Agora Fall 2019

Agora

THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE

FALL 2019

LUTHER COLLEGE, DECORAH, IOWA

Resilience

FALL 2019 VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1

THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE

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. Paideia consists of many activities and opportunities, including a three-course interdisciplinary core curriculum; performances and events, including an annual lecture series; library acquisitions; student writing services; networked computer classrooms; and a faculty development program that includes sabbatical grants and summer workshops. All these activities receive support from the Paideia Endowment, originally established through National Endowment for the Humanities grants matched by friends of Luther College. To see the current issue and archival issues on-line, go to <http://www.luther.edu/paideia/agora>.

LUTHER COLLEGE

PAIDEIA Seeking Wisdom in Community

The primary Agora contributors are Luther College faculty; writing is also solicited from other college community members and, occasionally, from outside writers. The journal was established in 1988 by then Paideia Director Wilfred F. Bunge, Professor of Religion and Classics. Mark Z. Muggli, Professor of English, was the editor from 1998-2004 and Peter A. Scholl, Professor of English, from 2004-2014. Martin Klammer, Professor of English, has been editor since 2014. Agora is distributed to five hundred on-campus faculty and administrators and to another five hundred off-campus friends of the college. Anyone wishing to be included on the mailing list should contact the editor. phone: (563) 387-2112 e-mail: klammerm@luther.edu

Contents Occasions Fall Convocation Address: Speaking Their Names (print copy only) Francisco Cantú.............................................................................................................. 3

2019-20 Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture Series: Resistance and Resilience Steve Biko: Black Consciousness as Resistance to the Apartheid State Martin Klammer............................................................................................................ 7 Education and the Ho-Chunk: Resistance and Resilience David Faldet and Anna Peterson.................................................................................. 14

Religion Forum Lecture Religion, Science, and Evolution: Confessions of a Darwinian Skeptic Robert Shedinger.......................................................................................................... 23

Sabbatical Reports A Challenging Outlook: Affordability and Enrollment at Iowa's Private Colleges Rob K. Larson.............................................................................................................. 30 Two Women Wearing Hats, Sharing Tea, and Inventing a World No One Has Seen Nancy Barry................................................................................................................. 33 Get Lost—The Philosopher Follows Her Nose Holly Moore.................................................................................................................. 37

Chapel Talks Papaw’s Tuning Fork, Mother’s Piano, and Daddy’s Saxophone (September 11, 2019) Jenifer Ward................................................................................................................. 40 The New Thing Upon This Earth (September 13, 2019) Nancy Barry................................................................................................................. 42 A New Thing? (October 11, 2019) Kristin Swanson........................................................................................................... 44 Nevertheless, God Persists (October 31, 2019) Amalia Vagts................................................................................................................ 46

Poem October Fires Carol Gilbertson........................................................................................................... 48

Cover: Angeline Hopinka graduating from Luther College, June 1953. Image courtesy of the Archives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

Introduction

by MARTIN KLAMMER, Professor of English, Editor of Agora

More and more we are talking about the need to help our students develop resilience—that is, the ability to withstand the emotional, social, and academic challenges of college.

Today’s students are depressed and anxious in numbers greater than ever before. In addition to the usual stresses of college life, today’s students are graduating with enormous debt and no guarantee of employment that will help them pay off that debt any time soon.

In light of these realities, it’s interesting to contemplate the challenges faced

by Angeline Hopinka, featured on this issue’s cover. Ms. Hopinka was a member of Ho-Chunk nation who was raised at the Bethany Indian Mission, a Lutheran mission in Wittenberg, Wisconsin. She attended Luther College in the early 1950s and was the first Native American to do so, graduating in 1953. In her graduation photo she has a lovely, beaming smile, and I wonder what challenges she overcame as one of the few persons of color at Luther.

Ms. Hopinka appears in the conclusion of the fascinating Paideia Text & Issues lecture by David Faldet and Anna Peterson, “Education and the HoChunk: Resistance and Resilience” (see pages 14-22). Their combined lecture details how Ms. Hopinka’s ancestors were removed from their homeland in Wisconsin to the Neutral Ground of northeastern Iowa, which includes present day Decorah. The Ho-chunk were then culturally assimilated by mission school education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

But, as Anna Peterson describes, in 1938 the Ho-Chunk resisted what they felt was their poor treatment at the Bethany Indian Mission by Reverend Ernest Sihler, the mission’s director and superintendent. They made their 2

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complaints known to the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America (NLCA) and the Church—well, the Church leaders “dismissed the tribe’s concerns” and “shamed tribal members for their display of ingratitude,” according to Peterson.

But despite this sad display of ecclesiastical (one might even say colonial) power, there blossomed a sort of grace. For Pastor Sihler responded with a “Dear friends” letter to the people, showing himself more willing than church leaders to “admit fault and offer up potential solutions.” He still sounded a bit defensive, Peterson says, but he was “vulnerable . . . a work on progress, someone who was learning and who admitted that “sometimes my judgment was not the best.”

I find in Sihler’s response not only grace but a kind of resilience in his ability and willingness to look at his own faults and to seek to correct them.

As for Angeline Hopinka she seems to have lived a good life after Luther.

With the help of college archivist Hayley Jackson, the Registrar’s office, and Alumni Records, we were able to locate her obituary. She lived her later years in Wittenberg and died a year

ago, December 2018, at the age of 87.

The obituary gives her name at the time of her death as Dolli Elsa (Hopinka) Big John. After leaving Luther, she taught physical education and English at various schools, married Maurice Big John, and raised four daughters. She was an active member of the Native American Church, the obituary states, and “enjoyed pow-wows, bingo, and a trip to the casino.” Her picture here suggests she lived joyfully. It’s good to know that Luther College was part of her life’s journey.

Steve Biko: Black Consciousness as Resistance to the Apartheid State

by MARTIN KLAMMER, Professor of English

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one historian put it (Wilson 13). His resistance and resilience inspired others to be proudly black, to be a new kind of South African, to be fully human.

Early Life

LUTHER COLLEGE PHOTO BUREAU/ NICK GRESETH, '23,

n Tuesday, September 6, 1977, Stephen Bantu Biko was taken by the South African security police to Room 619 of the Sanlam Building in Port Elizabeth. He was handcuffed, put into leg irons, and chained. He was interrogated for twenty-two hours, tortured and beaten, and struck repeatedly on the head. By 7:00 a.m. the next morning he had sustained five brain lesions, later shown to have caused severe brain damage.

He was left shackled in leg irons and handcuffs for two more days.

He lay helpless. On September 12, he was taken in the back of a Landrover to Pretoria, 700 miles away. Lying naked and unconscious, somewhere along the way, he died (Woods ix).

Steve Biko did not die of a hunger strike as the Minister of Justice claimed. He died in the back of a police van, naked and unconscious. He was 30 years old.

Steve Biko was born on December 18, 1946, just two years prior to the beginning of apartheid. Biko was born in a small town in the Eastern Cape, the third of four children. His father Mzingaye was a former police officer who worked as an administrative clerk. His mother Alice, known as MamChete, earned a small income as a domestic worker. Both were Xhosa, one of the nine African ethnic groups in South Africa ruled by a coalition of the two white—or European--groups, the English and the Afrikaners, who were mostly Dutch descendants but also German and French.

His father chose to name him The world was shocked and Bantu Stephen Biko. Bantu horrified by Biko’s death, no more Martin Klammer gives the Paideia Texts and Issues lecture means people. It was a prophetic so than in South Africa. One black about Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness movement. choice because Biko became a school teacher told the Times: “I countrymen, and his death convulsed person for other people, as in don’t know anybody under 40 who our nation and reverberated far beyond the African saying: “a person is a person didn’t hero worship Steven Biko (Burns, its boundaries” (x). because of other people [umntu ngumtu “Tension is Rising”). ngabanye abantu]” (Wilson 17-18). In Steve Biko was the voice of Black How Steve Biko became a hero to so other words, you are who you because of Consciousness, a movement that many is remarkable, given that the your relationship with others. empowered South African blacks to apartheid state did everything it could live with pride and dignity and to resist Biko grew up in a black area called to silence him. He was restricted to any attempts by whites to diminish Ginsberg, which he described as “a living under banning orders in the small, or dehumanize them. Biko became small township of about 1,000 houses, remote town of King Williams Town. such an energizing force among young very poor.” Every four families shared As his friend the journalist Donald blacks that the apartheid state sought communal taps and toilets. But Woods wrote shortly after Biko’s death, to silence him by killing him. But, as Ginsberg had spirit, and a sense of “He was forbidden to make speeches; we shall see, they failed. In the years community (Wilson 18). Ginsberg had forbidden to speak with more than one following Biko’s death, the power of a jazz ensemble, a choral society, boxing person at a time, forbidden to be quoted Black Consciousness helped bring down and cricket clubs, a community garden, . . .Yet in his short lifetime he influenced the apartheid system. Biko remained and a YWCA and a women’s club the lives and ideals of millions of his in his death “a life-giving force,” as (Mangcu 86-7).

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When Biko was four his father died suddenly. His mother took a job as a cook at the white hospital. Biko “worried about his mother all his life and was deeply committed to her wellbeing” (Wilson 19).

Young Steve Biko was bright, but he could also be mischievous. One of his friends said that in primary school Steve never studied. Instead, he would stand in front of the class and make “silly jokes and the whole class would burst into laughter” (Mangcu 98). Yet Steve was already a leader among his peers, who gathered around him. One boy said he passed Standard Six—that’s 8th grade—only because Steve took the time to study with him after school (Mangcu 98-100).

Apartheid and Resistance Steve Biko grew up in the context of apartheid, a system that benefitted the 15% of the population that was white and that repressed the 85% that was Black, Coloured (mixed-race people), and Asian (mostly Indians). Apartheid means “separateness” in Afrikaans, a language variant of Dutch. In 1910 not long after a bitter war between the British and the Afrikaners, these two groups of European descendants formed the Union of South Africa. In 1948 the Nationalist Party won the election and instituted apartheid, a more extreme form of Afrikaner white nationalism.

The Nationalists applied the policy of “separate development” to every aspect of life. Blacks and whites lived in separate areas, attended separate schools, and used separate facilities such as restrooms, cinemas, restaurants, and hospitals. More than that, apartheid was designed by whites to exploit black labor for white privilege and benefit.

Blacks were excluded from all but the lowest level jobs and could only live and work in white areas if they carried a passbook or ‘pass’ signed by their white employer; otherwise they were forced to live in bantustans somewhat like American Indian reservations. These areas could not sustain life and were largely populated by old people and the wives and children of men who worked in the cities, many of them in the gold mines around Johannesburg. Apartheid 8

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was justified by the Dutch Reformed Church which taught that the separation of the races was the will of God and that whites were to look after blacks as a trusteeship from God—as if Afrikaners were the parents and blacks their children.

When Steve was in his early teens South Africa had reached a crisis point. In 1960 police opened fire on blacks who were protesting the pass laws in Sharpeville, just outside of Johannesburg. Sixty-nine innocent people were killed, many of them children, many of them shot in the back.

The government immediately outlawed the African National Congress led by Nelson Mandela and all other political organizations opposed to apartheid.

A few years later Mandela and others were sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island (Wilson 21).

Other activists faced detention, house arrests, banishment, and even death in detention. The apartheid regime seemed to have succeeded in shutting down the opposition. As one historian put it: “Virtually all channels for the expression of anti-apartheid sentiment were closed” (Gerhart 258).

In the wake of these events, Steve Biko became more serious at school.

He excelled in math and English, and formed a study group for his peers.

After finishing at the top of his 10th grade class, he was given a scholarship by a Ginsberg community association to attend a private school, Lovedale College in Alice, about an hour away.

Shortly after his arrival, however, Biko was expelled simply because he was the younger brother of Khaya Biko. Khaya was charged with being a member of Poqo, the armed wing of the PanAfricanist Congress, one of the black political organizations outlawed after the Sharpeville Massacre. Khaya was later convicted but acquitted on appeal.

Steve’s expulsion politicized him in a way nothing else could. Khaya had been trying to get his younger brother interested in politics. He said, “In one day the police were able to do what had eluded me for years” (Mangcu 107-9).

Biko himself said: “I began to develop an attitude which was much more

directed at authority than at anything else. I hated authority like hell” (qtd. in Wilson 19).

After being dismissed from Lovedale, Biko attended St. Francis College, a prestigious Catholic boarding school near Durban on the east coast. He became active in the debating society where he sharpened his skills in political debates about African independence, human rights, and the virtue of struggle for a common society.

After high school Biko wanted to study law, but law was equated with political activism by the authorities so Steve chose to study medicine instead. He won a scholarship to the University of Natal, Non-European Section (UNNE) near Durban. At this time universities were strictly segregated on the basis of race. At university Biko would meet many intelligent young black leaders like himself who would come into conflict with the white administrators of apartheid (Wilson 22, Mangcu 113).

Biko and the Beginning of Black Consciousness in SASO African students who wished to be politically active at this time joined the National Union of South African Students, or NUSAS. NUSAS was a multiracial anti-government group, but most NUSAS members were whites because most university students in South Africa were white: about 90% though only 15% of the population.

These white students were from English-speaking universities who vocally opposed apartheid (Gerhart 257-8). Scholars disagree about how committed these whites were to the Struggle. One article I read said NUSAS stayed on the safe side of the law and did not risk much. But another writer called NUSAS a “courageous” organization: “Its leaders . . . had been repeatedly jailed, banned, and prosecuted for protesting against racial injustice” (Woods 34).

In any case, Steve Biko started out in NUSAS, but this would soon change.

At a NUSAS conference in 1967 when Biko was 20, the black students found that they were required to stay offcampus at a church hall. Biko made a motion proposing that the conference

adjourn until they could get a “nonracist” venue (Wilson 22, Mazamane et al 111). During an all-night debate Biko said he realized that “’I had been holding onto the whole dogma of non-racism almost like a religion, feeling that it was sacrilegious to oppose it . . . They [white students] had this problem, you know, of superiority, and they tended to take us for granted and wanted us to accept things that were second-class” (Qtd. in Woods 153).

physical oppression accruing out of living in a white racist society.” Thus, “the emancipation of black people in this country depends entirely on the role black people themselves are prepared to play” (qtd in Woods 161).

