Agora Fall 2022

THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE FALL 2022

Martin Klammer, editor

Bonnie Tunnicliff Johnson, production editor

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

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

To see the current issue and archival issues online, go to www.luther.edu/paideia/agora.

Reports from the Field

The Peculiar Case of the Reverend Knut Klinger H. George Anderson ............................................................................................... 3

Sabbaticals

The Luther Entomological Research Collection: Documenting Northeast Iowa's Insect Biodiversity

Kirk Larsen 6

The Baptism of "Turks" and "Moors" in the Early Modern German-Speaking World: Religion, Identity, and Symbolism

Robert Christman ................................................................................................... 9

The Dead, Robots, and End-of-Life Care in Japan: How to Deal With/Study Inconvenient Phenomena

Gereon Kopf 12

Investigating Sunflower Ancestry and Catching Up to Next-Generation Sequencing

Eric Baack ............................................................................................................ 19

A Semester in Bulgaria: A Window into Beauty, History, Community, and Hope Alexandra White ................................................................................................... 22

Reconciling Wealth and Faith Kate Narveson 28

Puzzles

Target Practice

Tommy Occipinti .................................................................................................. 32

Chapel Talks

Travel Testimony: Unexpected Experiences (August 28, 2022)

Marv Slind .......................................................................................................... 33

Our Wittenberg Year (September 23, 2022)

Max Holt ('23) 35

Open the Eyes of Your Heart (October 12, 2022)

Holly Moore 36

Always Re-Founding (October 14, 2022)

Jenifer Ward ......................................................................................................... 38

Post Script

Director's Notes for Macbeth

Robert J. Vrtis ....................................................................................................... 40

Cover: Bridge to Farwell Hall Martin Klammer

Introduction

by MARTIN KLAMMER, Professor of English, Editor of Agora

Make It New” the poet and critic Ezra Pound famously proclaimed in his 1934 collection of essays of the same name. Ironically, Pound’s modernist slogan of the value of novelty was itself not new. Pound scholars who specialize in his fascination with Chinese texts point out that he likely discovered the saying in an anecdote about Ch’eng T’ang, first king of the Shang dynasty (1766–1753 BC). The king was said to have had a washbasin inscribed with “Make It New.”1

The fact that Pound’s famous dictum is itself recycled suggests just how difficult it is to make anything new. And yet in reading the sabbatical essays as they arrived for this edition of Agora, I was impressed with how our faculty continue to make things new in their scholarship and teaching.

Robert Christman, whose awardwinning 2020 book examined the execution of two Augustinian friars in 1523 and its historical significance for Reformation history, writes in this issue on his latest research interest: how Lutheran, Catholic, and Reformed Christians in German-speaking areas “responded to the sudden appearance of ‘others’” in the late sixteenth century and integrated them into society.2 These “others” were Islamic captives as a result of wars with the Ottoman Empire and Black Africans from Muslim or pagan backgrounds in the Atlantic slave trade brought to the German-speaking lands in large numbers for the first time. Integration into German Christendom involved baptism, raising a number of thorny theological issues which Robert investigates.

Alexandra White writes of her sabbatical as a Fulbright Scholar in Bulgaria, a country she admits she knew little about, though she and her husband

had traveled widely. Her experience required the kind of flexibility and resilience that often comes with life in another country, such as developing a graduate-level course on the spot after finding out that the course she thought she would teach was not being offered. But her willingness to try new things led to judging a high school speech contest and serving as faculty advisor for a social innovation competition. When Russia invaded Ukraine just three weeks after Alexandra and her family arrived in Bulgaria, she had the opportunity to tutor a Ukrainian refugee in English. Though Alexandra taught in various contexts during her Fulbright, her essay makes clear that she was also a student, opening herself to new adventures and opportunities in her teaching and travels.

The sabbatical projects of other faculty members show their curiosity and initiative, even if the results were not always what was intended. Eric Baack concludes that his sabbatical on genome sequencing in sunflower species did not yield all of the results he had hoped, yet “I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far.” The faculty in this issue model the habit of mind that President Jenifer Ward speaks of in her chapel talk—that of “always becoming.” It’s a theme she has expressed in various talks going back to her inaugural speech in 2019. The idea is based on a connection she discovered in writings by Martin Luther and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: we should be “always questioning, always loving the questions, and always in the process of becoming, knowing that to answer the questions would be to stop growing and becoming.”

A somewhat unexpected model of “always becoming” is in the essay that immediately follows. H. George Anderson, former Luther College President

Martin Klammer

and Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, turns investigative journalist in submitting his story on the mysterious case of the Reverend Knut Klinger almost 40 years ago. I hope you enjoy the story and enjoy the issue as much as Bonnie and I have in putting it together.

Notes

1. Michael North, “The Making of ‘Make It New.’” Guernica, Aug 15, 2013 (https:// www.guernicamag.com/the-making-ofmaking-it-new/)

2. The Dynamics of the Early Reformation in their Reformed Augustinian Context (Amsterdam University Press, 2020).

The Peculiar Case of the Reverend Knut Klinger

by H. GEORGE ANDERSON, President of Luther College 1982-96

Irecently received a file on the storied case of Reverend Knut Klinger and his candidacy for campus pastor. The file was sent to me by Robert Shoffner, who had led the search committee and was apparently cleaning out old files. Although the file is incomplete, it provides an outline of what transpired. The following is a summary.

In late November 1982, the Reverend Robert Shoffner, assistant to the president of Luther College, received a letter from Woodrow Fossegrim, interim pastor of the Lutheran church in Blackduck, Minnesota.

The letter, on church stationery, began, “The news has reached us here in Blackduck that Reverend Knut Klinger is being considered for the preacher’s job down at Luther College in Decorah. That is a blessing to hear. All of us are glad to see a chance like this open up for the guy.”

Pastor Fossegrim went on to recount that, although Reverend Klinger could “really preach,” he had begun to act strangely. “People weren’t used to a preacher coming right down in the aisle, like he did, but we never slept through church any more.” Some of the changes were good. “He even got Earl Old Person to quit drinking for a while, and Earl gave his heart to the Lord four times there in 1980.” But the erratic behavior continued: “Last spring, right after he had come back from the district convention in Moorhead, he just seemed to be different. He used his May car allowance to build a meditation yurt behind the parsonage. . . After the Luther League convention in Texas he wore a goat-roper’s hat and spurs all the time, even at weddings & funerals. Now he’s just selling Avon and Shaklee, so he needs a job real bad.”

Shoffner was surprised, because the campus pastor opening had not yet

been formally announced. He assumed that the faculty network had spread the word. His suspicions were confirmed when, in early January, he received a memo headed “Re: Campus Pastor Search” from Professor Harley Refsal.

“After reviewing all the suggested qualifications,” Refsal wrote, “I’m happy to identify the perfect candidate. Rev. Knut Klinger, a highly respected Lutheran who currently lives near Blackduck, Minnesota, is your man.” Refsal detailed many qualities of his candidate, including Klinger’s theology (“flexible”), his concern for social issues (“currently organizing a Save the Lemmings group”), and his active mind (“subscribes to Reader’s Digest, People, High Fidelity, Money, and Grit”). He listed Klinger’s interests as “sailing, Kierkegaard, French cooking, trapping, and restoring antique tractors.” He concluded, “If you want more information on this candidate, I would be happy to supply it. Frankly, I think your worries are over.”

Ten days later, a letter and a completed application form came from Klinger

H. George Anderson

IMAGES COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Recommendation for Reverend Knut Klinger from Woodrow Fossegrim, interim pastor of Blackduck Lutheran

himself. He had moved his yurt to an abandoned cemetery in Bowstring, Minnesota and described his current job as “self-employed evangelist.” He felt that he was a “spiritual goldmine,” and he wanted to “get someplace where they have a pipe organ and a mimeograph machine in working condition.”

The application form also required several character references. Two came in during the following weeks. One was from Mrs. Klinger, who was principally concerned with housing at Luther. “I was hoping you would have something lined up fairly soon,” she wrote. “I’m quite fussy when it comes to housekeeping and will need a little time picking out draperies.” The other, typed on personalized stationery, was from Charleen Sumstad, president of the Cottonwood County Gideons in Westbrook, Minnesota. Ms. Sumstad cited Reverend Klinger’s influence on her and the three other members of Blackduck Lutheran’s Senior High Luther League, noting that all of them had gone into “work for the Lord.”

There is a gap in the documentation of Klinger’s candidacy at this point, but faculty and staff members who were on the search committee remember that, despite Klinger’s remote location and rudimentary typing skills, they were able to depend on Professor Refsal’s efforts as a go-between. He forwarded their inquiries, delivered Klinger’s answers, and reported Klinger’s ever-shifting locations, economic woes, and minor achievements. He became, in a sense, Klinger’s alter ego. The search committee decided to invite Klinger for a personal interview.

No printed record exists of the interview, which took place in the Nobel Room, but evidently the committee was worried about Klinger’s preaching skills.1 Correspondence

between committee chairman Shoffner and Klinger indicates that a preaching appointment was arranged at Clayton Center, but something involving a dead opossum came up and the next letter, dated April 25, 1983, ended his candidacy. I quote the letter in its entirety:

Dear Pastor Klinger,

Thank you for your moderately well-typed application for the position of campus pastor at Luther College.

Naturally, a large number of criteria were considered as we tried to evaluate the qualifications of each candidate. While you rated highly in respect to experience and availability—you were at the very top in the latter category—the committee felt that other candidates had stronger overall appeal.

The Committee suggests that you consider improving your typing skills and learning the alphabet by memory. This would prepare you for a job in administration. Furthermore, since it appears that you have learned English as an adult, you might consider working with persons who are new to American society. Another alternative would be something in arts and crafts.

Reverend Knut Klinger's application for campus pastor, detailing his unusual career.

Reference letter for Reverend Knut Klinger from Charlene Sumstad on her personalized stationery, reprinted in full.

I hope these few remarks will be helpful to you as you consider other opportunities suitable to your numerous gifts and varied background.

Yours sincerely, President H. George Anderson

Klinger took the rejection in stride. Two remaining items in the file demonstrate his continued optimism. The first is a letter from April, 1991, once again applying for the campus pastor position, which had recently become vacant. He grumbled, “Boy, you folks sure go through campus pastors. It can’t be more than 8 years ago since you hired the last one.” He offered to “do the best job I can, and I’d stick around till retirement age.”

The final item is a photocopy of a postcard and picture. The postcard, undated and signed by Klinger, was sent to Robert Shoffner from Norway. Writing in Norwegian, Klinger reported that he was now the president of a university in Norway. “I’m writing to tell you that I have no hard feelings toward you and Luther College. To emphasize that, I’m pleased to offer you a job as my assistant.” Also on the card is a label that

reads, “Rector Knut Klinger, Julebukken Folkehøgskole, with his faculty.” I believe it refers to the other item on the page, a picture of Harley Refsal with several of his carvings.

Editor’s note: Agora has received further information about the interview from professor emeritus Loyal Rue, a member of the search committee. At a tribute for a retiring faculty member a few years back, Rue recalled that “Klinger showed up all decked out in a Norwegian sweater and a seedcorn cap and a Dolly Parton necktie. Jim Eckblad, an evolutionary biologist extraordinaire, was sitting there armed with a very sticky theological question with which he was going to use to ambush poor old Klinger: ‘Did Adam,’ Eckblad wanted to know, ‘have a belly button?’ Klinger didn’t miss a heartbeat. He came right back and said, ‘Oh I don’t think that’s the question, whether he had a belly button. Of course he had a belly button. The more interesting question is whether it was an innie or an outie.’ Then he went on to explain that God had created Adam with a great flourish and when the job was all finished he gave him a poke in the belly like the Pillsbury doughboy and that’s how we know that Adam had an innie.” Rue’s remarks may be heard by copying and pasting this address into your web browser: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3cpco3xetl06la3/01%20Harley%20Refsal%27s%20Retirement%20 Tribute%20copy.mp3?dl=0

Postcard (above) and photo (below right) from Reverend Knut Klinger, Rector of Julebakken Folkehøgskole, sent to Luther College from Norway, 1991.

The Luther Entomological Research Collection: Documenting Northeast Iowa's Insect Biodiversity

by KIRK LARSEN, Professor of Biology

Our Luther College mission statement refers to embracing diversity, presenting knowledge into a larger world, and practicing “joyful stewardship of the resources that surround us” where “river, woodland, and prairie meet.” These phrases intersect perfectly with my ongoing research program of the entomology research laboratory in the biology department where our goal is to provide students meaningful research experiences in insect ecology and opportunities to actively explore entomology as a subdiscipline of biology, with the purpose of contributing to our knowledge of and leading to the conservation of insect diversity in northeast Iowa. The driftless region where we reside in Northeast Iowa is “where river, woodland, and prairie meet,” and to be able to steward “the resources that surround us” we first need to understand and know the biodiversity that surrounds us.

Over the past 29 years, the Luther Entomological Research Collection

(LERC) has grown into a significant and unique repository of insect diversity in Northeast Iowa. The collection contains a number of specimens approximately 50 years old collected by Luther biology students back in the 1970s.

Building the research collection necessarily requires “collecting” insects. When ethical and responsible collection practices are used, collecting poses no threat to insect populations but is extremely valuable from scientific and educational perspectives. During research surveys, if we can identify insects in the field to species, they are released live. Insects are taken only when close examination is required for identification and confirmation. Since it is estimated insects outnumber us by about 200 million to one, collecting a few dozen or a couple hundred specimens for research or class projects has negligible impacts on insect populations, particularly when compared with the negative effects on insects of windshields and radiators on the front of our fossil-fuel propelled vehicles!

students habitat characteristics, insect behavior, and the interactions of the specimen with plants or other animals. Capturing their first tiger beetle, which are masters of escape and literally taunt their potential captors after escaping the net, is always an adrenaline rush for students.

Dorsal surface of a specimin of Catocala relicta, the "white underwing" moth from the Luther Entomological Research Collection, illustrating the specimen, a 5 mm size scale, and the important locality label, identification label, and LERC accession label. This image is part of the online LERC database and is searchable in SCAN.

