 1999. Back: Pastor Mike Blair, Heidi Torgerson, Chris Webber, Archibishop Jerome Hanus, Father Gary Krapfl. Front: Pastor Joan Mau, Bishop April Ulring Larson, Mark Muggli, Lucas Keune (pupil at St. Benedict School, Decorah), Carol Gilbertson, Ruth Kath.

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What Does It Mean to Worship in the Spirit? November 12, 2012 Text: John 4: 20-24 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” “

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hen I was a college student, the part of the creed that confesses faith in the Holy Spirit always worked better for me than the part on Jesus Christ. The idea of the Holy Spirit worked, I think, because it was both transcendent and intimate. The Holy Spirit was able to touch my heart but also to be everywhere present. Maybe it was my Midwest self-effacing upbringing that made me uncomfortable with what felt like too much stress on Jesus as a personal God who was my special friend—it seemed too self-focused. Besides, I liked the idea of God as advocate—not the Creator / Judge, not the one who died for me, but the one who saw the good in my flawed being and held that up as what matters. But then, if I leaned toward the idea of God as Holy Spirit, what did that mean for worship? A lot of my friends would say things like: “I don’t go to church, but I’m spiritual. I think I can find God better going on a walk than going to church.” I resisted that attitude, but why, since I liked the by

KATHERINE NARVESON

Kate Narveson joined the English Department in 2000, and has been regularly teaching Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Renaissance Literature, and putting her PhD from Chicago in early English literature and her graduate degree in history from London’s Warburg Institute to work in the Paideia Program. Her 2012 book, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England, published by Ashgate Publishing, is based on a study of books and manuscripts written between 1580 and 1660.

idea of God as Spirit? For some people, an emphasis on God as Spirit calls into question the value of worship in a specific time and place, and especially calls into question a set liturgy. Doesn’t that confine the Spirit, or put our own inventions in the place the Spirit ought to be? I’ve also heard people say “I’m spiritual, and that’s why I don’t see any good in a bunch of ritual words and actions.” A bit of history—because in my scholarly research, I study religious culture in Shakespeare’s time, and often find this research helps clarify the issues for me, too. Historically, the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on salvation by grace alone exacerbated the potential tension between formal congregational worship and worship in the Spirit. Because so many of the practices that the medieval Catholic church had stressed as meritorious, as worthy ways to earn grace, were practices centered in worship, Martin Luther’s attack on vain, empty works was in part an attack on traditional worship: repeating prayers, lighting candles to the Virgin. The attack on such practices was in part that they were mere empty ritual, with no intrinsic value. Thus the attack on works tended to tar congregational worship in general. Some Protestant sects, in the decades following Luther, took this line—echoing John 4, they would say, “we are neither Samaritans nor Jews, because we now worship in the spirit, not tied to Jerusalem or any other place.” And who wouldn’t prefer the spirit to the letter? Who wants to be focused on what could easily become empty ritual, or legalistic concern with getting the details right? At one church I attended, the altar guild fought over how to clean up after Communion: was it okay to vacuum up the body of Christ? Given that kind of focus, we can see the value in shifting to an emphasis on the spirit. God’s Spirit touches our hard hearts, and true worship flows from the heart, softened by the spirit and made responsive to God’s presence. True worship was spiritual, bending not the body’s knees but the knees of the heart. One consequence of this emphasis was that the sermon became central to Protestant worship, since believers must understand what they believe. God’s grace did the work of creating faith; church services made sure people understood their faith. Worship shifted from church as performance space for ritual to church as lecture hall. But really, is that worship? Listening to theological instruction? Definitely, understanding is necessary, and sermons bring spiritual truths to life for us, but what about making sure the Spirit is present too? Another way to put the Reformation dilemma, and the dilemma of anyone who stresses the work of the Spirit, is this: if you cannot make yourself feel praise or joy, can’t make yourself love God, because that has to be the work of the Spirit, then Fall 2012/Agora