“I Write What I Like” The following year, 1970, Pityana became the second president of SASO and Biko turned to editing the SASO newsletter. He began a column called “I Write What I Like” and signed it Frank Talk.

In the next two years Biko used the column to articulate the philosophy of Black Consciousness as developed in conversations with friends and colleagues.

Biko began to question what he saw as “the artificial integration of student politics.” He saw his fellow blacks “hanging back” and letting the white students define “black grievances and goals.” He thought this would only further the status quo of white domination (Gerhart 260).

“As long as the white liberals are our spokesmen, there will be no black spokesmen,” he said (Biko qtd in Woods 116).

He began to recognize that black students could be their own liberators first and foremost by resisting their oppression with a different mental attitude. This new mental attitude would come to be known as Black Consciousness: put simply, black pride and self-determination, independent of whites. They would form their own student organization.

Biko excitedly talked through the night with his friend Barney Pityana about his ideas. Pityana, who went on to become a highly respected human rights lawyer and Anglican clergyman, was skeptical at first. But eventually Biko won him over. Biko and Pityana traveled throughout the country, speaking to black university groups about a new black consciousness of pride and self-determination (Mangcu 159, Wilson 34-35).

That new pride would be signaled by self-identification using the word Black.

Under apartheid the oppressed groups were lumped together as “Non”—nonwhite or non-European—or classified by socially constructed categories of race—African, Coloured, Asian.

“Non-white” meant blacks were defined as an absence of whiteness. Black

Consciousness would change all that: “Black” would not now mean a darkskinned African person, but all of the oppressed (Wilson 40, Gerhart 277-78).

The term “Black” not only liberated people from the rigid categories that separated them under apartheid. It also posed a threat to the apartheid regime whose whole divide-and-conquer strategy was embodied in the policy of separate development where Blacks, mixed-race, and Indian peoples lived and worked apart from each other.

In 1969, at just about the time Luther College’s black students were forming the Black Student Union, Steve Biko, Barney Pityana, and other black university students formed the South African Students’ Association (SASO), a breakaway group from NUSAS. Steve Biko was named as its first president (Wilson 25).

The resolution forming SASO stated: “SASO is a black student organization working for the liberation of blacks first from psychological oppression by themselves and secondly from the

The first of these essays is titled “Black Souls in White Skins?”

It is a sharp critique of white privilege and of multiracial organizations like NUSAS where the white liberal majority speaks for blacks.

Biko writes: White liberals always knew what was good for the blacks and told them so . . . As a result the integration so [far] achieved is a one-way course, with the whites doing all the talking and the blacks the listening. Does this mean I am against integration?

If by integration you understand [mean] an . . . assimilation and acceptance of blacks into an already established set of norms and codes of behavior set up and maintained by whites, then YES I am against it. I am against the superior-inferior white-black stratification that makes the white a perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual pupil . . . . (24) The way forward, Biko says, is for blacks to organize themselves for themselves.

At the heart of true integration is the provision for each man, each group to rise and attain the envisaged self. Out of this Fall 2019/Agora

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mutual respect for each other and complete freedom of selfdetermination there will arise true integration. (21) Biko is seeking for black South Africans to claim their full humanity, not defined or diminished by whites, but proud and dignified. Once blacks throw off the chains of psychological oppression through a feeling of inferiority, only then can blacks and liberal whites come together in “mutual respect,” defeat apartheid, and form a truly non-racial society.

Biko identifies the deeper root of white superiority and black inferiority in the historical system of labor. In the master-servant relationship, whites so exploited and dehumanized blacks that both whites and blacks came to believe that blacks were somehow less than fully human.

The result, Biko says, is a black man who “has lost his manhood. Reduced to an obliging shell, he looks with awe at the white power structure and accepts what he regards as the ‘inevitable’ position (28). What must be done, Biko writes, “is to make the black man come to himself; to pump life back into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity . . . This is the definition of ‘Black Consciousness’” (29). Black Consciousness is “group pride and the determination by blacks to rise and attain the envisaged self . . . Black Consciousness makes the black man see himself as a being, entire in himself, and not an extension of a broom or additional leverage to some machine” (68).

In coming to feel pride in who they are as blacks, black people will recognize and celebrate their humanity, a humanity that will benefit the all of South Africa. “We have set out on a quest for true humanity,” Biko writes.

“Let us march forth with courage and determination, drawing strength from our common plight . . . In time we shall be in a position to bestow upon South Africa the greatest gift possible—a more human face.” (98) Biko and his colleagues in the Black Consciousness movement theorized that the first step toward resistance 10

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was what he called “an inward-looking process.” What blacks must do first was not protest or fight the apartheid machine—though that might come— but rather understand one’s self as a human being, not a thing, a laboring animal, or a cog in a machine, but a human being created by and in the image of God. Roots and Reactions What were the sources of inspiration for this new Black Consciousness?

Chief among them were the Black Power writings from the United States: Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Black Power by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, and the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Black Americans had long exerted influence on black South Africans’ taste in magazines, movies, and music—insofar as these were available. But the ideas of Black Power captured the imagination of South Africa at a deeper level (Gerhart 275).

Biko’s close colleague and, for a while, intimate partner Mamphela Ramphele recalls the excitement of their university days listening to black American leaders: We used to have parties on weekends at which we drank beer and sat around in the smokefilled room [of the residence hall], talking politics, listening to Malcolm X’s speeches on tape as well as those of Martin Luther King Dr., discussing banned books which were secretly circulated amongst friends, sharing jokes, and also singing and dancing. (Mamphela Ramphele 58) The group had twelve records of Malcolm X’s speeches. One member (Mandla Langa) said: “Compared to Martin Luther King, we felt that Malcolm X’s preachings were much more gutsy, much more in tandem with what we were thinking and feeling” (qtd. in Wilson 29).

Another key influence was the liberation and independence of many African nations since the end of World War II. Nelson Mandela said that the rise of

Steve Biko and Black Consciousness in the late 1960s and early 70s “came at a time when the political impulse of our people had been rendered faint by banning, imprisonment, exile, murder, and banishment . . . But it was also a time when the tide of Africa’s valiant struggle and her liberation . . . was consolidating black pride across the world” (qtd. in Mzamane et al, 102).

As among blacks in the U.S., South Africans began to say ‘black is beautiful.’

Biko promoted the slogan “black is beautiful” (Gerhart 277). He explained that this meant, “Man, you are okay as you are. Begin to look upon yourself as a human being.” Black women began to let their hair grow out naturally. Some blacks switched to using their African names instead of European names they were given.

Not all blacks immediately bought into Black Consciousness: “When SASO was first launched in 1969, reactions among black students was mixed” (Gerhart 267). Some wondered if it was only promoting the government’s plan of “separate development.”

Others worried that it might not survive. Still others wanted something more militant—not ideas about “consciousness” but action (267). But as early suspicions gave way, students rallied to the cause, especially SASO’s emphasis on “black pride.” The historian Gail Gerhart writes: “In a remarkably short period [SASO] had become the most politically significant black organization in the country” (267).

And how did whites react? Some liberals, like the novelist Alan Paton, felt that the Black Consciousness movement was “promoting apartheid” by “entrenching the idea of racial exclusivity and therefore doing the government’s work.” These whites felt SASO was choosing a “safe” target— “the weak liberal fringe”—and making it a scapegoat for the real villains of apartheid. These whites felt abandoned after dedicated much of their lives to working with blacks against apartheid.

Biko responded by saying, “White liberals must leave blacks to take care of their own business while they concern themselves with the real evil in society—white racism” (23).

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Map of contemporary South Africa Early on, the apartheid government considered Black Consciousness to actually be aiding its cause. It saw the black separatism of Black Consciousness as consistent with its policy of separate development of black “homelands” for each ethnic group. In these early years the government let SASO and people like Steve Biko alone, but that was soon to change.

Biko’s personal life in these years was challenging, to say the least. In December 1970 he married a nurse he had met in Durban, Nontsikelelo “Ntsiki” Mashalaba whom I have met; their first child, Nkosinathi, whom Professors Nave, Mtisi, and I have met, was born in 1971.

Biko initially did well in his university studies, but his grades declined as he devoted increasing time to political activism. He had to repeat his third year. In 1972, as a result of his poor academic performance, the University of Natal barred him from further study. In 1973, Biko enrolled for a law degree by correspondence from the University of South Africa. He passed several exams, but had not completed the degree at his time of death, perhaps understandable given the activity and stresses in his life (Mangcu 213-14).

Banned but Active Biko was the leading spokesperson and public figure of Black Consciousness, but he certainly wasn’t alone. Within a few years there were 4,000 members of SASO at 41 branches throughout South Africa (Mangcu 189). Some wished to confront the apartheid state directly in word and action.

In April 1972 a young man by the name of Onkgopotse Abraham Tiro was asked to give a speech as the student council president at the University of the North. He was supposed to speak about the power of education to students, parents, and government officials. Instead, he delivered a scathing attack on racist practices at the university and society in general. He was expelled (Mangcu 163). Students embarked on a solidarity strike, boycotting their classes, and many were expelled (Gerhart 296).

Shortly later at a national SASO meeting, members hotly debated whether SASO should join the military struggle outside the country against the apartheid regime. SASO was determined not to be drawn in. As one historian notes: “Steve found it more and more difficult to get an increasingly assertive and militant leadership of the

movement to listen to his counsel” (Mangcu 184). A political organization of the movement was formed called the Black People’s Convention: Steve voted for it but chose not to run for office.

And so by the mid-1970s, the Black Consciousness Movement was “swept into the anti-apartheid struggle, with the ideological conflict and violence that entailed” (Magaziner 12).

The government now regarded Black Consciousness as a threat. It sought to disrupt Biko’s activities, and in March 1973 placed a banning order on him and other key leaders of BC and SASO. This prevented him from leaving the King William's Town magisterial district, prohibited him from speaking either in public or to more than one person at a time, barred his membership of political organizations, and forbade the media from quoting him. As a result, he returned to Ginsberg, living initially in his mother’s house and later in his own home (Wilson 83-84, Mangcu 204).

Despite the banning order, Biko was able to maintain a “reasonable quality of life” (Ramphele 93). The restriction in fact allowed Biko to put actions to words. Black Consciousness was meant to set a psychological attitude of “self-reliance and dignity” that would lead to new initiatives” (Woods 33). A key part of these new initiatives came to be known as Black Community Programmes. These were a series of organizations established to put into practice “the philosophy of self-reliance, self-help, and liberation through the development of the whole person” (Ramphele 94). Steve directed the Eastern Cape Regional Office from an unused Anglican Church building in King Williamstown. Students came to help out from a nearby theological seminary and from Fort Hare University, which Nelson Mandela and other famous black leaders attended.

Under Steve’s leadership, the office became a “hive of activity” (94). These programs included: The Zanempilo (Bringer of Health) Community Health Centre, headed by Mamphele Ramphele (our Luther students visited this site in 2015); Fall 2019/Agora

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The Zimele Trust Fund to help those who had been imprisoned find jobs, scholarships for their children, and money for funeral expenses, clothes, and furniture; Self-help sewing and knitting groups of rural women; The Njwaxa Leather Home Industry which produced leather purses and tobacco pouches, blets, handbags, horse saddles, sandals, shoes; Creches (day care centers); A bulk food cooperative.

The Zanempilo health clinic’s out-ofthe-way rural setting also made it ideal for political meetings of activists in the Eastern Cape and as a haven where Steve could meet with people outside of the watchful eyes of the system.

Among his international visitors was Democratic Senator Dick Clark of Iowa. Clark served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chaired the Subcommittee on Africa.

Because of Senator Clark’s efforts to assist those against apartheid, the South African government paid good money to get him out of office.

According to former South African information secretary Eschel Rhoodie, the apartheid regime contributed $250,000 to the campaign of Clark’s opponent, Republican Roger Jepsen, who defeated Clark in 1978. Jepsen, who famously mocked Clark by calling him the Senator from Africa, claimed not to have known about the quartermillion dollar gift from the white South African regime.1 The Final Year: 1976-77 The apartheid regime did everything it could to silence Biko, including detaining him numerous times without charging him. But ironically it was this same white government that gave Biko the biggest stage of all. He was called as a witness in the trial of seven other BC activists in 1976 to explain Black Consciousness. His sharp, brilliant, and at times humorous exchanges with 1. www.bleedingheartland.com/2013/12/29/ south-african-government-spent-money-todefeat-senator-dick-clark/

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the judge were captured by Denzel Washington playing Biko in the 1988 film Cry Freedom. Donald Woods in his biography of Biko provides the text of these exchanges. For example: Judge: “Why do you refer to you people as blacks? Why not brown people? I mean you people are more brown than black.”

Biko: “In the same way as I think more white people are pink than white” (Laughter) (Woods 165).

Or this: Attorney: “Nowhere in these documents do you say that the white government is doing anything good.”

Biko: “It does so little good that it is not worth commenting on” (Woods 201).

In the year before his death Black Consciousness was making an enormous impact on the lives of young black people in South Africa and on the country in general. Biko said in an interview that Black Consciousness had succeeded “to the extent that we have diminished the element of fear in the minds of black people.” In the mid-60s black people were “terribly scared of involvement in politics,” but now black students see their role as preparing themselves for leadership roles in the black community. “Students are no longer scared of your police, your dogs, your soldiers” (YouTube: Steve Biko speaks on The Black Consciousness Movement).

His prime example was the Soweto Uprising of 1976 when black high school and even primary school students took to the streets to protest having Afrikaans imposed on them as a medium of instruction. Many of those youth were inspired teachers who had come of age in universities affected by the Black Consciousness movement.

Tens of thousands of students took part, and many paid the price: in the course of a year more than 500 students were killed by the police.

When asked at the trial what evidence he had that young people supported black consciousness, Biko replied: “In one word: Soweto! The boldness, dedication, sense of purpose and clarity

of analysis—all of these things are a direct result of Black Consciousness ideas among the young in Soweto and elsewhere” (qtd. in Woods 119).