Collecting insects is also a hands-on, experiential activity that helps students better understand and develop a connection to the biodiversity of the environment around us. Famous scientists like Charles Darwin and E.O. Wilson started out collecting insects when they were kids. The process of collecting insect specimens (ever try to get a wasp that might sting you from a net into a collecting jar?) reveals to

Collecting is also necessary because most insect species must be examined under a microscope to identify them to species. Having specimens available is crucial to document the presence and ongoing trends of insect populations for ecological studies, and to see their response to climate change or management and stewardship practices. Without specimens in hand, we’d have no clue about the majority of over 1,200 species of butterflies, moths, and beetles we have here in Northeast Iowa—for many of these, all we know about them is their name! In Genesis 2:19, Adam was commanded to name the animals, and in the ancient Hebrew culture naming required an intimate knowledge of the characteristics and features of the person or object to be named. Knowledge of plants or animals is also necessary for us to be good caretakers

Kirk Larsen

of those organisms, and is crucial in our role as stewards of the environment around us.

Natural history collections provide an important record of life on earth and possess data that are often locked away with the specimens in the cabinets, unless specimen records are made available online. The Luther Entomological Research Collection is a repository of voucher specimens of published research articles, housing specimens from studies of carrion beetles (Coyle and Larsen 1998), butterflies (Larsen and Bovee 2001, Powers and Larsen 2014, Stivers et al. 2019), ground beetles (Larsen and Williams 1999, Larsen et al. 2003, Schuh and Larsen 2015), scarab beetles (Worthington and Larsen 2010), aquatic insects (Wittman et al. 2013, McDermond-Spies et al. 2014), and numerous other types of insects. A recent study by biology student Lena Schmitt (Schmitt and Larsen 2021) found over 470 species of moths living in the planted tallgrass prairies and oak woodlands right here on Luther College property. Additional surveys of bees have found the federally-endangered rusty patched bumble bee (RPBB) in several of our planted tallgrass prairies, and RPBB queens are likely spending the winter protected in our oak woodlands, then getting nectar from the spring wildflowers in those woodlands before moving into our prairies that burst into their summer glory.

The Luther Entomological Research Collection (the LERC), one of the three primary collections of the Hoslett Museum of Natural History in the Valders Hall of Science, is an important repository of Northeast Iowa insect biodiversity, and includes many

state record specimens (insect species not previously found in Iowa or documented in any collection).

Having grown from about 2,800 specimens in 1996, the Luther Entomological Research Collection now contains well over 12,000 accessioned specimens in 170 drawers housed within 16 cabinets hidden in a storage room in Sampson Hoffland Laboratory. Over 1,200 different insect species have been identified in the collection, and 75% of the collection is georeferenced, allowing precise locality data for the majority of specimens in the collection. Most of the species identifications are from numerous past and current insect biodiversity surveys by Luther biology students performed in the tallgrass prairies, forests, streams and other habitats on campus and nearby in northeast Iowa. A total of 20 publications (to date) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature have produced voucher specimens found in the LERC. Visits both in person and virtually by a number of researchers from around the country have resulted in collaborations, and some groups of insects have been identified by experts in their field, providing new information on species distribution patterns not previously known.

versity present in our collection. With only about 12,000 specimens to go, photographing them and getting images posted will take many years!

Although our collection is small by some standards (e.g. the U.S. National Entomological Collection at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History houses over 35 million specimens), the LERC has a unique role documenting the insect biodiversity of the driftless region in northeast Iowa, southeast Minnesota, and southwest Wisconsin, and has unique records that provide important biodiversity information for this area, and we want to and should share these data with the broader scientific community.

Digitized collections greatly enhance the ability of scientists to conduct research on biodiversity and answer some of the most fundamental questions for biodiversity researchers like myself—questions such as how species are distributed spatially, temporally, and ecologically. The answers hidden in collection data may help us better understand the consequences of habitat loss and ongoing global climate change.

Each individual specimen has a unique catalog number which is associated with a record in our collection database. Several hundred specimens have now been photographed, and these closeup photographs help document the biodi-

The primary goal of my sabbatical this past spring was to upload the Luther Entomological Research Collection to an online database called Symbiota, and connect our collection to an online data portal through the Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN, https:// scan-bugs.org) which provides access to over 65 million specimen records from insect collections at museums and institutions primarily in North America. A major task during my sabbatical was reorganizing and rearranging the collection to get all specimens arranged appropriately within the collection. This task required the use of the entire entomology teaching lab and research lab space. With the help of four biology students this past spring semes-

An endangered rusty patched bumble bee (RPBB) Bombus affinis, visiting a Culver's root flower in Gateway Prairie during July 2021. Specimens of the RPBB are in the collection from before it was listed. Today, we document RPBB digitally and do not collect it due to its endangered species status.

IMAGES COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

ter, we were able to complete the major reorganization of the collection, upload the database to Symbiota, and add numerous new specimens to the collection. Through SCAN, our collection is also now visible on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) specimen portal (www.gbif.org) which has over 1.5 billion specimen records from collections worldwide.

In April, I was able to travel to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to visit their entomology department. They also use Symbiota, the program that we use to share our biodiversity information with researchers around the world. During that visit I confirmed that our insect collection accession and digitization methods were the same as those used by collections literally hundreds of times larger than the LERC.

This project will significantly enhance my teaching by allowing students now to access data from the LERC for class exercises and projects. This project may also provide a source for new biodiversity research questions, inspiring future study and field surveys that will involve our students in our natural areas, while giving current students opportunities to participate in monitoring and documentation of globally significant but local biodiversity.

Works Cited

Coyle, D.R & K.J. Larsen. 1998. Carrion beetles (Coleoptera: Silphidae) of Northeastern Iowa: a comparison of baits for sampling. Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science 105(4): 161–164.

Larsen, K.J. & J.A. Bovee. 2001. Changes in the butterflies (Lepidoptera) of Winneshiek County, Iowa after 90 years. Great Lakes Entomologist 34(1): 43–54.

Larsen, K.J. & J.B.Williams. 1999. Influence of fire and trapping effort on ground beetles in a reconstructed tallgrass prairie. Prairie Naturalist 31 (2): 77–88.

Larsen, K.J., T.W. Work, and F.F. Purrington. 2003. Habitat use patterns by ground beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae) of northeastern Iowa. Pedobiologia 47: 288–299.

McDermond-Spies, N., D. Broman, A. Brantner, and K.J. Larsen. 2014. Family-level benthic macroinvertebrate communities indicate successful relocation and restoration of a Northeast Iowa stream. Ecological Restoration 32(2): 161-170.

Powers, N.M. & K.J. Larsen. 2014. Butterflies (Lepidoptera) on hill prairies of Allamakee County, Iowa: A Comparison of the Late 1980s with 2013. Great Lakes Entomologist 47(3-4): 129-143.

Schmitt, L. and K.J. Larsen. 2021. Moths of oak-hickory forests and planted tallgrass prairies on Luther College natural areas in Decorah, Iowa. Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 75(1): 49-64.

Schuh, M. & K.J. Larsen. 2015. European buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) invasion reduces ground-dwelling insect abundance and diversity in northeast Iowa forests. Environmental Entomology 44(3): 647-657, DOI: 10.1093/ee/ nvv050.

Stivers, E.K., J.T. Wittman and K.J. Larsen. 2019. A comparison of adult butterfly communities on remnant and planted prairies in northeast Iowa. Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 73(4): 268-274.

Wittman, J., A. Weckwerth, C. Weiss, S. Heyer, J. Seibert, B. Kuennen, C. Ingels, L. Seigley, K. Larsen & J. Enos-Berlage. 2013. Evaluation of land use and water quality in an agricultural watershed in the United States indicates multiple sources of bacterial impairment.

Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 185: 10395-10420.

Worthington, R.J. & K.J. Larsen. 2010 An annotated checklist of scarab beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) from Northeastern Iowa. Great Lakes Entomologist 43: 84-97.

Several drawers of butterflies in a cabinet of the LERC

A drawer of sphinx or hawk moths from the LERC. The white-lined sphinx moths found in the lower right quarter of the cabinet are common evening pollinators in the Decorah area during the late summer.

The Baptism of "Turks" and "Moors" in the Early Modern German-Speaking World: Religion, Identity, and Symbolism

by ROBERT CHRISTMAN, Professor of History

In recent years, deep concerns about society’s failures in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion have occupied the attention of Americans and others across the globe. At their core, these issues are about how individuals and groups with differing identities, ethnicities, and backgrounds should co-exist. Although they may seem contemporary and even novel, in their own ways and contexts, such questions have always existed. In the German-speaking lands, they achieved a new immediacy in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My sabbatical project, “The Baptism of ‘Turks’ and ‘Moors’ in the Early Modern GermanSpeaking World: Religion, Identity, and Symbolism,” is an investigation of how Lutheran, Catholic, and Reformed Christians in this area responded to the sudden appearance of “others” in their midst and how they went about integrating them into society.

Until the sixteenth century, medieval Europe had been a largely closed society, defining and differentiating itself not via race or ethnicity, but by religion. Contemporaries understood Europe as the Corpus Christianum, the body of all Christians, a concept that is encapsulated in our word “Christendom” with its religious, political, and geographic connotations. Of course, there was always movement within Europe so that minority individuals or groups were not unknown. But despite their linguistic and ethnic differences, all were products of a Latin Christian mono-culture that dominated most of Europe, particularly the North. A few exceptions existed. The Jews, for example, were allowed to remain under highly regulated conditions. And individual traders and war captives from around the Mediterranean could be found especially in the cities of southern Europe, but these were mostly individual cases.

But in the late sixteenth century, two historical phenomena began to bring significant numbers of individuals from outside of a Judeo-Christian, European context into the German-speaking lands. As a result of wars against the Ottoman Empire, Islamic captives began appearing in large numbers. What began as a trickle reached its peak following the failure of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. One contemporary observed, “Slavery rolled over our land anew as the result of the successful wars against the Turks achieved with the help of God. From [those wars] came prisoners in numbers heretofore unknown.”1

At the same time, the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade brought “Moors”— Black Africans from Muslim or pagan backgrounds—to the German-speaking lands in significant numbers for the first time. Found mostly in the courts of the nobility, such individuals were regarded as status symbols. Scholarship is still far from able to calculate accurately how many people from the Ottoman Empire and sub-Saharan Africa were living in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German-speaking lands, but they must have numbered in the thousands. For most inhabitants of these regions, such individuals were the first true “outsiders” they ever encountered.

Their presence raised new questions for German-speaking society. Although Europeans were still grappling with the fallout from the Protestant Reformation and the break up of the Catholic Church, all of Europe’s Christian confessions nonetheless agreed that entrée into society required conversion to Christianity, demonstrated via the rite of baptism. Lutheran theologians used the German word einverleiben to describe this integration into Christendom, the act of literally becoming a living part of a body, a concept used by St. Paul to illustrate membership in the

Christian community. From 1573 on, when the first known of such baptisms was recorded in the Saxon city of Halle, the practice became increasingly widespread and elaborate, reaching its apex around 1700.2 Such baptisms offered early modern society a forum in which to debate questions surrounding the assimilation of “outsiders,” a ritual for that incorporation to take place publicly to which various meanings were assigned, and often insight into the origins, biography, and the degree of integration achieved by the individuals being baptized. These three strands represent the three directions my work is currently proceeding.

The first is to consider the intellectual implications of bringing these “outsiders” into the Corpus Christianum, for such baptisms raised new theological questions among Protestants. In published pamphlets Lutheran pastors debated whether, for example, a four-year-old child from pagan Guinea sold into slavery should be baptized like an infant, or must she first reach the age of discernment, then be given the choice? Should a distinction be made

Robert Christman

between the age to baptize children from Christian families and those from Muslim or other religious backgrounds? Or was a child simply a child, despite familial religion? And was it compulsory to manumit captives who had converted to Christianity? At the heart of these questions was really the issue of essential difference: can the “outsider” achieve belonging or is he or she somehow essentially and always different. Among Catholics, with longer-standing traditions of interactions with peoples from outside of the Judeo-Christian context, it was the situation of the Ottoman Turks in particular that raised new theological questions, mostly associated with concerns that arose after peace with the Ottoman Empire was signed in 1699. Closest to the military front, cities such as Vienna and Munich, were filled with captive Turks, suddenly freed as a result of the treaty. Letters between churchmen and government officials that I discovered in the archives of those cities indicate that questions regarding the religious status of subjects of the Ottoman empire who had converted to Christianity while in captivity were especially difficult. Had they been coerced to convert or done so out of free will? Were they “true” Christians or not? What would become of those who chose to return to the Ottoman Empire? Would they be executed for

apostacy as Islam demanded? What about captive Turkish women who had married Christian men and therefore undergone the Christian sacrament of marriage? Were they Muslims or Christians? And should they be allowed to return to the Ottoman Empire or be forced to stay? And what of children of such unions, were they to be considered Muslims (and allowed to return to the Ottoman Empire) or Christians (and forced to stay in Christendom)? In short, interactions by both Protestants and Catholics with the early modern “other” led to a series of new theological questions that presaged the increasing complexity all confessions would face as Western Christianity encountered the wider world.

A second strand of my work is to think about the baptisms themselves, and the meaning of these rituals for society. Certainly they were used as another battle ground for truth claims by the various Christian confessions. But such predictable differences beg more substantive questions of a comparative nature regarding relative numbers, frequency, and utilization of such baptisms, and may ultimately reveal different confessional understandings of “the other.” The most spectacular baptisms took place under the patronage of the nobility, and often included a dozen or more aristocratic godparents, with

thousands of spectators in attendance. Such elaborate public services, described in great detail in the archival records of Court Marshals, those officials responsible for all court ceremony, raise the question as to why these events became the prerogative of the nobility. What meaning(s) did they ascribe to them? Was it an issue of increasing fascination with the exotic so prominent in the early modern courts? Or does the praise heaped by churchmen upon those nobles for bringing poor souls to salvation indicate that such patrons received status from these baptisms? The extreme power differential inherent in them suggests that, at least in part, they were examples of performative subjugation.

And the third strand of my sabbatical project is to discern as much as possible about the lives and experiences of these forced immigrants to Europe. In this regard, printed baptism sermons are particularly helpful because they often include a short biography of the individual being baptized, such as the young boy from Guinea, stolen by “black Jews” as he gathered wood for his mother, sold to the Portuguese, then to the English, then to a German merchant in London, and eventually gifted to a court official in Saxony. Via such sources, we begin to get a sense for the lives of these individuals.

In a few cases, the archives have been particularly revealing, providing not only insight into baptized “outsiders”, but the lives of some of the unbaptized as well. For example, I discovered the cases of the “Moor” Balthasar from Dessau, accused of stealing from his master, the Elector of Brandenburg, and sentenced to learn the catechism so that he might eventually be baptized and “lead an honorable Christian life”; and the Turk, Osmann, a wealthy Muslim

Interactions by both Protestants and Catholics with the early modern “other” led to a series of new theological questions.