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how can you feel worshipful just because it’s 9:30 Sunday morning and church is starting? What can people do, besides sit around and wait till the Holy Spirit kindles some spark in them … which makes it hard to schedule church service. I got interested in the Reformation perspective on this problem when I was in graduate school and reading great Protestant poets like George Herbert. Herbert tends to put the individual’s relation to God at the center of devotion, and not to write much about shared worship. One poem, “Sion,” starts by talking about the temple in Jerusalem: Lord, with what glory wast thou served of old, When Solomon’s temple stood and flourished! Where most things were of purest gold; The wood was all embellished With flowers and carvings, mystical and rare; All showed the builder’s, craved the seer’s care. Yet all this glory, all this pomp and state Did not affect thee much, was not thy aim. All Solomon’s sea of brass and world of stone Is not so dear to thee as one good groan. And truly brass and stones are heavy things, Tombs for the dead, not temples fit for thee. But groans are quick, and full of wings. And all their motions upward be …. For Herbert, the individual is the true temple of God. Yet he was a pastor. So why have congregational worship in a church? Reformation thought also offered ideas that helped me answer that question. The people I study believed that godly emotions could be engendered and cultivated and inflamed through devotional practices. If you focus on a certain idea, it’s going to affect how you feel. Focus on your sinfulness, and you’ll start to feel wretched. Focus on God’s saving grace, and you’ll start to feel joy. These cultivated feelings were not perceived as inauthentic or artificial by early modern Protestants. Their attitude was more like the modern psychologists who find that people can put themselves into a genuinely good mood by focusing on good thoughts. So does this help think about how worship can be in the Spirit, and can also be scheduled? We gather, we focus on thoughts of God that kindle certain feelings. And thus we put ourselves in the way of the Spirit, and the Spirit finds our hearts. Still, people might argue that they can put themselves in the way of the Spirit just as well in the comfort of their own dorm rooms, and why is it any more valuable to go to church? This attitude isn’t new—Protestant preachers asked “what shall we then think of those private devotions,” where men think “that they can get as much good in their warm chamber by reading of books, as in the public congregation?” Another pastor offers a good answer that still speaks to us as we wonder why go to church. Daniel Featley wrote that in private, a person may feel “some soft and sweet blasts of the spirit” but in public worship, the spirit comes “like a mighty 64

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Pentecost. Artist unknown. From the Acts of the Apostles printed in Tbilisi, Georgia, 1709. rushing wind.” To give a more modern example, imagine a rock concert without a crowd; or a symphony concert with only you in the audience; or a dance, with just the band and you out there on the floor grooving to the beat. In theory, all you need is you and the music—why does it matter whether there’s anyone else there? So maybe worship is similar to live music, needing to be a shared experience: shared worship, at a given time, maybe even with shared rituals. It’s not just that we can foster joy and praise in our own hearts by going to church to focus our minds on God’s amazing grace. It’s also that we get something wonderful from sharing that Spirit with each other. There’s a poem by a contemporary of Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, which captures for me what shared worship can be, at its best. Spenser prays: …that Thy love we weighing worthily, May likewise love Thee for the same againe; And for Thy sake, that all lyke deare didst buy, With love may one another entertayne! So let us love, deare Love, lyke as we ought, —Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught. If the Spirit of worship is the Spirit of Love, then is it enough to worship alone? How can we fail to want to gather with others?

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Indeed, Herbert goes on to tell God,

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earch “Agora” on the Luther College homepage. Then click on “Paideia: Agora....” A hotlink to the archives portal appears; click on it. You will be at: “Luther College Publications Archive” where you “click to enter” and then “select publication,” using the dropdown box to choose either Agora or The College Chips—the complete files of both Agora and the campus newspaper are available. You can search using names, words or phrases, and dates. You can read online or download as a PDF.

Changing your address? Want to stop receiving Agora? If you do, please email or write us! Contact Agora, c/o boesejud@luther. edu, or write Agora, Main 126, Luther College, 700 College Dr., Decorah, IA 52101. The image above 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.