For all of its considerable strengths, Black Consciousness and Biko himself had one glaring weakness, and that was with respect to gender. Mamphele Ramphele, the leading woman in the Black Consciousness movement, wrote that because the dividing line was always race, women took a back seat to the men: “Women were involved in the movement because they were black.

Gender as a political issue was not raised at all . . . Women were important as wives, mothers, girlfriends, and sisters in fighting a common struggle against a common enemy—white racism.

Scant attention was given to [them] as individuals in their own right.” (“The Dynamics of Gender” 215-16.)

A few women like herself “made themselves available for leadership roles . . . and were accepted fully as colleagues by men” (216). Even then, the women were expected to make the food and serve the tea to the men. She felt overall that Black Consciousness had “a significantly positive impact on black women” in the way that “the assertion that ‘Black is beautiful’ liberated black women from being defined in terms dictated by the dominant white culture” (217). But “interpersonal relationships remained largely unchanged, with the man as the dominant partner, and many women remain trapped in unsatisfactory relationships that violated their dignity as people” (220-1).

Ramphele may have been eluding to her own relationship with Steve Biko, or to his wife Ntsiki’s relationship with him.

For off and on throughout his marriage to Ntsiki he carried on an affair with Ramphele. He had two children by Ntsiki, and two by Ramphele, and after his death a third woman bore another child of his. He was admonished by other male leaders about his affairs with multiple women, but it was a pattern of behavior he never seemed to relinquish.

Without minimizing this behavior, it’s important to remember the qualities that made people follow Steve Biko.

Many people testify to his humility, his

respect for others, his love of company, and his ability to be present and to listen.

Bokwe Mafuna, a journalist working for the Rand Daily Mail, recalled Steve Biko’s “working-class” ease with all kinds of people: “Steve respected people and he made people respect each other . . . He had extraordinary gifts of knowing how to relate to people and [to] be able to inspire confidence in people and trust” (Wilson 31).

The writer Mongane Wally Serote recalled their nights in the shebeens (informal pubs): “We would all be tired and I would fall asleep and I would wake up and Steve would still be on his chair, talking and drinking. And the thing that struck you was [his] great joy at being among people. This seemed to inspire him . . . to give him energy . . . Under a relaxed atmosphere we were able to explore a whole lot of very complex issues, informally, of course always with Steve presiding” (Wilson 30).

Biko even wanted to relate to the white security police. He said shortly before his death: “If they [the police] talk to me, well I’m bound to be affected by them as human beings. But the moment they adopt the rough stuff, they are imprinting on my mind that they are police. And I can only understand one form of dealing with police, and that’s to be as unhelpful as possible. So I button up. And I told them this: ‘It’s up to you’” (qtd in Woods xii).

It was up to them and they killed him. But he was not afraid. He said famously: “You are either alive and you are proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t care anyway. And your method of death can itself be a politicizing thing” (qtd. in Woods xii).

Many had died at the hands of the police throughout the 1970s. A prime victim of that violence was Abraham Tiro. He left for Botswana and was killed by a parcel bomb in 1974, becoming one of dozens of victims of government-sponsored assassinations and the first one to be murdered outside the country.

The five security police men who were involved in Steve Biko’s death came before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998. The Commission refused to grant amnesty to the five men because their accounts were conflicting and deemed to be untruthful. Yet these men have never been brought to justice. In October 2003, South Africa’s justice ministry announced that the five policemen would not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had elapsed and there was insufficient evidence to secure a prosecution.

And what of the Black Consciousness movement that Steve Biko did so much to found and to inspire? One month after Biko died the government outlawed all Black Consciousness organizations, “sending the Black Consciousness Movement BCM into a coma from which it never recovered” according to South African historians (Mzamane et al 150).

Yet Steve’s death was politicizing, as he said death to activists could be.

Many BC-trained youth fled into exile to join Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC. But an even more important legacy of the Black Consciousness Movement was how it taught skills to thousands of young people in leadership, planning, strategizing—and thus became more powerful through a multiplier effect. This was exactly what Steve Biko wanted all along—not a single organization with one or a few leaders, but many organizations and many leaders who could not be suppressed and would be heard until the day of freedom finally came in 1994 when Nelson Mandela was sworn in as South Africa’s first truly democratic president.

Steve Biko’s legacy lives on today in many ways: through an annual lecture at the University of Cape Town whose speakers have included Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and novelist Chinua Achebe; through the Biko Foundation, a community development organization whose founders include Biko’s son and former CEO Nkosinathi Biko; and through the Biko Centre in King Williams Town, a conferencing, exhibition and training center which conducts arts and

developmental projects for youth and the community at large. Several Luther classes taught by Professors Nave, Mtisi, and me have visited the Centre and enjoyed interacting with the staff and young people there.

It is best, I think, to let Steve Biko have the last word: We believe in the inherent goodness in man. . . We regard our living together not as an unfortunate mishap warranting endless competition among us, but as a deliberate act of God to make us a community of brothers and sisters jointly involved in a composite answer to the varied problems of life. (42) WORKS CITED Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. Ed. Aelred Stubbs. The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Burns, John F. “Tension is Rising in South Africa Over Black’s Death.” The New York Times, 15 Sept. 1977, p. 3.

Gerhart, Gail. Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology. The University of California Press, 1978.

Magaziner, Daniel. The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977.

Ohio University Press, 2010.

Mangcu, Xolela. Biko: A Life. I.B. Tauris, 2014.

Mzamane, Mbulelo Vizikhungo, et al. “The Black Consciousness Movement.” The Road to Democracy in South Africa. Vol. 2, Unisa Press, 2006.

Ramphele, Mamphela. A Life. David Philip Publishers, 1995.

-----------------------------. “The Dynamics of Gender Within Black Consciousness Organisations: A Personal View.” Bounds of possibility: the legacy of Steve Biko & Black Consciousness. Zed Books, 1991.

Wilson, Lindy. Steve Biko. Ohio University Press, 2012.

Woods, Donald. Biko. Penguin, 1987.

Youtube, “Steve Biko speaks on The Black Consciousness Movement."

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13

Education and the Ho-Chunk: Resistance and Resilience

by DAVID FALDET, Professor of English and ANNA PETERSON, Associate Professor of History

We acknowledge that the land on which this college stands was home to the Ioway, Sac, Fox, Dakota, Winnebago, and Ho-Chunk people, whose relationship to this land continues today. We acknowledge that the Ho-Chunk moved here from Wisconsin against their will; and in less than a generation, pressure from the US government and immigrant settlers, such as those who founded and attended this college, forced them to relocate again. We acknowledge that this land, once called The Neutral Ground, was created by the US government to control the movement, lives, and livelihood of Native peoples. We acknowledge that the history of this college is directly tied to the dispossession of the Sac, Fox, and Dakota and the forced migration of the HoChunk people.

Anna Peterson: These statements are often referred to as land acknowledgement statements. The purpose of these statements is to show respect for indigenous peoples and recognize their traditional and enduring relationships to the land. Practicing acknowledgment also works to counter the erasure of indigenous peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history and culture by naming and remembering the traditional indigenous inhabitants of the lands we are on.

David Faldet: Anna Peterson and I have both made a winding intellectual journey to our talk here tonight. Anna is a scholar of the last two centuries of Norwegian history as it extends into Norwegian American history. But one part of the latter is missionary activity, including a boarding school, among the

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PHOTO COURTESY MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Editor's note: This land acknowledgement statement appeared at the bottom of the program for this lecture:

Ho-Chunk chief Winne-Shiek (Thunder Coming) and other leaders, circa 1865.

Indian nations of Wisconsin, which she will discuss tonight. For myself, my main area of academic training is nineteenth-century British literature.

Once I had made the odd intellectual choice of starting to research an environmental and resource history of the local river basin 23 years ago, it was a less odd choice that I would have gotten most interested in the nineteenth-century history of this place, in particular the story of the last Indian tribe to live here, the Ho-Chunk/ Winnebago. Anna and I are going to focus on the resistance to the threat Euro-American culture posed to their life and their culture, and to focus in particular on the way educational choices figured in this resistance.

The people we are going to talk about call themselves, in their own language, the Hochungra, people with the big voice. Their not-always friendly Algonquin neighbors, however, called them Winnebago, people of the stinking waters. Today these people are divided by history, governance, and place into

the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska.

The forbearers of the Ho-Chunk Nation resisted treaties imposed on them by the U.S. government to push them out of their homeland and open it for Euro-American settlement, and the Winnebago Tribe did their part to comply with these treaties, pushing them out of Wisconsin, into Iowa, then to Minnesota, the Dakota Territory, and finally to Nebraska. My own part of the talk will look at these pushed-out people, the Winnebago, in the period of that push, examining the way they resisted and changed over two decades.

The Removal of the Winnebago As background, the Winnebago see their original home to be in the area of modern Wisconsin centering around Lake Winnebago. Over the course of the colonial period they spread along the rivers of Wisconsin all the way to the Rock River in the south and the Mississippi on the west. They often allied with the French and, after the

Father, you promised us repeatedly that this place would not be given up; and if you actually intend to abandon us to our inveterate enemy who always sought our destruction, it would be better that you had us killed at once, rather than expose us to a lingering death. It is probable that the Americans may not at first show their intentions of destroying us immediately; but we are fully persuaded that they will avail themselves of the first opportunity for exterminating us.

Father, the peace made between you and the Big Knives [Americans] may be a lasting one; but it cannot be for us, for we hate them. They have so often deceived us that we cannot put any faith in them. 1 The comments of He Who Walks Naked show the Winnebago at the opening of the nineteenth century disposed to fight, somewhat resigned to theirs being a fight to the death now that they have no allies as powerful as the American government. Up through the Black Hawk War of 1832, in which the Winnebago Prophet allied with Black Hawk and his so-called British Band (because they still held out hope for British aid in their resistance struggle), armed resistance was part of this struggle. Following that time resistance was made up of stealth and evasion to maintain land, lifestyle, and pride, or statesmanship and protest aimed at the same ends.

In the half century between 1828 and 1873, the so-called Removal Period of the Winnebago, the U.S. government and its settler constituency saw three happy outcomes in their engagement with the tribe. One would be the disappearance of the tribe, the destruction or extinction He Who Walks Naked names. The second was segregation: pushing the Winnebago beyond white settlement into the territory of what was then called the Great American Desert where they could live as they saw fit, ideally neither molesting nor being molested by European Americans. The Winnebago did not see a future for themselves in that but rather the “lingering death” mentioned by He Who Walks Naked as they would be marooned away from the rich land and resources and familiar territory and people they knew in Wisconsin to an island of land so unpromising that whites could not imagine wanting it. Finally, the third desired outcome was sometimes in the nineteenth century described as “killing the Indian, saving the man”: cultural genocide without physical genocide, the assimilation of Indians to a Europeanized way of life that would allow them to blend in seamlessly to the dominant culture. The snippets of discourse about education I will discuss show a shift from resisting that final option to accepting it.

Removal became national doctrine once President Andrew Jackson, a famously successful Indian fighter, signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830. It was premised on the colonial doctrine of land going to its Christian “discoverer” and the emerging concept of Manifest Destiny, the idea that God ordained that Euro-Americans should expand and succeed and indigenous nations dwindle and fail. Where Luther College sits today was once part of the Neutral Ground, a territory bought by the federal government in 1830 as a buffer strip between Dakota in the north and Sac and Fox in the south who were hostile to one another and assigned to the Winnebago in exchange for relinquishing Wisconsin land as punishment for the Black Hawk War in 1832. In 1832 Andrew Jackson appointed his friend, Rev. David Lowry to oversee the mission in this new Winnebago reserve, first on the Yellow River and from 1840 on the Turkey River. Lowry was a pastor in the Cumberland Presbyterian faith. He was the first teacher and later superintendent of the school established at the agency. In 1837, in an act of clear government dishonesty, the U.S. got Winnebago signatures on a treaty that abandoned Wisconsin lands altogether and required complete removal to the Neutral Ground.

MAP COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, # 2007626856

Treaty of Paris that concluded the French and Indian war in 1863, they allied with the British. Neither of these foreign governments had immediate designs on their land or pushed very hard to eradicate their culture. This changed with the establishment of the United States. The Winnebago with the arrival of the federal period allied with the British or with other tribes to fight the U.S. government. As He who Walks Naked explained to British officers at Mackinac in 1815 after the signing of the Treaty of Ghent that relinquished British holdings in the Winnebago homeland:

Section of 1845 "New Map of Iowa" showing the Neutral Ground occupied by the Winnebago people

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Reverend David Lowry's School

If the Indians cannot be civilized, it is important to know why . . . . If everything else can be done, why not this? If we can wage war with the red man, expend millions, conquer and drive him why not tame him? Why not invade those gloomy and hateful legions of superstitions which he inhabits with a knowledge of letters and with the light of the gospel of Christ. This can be done. It must be done.2 Lowry’s words quite explicitly show his philosophy of assimilation. First, Indians without schooling are not civilized. Second, the government that employs him is happy with its military might to “conquer and drive . . . the red man.” And finally that assimilation is its own kind of war: “invad[ing] those gloomy and hateful legions of superstitions . . . with the light of the gospel of Christ.” In other words, kill Winnebago cultural practices to save Winnebago lives.

A remarkable survival of this war of hearts and minds as it was waged exists in the form of a school essay, written by one of Lowry’s pupils, whose school name was Margaret Porter, a 12- or 13-year-old girl. It was published as part of a settlers’ guide to Iowa the year the territory became a state: 1846. It reads: I like to see another Spring come; I love to see all the beautiful flowers growing. I like to take a walk in the woods, and hear the birds singing upon the trees. In a little while all the Indians will come back, and fix their wigwams with new bark. I like to go and live in a new bark 16

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SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF IOWA, IOWA CITY, IOWA

At Lowry’s school, children were assigned Christian names such as Martin Van Buren or Henry Clay, required to exchange traditional dress for Westernized clothing, speak and write in English rather than Ho-Chunk, acquire literacy and arithmetic, and absorb Christian principles of behavior.