“Sarazens” (1486), a woodcut by the Dutch artist Erhard Reuwich.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS: PUBLIC DOMAIN

merchant from Istanbul, who spent years living in Dresden in the house of a Christian butcher, only to die suddenly without having been baptized and without leaving an heir. What should be done with his body? (Answer: it should be buried outside the city as deeply as possible without any marker.) And what should be done with his considerable fortune? (Answer: it should be confiscated by the prince and used in the construction of the Frauenkirche in Dresden). Such examples reveal a great deal not only about the lives of these unbaptized individuals, but about the attitudes of broader society toward them.

It comes as no surprise that early modern answers to the question of how individuals and groups from disparate backgrounds should be treated and integrated differ from today’s responses to these questions. In this case, history does not provide us with direct answers. But studying how this past culture grappled with such questions reminds us that they are universal; that we are part of humanity’s long-running effort to address them; and that as historical contexts change, they must be confronted ever and anew.

Notes

1. Postquam igitur servitus de novo quasi invasit ex bello huc usque per DEI gratiam fausto contra Turcas, quorum mancipia nobis obvenerunt quam plurima. Gottfried Ittig and Johannes Königk, Disputatio Juridica de Mancipiorum Turcicorum Manumissione Baptismo implicata. Leipzig: 1689, 4.

2. Markus Friedrich, “Türkentaufen: zur theologischen Problematik und geistlichen Deutung der Konversion von Musilmen im Alten Reich.”

Zeitsprünge 16 (2012): 47-74, 50.

The Dead, Robots, and End-of-Life Care in Japan: How to Deal With/Study Inconvenient Phenomena

by GEREON KOPF, Professor of Religion

In Spring 2020, I was awarded a sabbatical for 2020-2021 as well as a Paideia supplemental grant plus two external research fellowships. In preparation of my sabbatical I had applied to these grants to finance my research in Japan. At the same time (2020-2022), I served as the principal investigator of a Wabash Center grant aimed at developing models to “teach philosophy of religion inclusively to diverse students.” Obviously, the pandemic made it impossible for me to travel during my sabbatical and limited my interaction with colleagues to zoom conferences. But I used the rather long period of time at home interrupted only by long evening walks to develop a new philosophy that analyzes why we human beings insist on drawing boundaries and erecting walls between what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities,” regardless of whether they are stratified as religious, national, ethnic, ideological, or whatever identities; refuse to cross/ transgress these artificial boundaries; and relish in dividing the world along the lines of identity politics into good and bad, us versus them. My philosophy introduces a radically new way of conceptualizing and practicing inter-cultural, inter-religious, inter-ideological, and inter-personal encounters. I presented the blueprint of this philosophy in my Paideia Texts and Issues lecture plus the customary accompanying Agora article in the fall of 2021. In summer 2022, I published a mature version of this approach, which I call alternatingly “philosophy of expression” or “multi-entry philosophy,” in Culture and Dialogue and presented it in talks at Nanzan, Tōhoku, Shirayuri, and Tokyo Universities this summer in Nagoya, Sendai, and Tokyo. This summer, the restrictions for travel to Japan finally eased to a degree that I was able to embark on my research trip that I had planned for my sabbatical, albeit in truncated form. I spent the

better part of June, July, and August at Tōhoku University in Sendai, Japan. During this time, I explored a new line of research inquiry—what could be called a philosophy of death/the dead—as well as the use of robots in Buddhist temples in Japan. I was able to squeeze quite a few interviews, academic discussions, workshops, conferences, talks, library time, field trips, and site visits into these two months. Three topics featured prominently during my time in Japan and made it into the title of this essay: the communication with the dead, the use of and interaction with robots as well as the conception of Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI), and an innovative program in spiritual care at Tōhoku University, one aspect of which is end-of-life-care. Most readers will probably struggle to see a relationship between these three topics. But there is, at least, one fundamental commonality. One of the larger research projects that I am working on these days involves the development of a new conception of consciousness/mind. The three phenomena discussed above relate directly to our understanding of consciousness. The positive response to each of these three topics (even though I assume there are not too many readers responding positively to all three phenomena) maps out the central conundrum of consciousness studies. I will return to this conundrum later. I will introduce these three phenomena, and then outline what they teach us about the study and nature of consciousness. If the title has not scared you off and you have read this far but are not sure about the topic, I ask you to bear with me. My research is not about occult phenomena but about the “enduring questions”: “what makes us human?” and “what is consciousness?” Most of all, I would like to explore the question of how to deal with inconvenient phenomena that do not fit our worldview.

So let’s start with the dead, to be exact with the communication with the dead. Based on my experience teaching at Luther College for 25 years, I assume that most people in Iowa will be hesitant when it comes to this topic. The response will be mostly along the lines of “this is irrational,” “creepy,” or “crazy.” But things are not that easy. As we will see later, any of these responses reveals probably more about the person who holds them than about the phenomenon they are attributed to. That is, anyone who believes that consciousness is not completely reducible to neurological processes opens a door, as small as it may be, to the possibility of an afterlife, and everyone who believes in an immaterial soul that survives physical death allows the possibility that those dead communicate with the living. But I get ahead of myself. I will return to this discussion later. Under the theme “communication with the dead,” I subsume a variety of phenomena. Here I would like to discuss three: 1) the encounter with the dead, 2) the work of mediums who channel the voices of the dead, and 3) the return of the deceased victims of a tragedy.

Gereon Kopf

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

In July, I participated in a field trip of the Religious Studies Department at Tōhoku University to Osorezan, literally “Fright Mountain.” In the area referred to by this name, one can find a temple of the Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism called Bodaiji and a larger area that is not controlled by any religious group where people express their personal faith about the afterlife. The whole area referred to as “Osorezan” is divided into four regions: the temple, the area where the dead are presumed to be living in this world, a lake that symbolizes the transition to the other world, and a mountain range that symbolizes the other world. In the case of the mountain and the lake, it is important to note that they are taken to be symbols of the “other world” and not the “other world” itself. The temple administrates rituals related to death, dying, and commemoration. Many people believe that the dead, who have not yet made it to the “other world” (ano yo), a Japanese word that includes various conceptions of nirvāna and heaven, including the Christian heaven and the Buddhist “Pure Land,” continue to exist as spirts/ ghosts in our world until they are released and either enter the “other world” or are reborn. The area on Osorezan contains sulfur and its smell does convey the feel of the land of the dead as does the rather large number of crows. In this area, people use a variety of symbols and personalized rituals to remember and communicate with the dead. During my visit in July, I saw one person sharing a lunch with a deceased relative. She ate her lunch while she was conversing with the dead. Frequently, people leave food at the sites where they believe/ imagine their departed loved ones to be. These places are marked by small piles of stones, cloth effigies, statues of Jizō Bodhisattva, and/or pin wheels. At the shoreline of the lake, people leave offerings and flowers to commemorate the dead and to wish them a safe journey to the other world. Finally, in one of the halls of the temple Bodaiji, a shaman channeled the dead to distraught family members who sought comfort.

On another trip, a colleague and I went to two temples that enshrine drawings of “postmortem” weddings (shigo kekkon) during which a person who has passed

away without having had the chance of married life is married to a ghost. Other temples enshrine dolls of the ghost brides included in these postmortem weddings. Frequently, photographs of the departed are enshrined together with the ghost dolls. What may sound creepy to some is actually a sweet practice in which parents, who lost their children before they could enjoy what is considered a full life, imagine that their departed child lives a life of marriage and parenthood in the “other world.” This practice reveals a lot about the social norms of this area and the conception of the afterlife held by the practitioners. Most of all, it expresses a unique way in which parents deal with the untimely loss of a child. In some sense, this is an interesting practice as it constitutes a Buddhist ritual based on the Shintō belief in immaterial spirits/ ghosts that embraces the Confucian belief that marriage and parenthood provide meaning to our lives. The clear highlight of this trip was a conversation with an artist/shaman (mukasari

emashi) who draws pictures of those postmortem weddings. In our conversation about the process and the artistic techniques, she revealed that she communicates with the dead. She described this communication with the deceased not the way Hollywood imagines ghosts in movies but rather as an empathic response to pictures of the departed or as contemplation on the name of the deceased after having talked to the parents about their departed child whom they would like to be married in the other world. Communication with the dead is not limited to shamans and mediums. Survivors of the tsunami in 3/11 (March 11, 2011) have reported being called or visited by loved ones they lost in this tragedy. Anyway, the pictures of postmortem weddings and the dolls of ghost brides married to the departed constitute memorials not unlike the memorials to the victims of catastrophes such as 3/11 and the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima.

A further trip took me to Kōdaiji, a temple of the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism in Kyoto, which houses Mindar, a depiction/manifestation of Kannon Bodhisattva in the form of an android. Kannon Bodhisattva is the Mahāyāna Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion known in Chinese as “Guanyin” and in Sanskrit as “Avalokiteśvara.” At Kōdaiji, Mindar is housed in a separate building, called the Education Hall. On the weekends, the Education Hall is open to visitors who come to hear a 20-minute dharma-talk by Mindar. The talk is accompanied by visual effects and is embedded in a video projected at a surround screen which simulates an interaction between Mindar and the audience. As of now, Mindar cannot interact in conversation. Venerable (Ven.) Gotō Tenshō insists that Mindar has neither consciousness nor is able to attain Buddhahood. This question of whether AI can attain buddhahood has already been raised by the 2012 Korean movie Doomsday Book (Inryu myeong mang bogoseo). Ven. Gotō imagined Mindar and created the android together with his high school friend Professor Ishiguro Hiroshi, one of the leading robotics researchers in Japan, in order to spread the Buddha’s teaching and help people overcome

Ghost bride doll

suffering. Mindar’s dharma-talk is well-scripted and raises quite a few central philosophical topics. For example, Mindar explains that while androids are selfless, their type of selflessness is fundamentally different from the type of selflessness attained/experienced by the Buddha.

In April, Luther College hosted a workshop on the role of AI in the liberal arts. At that time, some faculty and students expressed discomfort at the idea that an android could be considered a representation of the divine. Many people in Japan do not feel this discomfort. The reason for this lies in the respective worldviews. Mainstream Christian theologies advocate or, at least, imply a fundamental dualism contrasting the creator and his (her?/their?) creation. Therefore, the idea of humans creating an image of the divine seems counterintuitive. However, Christians have been creating images of God for all of the history of Christianity. Interestingly enough, Ven. Gotō agreed with the suggestion that Mindar could be understood as a “talking Buddha statue.” More importantly, a lot of Buddhist philosophy rejects any form of dualism and denies that there is an essential difference between human beings and buddhas or human beings and inanimate objects. According to mainstream Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, all “sentient beings” (T 374.12.522) as well as “insentient beings” “possess buddhanature” (T 2223.61.0011) and “can/will become buddhas” (T 2223.61.0011). Finally, the famous chapter 25 of the Lotus Sūtra suggests that Kannon Bodhisattva can take on any form. Given this worldview, it is not difficult to imagine that the divine can be manifested in an android.

What fascinates me about these phenomena is not only the beautiful mountain temples that enshrine postmortem wedding pictures and ghostbride-dolls and the spectacle of listening to an android giving a dharma talk. Discussions of these phenomena often elicit strong responses from the audi-

ence. Why is this so? Both phenomena fundamentally challenge mainstream worldviews in the US. As a side effect these discussions also illustrate that most of us tend to reject phenomena that cannot be integrated into our own, personal worldview without investigating them properly or giving the people who report them the benefit of the doubt. The assumption is that everyone who disagrees with me must be deluded or harboring a malicious intent. Finally, both phenomena fundamentally touch on the issue what we humans are, what consciousness is, and whether human beings are special and essentially different from animals, androids, and/ or disembodied spirits. Philosophically speaking, these phenomena touch on two fundamental questions, the inquiry into the nature of reality (ontology) and the investigation of our knowledge of as well as our methods of discerning what is real (epistemology).

Let’s start with the ontological question concerning the dead and robots. Our beliefs whether or not there is life after death and whether it is possible for the departed to exist for some time in our

world even after the death of the body depends on our worldview and specifically our beliefs about the nature of consciousness and human beings. If you are a reductionist materialist and believe that consciousness and human personality can be reduced to neural activity, there is, of course, no possibility of an afterlife and you may jump to the next paragraph where I discuss the epistemological questions. Panpsychists believe that all matter is infused with some kind of spirit and that, as Inoue Enryō (1858-1919) did, death is not the end but a transformation of both matter and spirit (IES 19: 323331). This belief opens the door to the possibility that our spirit survives physical death, usually defined as the cessation of circulatory and neurological functions, in one form or another. Actually, Inoue uses his panpsychist belief as a jumping board to argue for the beliefs in reincarnation and the “birth in the Pure Land.” Panpsychism itself, however, only implies the transformation and survival of consciousness in some form or another. The non-essentialists, who believe that body and mind/spirit are not two distinct and separable essences, find themselves in a similar situation. To essentialists, the concepts “body” and “mind” describe diverse aspects of the human experience. The belief that consciousness constitutes the relationship of an embodied brain to the environment and self-consciousness the relationship of one embodied brain to another, allows for interesting interpretations of, e.g., Near-Death-Experiences (NDEs) and related phenomena such as the communion with the recently departed. The same applies to robots. However, in the case of robots, one would have to figure out, first, whether an artificial and, what is more important, inorganic neural network can be associated with consciousness the way we know and experience it. Is it meaningful to call the mental function of an inorganic neural network “consciousness”? Materialists will have to answer the same questions concerning the questions of whether robots, at one point, will possess con-

Venerable Gotō Tenshō with Mindar

sciousness. Dualists, especially those who advocate the survival of an immaterial soul after our physical death in a different dimension, should have no problem affirming the possibility that the dead can communicate with the living. Strong AI, the position that robots can possess consciousness, however, they are more likely to reject. This is a sketch of the ontological questions implied in the discussions of whether it is possible to commune with the dead and whether AI can possess consciousness. In this essay, I do not intend to evaluate these four worldviews for their strengths and weaknesses since my interest lies in the epistemological question of how we can assess inconvenient positions.