Lowry explained his mission as teacher to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1842:

David Lowry wigwam. When all the children come back from hunting, they are glad to come in school again.

A great many school children have died. When any one dies, they paint their face, then put every thing new on; they dress them very fine, and bury them.

Then they take goods, and put it on the grave; and if it is a woman, the women gather then together and play games; if it is boy, the boys gather themselves, and play ball; and if it is a girl, the girls gather themselves together and play. The Indians have a great many things to do.

They say the white people when they die go to one place, and the Indians go to another place. At a medicine feast they have an otter skin, or some other skin, which their medicine is in, and call them medicine bags; they shoot themselves down, and say those that join the feast that God would forget their sins, and those that stay out are sinners; and they must fix themselves very nice if they go to the feast, if they don’t fix themselves God would not like them.3 Margaret Porter’s essay shows the partial success of Lowry’s educational aims among the Winnebago of the Neutral Ground. First of all, Porter’s attendance at the school means she was from the “School Band,” living near the

mission and agency, in regular contact with whites. More than a dozen bands kept a day’s or two days’ ride away.

Second, it shows that she had learned to speak and write basic English. Third, it shows Porter enjoys her schooling. And finally it demonstrates a knowledge of Christian teaching about salvation and damnation.

From Lowry’s point of view, however, it also demonstrates large failures: the strong hold of that “legion of gloomy and hateful superstitions.” Porter lives not in a permanent frame house but a wigwam. Her people hunt rather than farm (at this time agricultural work was scorned as women’s labor that, unlike hunting, would be humiliating for any warrior). Funeral rites, rather than being Christian, are Winnebago: painting the face to indicate clan membership and playing games that will keep the spirit diverted and away from the dwellings of the living. Far from respecting assimilation, Porter subscribes to the idea of a strict segregation of races even beyond the grave. Finally, her knowledge of communion is probably more Catholic than protestant, and more steeped in a Winnebago culture of otter skins and dances than a Christian culture of church worship.

“Saving the Man” For all of that, the tribe at this point in removal history was dominated by traditionalists who resisted assimilation and removal and saw the government as their enemy. In 1845 they petitioned the Secretary of War to take away Lowry’s school. They wrote [We are] all one way of thinking on the subject of religion and do not wish to be compelled to have our children taught different from what we believe to be right. . . . Not a scholar has left that school but that is a disgrace to the tribe . . . many of our children that went to that school were Gems of our hearts, beautiful as the flowers that deck our wide prairies, but when they returned to us, were loathsome with disease contracted while scholars at the school.4

within months of hunger, exposure, and disease. Those who were strong enough escaped in 1864 by dugout canoe down the Missouri River to the reservation of the Omaha tribe. There in 1865 they bargained for a new treaty that exchanged their Dakota territory for 12,000 acres of Omaha tribal lands.

Once the Winnebago were there the government received a surprising petition from tribal chiefs:

children taught the Christian religion, as before, we would like our school placed under the care of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. And last, Father, to show you our sincerity, we desire to have set apart for its establishment, erection, and support, all of our school-funds and whatever more is necessary.6

Though other chiefs contested the Unfortunately for the Winnebago, the legitimacy of this petition, it had the Father: some years ago, when we same unscrupulously obtained 1837 assent of some of the more powerful had our homes on Turkey River, treaty that decreed that they abandon tribal leaders. Even though the tribe’s we had a school for our children, the whole of Wisconsin for the Neutral earnest effort to assimilate during where many of them learned Ground also had wording, unknown their years at Blue Earth was rewarded to read and write and work like to the treaty signers, that said they by violent and brutal removal, the white people, and we were happy. must abandon the Neutral Ground as brutality of the gesture, the suffering Father: Many years have passed soon as a better and more permanent and loss of life behind removal to the away since our school was broken home could be found for them. In Dakota Territory, seems to have clearly up; we have no such schools 1846 they were coerced into a treaty ingrained the seriousness of the “kill among us, and our children are exchanging the Neutral Ground for a the Indian” half of the formula “kill growing up in ignorance of those tract in central Minnesota. Here the the Indian to save the man.” The tribe things that should render them tribe experienced extreme cold, scurvy, had come a long way from its talk of industrious, prosperous, and and starvation. One of their elderly war and its warrior leaders’ readiness to happy, and we are sorry. leaders, a chief who early in the century die rather than give up their land and had taken up arms under Tecumseh to culture. Watching elders, children, and Father: It is our earnest wish to keep the whites at bay, was reported to women suffer and perish, and learning be so situated no longer. It is have concluded in 1850: “Our children that indeed as He Who Walks Naked our sincere desire to have again must all be sent to school. . . . It is a had said, Winnebago could really put established among us such a great thing to know how to read and no trust in white government, the tribe school as we see in operation write well. It is what gives the white insisted on being given the tools to among your Omaha children. men such an advantage over us. Take allow it to succeed in the same way Father: As soon as you find a all the little children that are old Euro-Americans succeeded. The threat permanent home for us, will enough to walk and push them into the of physical extinction made cultural you not do this for us? And, schoolhouse, where they can learn to extinction seem a palatable necessity.

Father, as we would like our be skillful and industrious; and more, besides that, they will bring home bread and pork.”5 In 1855 the Winnebago succeeded in exchanging that unsatisfactory tract for a much more fertile and desirable tract near Blue Earth. There they lived for seven years.

During that time assimilationist chiefs replaced most of the traditionalists, the idea of the tribe was replaced with a concept of individuals and individual ownership, and agriculture was embraced as an acceptable practice for men as well as women. Unfortunately, their white neighbors were outraged that Indians would be allowed to hold valuable farmland, and using the pretense of the Dakota war of 1862 (in which the Winnebago tribe played no antagonistic part) the Winnebago were forcibly evicted to a near desert in the Dakota Territory where hundreds died “Map Showing Accession of Territory from Indians” created for the 1905 Iowa Census Fall 2019/Agora

IOWA 1905 CENSUS MAP, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

From the traditional chiefs’ point of view, the accomplishments of scholars like Margaret Porter were a “loathsome” “disgrace.” What they had learned was like a “disease” that was likely to spread to the rest of the tribe and bring about its extinction. It posed a threat to the traditional religion of the Winnebago and to traditional practices such as those Margaret Porter lovingly describes in her discussion of funerals.

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COURTESY OF THE ARCHIVES OF THE EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH IN AMERICA

Bethany Indian Mission, Girls Building 1950-54 Anna Peterson: As David evidenced, the Winnebago/Ho-Chunk people actively responded to and negotiated the devastating cultural and material effects of the U.S. Indian removal policies.

Though their choices were at times severely limited, they were still agents of their own lives – making decisions based on the particular circumstances in which they found themselves. As David demonstrated, these choices changed over time and ultimately resulted in the tribe’s somewhat ambiguous acceptance of cultural assimilation as necessary to the Ho-Chunk’s continued survival.

My focus moves us forward in time to the late 1930s. The model of Indian boarding school education had been in place for over fifty years. During this time the reformist aims of the boarding schools to assimilate Native American children into dominant white society, or as David more directly put it – cultural extermination – was met by Native American uses of the boarding schools to further their own aims and goals of cultural and material survival.

By the 1930s, reformers had abandoned the ideas behind Indian boarding schools and federal government and religious mission schools closed around the country. In many ways, due to the effects of the economic depression, American Indian families needed the assistance offered at the boarding schools more than ever and resisted 18

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the school closures. I want to take you through one example of this: In 1938 members of the Ho-Chunk nation living near the Bethany Indian Mission outside of Wittenberg, Wisconsin sent a formal articulation of grievances to the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America. In their letter, they called for the removal of the Superintendent of the Mission. While their request garnered responses from both the Church administration and the pastor himself, they were unsuccessful in achieving their goal: the pastor remained in his position until the Mission closed in 1955.

I want to walk you through this historical moment of resistance. My aim is to give some context to this action in an effort to understand its underlying causes and ramifications. I will argue that though they were not able to get the pastor removed from his position, their act of protest did have beneficial outcomes for the Native peoples living near the Mission.

History of the Mission In 1883, Luther College graduate and recent immigrant from Norway, Even Johnson Homme, founded the Bethany Evangelical Lutheran Indian Mission outside Wittenberg, Wisconsin. In operation from 1884 to 1955, fellow Luther College alums and first- and second-generation Norwegian immigrants, followed Homme in the

deeply ambiguous work of offering religious and secular instruction to Native American tribes in Wisconsin, mostly Oneida and HoChunk. While the founders and subsequent leaders and teachers at the Mission had humanitarian reasons for taking up this work, these motivations were undergirded with the desire to convert and assimilate indigenous children in ways that reflected dominant white culture at the time.

Between 1884 and 1933 the Mission functioned as a boarding school where local tribes sent their children to receive an education along with room and board.

All of this changed in 1933 when the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America decided it would no longer operate a boarding school at the Mission.

After 1933 the Native American children were expected to go to local district schools alongside their overwhelming white majority neighbors. It was an integrationist model. Optimistic reformers believed that Indians had progressed to such an extent that complete separation from their families and neighbors was no longer needed (pessimists also thought boarding schools should be abandoned but for a different reason – namely, that Native Americans would never be able to fully assimilate so they should give up trying).

Of course, financial motivations also played a role. The closure of the boarding school took place in 1933–the height of the Great Depression, when nearly a quarter of the U.S. population was unemployed. The Norwegian Lutheran Church in America, like other institutions, suffered during this period of economic crisis and they found it difficult to maintain their missions both abroad and at home. Closing the boarding school was as much a decision of economic necessity as it was about implementing new thinking about Native American education.

While many reformers lauded the new integrationist policy, Native American children and their families had a more mixed response. The timing of the federal government’s decision to close boarding schools could not have come at a worse time for Indian families who often turned to the boarding schools as a source of support during difficult times. Due in part to the severe economic hardship American Indians faced during the Depression, Indian families sent their children to boarding schools in increasing numbers.7 In addition to economic factors, some families wanted to send their children to Indian boarding schools instead of public schools because of the intense racism many Indian children endured during the early years of integrated schooling.8 Sihler’s Installation at the Mission

Seminary in 1926. Sihler also married into a prominent Norwegian-American missionary family – the Wolds.9 So while he sometimes felt an outsider in the predominantly Norwegian American congregations he served (He was ordained in the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America) and lamented having to give services in the “lutefisk language” in Clearbrook, Iowa, he was enmeshed in Norwegian American culture and society.10 Prior to accepting the call to serve at the Mission in 1935, Sihler expressed some concerns that reveal his perceptions of Native peoples. He described Indians as “others” – as being separate from himself and the majority NorwegianAmerican congregation he pastored in Clearbrook: he noted Indians were of a different color and smell, possessed simple and undeveloped minds, and he feared they would be lazy – a characteristic he found “irritating.”

To maintain his own “civilization” he believed he would have to be sure to spend enough time at home away from what he implied would be savage influences. He was the kind of person who found these challenges “thrilling”

and believed these Native American deficiencies could be overcome by “the gospel.”11 These attitudes would prove critical in his interactions with the indigenous people at the Mission.

The Complaint Many of the Ho-Chunk living near the Mission did not have positive experiences with Sihler when he first came to the Mission. Sihler certainly thought that his role at the Mission was to do good for the Native peoples living there. He wanted to help them and save them – literally in religious terms. But whatever his intentions, his methods left many Ho-Chunk humiliated, angry, and driven to act against him.

By the Spring of 1938, the situation had reached a breaking point. The HoChunk set up a meeting at the home of the Whitewings to discuss their experiences with Sihler and decide what to do. Both men and women spoke up and shared their frustrations with Sihler, including his prejudices against them. All in all, 44 signed their names to a petition calling for Sihler’s removal from his position at the Bethany Indian Mission.

COURTESY OF THE ARCHIVES OF THE EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH IN AMERICA

It was at this critical juncture when the Mission closed the boarding school that a new pastor was hired to be Director and Superintendent of the Mission: Reverend Ernest Sihler. Sihler was not only responsible for overseeing dramatic shifts in Mission services, he also differed from previous Directors of the Mission in one notable respect: Whereas all the previous Directors and members of staff had been first- or second-generation Norwegian Americans, Sihler was a German American. That said, he was raised in a largely NorwegianAmerican environment. He grew up in Decorah where his father was a professor of German (along with gymnastics, music, Greek, Latin, French, geography, history and zoology) at Luther. Sihler himself graduated from Luther in 1921 and Luther Native American man with Pastor Ernest Sihler, Bethany Indian Mission circa 1950s

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A summary of the complaints they shared are as follows: Personality and Character • Unfriendly and inhospitable • Condescending • Unchristian • Unskilled at preaching Religious • Doesn’t recognize other churches • “Compelled to go to church” Inhumane Treatment • Cheap and withholding (stamps, clothing promised, wood) • Treatment as “slaves” ---multiple references • Calls them names “dirty pigs” “dirty Indians” “bad women,” “red skins” -Believes they are dirty and forces them to watch delousing videos and hands out articles on shampoo -Won’t let them come in his home • Took 2 small children from their family and sent them to a home far away • Inspires hate and division -Plays favorites, prefers Oneida -German, prefers Germans to Norwegians -Favors drunkards The situation had reached a level of no return in their minds. Bob Bigthunder said he would move away if Sihler wasn’t removed. Some explicit and implicit threats were shared: “no one has stirred up anything yet… look forward to Sihler’s removal,” “will drive him off the Mission hill with clubs.”12 From these experiences, it would be easy to say that the Ho-Chunk resisted Sihler and called for his removal because he treated them abominably.

But I think it is more complicated than that. Yes, there is ample evidence that Sihler did not consider the people he missioned to equals. Like most people in the dominant white society at the time, Sihler could definitely be considered a racist by our current understanding of the term. But they weren’t just asking for Sihler’s removal – they simultaneously requested the reinstatement of the previous Superintendent of the Mission, Reverend Rykken. Perhaps that was 20

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because Rykken was Norwegian and they seemed to prefer Norwegians (inline with anti-German sentiment in the U.S. in the late 1930s) or maybe Rykken was a better person, less racist, more humane.

My own hypothesis is that they not only opposed Sihler, but they also opposed what he represented: a time of austerity, a time of restricting funds and resources, a time of closures and contractions of services at a time when Indian families were in dire need of financial and material assistance. They wanted Rykken back because they wanted to go back to the previous era of the Mission.

A time when the Church had more available funds to use at the Mission, a time when the boarding school was in operation.

This line of thinking is in accordance with scholarly studies of resistance: The reasons behind occurrences of resistance vary, but they generally arise in defense of pre-existing and established sociopolitical arrangements, including existing power structures, elite or otherwise.13 Church Response To further understand the meaning of the Ho-Chunk action, it’s important to see what kind of response their resistance to Sihler, and the policy shifts he represented, generated.

In writing to the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America (NLCA), the Ho-Chunk signatories participated in a form of resistance more precisely known as protest. Protest differs from the concept of resistance in that while resistance may be silent or stealth, protest assumes a more explicit form of articulation of grievances. And importantly, protest relies on the presumption that the protestors share some common social and political order with those they appeal to for redress.14 By articulating their grievances in a formal letter sent to Church administrators, the Ho-Chunk invoked a shared relationship with the Church.

Due to this relationship, the Ho-Chunk believed they had a right to seek redress through official Church channels. For their part, the Church hierarchy did not

recognize this mutual relationship with the Ho-Chunk in their response.

Overall, the response from the NLCA was disproportionate to the demands of the Ho-Chunk and was written with the intent to reassert Church power and authority. This aim is clearly evident in who sent the letter: the letter had signatory lines for the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bethany Indian Mission, the chairman of the Board of Home Missions for the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America of America, and the President of the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America in America, J.A. Aasgaard.

With these signatures, the NLCA wanted to communicate unity, power, and authority. With agreement between all these administrators, the tribe would have little recourse to appealing their decision.

The NLCA also used the content of the letter to communicate to the Ho-Chunk that the tribe was not in a position to complain. In their written response, the NLCA not only dismissed the tribe’s concerns about Sihler as immaterial and not carrying the necessary weight required to remove a pastor from his position, they also shamed tribal members for their display of ingratitude.

They gave a full account of the costs of running the Mission for the past twenty years down to the penny: $356, 311.86 and encouraged them to not only expect to “receive but also to give” and called on them to invest their own money in the mission.15 In fact, the NLCA used the opportunity to impress upon the Ho-Chunk that Church support of the Mission was contingent on Native-American compliance and gratitude. By resisting Sihler and thus calling into question Church hierarchy and decision-making, the Church felt compelled to punish the Ho-Chunk. In its response, the NLCA notified the Ho-Chunk that the Mission would be discontinuing many services at the Mission, such as the distribution of free clothing, and the work of facilitating basket sales, as well as reducing the staffing of the Mission.

The letter concluded with a demand that the Ho-Chunk give up their

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARCHIVES OF THE EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH IN AMERICA

relationship to the Native American Church. The NLCA drew a hard line and stated that the HoChunk could not be members of the Native American Church and the NLCA at the same time and admonished the tribe to stop using peyote in conjunction with religious ceremonies and prayer meetings. It was perhaps for this reason – that Ho-Chunk continued to partake in Native American religious rituals – the NLCA refused to recognize the shared relationship the Ho-Chunk called upon in their protest of Sihler.

while offering his own forgiveness for the complaints they had made against him.

Conclusion

As I mentioned earlier, Sihler stayed in his position at the Mission until the Mission closed in 1955 – nearly twenty years after the Ho-Chunk complaint was filed. During this period, Sihler had to work hard to (re)gain the trust and acceptance of local families. Sihler ameliorated some of these tensions by finding other ways to materially serve the American All of this was in response Indians at the Mission to the singular demand Lawrence Martin, an American Indian who attended both Bethany Indian after the residential of the Ho-Chunk letter Mission and Luther College, circa 1953 boarding school closed. asking for Sihler’s removal.

In spite of the NLCA’s Why was the NLCA’s Sihler Response declaration that the Mission would response so disproportionate? It is no longer distribute free clothing or possible that the Church had already In addition to the official Church facilitate basket sales, Sihler continued been planning to discontinue many response, Sihler also responded to the to do this work and even implemented of these services given the financial tribe’s criticisms of him in a letter that new programs such as opening a constraints the Church and the country started off with the salutation “Dear religious summer school for American faced during the Great Depression. friends.” Compared to the Church’s Indian youth. Sihler also cultivated Certainly, the Church had also been response, Sihler was more willing to relationships with regional Lutheran frustrated and dismayed by the admit fault and offer up potential colleges in an effort to connect former continued pull of indigenous religious solutions. He recognized the mutual students from the Mission with higher practices and identities despite the and reciprocal relationship that existed educational opportunities. These influence and presence of the NLCA. between Ho-Chunk and himself. That is students included Constance Rockman But why choose to outline all of this in not to say he wasn’t defensive at times: who attended St. Olaf College and this particular letter – a letter that in its He included a statement that reads Angeline Hopinka and Lawrence purpose might have been solely focused to me as a way he was able to process Martin, both of whom attended Luther on the Ho-Chunk’s call for Sihler’s and justify their complaints not only to College. dismissal (which they addressed in one them but also to himself: “The person paragraph of a 2.5 page letter). I believe the Church saw all of these things as connected.

who has to put thru changes that make things harder rather than easier for those concerned is seldom popular.”16

They also likely perceived the collective demands of the Ho-Chunk a threat to church influence and power in the region and worried about coming off as weak in response to this threat. They may have asserted power and authority in an attempt to squelch any further collective resistance – now the tribe was focused on Sihler, but what if the members turned their attention to other vestiges and symbols of the Church’s power?

In contrast to the NLCA response, Sihler was vulnerable at times in his letter and did not present himself as the all-knowing authority but rather someone who was a work in progress, someone who was learning, and potentially still had more to learn.

Perhaps most significantly, Sihler admitted that he had made mistakes and said that “sometimes my judgment was not the best.” He apologized for this and asked their forgiveness

So while the Ho-Chunk demands were not met by the NLCA in 1938, I do believe their actions led to change at the Mission. Sihler seemed to take their concerns seriously and to genuinely want to transform his thinking about the community and people he served. In this way, their resistance affected change that ultimately improved their lives and the lives of their children.

With that, I want to end with a note of caution about thinking about the outcomes of resistance and about human beings in dichotomous terms: good/evil, successful/unsuccessful, right/ Fall 2019/Agora

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7. Brenda Childs, Boarding School Seasons, 14-15.

8. Brenda Childs, 22.

LUTHER COLLEGE PHOTO BUREAU/ ANTHONY HAMER, '21

9. A Biographical Directory of Pastors of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, edited by John Peterson, Olaf Lysnes, and Gerald Giving (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House), 1952, 499.

Anna Peterson and David Faldet speaking at the Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture, November 12, 2019 wrong. We could – I think wrongly consider the Ho-Chunk’s 1938 protest against Sihler unsuccessful because it did not result in Sihler’s removal. We could also all condemn Sihler for the way he treated Native peoples early in his tenure at the Mission. Certainly, the complaints against him were horrible.

But I think Sihler and his legacy defy a simple classification. For example, Sihler could have tried to erase this protest against him from the historical record, but rather all of the sources I used for this research came from the personal papers he donated to the Luther Seminary Archives in the 1970s. He didn’t try to hide his flaws. He wanted to take responsibility for his actions. In fact he expressed this very thought in a letter he wrote to a younger colleague in 1970: “We had our day, and must answer for it.”17

NOTES 1. He Who Walks Naked, quoted from “Papers of Capt. T.G. Anderson, British Indian Agent”: Wisconsin Historical Collections 10 (1888): 142-145.

2. Rev. David Lowry to Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Hartley Crawford, February 26, 1842. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Letters Received, 1824-1881, National Archives, Record Group 75, Series M234, Roll 729.

3. Margaret Porter, quoted in J. B. Newhall, A Glimpse of Iowa in 1846: or, the Emigrant’s Guide and State Directory (W. D. Skillman, Burlington, IA: 1846; Iowa City, State Historical Society of Iowa: 1957), 39.

4. Petition by Winnebago chiefs to the Secretary of War 12 May 1845, National Archives, Microcopy 234, Roll 863.

5. Captain Jim, quoted in Mark Diedrich, Winnebago Oratory: Great Moments in the Recorded Speech of the Hochungra, 1742-1887 (Rochester, MN, Coyote Books: 1991), 75.

6. Petition of 38 chiefs to Washington, D.C., quoted in Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor: The Early Crusade for Indian Reform (New York, Harper and Row: 1881; New York, Harper Torchbooks: 1965), 237.

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10. “Comparison of Clearbrook and Wittenberg Fields,” Letter of Call and Job Correspondence, 1938-1970, E.W. Sihler Papers, Bethany Indian Mission Collection, Region 3 Archives, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN. 11. “Comparison of Clearbrook and Wittenberg Fields,” Letter of Call and Job Correspondence, 1938-1970, E.W. Sihler Papers, Bethany Indian Mission Collection, Region 3 Archives, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN.

12. “Meeting at Whitewings,” 1938 Indian Complaints about Leadership, NLCA Response, Correspondence 1935-1955, Pastor Sihler with Home Mission Secretaries, Bethany Indian Mission Collection, Region 3 Archives, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN.

13. Rethinking resistance : Revolt and violence in African history, edited by Bruijn, Mirjam de, and Walraven, Klaas Van (Boston: BRILL, 2002), 8.

14. Ibid, 8.

15 Letter from NLCA to Winnebago, May 10, 1938, 1. 1938 Indian Complaints about Leadership, NLCA Response, Correspondence 1935-1955, Pastor Sihler with Home Mission Secretaries, Bethany Indian Mission Collection, Region 3 Archives, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN. 16. Letter from Ernest Sihler to Winnebago, May 1938. 1938 Indian Complaints about Leadership, NLCA Response, Correspondence 1935-1955, Pastor Sihler with Home Mission Secretaries, Bethany Indian Mission Collection, Region 3 Archives, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN. 17. Letter from E.W. Sihler to W.W. Weber, May 14, 1970, Correspondence 19351955, Pastor Sihler with Home Mission Secretaries, Bethany Indian Mission Collection, Region 3 Archives, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN.

Religion, Science, and Evolution: Confessions of a Darwinian Skeptic

by ROBERT SHEDINGER, Professor of Religion

This lecture was presented at Luther's Religion Forum on October 3, 2019.

I

would like to frame my reflections this evening around three representative quotes. The first comes from the noted Tufts University philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett: “If I were going to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of either Newton or Einstein.”1 This quote reflects what I call the grand narrative of Darwinian triumph, a narrative that consistently overstates the scientific importance of Darwin’s theory of evolution in service to a largely ideological agenda. The second quote is from a Chinese paleontologist, Y. A. Chen, who once quipped, “In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.”2 There is great truth in this statement—critics of Darwinian evolution in the West are often caricatured as scientifically uninformed, unintelligent, or beholden to fundamentalist religious ideology— or all three! The third quote is attributed to the important British population geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, who was always good for a memorable saying: “Teleology is like a mistress to the biologist. He can’t live without her but he doesn’t want to be seen with her in public.”3 These three quotes sum up much of what I argue in my recently published book The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms: Darwinian Biology’s Grand Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion (Cascade, 2019).

Through a close reading of the scientific literature of evolutionary biology from Darwin to Dobzhansky to Dawkins and many others in between, I come to the conclusion that the Darwinian

mechanism of evolution—natural selection acting on the randomly produced variation in populations of organisms—has functioned much more as an ideological structure over the last 150 years than as a well-supported scientific theory. Don’t get me wrong; I am not making a creationist argument.

The fact of evolution is well supported by mountains of empirical data. But knowing that evolution occurred is far different from understanding how it occurred. In my view, the mechanisms driving the evolutionary process remain a mystery, while the widely-accepted view that evolution is primarily driven by natural selection is part of a grand narrative of Darwinian triumph that obscures this mystery in service to the ideological agenda of making sure the biological sciences are firmly based on a naturalistic foundation (or as the Harvard geneticist Richard Lewinton once put it, to prevent a divine foot from getting in the door). It is not my intention in this presentation to argue this admittedly provocative thesis in detail. The argument is laid out in The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms for those who are interested. I would like to make some remarks instead about the larger significance of this work.

First, I would like to push back on the caricature that Darwinian skeptics are uninformed, unintelligent, or religiously biased. There are a growing number of such skeptics who fail to fit this stereotyped profile (I think I am one of them!), and I would like to briefly mention three in particular.

Stanley Salthe is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brooklyn College. In 1972 he published a textbook on evolutionary biology focused squarely on Darwinian natural selection as evolution’s primary mechanism. But in recent decades, he has become skeptical of natural selection’s ability to adequately account

for the evolution of complex organic structures and has posted on his website fourteen arguments critical of natural selection.4 Stanford University Professor Emerita of Ecology and Evolution, Joan Roughgarden, specifically challenges Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, the idea that secondary sexual characteristics like the peacock’s tail result from peahens being attracted to peacocks with slightly longer showier tails, leading to those peacocks leaving more offspring bearing this characteristic. Roughgarden believes this theory improperly imposes on the natural world heteronormative assumptions about human sexuality, a dynamic she is especially sensitive to given her own identity as a transgender woman. In her 2004 book Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, Roughgarden documents the great diversity of sexuality and gender expression that exists in organisms from lizards to birds to mammals to primates, a diversity that in her view undermines the very foundation of sexual selection theory. As it turns out, humans’ closest evolutionary relatives, the bonobos, engage in homosexual activity quite frequently, demonstrating that sexual activity in nature is not always about procreation, but has important social functions.

Roughgarden’s 2009 book, The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness, is meant as a direct response to Richard Dawkins’ best-selling The Selfish Gene. Roughgarden argues that the ruthless competition so frequently associated with Darwinian evolution is belied by the existence of cooperative arrangements throughout the biological world.