The clue of how to deal with multiple and especially inconvenient and annoying viewpoints I receive from consciousness studies. As Evan Thompson has observed, consciousness studies is unique insofar it poses the conundrum of a subject studying itself, namely, (a) consciousness studying (another) consciousness (Thompson 2015, 99). For that reason, consciousness studies, unlike most other fields of inquiry, is divided by adherence of the scholars/ scientists to one of two methods: a first-person and a third-person approach. The former reveals the so-called phenomenal consciousness, i.e., the personal, subjective experience (philosophers refer to this as “qualia”), the latter the neural processes that “process environmental stimuli” and “integrate information” (Chalmers 1996, xi). The

difficulty of mapping the former onto the latter David Chalmers famously calls the “hard problem.”

The “hard problem” concerns the question such as “[w]hy is all this [neural] processing accompanied by an inner life?” (Chalmers 1996, xii). How is it possible to explain phenomenal consciousness by means of a third-person approach? This is, however, not the only problem. The conception and formulation of both approaches is highly abstract and does not reflect reality. To communicate their experience, even the most ardent advocate of the first-person approach needs to use a shared language and thus moves toward the domain of the third-person approach. By the same token, regardless of the protocol being used, the data rendered by a third-person approach is always interpreted by one or many individual subjects. This dilemma can be best exemplified by the so-called Turing test. Alan Turing (1912-1954) created the famous thought experiment named after him to discuss the possibility of “strong AI.” The term “strong AI” refers to AI that can imitate the human brain. Turing asks us to imagine a tester communicating with two test subjects, one human being and one computer. In this scenario, the tester is not able to see the two test subjects. If the tester is not able to correctly identify which of the two test subjects is human and which

one is not, the computer passes the test and qualifies, for all practical and, potentially, legal purposes, as a person with a human-like consciousness. Turing argued that if AI can fool a human being into believing that it is human, we can attribute consciousness and personality, if not person rights, to that machine. In some sense, the Turing Test follows the “principle” “if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck.” The Turing Test is clearly an example of the third-person approach insofar as it relegates the decision of whether a particular form of AI possesses consciousness to an outside agency, the tester, who is asked to apply a specific set of criteria, explicit or implicit, to the test subject. A first-person approach would relegate this decision to the machine itself. A first-person approach would ask, for example, Siri or Alexa, if they have consciousness and rely on their response. However, even in the case of the Turing Test, the decision of whether or not a particular form of AI possesses human or human-like consciousness is made by one individual subject/agent and thus implies certain first-person qualities. A different tester

might arrive at a different result. Of course, adherents of the third-person approach would argue that each tester would arrive at the same conclusion since they all follow the same protocol. Our suspicion that this might be not that simple provides suspense to movies such as Blade Runner.

Offerings and flowers for the dead at shoreline of the lake at Osorezan

Cloth effigies at Osorezan

Current work in contemplative studies/research has suggested as an alternative the second-person approach. This innovative approach has been described by a series of essays edited by Olen Gunnlaugson et. al. (2017, 2019) and the website of the Center for Contemplative Research [CCR] (https://centerforcontemplativeresearch.org). The second-person approach assumes that “there are always at least three points of views: mine, yours, and ours together” (Gunnlaugson et. al 2017, ix) as well as “a shift from ‘me’ to ‘we’” and focuses on what Thich Nhat Hanh called “interbeing” (ibid., xiii). Evan Thompson cites as an example of such a second-person approach the “explicitation interview,” which “uses open and undirected questions in order to help individuals recall implicit aspects of their experience to which they may not have immediate cognitive access” (Thompson 2015, 317-318). In a deeper sense, however, the second-person approach mediates between the first-person and thirdperson approaches; in a relationship, we are both subject and object, actor and acted upon (Kopf 2021, 2023), or as Jessica Benjamin suggested “doer and done to” (Benjamin 2017). The secondperson approach gives credence to the fact that consciousness and, especially, self-consciousness, is relational.

The importance of the second-person approach was illustrated to me this summer in Japan. One of the activities that I participated in during my two-month research trip was a two-day workshop of an MA program in “spiritual care” taught by colleagues at Tōhoku University. “Spiritual care” means something different in Japan than it does in the Anglophone world. It is a secular (the separation of religious institutions and state is taken very seriously in Japan) care for hospital and hospice patients suffering a long-term and/or terminal illness who face certain existential questions. At the end of the two days, each participant was asked what their individual take-away from the workshop was and what they wanted to improve

upon until the next workshop. The answers fell into three categories: 1) some wanted to be more self-aware, 2) others desired to hone their listening skills to be able to completely focus on the patient, 3) and a third group was working to prioritize their relationship with the patients. It is easy to see how these three types of responses can be described as first-person, third-person, and second-person approaches, respectively. Together they illustrate the observation of Gunnlaugson et. al that “there are always at least three points of views: mine, yours, and our together.” The responses of the participants in the workshop reveal that, in praxis, these three standpoints/approaches cannot be separated. The practice of listening does not only require a relationship between self and other; it necessitates that the listener possesses a certain degree of self-awareness and self-cultivation.

Listening starts with the self. Therapists, clinicians, and/or ministers absorbed in their own personal problems will not be able to see their patients. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) already identified transference and counter-transference as serious obstacles to psychotherapy.

In my recent work (Kopf 2021, 2023), I have introduced what I call “fourthperson approach.” “ While a first-person approach is driven by MY narrative, a thirdperson approach by THE grand narrative, and a secondperson approach by TWO potentially conflicting stories, a fourth-person approach engages a MULTIPLICITY of vantage points in a creative multilogue” (Kopf 2021). The fourth-person approach takes into account that every subject, every theory, and every relationship is located in a concrete historical and discursive context. An understanding of a specific experiential account, theory, or dialogue requires an awareness of its situatedness. To make things worse and even more complicated, I do not believe that each of these types is uniform and monolithic. To be exact, there are uncritical and critical versions of each of these approaches. For example, a firstperson approach can be as sophisticated as any third-person approach as the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1858-1938) and the Yogācāra Buddhism of Vasubandhu (4th/5th century) and Xuan Zang (d. 664) demonstrate. There are multiple versions/incarnations of each approach. As an experiment, I have looked at each of these four approaches from the perspective of all four in order to illustrate the complexity of each approach.

Obviously, a short report in Agora does not provide for a detailed analysis of this complex map of theoretical approaches. But, I think, a brief look can shed some light on the basic discursive conundrum on the question of how to deal with diverse and annoying/ inconvenient opinions. We learn from the first-person approach that all our

Cloth effigies, stones, and statues of Jizō Bodhisattva at Osorezan

approaches/viewpoints/theories are steeped in subjectivity. This constitutes the fundamental epistemic predicament of human beings. Faced with our epistemic limitations, many religious systems have imagined various forms of supramundane knowledge. Third-person approaches teach us the necessity of requiring and following a public protocol. This is why scientific disciplines insist that “facts” be repeatable and theories verifiable and falsifiable. The purpose of these criteria is to ensure that theories can be tested/proven/understood by other knowers. Second-person approaches remind us that all views are framed in the face of and in-relation-to an other, opposite position. For example, “atheism” is framed as rejection of and in opposition to theism. The fourthperson approach attempts to understand each standpoint/theory on its own, in its historical, social, and discursive context. The question a fourth-person approach asks is what does a specific standpoint/ theory express? What does it contribute to our general knowledge about a particular subject as well as the world in general?

And now, I have come full circle to my opening question: How are we (how is one) to deal with/study inconvenient phenomena? Many of us are bothered or annoyed by inconvenient positions,

beliefs that differ from and, thus, may challenge our own beliefs. Analytical philosophy teaches us to probe every argument, whether it is correct or false. And, yes, it is important that our arguments and beliefs are coherent. Inconsistency of beliefs creates havoc in politics and public opinion. So yes, coherence and consistency are important. However, a valid argument is one that follows from its premises and does not necessarily have to describe reality adequately. The key to what beliefs and arguments express lies in their premises, in their assumptions, whether they are implicit or explicit. This is where the fourth person approach comes in. This approach provides us with a method to explore why people hold the beliefs they do, what they express, and what we can learn from them. Let’s have a look, for brevity’s sake, at one of the two beliefs mentioned above: “Can the dead communicate?” In some sense this is a controversial question. However, as I mentioned above, it is only materialists and perhaps panpsychists that have valid philosophical reasons to oppose the possibility of communing with the dead. But even materialists have to ask themselves the question why they oppose the belief that it is possible to communicate with the dead. On the surface, the disagreement seems to be caused by two opposing positions. Of course, I assume

that my position is correct, but we all do, even those whose beliefs I find absurd. Am I justified to privilege my own position a priori? Jean Piaget (1896-1980) suggested that there are two ways of dealing with new information: we can assimilate this new information into our worldview or we can transform our worldview to accommodate this new information (Piaget 1952, 407-408).

The question is when are we justified to assimilate new information into our cognitive frames and when are we challenged to transform our way of thinking? To solve this dilemma, I would like to apply my fourth-person approach as it is presented in the above table. On first sight, both positions reflect two opposing subjectivities. Therefore, it is necessary to take a step back and to explore the two positions, their assumptions, and their reasoning in their own right. Then, we will realize they are framed in opposition to each other, one presupposing the existence of an immaterial spirit and one rejecting its very existence. The fourth-person approach then asks us to understand what each position expresses; the former emphasizes the experience of continuity and the enduring significance and influence of those who have gone before us onto our lives, the latter the empirical world of the five senses, the tangible hereand-now. This way, we can understand the position of the other that seemed strange or absurd at first. Also, by focusing what these opposing positions express we can increase our understanding of the human experience in general. This method of negotiating conflicting and annoying beliefs not only applies to the question of consciousness and survival but also to ethical and political controversies. In my example here, I focused on two conflicting positions but, as I have indicated above, that even in the case of exploring consciousness or the possibility of an afterlife there are multiple positions that, for some reason or another, are often framed in binary alternatives. It is my hope that this method that I have developed during my sabbatical can help us solve not only specific philosophical questions but also moral and political disagreements and conflicts of our time. Therefore, I thank Luther College for my sabbatical and

Piles of stones to commemorate the dead at Osorezan

the Paideia program for their generous funding.

Abbreviations

IES Inoue enryō senshū 『井上円了選集』 [Selected writings of Inoue Enryō]. 25 vols. Tokyo: Tōyō Daigaku. 1987–2004.

T  Taishō daizōkyō 大正大藏經 [Buddhist Canon - The Taishō Version], ed. by Junjirō Takakusu and Kaigyoku Watanabe. Tokyo: Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō Kankōkai. 1961.

Works Cited

Benedict Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism London: Verso.

Benjamin, Jessica. 2017. Beyond Doer and Done to: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity, and the Third. New York: Routledge.

Chalmers, David. 1996. The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gunnlaugson, Olen, Charles Scott, Heeson Bai, and Edward W. Sarath. 2017 (eds.). The Intersubjective Turn: Theoretical Approaches to Contemplative Learning and Inquiry Across Disciplines. Albany: SUNY Press.

Gunnlaugson, Olen, Charles Scott, Heeson Bai, and Edward W. Sarath. 2019 (eds.). Catalyzing the Field: Second-Person Approaches to Contemplative Learning and Inquiry. Albany: SUNY Press.

Kopf, Gereon. 2021. “How to Make Philosophy of Religion Relevant for the Future.” In “Is there a Future of the Philosophy of Religion,” published on Philosophy of Religion: big question philosophy for scholars and students hosted by Boston University (Philosophyofreligion.org).

Kopf, Gereon. 2022. “Envisioning MultiCultural and Multi-Disciplinary Engagement: Lessons from the Twelve Wolf Encounter Pictures.” Culture and Dialogue Vol. 10, No. 160-94.

Kopf, Gereon. 2023. “The Theory and Praxis of the Multi-Entry Approach.”

In Philosophy of Religion Around the World: A Critical Approach, eds. Nathan Loewen & Agnieszka Rostalska. New York: Bloomsbury Academics.

Piaget, Jean. 1952. The Origins of Intelligence in Children, transl. Margaret Cook. New York: International University Press.

Shieber, Stuart (ed.). 2004. The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of

Intelligence. Boston: MIT Press.

Thompson, Evan. 2015. Waking, Being, Dreaming: self and consciousness in neuroscience, meditation, and philosophy New York: Columbia University Press.

Investigating Sunflower Ancestry and Catching Up to Next-Generation Sequencing

by ERIC BAACK, Professor of Biology

Ifinished my PhD in 2003, and my post-doc in 2007, just as the first “next generation” DNA sequencers were being put to use. These tools have vastly reduced the price of genome sequencing, making repeated sequencing of cancer tumors a clinical tool. By 2014, genome sequencing had become a standard tool in my field of evolutionary biology, but one that I didn’t know how to use. During my last sabbatical, I spent the fall of 2014 in the greenhouse and lab at the University of British Columbia, developing my expertise by preparing nearly every species of sunflower (genus Helianthus) for genome sequencing. In April of 2015, I received the reads—all 50 gigabytes of data—but the challenge of analyzing the data led me to let them sit until this sabbatical, when I opened them up to see what sense I could make of them.

Contemporary sequencing techniques take an organism’s complete DNA, which in the case of humans and sunflowers is around 6 billion pairs of bases, and break it into small fragments of about 500 bases. Each of these is “read” by a sequencer that obtains the sequence of the two ends of the fragment (Figure 1). By doing this millions of times, the sequencing will “read” all parts of the DNA multiple times, allowing scientists to reassemble the genome from the fragments.

Imagine that two lines of a poem (analogous to the sequence of a gene) were concealed in an organism, and could not be read without sequencing the organism. Here are what the paired end reads might look like, and how they could be assembled into the full two lines (Figure 2). In this example, I laid out the fragments by hand, but software is essential for dealing with the billions of bases generated by sequencing.

Figure 1: Schematic of next generation sequencing using paired-end reads. The top line shows the length of a gene. The bottom five lines show how sequencing reads two short portions of the original, separated by a gap. With enough reads, the full sequence of the original gene will be covered.

Figure 2: Simulated paired end reads of two lines of a poem.

One of my goals for this project was gaining experience with current sequencing technologies and the software tools for analyzing the data so that I could better understand scholarly papers that I was reading with students. However, I was also thinking about a way to investigate why the majority of plant species have duplicated genomes. Species with diploid (two fold) genomes are familiar to us, as humans, most other species of mammals, and birds have two copies of their chromosomes. In polyploid organisms, there may be four sets (or more!) of chromosomes. This is quite common in plants: bread wheat has six sets of chromosomes (“hexaploidy”), as do Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus). One enduring question in evolutionary biology is why polyploidy is so common in plants. Having more chromosomes and more DNA is often disadvantageous as cells require more time to duplicate all the extra DNA,

Eric Baack

and extra DNA uses more nitrogen and phosphorous.