More recently, Marcos Eberlin, Professor of Chemistry at the Fall 2019/Agora

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1874 CARTE DE VISTE PHOTOGRAPH BY ELLIOTT AND FRY (RESTORED) , WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

and convince myself of its accuracy and coherence, I was struck by the frequency with which I encountered “religious” language in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

What I mean by “religious” language is terms like orthodoxy (usually couched in the phrase Darwinian orthodoxy), heresy, blasphemy, dogma, doctrine, and creed.

Such terms seemed out of place in scientific literature, but their frequent occurrence alerted me to something more going on in this literature than simply scientific discussion. As a religion scholar, I know that the terms orthodoxy and heresy are not synonyms for true and false; they arose in early Christian disputes over the nature of Christ and became ideological identity markers denoting the boundaries between different Christian communities. Since one person’s heresy can be another person’s orthodoxy, no idea is rendered true simply by being viewed as orthodox within a particular community. Could these terms be playing a similar role in scientific literature? I believe so. Let’s consider in detail one noteworthy example of this phenomenon.

Charles Darwin University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil published Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose (2019), an argument not only against Darwinian evolution but in favor of the much-vilified theory of intelligent design. Eberlin is the director of the Thomson Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at the University of Campinas and in 2005 received the Brazilian National Order of Scientific Merit. He is the highest profile scientist to recently declare his support for intelligent design. Salthe, Roughgarden, and Eberlin simply do not fit the stereotypical image of a Darwinian skeptic—they are not uninformed, unintelligent, or beholden to religious ideology. Darwinian skepticism is an intellectually respectable and growing phenomenon. So what were the seeds of my own Darwinian skepticism?

As I read through the scientific literature of evolutionary biology to try 24

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Many readers will be familiar with the name Francis Crick, one half of the team that in 1953 discovered the double helix structure of the DNA molecule ( James Watson was the other). Four years after this discovery, Crick proclaimed what he called the Central Dogma of molecular biology.

Why would Crick, a professed atheist, use such a religiously loaded term as dogma? Why did he not profess

the Central Principle of molecular biology or the Fundamental Theorem of molecular biology?5 Why dogma?

To answer this question we must know more about Crick’s background. Crick was not originally trained as a biologist; he studied physics. While working on his doctorate in physics during World War II, Crick’s lab was destroyed by a German bomb. Crick then went to work for the British Admiralty during the war effort, and after the war decided that since he was starting over, he could study anything he liked. So he turned to biology in order to stamp out what he saw as the last vestiges of vitalism in biology. Vitalism is an idea coming out of the nineteenth century that biological organisms contain within themselves a vital force (Henri Bergson called it the élan vital in France) that propelled their evolution in preordained directions. This sounded too much like religion to the atheistic Crick, and destroying vitalism became his own stated motivation for turning to biology.⁶ So what is the Central Dogma of molecular biology?

As I read through the scientific literature of evolutionary biology, I was struck by the frequency with which I encountered “religious” language….

In short, the Central Dogma states that genetic information can flow in only one direction, from DNA out to the synthesis of proteins, but never from proteins back into DNA. In other words, Crick was arguing that no force existed outside the nucleus of a cell that could reach back into the nucleus and alter DNA sequences in any intentional way. But of course, DNA sequences have to change over time for evolution to occur. If DNA sequences never changed, the world would be inhabited by only one-celled bacteria rather than plants, insects, birds, and mammals. But if there is no force that can alter DNA sequences in any intentional way, then DNA sequences can change only as a result of random copying errors during

DNA replication, or random mutations.

Crick’s Central Dogma fits handin-glove with Darwinian evolution; it guarantees that the variations in populations of organisms on which natural selection acts are produced accidentally, not in any purposeful way.

The Central Dogma is also consistent with Crick’s stated desire to stamp out vitalism from biology. But why did Crick feel compelled to call this idea a dogma?

In the article where he pronounced the Central Dogma, Crick wrote the following:⁷ My own thinking (and that of my colleagues) is based on two general principles, which I shall call the Sequence Hypothesis and the Central Dogma. The direct evidence for both of them is negligible, but I have found them to be of great help in getting to grips with these very complex problems….Their speculative nature is emphasized by their names.

Few scientists today could get away with publishing a paper in a peer-reviewed journal stating that the evidence for their hypothesis is negligible but that it just seems to them to be the way things work! But by 1957, Crick was one of the most famous scientists in the world and the standards were clearly different for him. The point, of course, is that he was forced to admit he was pronouncing a dogmatic position, not an evidencebased scientific one, and he is to be applauded for his transparency. But if the evidence for this dogma is negligible (or at least was in Crick’s day), how do we know it is true?

It was not long before the Nobel Prize winning corn geneticist Barbara McClintock began to challenge the Central Dogma. McClintock was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 (the first woman to win this award unshared) for her discovery of transposable elements— genetic fragments that can move around and relocate from one part of the genome to another. She believed that through this process of transposition, some genes acted to control the activity of other genes and that this

activity might be under the control of cells in ways that violate Crick’s Central Dogma. In her Nobel speech, McClintock concluded with this striking passage: In the future, attention undoubtedly will be centered on the genome, with greater appreciation of its significance as a highly sensitive organ of the cell that monitors genetic activities and corrects common errors, senses unusual or unexpected events, and responds to them, often by restructuring the genome. We know about the components of genomes that could be made available for such restructuring. We know nothing, however, about how the cell senses danger and instigates responses to it that often are truly remarkable.⁸ The teleological language here is unmistakable. McClintock raised the uncomfortable prospect of cellular cognition, the idea that cells possess some sort of primitive intelligence and ability to restructure their own genomes in intentional ways to respond to environmental challenge. This prospect takes us into realms far beyond anything envisioned by Crick and certainly by Darwin.

While McClintock has become something of a forgotten figure in the history of twentieth century biology (for obvious reasons), her more radical ideas have been perpetuated by her student James Shapiro, recently retired from the University of Chicago. Shapiro has coined the term Natural Genetic Engineering (NGE) to refer to the power he believes cells possess to alter their own genetic material, and he sees NGE as a replacement for—not an addition to— natural selection as a primary driver of evolution: A shift from thinking about gradual selection of localized random changes to sudden genome restructuring by sensory network-influenced cell systems is a major conceptual change.

It replaces the “invisible hands” of geological time and natural selection with cognitive networks

and cellular functions for selfmodification.⁹ As far as I can tell, the jury is still out on the truth of Crick’s Central Dogma. But the fact that he had to pronounce it as dogma speaks volumes about the ideological battles encoded within the scientific literature. Any suggestion of purpose or direction in evolution will be quickly marginalized because of the religious implications.

As Haldane noted, biologists do not want to be associated with teleology in public, even when the evidence might point in that direction. To seriously entertain teleological processes would be tantamount to undermining the foundations of biology as a naturalistic science. This is what I refer to in the subtitle of my book as the subversion of religion.

To seriously entertain teleological processes would be tantamount to undermining the foundations of biology as a naturalistic science.

This is what I refer to as the subversion of religion.

Of course, not all biologists hold to the anti-religious commitments of a Francis Crick. In the 1990s the late Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed that religion and science be viewed as non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) such that they cannot, by definition, be in conflict.

Science deals with the workings of the physical world; religion with ethics, morality, and faith. Their respective areas of concern do not overlap. Many find Gould’s NOMA solution attractive, at least in theory. Unfortunately, few adhere to it in practice.

In 2014, evolutionary biologists Francisco Ayala and John Avise edited an anthology of seminal papers titled Essential Readings in Evolutionary Biology. In their editorial comments, they lay out a NOMA understanding of the relationship between science and religion: Fall 2019/Agora

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The scope of science is the world of nature, the reality that is observed directly or indirectly by our senses….Religion concerns the meaning and purpose of the world and of human life, the proper relation of people to the Creator and to each other….

It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that science and religious belief appear to be antithetical.10 But in another part of the book, when discussing what they see as design flaws in biological organisms, they write: This scientific revelation is but one of many reasons why the findings of evolutionary biology are highly relevant to philosophical discourse on numerous topics traditionally reserved for theologians and other religious practitioners.11 Either the findings of evolutionary biology are relevant for religious thought or they are not. But even biologists like Ayala and Avise, who explicitly endorse a NOMA understanding of the relationship between religion and science, fail to adhere to it in practice! And Ayala and Avise are not alone. Evolutionary biologists have been violating the supposed boundary between religion and science for as long as evolutionary biology has existed. Four examples will make the point.

Few figures are more important in the history of the development of evolutionary theory than the Harvard zoologist Ernst Mayr. He was a central figure in the development of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory in the 1940s and was still publishing books defending Darwinism almost until his death in 2005 at the age of one hundred. Mayr characterized Darwin’s theory as follows: Thus, the Darwinian revolution was not merely the replacement of one scientific theory by another…but rather the replacement of a worldview, in which the supernatural was accepted as a normal and relevant 26

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explanatory principle, by a new worldview in which there was no room for supernatural forces.12 For Mayr, evolutionary theory has direct implications for the validity of religious thought. Darwinian evolution ushered in a new atheistic worldview. Douglas Futuyma of Stony Brook University, author of a widely used graduate level textbook on evolutionary biology, puts it this way, “Some shrink from the conclusion that the human species was not designed, has no purpose, and is the product of mere mechanical mechanisms—but this seems to be the message of evolution.”13 And the nihilism does not end here.

The late William Provine, former Professor of the History of Biology at Cornell University, put it like this: Modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principles for human society. We must conclude that when we die, we die, and that is the end of us….Finally, free will as it is traditionally conceived— the freedom to make uncoerced and unpredictable choices among alternative courses of action— simply does not exist. There is no way that the evolutionary process as currently conceived can produce a being that is truly free to make moral choices.14 So much for the teaching of ethics at Luther College! Finally, the father of sociobiology, the well-known E. O. Wilson, really ups the ante by proposing that science can now explain religion: We have come to the crucial stage in the history of biology when religion itself is subject to the explanations of the natural sciences. As I have tried to show, sociobiology can account for the very origin of mythology by the principle of natural selection acting on the genetically evolving material structure of the brain. If this interpretation is correct, the final decisive edge enjoyed by scientific materialism will come from the capacity to explain traditional

religion, its chief competitor, as a wholly material phenomenon.

Theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline.15 For Wilson, religion is science’s chief competitor and must be vanquished.

There is no attempt at all to hold to Gould’s NOMA solution. For these influential scientists, evolutionary theory has direct, and very negative, implications for religious thought.

Wilson’s comments are especially important. His founding of sociobiology in the 1970s touched off a wave of scientists who have taken up the challenge of explaining religion in purely naturalistic terms, but in many cases absent any engagement with the work of religion scholars themselves.

For example, in Dean Hamer’s bestselling 2005 book, The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes, Hamer considers the possibility that the Apostle Paul’s visionary experience on the road to Damascus resulted from a temporal lobe epileptic seizure.

People with temporal lobe epilepsy do frequently have visionary-like experiences during seizures. Hamer’s explanation could be taken seriously if not for the fact that few biblical scholars today read Paul’s experience in the book of Acts as an historical account.

Paul’s experience does not need to be explained naturally or supernaturally because it likely never happened!

Paul describes his own “conversion” experience in his letter to the Galatians in very ordinary terms. And it has been well established that the book of Acts is written in the style of a firstcentury Greco-Roman romance novel complete with all kinds of exaggerated adventures. Just a little engagement with modern biblical scholarship could have prevented Hamer from making a rather embarrassing mistake. Paul’s experience does not need to be explained naturally or supernaturally because it likely never happened!

LUTHER COLLEGE PHOTO BUREAU

In November of 2017, I attended the Second International Conference on the Evolution of Religion in New Mexico. This was a serious academic conference of scientists from around the world dedicated to the prospect of an evolutionary explanation of religion. I was not surprised to hear a presentation dedicated to the use of temporal lobe epilepsy as a naturalistic explanation for all the world’s religions. According to this presenter, Moses, Jesus, Paul, Muhammad, and the Buddha all had visionary experiences as a result of temporal lobe epileptic seizures, and these experiences gave rise directly Robert Shedinger to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. As a religion scholar it is of religious literacy among too many difficult to take this kind of scholarship scientists. A participant in the Science seriously. Religious traditions are in the Seminaries program, Howard complex socio-historical phenomena Divinity School Professor of Theology that consistently resist any attempt Frederick Ware, puts it this way: to boil them down to the singular experience of a singular founder, an idea A presupposition of the project almost cartoonish in its simplicity. But is that no theologian and/or in the evolution of religion discourse, minister can claim the cultural engagement with the complicating work fluency necessary for true of religion scholars is simply ignored, professional competence without but at the cost of developing scientific a basic knowledge of science and insights that might be of value in the its implications for the practice study of religion. of faith….The question is: can we also say that no scientist can claim the cultural fluency necessary for true professional I was not surprised to hear a competence without a basic presentation dedicated to the knowledge of religion/theology and its implications for the use of temporal lobe epilepsy as practice of a scientific vocation? a naturalistic explanation for If this is a thoroughly legitimate question—and I am convinced all the world’s religions. that it is—then it raises immediate concerns regarding what, if anything, is being done Most recently I became aware of a new or proposed to revise curricula collaboration between the American in the sciences. The Science for Association for the Advancement of Seminaries initiative addresses a Science (AAAS) and the Association of very real deficiency in theological Theological Schools called the Science curricula, but to the exclusion in the Seminaries program. Through this of what I would argue is an collaboration, the AAAS is providing ontologically related deficiency in resources allowing theology professors science curricula.16 to bring cutting-edge scientific research into the seminary classroom. The Sadly, I don’t expect to see a Religion goal is to produce a new generation in the Sciences program develop any of scientifically literate pastors and time soon. But the double standard is priests. Greater scientific literacy among unmistakable. religious leaders is probably needed, Returning now to the issue of religion but there is no comparable program and science as non-overlapping designed to address the poor levels

magisteria, there are certainly evolutionary biologists who do not adhere to the atheism of a Dawkins, Mayr, Futuyma, or Provine. A noteworthy example is Theodosius Dobzhansky. With the publication of his seminal Genetics and the Origin of Species in 1937, Dobzhansky was hailed as one of the most important figures in evolutionary biology after Darwin. He is credited with bringing the disparate sciences of genetics and systematics together into a grand synthesis of evolutionary theory.