One hypothesis has been that polyploid organisms have more evolutionary flexibility than their diploid relatives. If you have one set of genes that is crucial to your survival, mutations to those genes, or to the nearby regions that regulate them, may be unfavorable. However, if you had a second set of these genes, one set might experience mutations without any harm as the other set was still working as it should. In some cases, this second set might take on new functions that would lead to higher fitness. We know that this is sometimes true in the case of duplicated genes, which are surprisingly common: the average human offspring has ten duplicated genes that aren’t present in either parent, and any two humans are likely to differ in the number of copies of some genes. However, it is not clear if having four or six copies of chromosomes leads to different evolutionary patterns.

The ideal test case would compare a large number of closely related polyploid species with a large number of diploid relatives. The sunflowers of North America could be a perfect group to study. There are around 50 species of sunflowers, and over a dozen of these have experienced genome duplications. All of the species have originated in the last five million years, so they are very closely related. The next step in the study would be to make sure that the relationships between the species were well understood in order to compare the evolution of polyploid species with their closest diploid relatives.

Unfortunately, some of the same factors that make sunflowers ideal to study also lead to difficulties. Evolutionary biologists look for shared changes from an ancestor to group species together.

If species A shares many changes with species B, then we infer that species A and B share a recent common ancestor (Figure 3).

But, over short periods of time (e.g. a few million years for plant species), very few changes might occur to genes, making it more difficult to figure out relationships. Mutations would occur, but many mutations to genes that are

Figure 3: Sequences from an ancestor and five descendant populations, and inferred evolutionary relationships. Populations 1 & 5 share four changes from the ancestor (underlined), so are most closely related to each other.

important would have harmful effects and so would not persist. Even those that did not lower survival would often be lost due to chance. As a result, several species might be identical in their DNA sequences for a gene, making it difficult to infer ancestry.

Polyploid species add a second layer of complexity, as they often form when two species hybridize, then a mutation leads to a doubling of the genome. Polyploid species therefore share ancestry with two different species. With luck, the DNA sequencing would capture copies of genes from both ancestors, allowing me to infer both relationships, but this would only work if enough changes had occurred between the ancestors to allow me to distinguish their genes, and if the sequencing worked well enough to allow me to read both copies. I knew that there was a good chance that I wouldn’t succeed in making progress on my scientific question, but I was confident that I would learn a great deal in the attempt.

One approach to these challenges is to use more data—and this is where next generation sequencing comes in. Back when I was in graduate school, papers would be published using one or two genes to understand the relationships between species. Now, scientists

often use complete genomes. With my budget, I couldn’t afford to sequence 20,000 genes from 100 samples—but I could afford to sequence 900 genes. I was particularly hopeful that I might sequence enough introns—the areas in the middle of genes that don’t have code for proteins, so might evolve at a higher pace—to be able to figure out ancestors.

So, in January of 2022 I sat down to dig into 50 gigabytes of sequence data, with each gene broken into pieces that had 120 bases of DNA sequence separated by a gap of unknown length. The data had sequences from 900 genes from 100 samples; I needed to sort out each gene for each sample—so sort things into 90,000 piles. Then I had to assemble the gene fragments into full genes for each of these piles, line my genes up, and attempt to figure out relationships. Many scientists have done this work for diploid species, and have left careful instructions on what to do. However, the software tools are constantly changing, and those that worked in 2014 no longer work today. Fortunately, I’d spent some of the time between 2014 and 2022 taking computer science courses, so had the programming skills that allowed me to use the tools in different combinations.

In my sampling, I had deliberately included multiple populations of some species with the hope that they would group together, but in the case of Helianthus giganteus, they did not. Instead, one population of H. giganteus clustered with H. divaricatus (Figure 4).

There are several potential causes for this. First, some of the sunflower species are very tough to tell apart. I grew seeds from a seedbank operated by the US Department of Agriculture, and their collectors have included some of the best sunflower taxonomists. But when I checked the traits of the plants, I found that some did not quite match the species’ descriptions. Perhaps this was because many sunflowers can hybridize, and so one or more populations might have been descendants of hybrids between two species. A study from the 1950s (Long 1955) suggested that H. divaricatus can hybridize with H. giganteus, and that the offspring look like H. giganteus. I am still working on

Figure 4: Portion of diploid sunflower phylogeny. Vertical bars on right show two populations of Helianthus grosseserratus and three populations of H. decapetalus that clustered together, as expected. Arrows show three populations of Helianthus giganteus which do not cluster together.

analyzing the data to determine if there is evidence for hybridization. In summary, I am not sure that my method has failed, but I have reason to worry.

I found a larger issue when I went to add the polyploid species. I’d hoped that I’d have multiple sequences at each gene to help determine who are the closest diploid relatives, but in most cases, I had just a single sequence. This may be due to the software tools I used to assemble my gene fragments into full genes. The assembler I used (Bankevich et al 2012) incorporates error correction, which is important because next generation sequencing isn’t perfect—some fraction of the reads it produces have errors. However, I worry that the assembler might mistake two slightly different copies of a gene for sequencing errors, and therefore collapse the differences into a single assembled sequence. To see if this might be true, I’ll need to return to generate some simulated data for the assembler to align to see if it works correctly.

My sabbatical did not allow me to answer the question of how polyploid sunflower species are related to their diploid relatives, much less the question of why so many plant species are polyploid. All the same, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far. While some parts of my results are unexpected, many other

pieces fit well with prior analyses. I have a better sense of how the tools work and where they might not work perfectly. In this genomic era, many biology students think of genome sequencing as the first step in solving biological questions. As a result of my sabbatical, I have a deeper sense of why some questions will remain challenging despite the potential of this approach.

References

Bankevich, Anton, Sergey Nurk, Dmitry Antipov, Alexey A. Gurevich, Mikhail Dvorkin, Alexander S. Kulikov, Valery M. Lesin, et al. 2012. SPAdes: A New Genome Assembly Algorithm and Its Applications to Single-Cell Sequencing. Journal of Computational Biology 19: 455–77.

Long Jr, Robert W. 1955. Hybridization in Perennial Sunflowers. American Journal of Botany, 1955, 769–77.

Silverstein, Shel. 1984. Where the Sidewalk Ends. Columbia New York, 1984.

A Semester in Bulgaria: A Window Into Beauty, History, Community, and Hope

by ALEXANDRA WHITE, Associate Professor of Management

Why Bulgaria?

When my family and I shared our plans for where we would spend my spring 2022 sabbatical, the most common response was, “Hmm. Why did you choose Bulgaria?” followed closely by a thoughtful pause and often a follow-up question: “Where is Bulgaria, anyway?”

While we developed a shorthand for explaining the geography (north of Greece, south of Romania), we had a harder time articulating the answer about why we had chosen this particular Balkan country. Why Bulgaria? Part of the answer is exactly the reason other people were puzzled about our choice—because we knew so little about the country and its Balkan neighbors. Between the two of us, my husband and I have been able to travel to places in Western Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania, but neither of us had spent time in any of the Balkan countries. Bulgaria seemed like a beautiful and mysterious place and was conveniently located near other places that intrigued us as well—in particular, Greece and Romania.

Bulgaria also happened to be the place where I was awarded a grant to be a Fulbright U.S. Scholar. The Faculty of Economics of Business Administration (FEBA) at Sofia University (located in the capital city of Sofia) graciously offered me an opportunity to teach in their newly-established master’s degree program in Responsible and Sustainable Governance. So my husband and our two teenage children set off for our

adventure on February 1 from Minneapolis, which also happened to be the exact day that the EU (of which Bulgaria is a member) decided to lift the requirement for proof of negative PCR COVID-19 tests. This change meant we were saved the expense of the $800 cost of four rapid PCR tests; it felt like a lucky omen. COVID-19 cases were rising all over the world, including Bulgaria, so as we boarded the plane from Minneapolis, we double checked our uncomfortably tight N95 masks and hoped to avoid contracting the virus on our journey.

We had a long layover in Amsterdam before our Bulgarian Air flight. I took a walk in the airport to stretch my stiff legs and marveled at the gates I passed; passengers waiting to travel to Kyiv Boryspil, Bucharest, Manchester, Birmingham, and London City. I heard

Alexandra White outside the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration building for Sofia University with its sign in Cyrillic characters (left), and inside her office (right). The office’s prior history as a dormitory room in the 1950s is still evident with the built-in closet. The dorm sink used to be mounted to the right of the door.

Monument to the Soviet Army in Knyazheska Garden, Sofia, Bulgaria. The snow-capped Vitosha mountain is visible in the distance.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Plentiful neighborhood markets like this one on Vasil Levksi Boulevard made daily shopping easy.

people chatting in French and in many other languages I didn’t recognize.

It was then that it hit me: after over two years of sheltering in place, we were really, finally, away.

Early Days in Sofia & Unexpected Opportunities

We arrived at our two-bedroom apartment in Sofia on Gurko Street on a grey and snowy day, and lugged our bags up the four flights of stairs (no elevator). A few days after arrival I had my first meeting with colleagues at the Sofia University business school, which is housed in a former 1950s Communist-era dormitory. Each of-

fice still looks a lot like a dorm room, and every day I would walk through a device that checked my temperature as a COVID-19 precaution, then greet the security staff in my halting Bulgarian, and receive a tiny key from a huge wall of similar keys.

A key lesson I learned over my sabbatical, which was both cultural to Bulgaria and to life in general, is to avoid getting attached to expectations, plans or outcomes—all can be quick to change. But the process can still be very enlightening and valuable, though very challenging to someone like me who prefers structure, plans and clarity. In this vein, the detailed course proposal I worked diligently on, and was required by my host university, ended up not being used at all. Once I met with my colleagues, it was apparent that for various staffing reasons, I was not eligible to teach a full-semester class. So I pivoted quickly and developed a graduate-level management elective called the Ethics of Management.

profit non-governmental organization founded by Americans that organizes public speaking competitions in English and provides student leadership opportunities. So in short, Bulgarian high school students from all over the country perform speeches in English at various levels of competition. Because of COVID-19 cases, this spring competition was held virtually—all performances and judging took place online. My role as a judge required an evening training session and a weekend long commitment of actual judging (including writing detailed summary reports).

I was very impressed by the high work ethic and high level of performance of the students, and enjoyed being part of the process.

The social innovation competition was an in-person event from Friday evening through Sunday evening in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, in which college and high school students participated on the campus of American University in Bulgaria (AUBG). AUBG is an

Dedicated teammates working on their project at the AUBG campus as part of the 2nd annual social enterprise contest called the “Innovation Station.”

Before my graduate course was scheduled to begin, I was invited to participate in two very interesting experiences: one as a speech contest judge and one as a faculty advisor for a social innovation competition.

Single ticket for bus, tram, or trolley is 1.60 Bulgarian lev (about 80 cents).

The speech contest is one offered through the BEST foundation, a non-

English-speaking liberal arts college open to both Bulgarian and international students. I was invited to serve as a faculty advisor for one of the groups of five students. The premise of the competition is that non-profit organizations from Bulgaria register for the event, and each of them that participate

(we had 12 this year) write a business case for a problem they would like solved in some way. Each student team receives a different case and has to brainstorm through Friday and Saturday evening and come up with a proposed solution. Each team (whose members were assigned randomly, so they don’t know each other ahead of time) had a non-profit mentor and a faculty advisor to help. Each group presented its case on Sunday, and the winning group received 70,000 euros to implement the idea. Only two of the twelve groups were high school students—most were college students with much more experience and knowledge. I was assigned to Team 9, one of the high school groups, and was absolutely impressed with their hard work and creativity on their proposal. It can be very intimidating for younger people to compete against seasoned college students (many of whom had already done similar entrepreneurial type competitions before). However, Team 9 took all this pressure in stride and came together well. It was a joy to work with them and help them feel good about their final product. As one of the team members told me, “I know we didn’t win a prize, but we won anyway, in having a great time.” I remain impressed that high school students would give up their entire weekend to work late into the night with no real reward other than the actual project itself.

The War in Ukraine & the Shadow of Communism

After a few weeks, we began to get adjusted to our new home. Our children navigated the tangled difficulties of their online learning, while the adults figured out essentials like shopping, public transportation routes, and weekend plans.

Then, just 23 days after we arrived in Bulgaria, the excitement of feeling far away from home turned to worry. On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine, just 885 kilometers from Bulgaria. As a member of both the EU and NATO,

Bulgaria denounced Russia’s actions, and the prime minister and other officials publicly voiced their support for Ukraine. Living in Sofia, we were relatively far from the conflict, but wanted to do something to help. Fortunately, we soon had an opportunity.

As refugees began to enter Bulgaria, the Fulbright Program organized a schedule for volunteers to help tutor Ukrainian refugees in basic English. The safest and easiest method during COVID-19 times was to meet via Zoom. So my husband, who has a background in teaching ESL to adults, worked with a conversation group while I worked one-on-one with Olga, a student my age, with some beginning English. For several months, every Wednesday night we met online with our students on opposite ends of our Sofia apartment. The opportunity to do this work gave me an incredible appreciation for the dedication of these refugees, who with all of their struggles were choosing to learn a new language, and holding on to the hope that comes with mastering something new.

In our early conversations about the war with Bulgarian neighbors and colleagues, many reported that while they supported Ukraine, they worried that a significant portion of Bulgarians—particularly older people— quietly supported Russia’s efforts.

They explained that some older Bulgarians still view Russia as a protective force that fought the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s and liberated them, and then later enabled Bulgaria to become a communist state from 1946-1989. Like many aspects of Bulgarian culture, we noticed a contradiction—the push towards progress and the quiet, persistent pull towards the past.

We learned about the public removal of visible artifacts, such as the statue of Lenin that purposefully faced the national headquarters of the Bulgarian Communist Party, and the careful smoothing away of the raised hammer and sickle medallions along the building’s exterior. Yet many other communist symbols remain, with no plan to restore or preserve them, left to disintegrate.

One snowy, foggy Saturday in April we visited the Buzludzha Monument, an enormous structure built between 1974 and 1981 on a mountaintop, its interior walls covered with ornate mosaic tiles. It was intended to serve as a monument and ceremonial meeting place for the Communist Party. After the fall of communism, it was abandoned, tagged with graffiti, and is now structurally unsafe to enter. Some believe it should be preserved, others believe it should be left alone to deteriorate.

Sveta Sofia statue in central Sofia (left), which in 2000 replaced the statue of Lenin (right, now part of the collection at The Communist Art Museum). Sveta Sofia wears a crown to symbolize power, a wreath for fame, and an owl to convey wisdom.

This contradiction was also evident in my conversations with others about the ongoing influence of this history. I mentioned to a Bulgarian colleague that I was going to visit the Communist Art Museum over the weekend and asked if she had been there. She frowned and said, “We lived all of that. We don’t want to think about it or see it again.”

Younger students shared with me their passion for sustainability, for progress, for implementing more of what they see as “Western” values—individual rights, equality, innovation. But they also admitted their grandparents often told them that communism had been better in some ways than life in today’s Bulgaria. Communism had provided people a sense of security, comfort, and purpose. No one went hungry, everyone had a job, everyone knew what to expect. Many people described it to me as not communism but a “planned economy.” As one student told me, “We young people don’t want to go back to it [communism], but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for a lot of people.”

It was also clear that the communal part of communism pervades modern life in Sofia today. I was struck often by the acts of communal kindness, both in the classroom and beyond. A few examples stay with me. In my Ethics of Management class at the university, I presented my Bulgarian students with an ethical dilemma about a consulting company that is losing revenue. The scenario

(based on a real experience from my professional life) is this: the boss wants you to fudge the revenue numbers to make them meet the requirements. If you don’t do this, he will have to fire two people. Students are supposed to pick one of these two difficult options and explain their ethical reasoning for the choice: is it okay to commit fraud to save two people’s jobs? Is it better to lay people off than risk the company possibly being exposed for fraud? We discussed the case for a while until one of my students, Nadya, raised her hand and offered a third possibility. She spoke quietly yet firmly. “I have a better idea. I would give the two people part of my

grocery store. One day I was at our local Billa store with a large pile of items, a necessity with a family of four eating all meals at home. A man waiting behind me in line had a single large bottle to purchase. He gestured to the cashier that he wanted to just pay for his item rather than waiting behind me. Without asking me, she accepted his coins. After he started to leave, she called after him, as he hadn’t given her enough. Although my Bulgarian is very limited, this exchange was clear. They discussed and compared his coins for several moments, and the cashier seemed to emphasize that it was still not enough. Finally, another customer at the other checkout lane reached into his pocket and paid the difference. Both the cashier and the original customer accepted this development. No one said thank you or even broke a smile during the whole transaction. There was something ordinary and expected about all of it. To me, this moment showed me so much about Bulgarian culture and what I experienced as a temporary visitor; when someone needs something, you help.

Exploring Bulgaria

Throughout March and April, we became more confident about exploring other parts of Bulgaria on the weekends and holiday breaks and were dazzled with the variety of ancient and beautiful places so close to us—breathtaking mountains, caves, and waterfalls, wellpreserved monasteries, fortresses, and rural villages.

salary so we can all survive for a while. That way no one has to lose their jobs.” Her classmates nodded in agreement—a sound idea to address the problem. I have taught this case for eight years and never has a student suggested this third option.

Another example of this communal spirit came at the

Krushuna Falls near Krushuna Village northern Bulgaria

Devetashka Cave, which dates back to the Stone Age, near the town of Lovech and Devetaki Village, northern Bulgaria

The incredible Rila Monastery, an UNESCO World Heritage site, founded in the 10th century, nestled in the Rila Mountains.

Learning about Lutheranism in Romania

In May, my primary teaching commitments were complete and I was able to take some designated vacation, so we set our sights exploring Bulgaria’s neighbors, starting with Romania. We chose first to visit the beautiful city of Brasov, which is most famous for its proximity to Bran Castle (a popular spot for those who like to imagine it inspired Bram Stoker in his 1897 novel, Dracula. This connection is a fun myth; as it turns out, Stoker never visited the castle nor did his fictional castle resemble Bran Castle). Perhaps more interesting than a tenuous connection to a fictional vampire was the discovery of a connection back to Luther with the legacy of Johannes Honter. Born in Brasov, Johannes Honter was a sixteenth century renaissance person in every sense of the word—a humanist, theologian, educator, cartographer, and writer. Honter established Brasov’s first printing press, and in 1541 founded a school that is still in existence today. He led Lutheran reform in Transylvania and founded the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Romania.

Admiring the Ancients in Athens

After our visit to Brasov, we flew to Greece and spent a few days in Athens. It was an incredible experience to see the Acropolis, which is an UNESCO World Heritage Site, whose first fortification wall was built in the 13th

century BCE. We also visited the Ancient Agora, Roman Agora, Aristotle’s School, Hadrian’s Library, and Kerameikos cemetery. We were struck by the juxtaposition of the bustling sounds and experience of modern Athens—the rush of vehicles and motorcycles, the crowds of visitors—with the exquisite relics and art that remains beautiful despite its age. Somehow, getting to see these amazing structures and artifacts creates a sense of stillness and solace within the noisy city.

In mid-June, before we returned to the US, we had our series of “lasts” in Sofia—our last ping-pong game at our favorite table in the park across the street, our last Shopka salad at the beer garden (a favorite Bulgarian dish that roughly translates as a “Peasant salad”— a fresh and simple mix of Bulgaria’s version of feta cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes and red bell peppers), our last trip to the fruit market, my last bus ride from the office. Now that the snow had cleared, we also decided to take a hike on Vitosha Mountain. Just an hour’s bus ride from Sofia, it was a perfect respite and we had the unexpected gift of hearing an actual cuckoo bird in the wild. And yes, it really does sound just like the clock.

As I reflect over our four and half month experience, I think back to the

Acropolis at sunset, Athens, Greece

In Brasov, Romania, the statue of Lutheran reformer Johannes Honter (right) points at the high school he founded in the central square of the city. The school continues to welcome German speaking students from any area of the world.

question “Why Bulgaria?” In some ways I still cannot answer the question about why this country called us to visit. But I can say after living there I remain inspired by its people, its beauty, and its complicated history. This place has a kind of magic that I don’t think I will ever truly understand. Hopefully we will return to Bulgaria in the future with Luther students to help us explore familiar paths and journey on new ones.

Vtosha Mountain trail, where we heard the call of the cuckoo bird.

Ancient amphitheater at Acropolis, Athens, Greece. Note modern staging to enable ongoing use.

Statue of Aphrodite from 420 BC, Athens, Greece

Reconciling Wealth and Faith

by KATE NARVESON, Professor of English

Last April, toward the end of a year-long sabbatical with the pandemic finally easing, I headed to England for archival work on a new project: how did Lady Grace Mildmay, a contemporary of Shakespeare, reconcile her spiritual beliefs and worldly commitments? Bookending my trip with stints at the British Library, I spent the central weeks in Northampton, once the center of shoe manufacturing in England (a la “Kinky Boots"), now a downat-heel midlands city. In the city center I passed the usual takeaways offering curries, bahn mi, Chinese noodles, and pizza by the slice, plus one burger joint called “Five Lads.” But I strode by. I was in pursuit of manuscripts related to Mildmay.

I’d previously published on her scriptural meditations, and this venture still had a religious angle. Matthew 6 warns Christians to lay up their treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust will consume it. But what does this mean, in practice? Must we be lilies of the field, leaving all in God’s hands? Is it okay to worry about my retirement fund? In her 900-page manuscript of scriptural meditations, Mildmay regularly warns against placing one’s trust in earthly things. Yet she was daughterin-law to Sir Walter Mildmay, Queen Elizabeth I’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, mistress of Apethorpe, an estate that more than once hosted King James I, and she and her husband Anthony sued to gain possession of substantial land-holdings. Women of Mildmay’s rank oversaw staffs of servants, estate accounts, the medical care of the community, the education of children, and household devotional exercises. They used their social connections to negotiate marriages. They managed leases and executed wills. Many took part in lawsuits. Hence my research questions: Did someone like Mildmay compartmen-

talize, allocating different space in her mind for worldly and spiritual affairs? Or could I find evidence of how these aspects of her life might interpenetrate?

The County Records Office, which houses the archive, is on the edge of a Thatcher era housing estate, next to the police station and ambulance garage. While the archive has suffered from the government’s “austerity measures,” the head archivist was quick to help me make use of one of their most remarkable collections, the family papers of the earls of Westmorland, which includes deeds going back to the twelfth century, since a noble family had to keep track of endless leases and conveyances and mortgages on farms, copses, and pastures, not to mention rights for grazing, fishing, hunting, and mineral extraction. Imagine a title abstract going back five centuries, and then imagine keeping track of dozens of them. Other documents detailed the personal and real property a woman brought to a marriage, and her jointure, the lands or money designated to support her on her husband’s death. Besides documents dealing with land, there were letters, agreements, warrants, and licenses, many from Queen Elizabeth or James I.

The most stunning documents I looked at were those that recorded the settlements of major lawsuits. One suit fought the terms of Sir Walter’s will. He had entailed his lands on the male line, giving a large portion of his wealth to Anthony’s younger brother Humphrey, who had sons, whereas Anthony and Grace had only a daughter, Mary. The second set of suits was between the Mildmays, on the one hand, and Grace’s sister Olive and her family, on the other. Grace’s father had, on his deathbed, left a nuncupative (oral) will leaving the lion’s share of his estate to Olive. The Mildmays sued first to overturn the deathbed will and then to secure Grace’s

share of her mother’s jointure. The settlements were written on huge sheets of vellum, over three feet by four feet. The “exemplification of a cause of partition between Sir Anthony Mildmay & his wife & Oliva Stapleton widow of lands in Wiltshire” was typical, with calligraphed flourishes and the royal seal of James I, a thick wax hockey puck, affixed at the bottom.

These lawsuits seemed to fly in the face of Mildmay’s biblical meditations. “Let not the cares of this world, nor the deceitfulness of riches … enter into our hearts,” she prays (375). At another point, she mused on earthly possessions:

Every day draweth out the line of our lives, & every day shortens it. And whatsoever presenteth itself unto us, for the use of many days, even the same day it departeth from us. So that it is a question what is ours in this life? Whereto I answer – only that which we have for the present, & that which we have, we only have it as we are Gods, and God is ours in Christ

Kate Narveson

Jesus. Then can we lay up no lasting treasure to be enjoyed in this life. (265)

What attitude toward property disputes would have been taken by a woman who professed to have no lasting treasure on earth? This problem seems to have concerned Mildmay herself. She twice narrates the drama surrounding her father’s inheritance, once in a memoir written for her daughter and future descendants, and once in a meditation on God’s providence in her life. Both times, she plays up her Christian comportment.

There were real stakes involved. Because of Sir Walter’s entail, Mildmay’s husband would possess his lands only during his lifetime, after which they would go to his brother, meaning he could use none as a marriage portion for their daughter. Therefore, Grace Mildmay assigned to her daughter all “present possession” of her own inheritance from her father, save what would come to Grace at her mother’s death. If Anthony died before his father’s entail was broken, Mildmay would be left with little and would have to leave Apethorpe. And Anthony was in ill health. As she puts it in the memoir, If my husband had died at that time, I should have had no Land but the bare rent of about 300£ a year … Neither could I have been able to contend by law with my husband’s brother for my thirds, nor with my Sister for the right of mine inheritance. … [Thus] my state in myne age stood upon Hazards.

Mildmay recounts that she therefore asked her husband to repair a small parsonage so that she would have a place to go should anything happen to him. She would spend my whole life in that place in the most private manner possible … with great contentation of mind, and mortification to

the world, without repentance of whatsoever I had given [her daughter], wishing it much more with the abundance of Gods blessing therewith…. Often times I have prayed to God that if it were his pleasure that I should be cast out of this house in mine age by my Husbands brother, yet that he [God] should be pleased to go out with me as he came into this house with me … and then let his will be done. (49o)1

Mildmay dwells on this theme. She insists “I have often times said unto my soul in the secret of my heart; God forbid that I should so much wish or desire to dwell in this house during my life or to possess the Lands & provisions belonging thereunto, as that God would be pleased much rather to hold me in mine integrity and faithfulness towards God & my husband” (49o-50o). Having played out in her mind this drama of resignation, she then presents

the reversal of fortune that awarded them the estates as evidence of God’s favor, for God “looked upon me & gave me those earthly blessings which I asked not nor deserved neither could expect” (50o).

The enumeration of providences is key in early modern life-writing, and Mildmay turns next to the conflict with her sister, heightening God’s role and stressing her own acceptance of whatever outcome the Lord should give. We sense a tension, though, between her sense of grievance and her efforts at Christian resignation. She laments that on his deathbed, her father forgot that “my sister & I proceeded both from one father & from one mother, & that I had ever been his obedient and loving daughter, & that I had never provoked him to displeasure by any misdemeanor” (51o). Having hurried across England to say farewell, Mildmay was on arrival brought into his Chamber upon a sudden at the very instant when the judge [called to create the new conveyance] was there, & those accompanying him which were plotters, and workers of this unjust alteration, & upon the sight of me they scattered one from another & put away the books and parchments.

Mildmay was then bustled out of the room, whereupon “one after another” her mother, sister, and uncle came professing to assure her of her father’s love. But they did not let her see her father again until the conveyance in her sister’s favor was complete, even while she urged them to remind her father to be good to various servants and friends. As her father’s end neared and she knelt by his side, she writes, he looked with tears upon her and said “thou shalt have much trouble with thy land I tell thee, but I pray God thou mayest well

A page from Lady Grace Mildmay's memoir

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

overcome it.” Then, at his death, he exclaimed “oh that it were to do again” (52o-54o). By shaping a story of her father’s deathbed repentance, Mildmay can represent herself as the loving daughter of an upright father who was not ultimately of the company of those who betrayed her.

The drama did not end there. Mildmay goes on to relate that when her sister told her of the deathbed will, she responded “is it so indeed that my father hath dealt thus with me who never offended him willingly”? Well, she tells her sister, “if God moved him thereunto without any indirect dealings by your Husband, your selfe, or any other friends for you, then, the will of God be done … my small portion shall content me.” But “if you have laboured my father by all means to work, & bring to pass this unnatural wrong towards me, I commit my whole cause into the hand of God.” Thereupon, she relates, she went off by herself to commit her heart to God, and then “my mind was satisfied & never troubled after” (54o-55o). Stressing her assumption of the high ground with family and submission to the will of God, Mildmay retrospectively shapes her account around a renunciation of the things of this world.