Dobzhansky is also known as being the most conventionally religious of the major figures of evolutionary theory, a man deeply invested in his Russian Orthodox Christian faith. Somewhat surprisingly, Dobzhansky was also very interested in the work of the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who Dobzhansky called “One of the great thinkers of our age.”17 Teilhard is well known for developing a grand evolutionary scenario in which evolution had a goal of producing human beings endowed with reflective thought, allowing them to reflect on the Creator that made them. Teilhard’s evolutionary theology has been harshly—even brutally— criticized by many evolutionary biologists, but Dobzhansky served a year as president of the North American Teilhard Society.

Late in life, Dobzhansky published a widely cited essay titled “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Here he tries to find a synthesis of the two aspects of his personality, his support for Darwinian evolution on the one hand, and his very pious Christian faith on the other. But how successful was he? Dobzhansky stakes out his position by calling himself both a creationist and an evolutionist, noting that “Evolution is God’s, or Nature’s, method of Creation.”18 He then demonstrates his Darwinian bona fides by stating, “There is, of course, nothing conscious or intentional in the action of natural selection.”19 But just a few lines later, commenting on the fact that humans can make conscious decisions, he calls humans “the apex of evolution.”20 The problem should be clear. A process that has no larger Fall 2019/Agora

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direction or end goal by definition has no apex. If natural selection is undirected, then no species can ever be termed the apex of evolution.

Dobzhansky’s desire to simultaneously hold to an orthodox Darwinian view and an Orthodox Christian view dissolves into contradiction. But Dobzhansky is not alone.

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, is an avowed Evangelical Protestant. In 2005 he published The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. He seems to agree with Gould that science and religion operate in different realms with little overlap between them: If God exists, then He must be outside the natural world, and therefore the tools of science are not the right ones to learn about him….the evidence of God’s existence would have to come from other directions, and the ultimate decision would be based on faith, not proof.21 As a scientist in good standing, Collins does not want to violate the sacred principle of modern science— methodological naturalism—the idea that scientists must restrict themselves to the search for naturalistic explanations in their scientific research (even if they hold to religious beliefs in other aspects of life). Unfortunately, while Collins affirms methodological naturalism in his own field of biology, he does not necessarily extend it to other fields of scientific inquiry, writing: The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation. It forces the conclusion that nature had a defined beginning. I cannot see how nature could have created itself. Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that.22 Many cosmologists do believe that the universe could have been self-creating.

By positing the direct action of God in one branch of science—cosmology— while rejecting it another—biology— Collins seems to fall into a similar kind of contradiction as Dobzhansky.

Given the difficulty that atheistic scientists and religiously-oriented 28

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scientists both have in maintaining a clear distinction between the realms of religion and science, perhaps we should heed the sage advice of Harvard University astronomer Owen Gingerich: If someone tells you that evolution is atheistic, be on guard. If someone claims that science tells us we are here by pure chance, take care. And if someone declares that the magisteria do not overlap, just smile smugly and don’t believe it.23 The visceral feeling that religion and science are mutually implicated, no matter how much we may want to think otherwise, is what has fueled the modern intelligent design movement— the idea that some kind of intelligent agent is directly involved in the evolutionary process. I do not have the time here to talk in depth about this unfairly maligned movement but I do want to point to two markers of its growing influence.

The institutional home of the intelligent design movement is the Discovery Institute based in Seattle, Washington.

Until recently, no reputable research university would be caught dead providing support to intelligent design ideas or to the Discovery Institute.

But in May of 2017, Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo, Brazil, a highly respected research university, opened Discovery Institute, Mackenzie. This is the first intelligent design program to be affiliated with a major research university anywhere in the world. I doubt it will be the last.

There are signs that intelligent design thinking may be making some inroads into academic biology in Spain and Germany as well.24 The second marker of intelligent design’s growing influence comes from an article regarding the origin of life published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution in 2017. In commenting on the difficulties inherent in accounting for the origin of life by natural processes, Jan Spitzer writes: Since the subject of cellular emergence of life is unusually complicated (we avoid the

term “complex” because of its association with “biocomplexity” or “irreducible complexity”), it is unlikely that any overall theory of life’s nature, emergence, and evolution can be fully formulated, quantified, and experimentally investigated.25 “Biocomplexity” is the title of an intelligent design journal and “irreducible complexity” is an idea firmly associated with intelligent design thinking. So Spitzer is saying that he cannot use a common word like “complex” because he cannot risk being associated with the intelligent design movement! If establishment biologists feel it necessary to monitor and police their own language choices in this way, you have to wonder who is getting the upper hand.

This debate over religion, science, and evolution is not just an academic debate. It has practical consequences, and I want to close by briefly noting one of them. One effect of our adherence to naturalistic explanations for all evolutionary phenomena has been to marginalize the experience of subjective awareness and reduce it down to the physical structures of the brain. This reductionist approach to mind and consciousness has in turn underwritten a movement in psychiatry beginning in the 1970s to medicalize the experience of negative mental and emotional experience, or mental illness.

With the rejection of Freudian and Jungian psychodynamic approaches, the American Psychiatric Association, with the 1980 publication of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III, reframed mental and emotional disorders as discrete illnesses caused primarily by disruptions to the brain’s biochemistry—the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness.

One advantage of this medicalization narrative was expected to be a reduction in stigma associated with mental illness. If mental illnesses are basically biological illnesses, there should be no more stigma associated with them than with any other physical illness.

Surprisingly, recent studies indicate that stigma has risen under the influence of this medicalization narrative.

According to psychologist Philip Yanos in his 2018 book Written Off: Mental Health Stigma and the Loss of Human Potential, the medicalization narrative has especially increased selfstigma, as sufferers of mental illnesses come to see themselves as biologically defective (they have a “broken brain”) and therefore consigned to a lifetime of continual struggles and psychiatric treatment. This undermines the motivation to live a full and meaningful life, leading to the loss of human potential that Yanos speaks of. Many of the great musical, artistic, and scholarly landmarks of the past were achieved by those who would be diagnosed today as mentally ill. Even Abraham Lincoln rose to become this country’s greatest president despite a well-chronicled struggle with depression. But in the age of medicalization, the motivation to strive to reach life goals is often undercut by the message that the person experiencing mental or emotional disturbance has a diagnosable medical condition that will result in a lifetime of treatment and reduced functioning.

Jo C. Phelan of Columbia University (who replaces the term medicalization with geneticization) writes: …the most prominent expectation about the consequences of geneticization is that it will reduce stigma, and public education campaigns and direct-to-consumer advertising currently promote the idea that mental illnesses are biologicallybased. The present findings do not confirm these positive expectations, and enthusiasm for this idea and practices based on it should be reevaluated.26 If our reductionist view of mind and consciousness is providing a scientific foundation for a medical movement that may be doing more harm than good, it may be time to reevaluate our reductionist and naturalistic assumptions about the nature of mind and the deeper question of what it means to be a living being. It is not as if our naturalistic assumptions are themselves forced on us by science, for as Harvard geneticist Richard Lewinton said so well:

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot let a Divine foot in the door.27 Fear of the divine foot may be warranted given the long legacy of war and oppression linked to religion. But maybe we have allowed our fear to push us too far in the other direction; maybe it is time to open that door just a crack and let in some additional light. We might be better for it.

NOTES 1. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 21.

2. Quoted in Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?

(Washington, D. C.: Regnery, 2000), 58.

3. Quoted in Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: Norton, 2012), 107.

4. https://www.nbi.dk/~natphil/salthe/ Critique_of_Natural_Select_.pdf.

5. After all, the important population geneticist, Ronald Fisher, had proclaimed the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection in the 1930s.

6. See Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1996), 88.

7. Francis Crick, “On Protein Synthesis,” Symposium of the Society of Experimental Biology 12 (1957): 152.

11. Ibid., 44.

12. Ernst Mayr, “Evolution and God,” Nature 248 (1974): 285.

13. Douglas J. Futuyma, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 12.

14 William B. Provine, “Evolution and the Foundation of Ethics,” Marine Biological Laboratories Science 3 (1988): 27.

15. Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 192.

16. Frederick L. Ware, “Undercurrents in the Deeper Waters: Reflections on Science, Theology, and Professional Competency,” Spotlight on Theological Education (Spring 2019). http://rsn. aarweb.org/spotlight-on/theo-ed/ science-and-theological-education/ science-theology-and-professionalcompetency.

17. Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,” American Biology Teacher 35 (1973): 129.

18. Ibid., 127.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006), 30.

22. Ibid., 67.

23. Owen Gingerich, God’s Planet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 153.

24. A new German-speaking scientific society has recently been formed called the Zentrum für BioKomplexität und NaturTeleologie.

25. Jan Spitzer, “Emergence of Life on Earth: A Physicochemical Jigsaw Puzzle,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 84 (2017): 2.

26. Jo C. Phelan, “Geneticization of Deviant Behavior and Consequences for Stigma: The Case of Mental Illness,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 46 (2005): 319.

27. Richard C. Lewinton, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” New York Review of Books ( Jan. 9, 1997).

8. Barbara McClintock, “The Significance of Responses of the Genome to Challenge,” Science 226 (1984): 800.

9. James A. Shapiro, Evolution: The View from the 21st Century (Saddle River, NJ: FT Press Science, 2011) 145.

10. Francisco J. Ayala and John C. Avise, eds., Essential Readings in Evolutionary Biology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 273.

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A Challenging Outlook: Affordability and Enrollment at Iowa’s Private Colleges

by ROB K. LARSON, Associate Professor of Management

causing schools to enroll students with different capacity to pay.

Relationship between student debt, net price, and enrollment Within these initial inconclusive data there did emerge a pattern that suggested that there may be a stronger relationship between student debt, net price, and enrollment patterns. To evaluate these potential relationships, data gathering focused upon each of the private four-year, public two-year, and public four-year Title IV eligible (simply put, those that participate in federal financial aid grant and loan programs) colleges and universities in Iowa for the time period of 2005 through 2017.

graduate in future years. From 200708 through 2018-19 the number of high school graduates in Iowa declined from 34,573 to 33,200 representing a decrease of 4.0%. Projections through 2028-29 indicate a slow increase and a return to 2007-08 levels.

The states contiguous to Iowa are experiencing the same general pattern of no-growth or decline. This leads to a limited capacity for Iowa colleges and universities to mitigate declines in enrollment by recruiting across borders.

Complicating the ability to attract out-of-state students is the absence of tuition reciprocity agreements between Iowa public universities and similar institutions in other states. Further, Iowa residents are eligible for in-state tuition under certain conditions at public institutions in other states.

Each of these factors contribute to the intensity of competition for Iowa high school graduates.

During my sabbatical leave in the 201819 academic year I studied a number of variables that are present in the higher education enrollment market and attempted to identify independent and dependent relationships present between these variables. Initially, the research looked to find whether there For a number of years, the population of is a relationship between the rate in high school graduates in Iowa has been which colleges and universities increase flat or decreasing. Using current K-12 both published prices and their net enrollment levels in Iowa accurately prices after grant aid to changes in predict the number of students who will undergraduate enrollment. The research focused on Luther College as a part of a mix of colleges and universities in the Midwest that were drawn from primary crossapplication schools, Luther’s comparison school cohort used for salary, ratios and other comparisons, and member schools in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest.

The data suggested that there is a modest positive correlation between these variables but not strong enough to reach any meaningful conclusions. The limitations in the data shared by institutions with the National Center for Education Statistics and other sources does not provide enrollment data for specific family income groupings or by the academic profile of students. As such it is not possible to determine if shifts in enrollment are correlated Rob K. Larson and Haley Hoffman (22) presented on “Are Student Debt and Net Tuition Prices to cost or if increases in cost are Predictors of Undergraduate Enrollment?” at the Luther Agora on November 1, 2019 30

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SUBMITTED PHOTO

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n the lead sentence from a story published in July 2019 in the Cedar Rapids Gazette newspaper, the associate vice president for enrollment at the University of Iowa is quoted as saying, “The long-term outlook for higher education is bleak, and Iowa will be right in the crosshairs—requiring its institutions to take prompt action and investigate immediate planning to survive” (Cedar Rapids Gazette, July 25, 2019, p.1).

The decline of high school graduates from Iowa and surrounding states is reflected in the number of FullTime Equivalent students enrolled in Iowa colleges and universities. The pattern of enrollment mirrors high school graduates and shows the same overall decline within this timeframe.

What is striking however is the contrast between what Iowa’s private institutions are experiencing and the undergraduate enrollment at the three public universities. While overall FTE enrollment has been either flat or decreasing, the number of students attending the public institutions has increased materially. From 2006 to 2017 the aggregate FTE undergraduate enrollment at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and University of Northern Iowa increased from 51,262 to 61,343 students or 19.7% percent. Iowa’s 33 private colleges and universities decreased during the same time from 40,877 to 39,764 or -2.7%.

Of note, the decrease from a peak of 44,259 in 2011 is -10.2%. An obvious conclusion is that in the competition for new students, public institutions are winning the enrollment battle.

The question of what is behind this pattern may provide important insights into the basis of competition for students and be valuable as private colleges formulate their strategic enrollment and institutional plans.

Debt and Affordability Industry and mainstream media frequently publish content that focuses upon the increasing level of debt that college students incur as a means of

financing their education. Headlines like “College Enrollment Declines Continue” from a May 2019 edition of Inside Higher Education are common.

Public and consumer attention is increasingly directed to the range of issues that affect affordability and access for higher education.

grant aid paid by students. In 2011, the Department of Education required that each higher education institution that participated in federal loan or grant financial aid programs make available a net price calculator on the school’s website. These calculators consider college specific inputs on academic

During the same time period that public institutions in Iowa were increasing their undergraduate enrollments and private institutions were reporting decreases, there became a pronounced difference in the level of indebtedness graduates from these respective groups were incurring. In 2006-07 the average debt of students who graduated with debt was very similar between graduates of public and private institutions with $26,763 and $27,457 respectively. Through 2016-17 the gap increased with debt for public and private institution graduates moving to $27,575 and 32,724 respectively.