This attitude continues through the next acts of the drama. Sir Walter succeeds in having the nuncupative will declared void and her husband successfully battles her sister’s claim to full control of her mother’s jointure. Mildmay presents herself as passive in those disputes, accepting as God’s hand whatever came to pass, even while she dramatizes her sister’s unruly passions, noting that Olive exclaimed at one point “I will be drawen in pieces with wyld horses before ever I will yeeld unto her!” (56o). Mildmay (in her telling) held out charity to the last, and her sister reconciled herself, so that “all strife ended, natural love revived and confirmed, with all well wishing to each other & our posterities … all which was the work of God expressly (57o). Mildmay thus presents to her posterity a portrait of how submission to the will of God is rewarded both in heaven and on earth.

Historians, of course, bring a healthy dose of skepticism to a narrative written

for public consumption. Pronouncements on the vanity of the world seem easy enough when you live in a stately home and one of Queen Elizabeth’s most powerful advisors is on your side. By 1602, the family had a reputation for great wealth; John Manningham writes in his diary that Mary’s husband, Francis Fane, is “a gentleman of great hope and forwardness” in part because of the fortune to be received from Sir Anthony, whose worth he estimates at £3000 per annum, and from Lady Grace, at £1200. Given her wealth and financial activity, how could I flesh out Mildmay’s actual understanding of the relationship between earthly and spiritual riches?

The Northamptonshire archive contains several documents from the 1590s that provide a fuller picture of what would have shaped Mildmay’s sense of her socio-economic circumstances. One is a license allowing Sir Anthony Mildmay, “by the advice of Physicians to repair to certain Bathes in ye parts of Germany for the recovery of his health, & to remain for 1 year with 5 servants, 3 horses, 3 geldings, £100 in money together with certain Jewells of his own & a chain of gold.” It was dated July 19, 1595, and signed by Queen Elizabeth. This manuscript witnesses the seriousness of Anthony’s ill health, underlining Mildmay’s concerns for her future in the 1590s. It also suggests the level of expense and display necessary to a royal servant, which led Anthony into debt, as it had his father. One of Grace Mildmay’s manuscripts contains a page headed “I made Sir Anthony Mildmay this cordial as followeth”; it is a treatment for the heart. That illness and debt made the 1590s a tense time is further evident in the conveyance of property that Mildmay made, part of the marriage settlement for Mary Mildmay and Francis Fane, dating from 1596, a document that confirms that by signing away her inheritance for the sake of her daughter’s advantageous marriage, Mildmay made herself yet more vulnerable to financial distress.

Less dramatic but also telling are manuscripts that indicate the matters that demanded Mildmay’s everyday attention. An account book dated from 1593-96 suggests the size of the house-

hold their estate had to support, with weekly provision of bread, beef, mutton, beer and numerous smaller items, as well as the expense of Anthony’s travels, primarily to London, accompanied by up to 30 attendants, with payments for dinners on the road and saddlers. A leather-bound volume contains some of Mildmay’s medical notes, and there’s a gathering of her prescriptions, prefaced by lists of herbs and other more costly ingredients. A packet of loose papers contains an inventory of the bottles in her stillroom, where she distilled her tinctures and electuaries. Testimony to Mildmay’s managerial skill appears in Sir Anthony’s will, which not only left her the bulk of his property but named her as his executrix and instructed her to oversee the creation of a grand tomb monument to be placed in the parish church. The complex emblematic design, which seems to have been Grace Mildmay’s, stresses both biblical themes and family honor.

Other documents develop a context suggested by the tomb monument: there are pedigrees for the Sharingtons (Mildmay’s family), the Mildmays, and the Fanes (the family of Mary’s husband). These may reflect efforts to establish property rights. However, they also suggest the weight of lineage on one’s sense of identity. That idea that one represents a family line that will continue in one’s posterity is manifest in another manuscript volume, a “Book of Advices” bound in a cover embroidered in silk and silver thread. The manuscript collects letters of advice, primarily to Mary’s eldest son, Mildmay Fane, who would become the second earl, from Grace Mildmay and Anne le Despencer, his maternal and paternal grandmothers, and from Mary and her husband, each penned by its author. After these letters, Mary has copied a letter by Sir Walter Mildmay to Anthony, as his eldest son. Most letters focus on honor. Of Walter’s letter, Mary writes that all his posterity that “desires to have his earthly possessions blessed unto them, to live honored & leave a never-ending memory behind them as he hath done,” should “Lay [his letter] before them for directions” (15v).

The volume is material evidence of the value placed on honor and lineage.

These documents make clear that Mildmay must have felt the pressures of the world and its demands. Given her pursuit of property on the one hand and rejection of the world on the other, perhaps it’s a case of cognitive dissonance, of unconscious compartmentalization. But can that be true of a highly self-aware woman of deep faith? We all weave together varied threads of experience in our inward account of ourselves. What particular assumptions, values, and ideas combined to make Grace Mildmay a person who could hold seemingly incompatible ideas in her mind?

In the article I am writing I offer a fuller version of an argument I have space only to summarize here. Mildmay faced financial insecurity until she was in her fifties. Her concerns embraced not just money but family position. We see this in her remark that if her husband had died, her income would be “not sufficient to keep any house” suited to “my father’s daughter nor my husband’s wife” (48o). Similarly, Mildmay criticizes Sir Walter for failing to “leave any sufficient portion for the preferment of his [son’s] only child & daughter” (40o). In a later summary of the same situation, she meditates that “when no jointure was assured me by my Husband nor by his father” the failure “tended to the prejudice of me & of my posterity,” but the Lord “restored & established me my whole portion, both the law of God, & and the Law of the land assisting me” (618). These reflections position her in relation to lineage and her place in society. Seen in this light, Mildmay’s choice to give her lands to her daughter as a marriage portion reflects her commitment to the family line she had married into. As a Mildmay, she was obliged to contribute to the continuance of the line; right action (the law of God) and social obligation (the law of the land) coincided.

Birth brought the obligation to serve God with one’s wealth. In the guidance Mildmay gives her descendants, a recurring theme is the right attitude toward and use of one’s material possessions. They must withdraw “from all inordinate love & desires of earthly things,” but even more, “as soon as we receive

the benefits & blessings from God, let us give & distribute the same unto the needy, as nurses when their breasts be full are never quiet until they be drawn” (26o). They should not spend the gifts of God idly, upon vain needless delights, but rather “whilst we have time, let us do good unto all, in the name of the Lorde, from whom all goodness proceedeth” and call upon God’s name, “whereby we may receive new supplies from God to furnish our store & maintain the work of our benevolence” (27o). But alas, she fears,

we are too careful and costly in our superfluous & unnecessary meats, drinks, & apparel, & spend too much time therein ... [but] if we did use our plenty well, in those good uses, for the which God hath given them unto us, we should be sure never to want, but be endued with the love of God, & receive from him blessing after blessing, as we make the needy blessed, and multiply the praises of God thereby. (27o-28o)

What attitude toward property disputes would have been taken by a woman who professed to have no lasting treasure on earth?

This exuberant vision of benevolence increasing one’s plenty and multiplying blessings, both temporal and spiritual, for rich and poor, is perhaps wishful thinking. But it is also a reasonably coherent position. A well-born Christian cannot simply turn her back on the world. When contemplating the use of her “plenty,” Mildmay thinks in terms of what is ordinate or inordinate, needful or superfluous. Secular things require proper care. If God has given “great things” then let God also give “large hearts” to distribute those things (543). Mildmay warns that “it is a dangerous thing to be in league and friendship with this world” but later inserts “too much” – “too much

in league and friendship” (589). By contrast, when meditating on ultimate things, she thinks in absolute terms: “we must not embrace this world nor the vanity & glory thereof but esteem them as they are even fruitless unprofitable & dangerous; & an arrogant and proud spirit must depart from us” (782). The vanity of this world contrasts with the sure eternal promises of God, which “are forever, never failing thy chosen ones who put their trust in thee. The heavens shall vanish away like smoke & the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall perish in like manner. But the salvation of the Lord shall be forever” (189).

For Mildmay, wealth is a function both of her birth in the divinely given social order and of God’s providence in immediate, emergent occasions. She sees the stewardship of wealth as a duty by which one serves God, carried out with the firm recognition that wealth is a good only in a qualified sense. One must never trust in things of this world, but place one’s final trust in God. The piece that fits uncomfortably in this ethics might seem to be the prosecution of lawsuits in order to secure legacies, and her memoir betrays some uneasiness in the way it vacillates between resignation to God’s will and a sense of grievance about the wills that deprived her of the inheritance she expected. Yet ultimately, I think, she can see these lawsuits as justified because the property is their rightful inheritance according to the law of God and the land; and it is her duty to preserve it for her daughter and all the generations to follow. Special pleading? My sabbatical is over, and further pondering must wait. Still, Mildmay’s attempt to reconcile her wealth and her faith challenge us all, over 400 years after her death.

Notes

1. Page numbers with a superscript “o” refer to Mildmay’s memoir; those without refer to the scriptural meditations that follow in the same manuscript.

Target Practice

by TOMMY OCCHIPINTI, Associate Professor of Mathmatics

Rules:

1) Place the digits 1-9 into the grid so that every digit occurs exactly once in every row, column, and indicated 3x3 box. (These are exactly the rules of a newspaper sudoku puzzle.)

2) The sum of the digits along each line that connects two circles is equal to the sum of the digits in the circles at the ends. For example, if the circles at the ends of a line contain a 2 and a 7, the digits along the line could be 2, 3, and 4. Note that it is acceptable to repeat the 2 from the circle along the line as long as it does not violate rule 1.

Tommy Occhipinti

Travel Testimony: Unexpected Experiences

by MARV SLIND, Professor Emeritus of History

Editor’s Note: This talk was part of a series of reflections on travel during the Sunday service at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Decorah. The series was titled “Travels with the Spirit: A Summer Travelogue Through the Book of Acts.”

As a graduate student, I had the opportunity to spend a year studying and conducting archival research in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Heidelberg. My time spent there, as well as traveling during the university’s generous vacation periods, made me aware of how cultures evolve or develop differently than others, even those in close proximity. I also came to appreciate the centuries-old religious heritage I saw around me, even if much of it was from traditions that were different from my own.

As I traveled, I visited churches representing architectural and artistic traditions that had developed over the centuries. In Norway, I attended services in the 800-year-old church in Selbu, where both sets of my grandparents were married, and where my father was baptized; and I attended a Christmas Eve service in Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim. I also visited Catholic churches in Germany, France, and Italy, Orthodox churches in Greece, Protestant churches in Norway, Denmark, and Germany, and a Jewish synagogue and museum in Prague.

But my most memorable experience in a European church wasn’t in Germany or Norway, as you might imagine, but in France. Chartres Cathedral is early Gothic, with world-renowned stained glass windows from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When it was designated as a World Heritage Site, UNESCO described it as “the high point of French Gothic art.” (If you’re not familiar with Chartres Cathedral

and its magnificent stained glass windows, there are some excellent websites that provide great photos; simply google “Chartres stained glass windows.”)

We arrived in Chartres late in the afternoon, planning to explore the Cathedral the next morning. When we went to dinner near our hotel, we saw a poster advertising a concert that evening in the Cathedral: a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. We quickly ate our dinner (probably scandalizing the French restauranteur in the process), and went to see if there were any tickets available. Unfortunately, the concert was sold out. But as we turned to walk dejectedly back to our hotel, a young man who was walking by asked, “Êtes-vous étudiantes?” (Are you students?) “Oui,” I replied—still safely within the limits of my French vocabulary. He motioned for us to follow him to a side door, where there was a small booth selling student admissions to the concert. There were no seats remaining in the Cathedral, but the student tickets allowed us to sit on the steps along the nave, near the West entrance. We didn’t have a direct view of the full orchestra at the far end of the nave, but we could hear it well. And from our seats on the steps, we marveled at the majestic columns and Gothic arches.

We also had a spectacular view of the early thirteenth century stained glass windows across the nave from us, as well as the twelfth century rose window over the Cathedral’s west entrance. Although it was a dark evening, the windows were illuminated by the Cathedral’s exterior lighting, and their renowned cobalt blue images were spectacular.

A nineteenth century Romantic symphony seems a bit incongruous in a Gothic cathedral. I feared that the sound would be lost in its vastness. But I soon came to wonder if any other

venue could do it justice. Despite its size, we heard the orchestra and chorus extremely well, and as we sat listening to the “Ode to Joy,” with our fantastic views of the Gothic columns, arches, and stained glass windows, I had what I think can best be described as a “sense of the sublime.” Although it was a secular musical performance, in its own way it was a “religious experience.”

We wanted to thank the young man who had directed us to the student entrance: buy him a cup of coffee, or perhaps a glass of wine after the concert. But after he had showed us where to get the tickets, he disappeared into the church, and we never saw him again. He was what a former pastor in Pullman, Washington, used to describe as an otherwise ordinary person who plays the role of an “angel”—not bearing wings or descending from heaven with a choir, but rather someone who profoundly touches our lives with a very simple act.

Since my retirement in 2013, I’ve been fortunate to be an enrichment speaker on cruise ships. That has enabled Mickey and me to travel to many places we would otherwise never have visited.

Marv Slind

PHOTO COURTESY OF NINA GERZEMA

Whenever we travel, as we see or experience something very different from my own background, I usually say, “It’s a long way from Bow, Washington,” the rural area where I grew up.

Interestingly, on many of the cruises we’ve met people with connections to Decorah and Luther College. Sometimes they’re a Luther alum, asking if I know how some of their favorite professors are doing. A few have been grandparents of Luther alumni, curious to know if their granddaughter or grandson had been one of my students. Often, they’re long-time friends of people here. It’s not uncommon for me to have a guest approach me, and after confirming that I live in Decorah and taught at Luther, ask me something like, “Do you know Reg and Jeri Laursen, . . . or Gail and David Judisch, . . . or Bob and Marilyn Larson?”

That kind of experience reminds me that despite the vastness and grandeur of God’s creation, in some ways, it is indeed “a small world,” no matter how

far I am away from Bow, Washington. It reinforces the value of friendships, and the strength of long-lasting personal ties. And it also reminds me that we never know how our lives may have touched others, and that what we do in our lives and careers, and how we treat those we come to know as colleagues, students, friends, or even strangers, can leave a lasting impression and be a legacy of our lives. The young man at Chartres Cathedral undoubtedly assumed that I enjoyed the concert. But he had no way of knowing how profoundly I was moved by the experience. How many times has something simple that we have done for others had a much deeper impact on them than we might ever expect? In other words, how often might we unknowingly serve as “angels” in others’ lives?

Twelfth century rose window over the Chartres Cathedral west entrance

PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE COURTESY WIKIMEDIA: VITRAIL_CHARTRES-ROSACE_14

Our Wittenberg Door

by MAX HOLT, '23

Good morning everyone. My name is Max Holt. I am a senior here at Luther and this year’s Student Senate president. I want to start off by thanking Pastor Melissa Bills and the rest of Campus Ministries for the opportunity to speak here today. We are an ELCA Lutheran-affiliated college, but we are a community of many religious traditions. I want to call attention to the work that Campus Ministries has recently done in regard to supporting interfaith traditions and initiatives. As a non-Christian, nonLutheran student, I see this work as incredibly important for Luther College’s identity. I would also like to welcome any Luther community members or Luther parents here for Parents Weekend.

For today’s message, I want to highlight Ephesians 6:12 but spin it in a different light. It reads...

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

While Paul meant this in a different context, I am Jewish so I feel like I can bend the rules a little bit here. I don’t know if we can find G-d or what that would even mean to find G-d but what I do know is that we can find ourselves. The way I see it, Paul is saying the true enemy is not that of other people or our bodies but rather it is the struggle in the discovery, molding, and acceptance of our mind and our spirit.

One of the most important times for this self-discovery is in college. What is education’s purpose if not for the progression of knowledge of the world both around us and within ourselves? I think back to my time in high school and working through the awkwardness of living in my own body. Going through

high school, you learn to accept your physicality and I see that in college one learns to accept their mind and spirit. However, the way I see it, it is only in the unification of these three—body, mind, and spirit—that we discover who we are. In doing the work of discovery, one may find it best to work in selfreflection, but I have found that some of the most powerful and influential moments in my life have come in community with others.

We are at Luther College so I feel that I am obligated to mention Martin Luther at least once in my talk today. One of the hallmarks of Lutheranism is the imagery of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg as an act of rebellion. Instead, rather, Martin Luther put his ideas on the Church door for debate, because apparently that is where you did that in Wittenberg in 1517. In the continuing spirit of self-discovery, my question is, where do we do that at Luther College? Where is our Wittenberg door? It’s a difficult question to answer, especially in a place as diverse as Luther. People all think, engage, and associate with people differently based on their values, culture, and even language. In psychology, we hear it all the time that people associate with those most similar to them, not in debate but in affirmation, which... is still a very important thing. However, how often do you browse the internet looking for the representation of two sides only to see an echo chamber on one site and the other perspective on another site? In our media, it’s now reached a point where discourse has reached such polarization that many, most, are turned away from it entirely. America needs and the world needs a place like Luther College where individuals from all over the globe can come together to freely and openly discuss ideas that aren’t shared in other spaces, and where all people have the freedom to respond.

Now when I talk about these things I imagine one of two things pop into your head. You’re either thinking of where your Wittenberg door is or that that door doesn’t exist at all. This is what colleges and universities are for. Now more than ever, spaces for discourse, for opening the eyes of our hearts, are needed for all of our journeys into becoming better people. In doing so, we can discover more about ourselves, others, and the natural world around us than we would have ever thought possible.

College is not only a time to exercise the mind but also to work out who we are and who we want to become as individuals. Students here today, I urge you to take today as a chance to engage your peers in meaningful conversation. Find your own Wittenberg door, whether that be on or off campus. For any staff, faculty, and parents here today, please continue to assist in the journey of all Luther students. Together we can all help one another to fully realize our potential as lifelong learners.

Again, I want to express my gratitude for the opportunity to speak here today. Thank you for your time and attention.

Max Holt

Open the Eyes of Your Heart

by HOLLY MOORE, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Identity Studies OCTOBER 12, 2022

Iwant to share with you today the story of how I came to understand the connection between vulnerability and spirituality.

I came to Luther College an avowed atheist. My atheism was philosophical in nature, tied to my commitment to the existential and Socratic call to examine life and make it one’s own, allowing no other to take responsibility for one’s integrity. This was a kind of faith, in so far as it was a belief that shaped my worldview, and it was one I thought I needed in order to protect myself from both deception and credulity. When I was offered the job at Luther, I was glad to hear that “the life of faith and learning” was expansive enough to include even someone like me, who had no religious faith but recognized the value of faith in others’ lives.

The eyes of my heart were first opened when I started attending chapel somewhat regularly early on in my time at Luther. I was in principle averse to the religious nature of the event, but I tried to stay open minded and was encouraged to attend by several of my colleagues, one of whom is a particularly persuasive interlocutor and a powerful chapel speaker himself. I was persuaded that this was an important way of getting to know what it meant to be at a place like Luther and that it would introduce me to a different way of connecting with the community here. I was surprised by how many aspects of the practice were both comforting and emotionally charged for me. I found myself regularly holding back tears and unsettled by how deeply the feeling of connectedness called to me in this space. I came to really appreciate the ways this practice helped me to get in touch with parts of myself I’d long held in check, a legacy of my training as a philosopher and “rational agent.”

To explain why I held this identity so strongly at the time requires a little bit of background.

I was a “very sensitive child.” I cried easily, especially when I thought I was being judged and found lacking. And when I did cry, it would induce a spasmodic breathing reaction, making me scared it would never stop because I couldn’t catch my breath. I remembered hating this about myself, and I remember doing everything I could to try to make it stop. I got better over time at stifling my tears in public, but they seemed to store up for even bigger, longer, uglier cries later. Over time, I “got control of myself,” however, and although I still cried more easily than most, I could swallow most of my reaction down and not lose my grip.

So, when I started to experience a need (and a deep desire, to be honest) to cry, particularly when I was among others, this was a real shock. Something had clearly shifted in me. And this desire to cry came not from feeling judged or lesser than others; it came from feeling a part of something bigger than me, and from a fear of the vulnerability that exposed me to. This made the whole thing feel different. While I was still terrified, there was a curiosity embedded in my fear now.

Around this same time, I also encountered Jane Hawley’s teaching with contact improvisation and had the opportunity to experience the power of experiencing thinking and knowing through a genuinely embodied practice.

I found in my interaction with that artform a path to vulnerability that opened my heart in ways not unlike what I’d found by attending chapel. I was again, unsettled—moved from my position of perceived safety and comfort into a world of connection and a deeper sense of wholeness with this place and its

people. I remain deeply indebted to Jane for this pivotal experience.

I was, nevertheless, genuinely terrified of this vulnerability and tried to keep it at arm’s length. But time after time, in various ways and places, I’d find myself exposed to this same feeling of awe and openness. I came to understand that something important was calling me, and I slowly (sometimes haltingly) began to heed that call. Gradually, I admitted to myself and to others that I was on a spiritual journey.

It was during this same time period that I came to more actively and openly identify myself publicly as bisexual and queer, and each step on that path brought me to a larger sense of wholeness and connection with the communities of which I’m a part. Over time, it transformed my sense of myself, my purpose and allowed me to make big changes in my life. These transformations were neither easy nor quick, but each step I took toward more openness and more honesty gave me a sense of rootedness in my own life.

Holly Moore

By opening my heart to the sense of wonder already present within me, I not only found connection with the world around me and a deeper sense of who I really was, I also developed a much stronger form of empathy and compassion. Instead of suppressing the anguish I would experience at seeing an animal dead on the road, I began to follow the tug on my heart to respect that life. Perhaps I seem odd, parking on the side of the road to move a dead squirrel out of the path of oncoming traffic, but it seems important not to trivialize any death. After all, if we harden ourselves to the pain of others, we become less willing to acknowledge our own.

The ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi held that compassion is innate, and I have come to understand the truth of this. No one can give you a sense of compassion—you need only tap into your given connectedness to the world around you to find it there, buried in its own fertile ground. The ultimate gift of such compassion, of course, is that it must eventually fall back to yourself. By stretching out to others with love, and not just those whom it is easy to love but those whom it is difficult to love, we expand our capacity to love enough that we cannot help but also love ourselves. And those who can love themselves cannot willfully harm others.

I am by no means a master of compassion, especially when it comes to myself, but I am encouraged that my capacity seems to be growing, especially now that I’m not so assiduously evading my own vulnerability.

If you had told me before I came to Iowa that I was going to move there and find out how to love myself through a spiritual journey lasting a dozen years, I would have laughed in your face. This alone is enough reason for me to have compassion for everyone I encounter, for we know not where our journeys will take us.

Always Re-Founding

by JENIFER WARD, President of Luther College

Ephesians 1:17-18

I pray that God may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which God has called you.

What would it really mean to let light into the eyes of our hearts so that we may know the hope to which God has called us? Founder’s Day commemorations at Luther College and other institutions, especially when they come at the same time as Indigenous People’s Day, run the risk of resting solely in the past. On the one hand, a thoughtful celebration of this college and its history, of the recitation of the many names associated with the beautiful parts of the history of this place—Larsen, Koren, Preus, Sperati, Noble—and the events that marked significant changes in how we understood who we are: welcoming the first Black students, the first women students, the first music ensembles,the first sports teams, the addition of academic programs and clubs, the planting of “Darryl”—our wind turbine—high above campus to catch the wind, solar arrays. On the other hand, we appropriately acknowledge that the Norwegian immigrants who settled here and thought to found a college were not the first people to canoe this part of the Upper Iowa river, not the first ones to grow food, not the first ones to raise families and live in community. They were displaced—perhaps not by Laur Laursen himself—but nonetheless displaced. On the first hand, joyful celebration and nostalgia. On the other hand, somber reflection and knowing that our prosperity and opportunity were worked out on ground that we found—not ground we created. We see both these things when we face the past of Luther College.

At the same time, our text exhorts us to know what is the hope to which God has called us. This is a decidedly future-facing assignment. We don’t need hope for what is past, what was already displaced, what was already founded. We only need hope for what is before us. How do we look backwards and look forwards at the same time? How do we hold acknowledgment and contrition in the same place that we hold hope and creativity and a desire for beloved community?

There are a couple of well-known possibilities for looking backwards and forwards in our cultural history, neither of which seems very practical: in ancient times, people believed the god Janus— from which we take the name January— had a two-faced head, one that looked to the past and one that looked to the future at the same time. There was certainly no movement involved in this image, but a static observation of what was behind and what was before.

More recently, in 1921, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin purchased the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (“new angel”). Benjamin writes: “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly

OCTOBER 14, 2022 (Founder's Day)

propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Is this what change must feel like? Is this the only way to make progress? To feel violently battered by winds so powerful that they propel us into the future toward a pile of debris, because we can’t repair the mistakes of the past or awaken the dead and get an existential do-over?

Let me suggest a third possibility. When I was inaugurated as your president around this time in 2019, I was asked to choose a “theme” for that ritual moment. I chose to tie together two references that have been important to me—one from the poet Rilke, in which he asks a young poet to be “immer im werden”—always questioning, always loving the questions, and always in the process of becoming, knowing that to answer the questions would be to stop growing and becoming. The second is from this college’s namesake, Martin Luther: “This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness,

Jenifer Ward

not health, but healing, not being but becoming.”

What if we thought of the “founding” of Luther College as an ongoing process, as always becoming? What if every day is a re-founding? What if, rather than a pile of debris before us as we are propelled forward by the storms of change, we see a pile of lessons learned—both positive and negative; a pile of opportunities to repair, but with the eyes of our heart always enlightened by what that might look like for our future together; and a pile of tools: knowledge, trust, empathy, discipline, collaboration, curiosity? What would the ears of our heart hear if we sang “Jubilee”* every single day? What would the eyes of our heart see if we saw both the hope and the intention to re-found, every single day, Luther College?

And finally: can we, as a community, love these questions? Amen.

* Thanks to Norskkor for singing “O Sing Jubilee” during today’s chapel.

Director's Notes for Macbeth

by ROBERT J. VRTIS, Associate Professor of Theatre

Editor’s note:This director’s note is from the program for Macbeth, performed by Luther College students in November at Jewel Theatre in the Center for the Arts. In rereading Robert’s note, I was taken again by how the production engaged us in thinking about Shakespeare’s tragedy in a striking new way for today’s world.

Ifirst wanted to tell this story in a dark wood huddled around a campfire. Actors would speak the play in the hushed tones of a ghost story. I thought Shakespeare’s cursed play should feel like it is weaving through the shadows and bristling the hairs on the back of your neck, ready to leap out with a bloody dagger in the middle of a prolonged dramatic pause. Macbeth is supposed to be scary. Just the name spoken aloud makes actors jump.

The play is said to be cursed. Maybe you already know this. Some believe Shakespeare delved too deeply into real witchcraft and included genuine spells, evoking the ire of dark forces. Maybe a handful of real witches took their revenge on the play with a curse. The play has been said to be riddled with mischance and even mysterious deaths ever since. But, when I actually planned to direct this play, I thought much more about the Witches’ Well. It’s a small monument across the open space in front of

Edinburgh Castle; we occasionally visit the site on study abroad trips. It’s a quiet reminder of the thousands who were executed on charges of witchcraft – mostly women who were burned or hanged right in that open space – between the 16th and 18th centuries. King James VI, who this play was meant to thrill, was particularly keen to order witch-hunts.

unpredictable. It can’t be reasoned with because it operates absent of reason.

And that violence is usually inflicted on people who just want to live their lives in peace.

People who may not know why the soldiers are here, but can’t make them leave.

And that violence sparks more violence.

On and on.

I adapted the Macbeth you’re about to see feeling that it should be horrifying, but that the horror is not supernatural. It’s very human. I wanted the violence to feel close, immediate, possible… Because that’s why Macbeth is scary.

The witches don’t compel Macbeth to murder, they see something murderous and hungry for power in him already.

The illusory dagger Macbeth sees before murdering Duncan merely sends him in the direction he was already going.

This is what terrifies me about Macbeth: violent men seizing what they want, murdering any real or imagined threat to their power, and exercising that power on any whim. It’s that that violence is sudden, implacable, and often entirely

This is perhaps the least optimistic production I’ve staged in some time, but I’d say that that is because the hope isn’t on stage and so much harder to see. The hope is in the audience, who sit across the campfire from Macbeth, who can see that darkness spurring on the cycle of violence, and who can reject it.

Lindsey Fry ('22) as Lady MacBeth and Josie Ramler ('22) as MacBeth

IMAGE BY NICK GRESETH '23/LUTHER

PHOTO BUREAU

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

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The image at left illustrated early issues of Agora. The journal was established by the Paideia Program, and paideia translates as education. The image shows a teacher with his tablet on his lap and stylus in his hand.

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