These increases amount to a 3.0% debt increase for graduates of public institutions and a 19.2% debt increase for graduates of private institutions.

records and financial circumstances for prospective students and compute an estimate of what the cost of attendance will be and which portions can be paid with loans, work study, or require cash payment.

An additional set of data considered in this research is the net price after

Over the past four years my research project has assembled net price data drawn from computations gathered from roughly 40 colleges and universities using the net price calculators on the schools’ respective websites. The scenarios used consistent assumptions for family size, income, assets, and other inputs. The data was gathered using three different academic profiles and three different familyadjusted gross income levels. Thus, for each school nine scenarios were projected.

The broad result is that in Iowa the public universities offer a considerably lower price versus most privates in each of the nine scenarios. There are some limited exceptions, primarily for students with the very limited family economic resources, where schools like Grinnell that meet full demonstrated need can be less costly than the public institutions.

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As an example, using the scenario of a student with an ACT of 26 and a family adjusted gross income of $120,000, shows the price at a representative sample of institutions from the cohort used in this research:

are virtually certain to continue and intensify. Institutions that ignore or deny this do so at great risk to longterm economic sustainability.

SOURCES FOR DATA: Data for high school graduate numbers is from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE).

Data on higher education enrollment is provided by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Data on student debt is from The Institute for College Access and Success. Most collegelevel data are taken directly from U.S. Department of Education sources and the Common Data Set (CDS).

Potentially contributing to the enrollment impact of increasing debt and price disparities between college and university options for students is the pressure students and their families are placing on affordability and debt.

This increased emphasis is reflected in the findings from the annual Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) report: “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2016,” conducted by the Higher Education Research Institution at UCLA. In this report survey, “The majority of incoming first-year students in 2016 expressed some level of concern about their ability to finance their college education.” The report further details that the level of concern is increasing.

Conclusions The college selection process for students and families is complicated.

There are variables other than cost that are important considerations in decisions including programs of study, extra and co-curricular opportunities, geography, reputation, and other factors individually important to prospective students. The data gathered in this research suggest a clear indication that economics and affordability predict macro enrollment trends. These patterns 32

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There are significant, important ways that colleges can create favorable differentiations, but there is a limit to the extent consumers will value them and the extent to which they will pay a premium for them.

Going forward this project will continue to collect data on debt, price, and enrollment. The research process and findings inform courses I teach in marketing, financial planning, and management. The research has also created a number of opportunities for collaborative research and for student involvement in data collection and analysis. I am grateful for the opportunity my sabbatical leave offered for conducting this study and the financial resources to engage with students each year in this research.

Two Women Wearing Hats, Sharing Tea, and Inventing a World No One Has Seen

by NANCY K. BARRY, Professor of English

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f someone asked you to place any two great women from the past on stage for an hour, who would you pick, why would you pick them, and what would they talk about?

I turned my attention to Addams and Wald because I wanted to answer a small historical question: Why had Addams’s legacy and reputation completely eclipsed Lillian Wald’s as an early modern social reformer devoted to the health, education and assimilation of immigrant families? The ready answer to this question is that Addams’s reputation was codified and enlarged by her winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. She was the first American woman to be so honored (that’s why she has a room named after her in the Dahl Centennial Union at Luther College), whereas Wald appears never to have been even nominated for such a worldwide honor, and her fame remained distinctively local to New York City, and to the professions of social work and nursing. Despite the unevenness of their historical legacy, I decided to pose this question as a dramatic one rather than a scholarly one in order to set these two women together on stage so that

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

I posed that question to myself in applying for a sabbatical in 2019, and I had my selection already made: Jane Addams and Lillian Wald. These two pioneering feminists had distinctly parallel lives, and I knew they would be worthy conversation partners. Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois in 1860.

Lillian Wald was seven years her junior and was raised in Rochester, New York. Both were progressive feminists and social reformers, and both were instrumental in locating their vision in specific settlement houses for the poor: for Addams, it was Hull House, founded in 1889 in Chicago. For Wald, it was the Henry Street Settlement in lower Manhattan, founded in 1893.

Lillian Wald (left) and Jane Addams in Washington, D.C. in 1916. they might debate and challenge one another on the nature of their shared and distinctive legacies.

Indeed, the only reason that I know of Lillian Wald is because she is an ancestor of mine (my paternal grandfather’s aunt), which meant that

I learned about her legacy as “Great Aunt Lillian.” Jane Addams I learned about in my years in graduate school at the University of Illinois, and I can’t even remember the first time that the name Hull House came into my consciousness. In the end, the difference in their historical reputations is less a Fall 2019/Agora

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PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE, NATIONAL ARCHIVES. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

also uncovered in that research the primary documents that showed the deep friendship between Wald and her Chicago counterpart. The letters between Addams and Wald provide a rich archive of both their singular and shared heroism in wanting to provide a path toward citizenship and education for the immigrant families of their respective cities. During that year, I was puzzled as I read about their shared passions and work, settling on this question about why Jane Addams is such a well-known historical figure with a reputation and legacy that is scripted into 20th and 21st century, whereas Lillian Wald is a woman whose name is somewhat recognized yet still largely obscure.

My reading in 2019 helped me to answer that question, aided in part by the scholar Marjorie Feld who claims that the different legacies are dependent on the type and amount of material each woman has left behind: “Compared to Addams’s ten books of philosophy, Wald’s two books—filled mostly with anecdotes about life on the Lower East Side—offer far less grist for the scholarly mill” (Lillian Wald: A Biography, 199). Simply put, Addams was a more prodigious writer, speaker and public presence for the Progressive movement, and her winning the Nobel prize lifted her into the pantheon of great American women. But Feld cites another, more cultural bias for the disparity in their reputations: “While Addams came from a political family and traveled to England for her first encounter with settlements, scholars deem Wald’s merchant [and Jewish] relatives and brief baptism of fire as largely unworthy of extensive analysis” (199). Here’s another way to describe that difference: Addams was always theorizing about why and how American cities needed to become more hospitable to the poor. Wald was more of a pragmatist, less concerned about philosophy and more keen on money raising. A New Yorker profile published about Wald in 1929 entitled “Rampant but Respectable,” quoted a wealthy philanthropist as declaring to his hosts before a dinner party: “Please don’t seat me next to that Wald woman! Every time that happens I lose $5,000!”

Immigrant children, Ellis Island, circa 1900. Addams and Wald corresponded about providing a path toward citizenship and education for immigrant families. contest than it is an occasion to probe their respective identities, so I decided to let them talk through their respective challenges, to show the internal workings of their vision, separate and distinct, and also shared.

I had several scholarly hurdles to pass before I could begin the play. I needed to even out what I knew about both Wald and Addams, and to learn how their lives intersected. During a previous sabbatical (2011-12), I did extensive research on Lillian Wald, the New York activist. In addition to being a nurse and teacher, Wald was a writer, authoring two books on the Henry Street Settlement, along with frequent contributions to newspapers and magazines to promote her sense of how and why it was in the best interests of cities to promote public health, particularly for the poor. Along with Mary Brewster, she was instrumental in establishing what began as a “visiting nurses” program in the lower East Side of Manhattan that became the Henry Street Settlement, an institution still thriving today. In 1902, she seemed bold in suggesting that nurses should make a regular practice of visiting schools in New York City. In 1909, she convinced the head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company that policy 34

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holders were better served by having ready contact with nurses, perhaps providing the first corporate example of a “wellness coordinator” in American labor history. Both of these ideas were formative in the expansion and development of public health nursing in America.

Jane Addams was a woman who was new for my research, but the outlines of her life make her a worthy candidate for anyone’s attention. For Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in 1889, this reform work also embraced many spheres. She became a tireless activist for peace before and after World War I, was the chair of the Women’s Peace Party, and she also served as the president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom from 1919-1929. This surely was the work that cemented her reputation as a nominee for the Nobel prize, but I quickly moved passed that originating question and realized their distinctive personalities and shared vision could make for a worthy exchange in a twoperson play.

The autobiographical essay I worked up for Agora (“Occupying Wald Street”, Agora, Fall 2012) was the start of my writing about Wald, but I

I began by immersing myself in their correspondence, as well as a deep reading of Addams’s prolific archive. I learned that both these women were thwarted in their quest for higher education. Jane Addams strongly desired to attend Smith College; Lillian Wald, Vassar. And both women thought of this schooling as prerequisite to a career in medicine. It is an interesting notion indeed to think about how the history of American cities and social reform would have transpired had either one of these women been admitted to the Ivy League and their respective medical educations. We should applaud both for the quality and resilience of finding themselves in “Plan B,” and using that vocation to change the American landscape as forcefully as they did.

The women shared deeply in the political and social reforms of their day.

In 1903 they both were board members of the Women’s Trade Union League; by 1906, they were fighting for child labor reform. The first meeting of the NAACP occurred at the Henry Street settlement in 1909, with both women serving on its Board of Directors. They differed on their responses to the U.S. getting involved in World War I, but in the end both women travelled to Europe after the war to tour the damage in France and to find the grave of Addams’s nephew.

More intimately, the women share another parallel: whatever their longstanding reputation, each woman’s legacy includes an uneasy treatment regarding her sexuality, although Jane Addams seemed to be more at home with her long-standing relationship with women such as Ellen Gates Starr and her life-long relationship with Mary Rozet Smith, which has been written about extensively by her biographers.

As recently as 2013, however, the Chicago-based podcast “Curious City” devoted an episode to this question about Jane Addams (“Should We Use the ‘L’ Word for Jane Addams?”). For Wald, the history is more uneasy, in part because she never had a single life-long friendship or companion. In 2011, when I interviewed a public-relations executive for the Henry Street Project,

she related the “almost horror-stricken” face of one of the male executive board members when Doris Daniels, the author of the Wald biography, Always a Sister: The Feminism of Lillian D. Wald (1995) gave a lecture and made a passing reference to Wald being a lesbian. The director explained, “You wouldn’t believe how adamant this man was about saying he did NOT want that idea connected to Wald’s reputation!”

It is an interesting to think about how the history of American cities and social reform would have transpired had these women been admitted to the Ivy League and their medical educations.

It would be an easy plot line for the play to imagine these women as lovers, but I’m not sure I want to over-dramatize the question in such a heavy-handed way. In some respects, this quest to understand the women’s sexuality conveys much more about our modern desire to live by explicit sexual identities, and to somehow “know” without question where and how to classify patterns of love and intimacy.

For the most part, biographers and wiki-page editors have used the tame and non-sexualized language of “lifelong friendships” or “female-based” communities to describe each woman’s decision to live in and surrounded by a network of women. This issue of lesbianism echoes in small part the question about “why no Nobel prize for Lillian Wald?” Both stem from their descendants’ (literal and metaphorical) desire to understand their lives more fully, to write more nuanced histories, and to articulate these women’s lives with authenticity and eloquence, so that when we remember them, we are not deluding ourselves about the real life and the real choices these brave women made. Without question, one section of the play will involve these women talking about their intimate relationships with other women, not to

settle the matter for historiography, but to deepen our understanding of how and why women’s communities were tied to the sphere of social reform, and how that circle of dedicated women provided the necessary support for their public presence.

At this point, I am still transitioning from the reading stage to composing stage for the play, but I am fully convinced that a play is the right medium for these two great women to talk, quarrel, and debate between themselves whether, for example, the word “Socialism” is something we should fear. For one thing, plays are probably one of the most effective vehicles of letting individuals’ own words come alive. I am a bit intimidated by this task, as my experience in writing a play has been limited to a one-woman show, “Lessons from Cancer College” (2011). As I learned so well in turning my cancer experience into a play, the dramatist has to do way more than simply arrange prose into speeches and let someone stand on stage and speak the lines. To create a drama is make something “be at stake” for each character. The questions about historical legacy and sexual preference are topics with a kind of “historical muscle,” but the real question is what Addams and Wald will be in conflict about, on stage, as they debate, remember, and resurrect their lives. The play will use their own language, but it will be authored by me, with the license to paraphrase and arrange their words to make these women available to contemporary audiences.

I wish I could report that the sabbatical went swimmingly and I have an hourlong play finished! Sadly, the progress was slower, and I am still mired in the research, not altogether happily. I encountered two different calamities on my travel through this research.

One was physical: I suffered a nasty fall during January term before I left on sabbatical, and it tore the rotator cuff in my right shoulder. For complicated reasons having to do with a residency I had scheduled at the Collegeville Institute, I delayed surgery until April, but there is no question that the impact of the fall and the recovery from the Fall 2019/Agora

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Surely, the sentence is duly admirable and worthy of a prize, but it still put me to sleep!

The intellectual calamity became an almost comic road block that completely stunned me, regarding Jane Addams. She was a prolific writer and speechmaker, so I began enthusiastically with her book Twenty Years at Hull House, only to find myself taken aback by her prose style. Simply put, she was trained to write in the 19th century, and my post-modern brain found itself rapidly losing patience with her overly ornate, parallel and dependent-clauseridden sentences! Here’s an example: “That Christianity has to be revealed and embodied in the line of social progress is a corollary to the simple proposition, that man’s action is found in his social relationships in the way in which he connects with his fellows; that his motives for action are the zeal and affection with which he regards his fellows” (64). I spent half of one afternoon trying to diagram that sentence, and then gave up, thinking I had no idea where to put the central verb “is.”

Lillian Wald’s prose had a similar problem, although her writings were less prolific than Addams’s, but still laden with a censorious style. I was completely flummoxed about how to turn these voices into the sound of real women talking! At this point, my solution is to grab more words from their rich anecdotal passages, such as the time Jane Addams describes the first night spent in Hull House, when they not only forgot to lock the door, but also left a side entrance to the house completely open!

It didn’t seem to matter whether Addams was speaking or writing, because her style was balanced, Nancy K. Barry measured, and decidedly nonconversational. Here, for example is the concluding sentence to a lecture In addition, I turned to the letters she gave in Plymouth, Massachusetts in that the two women shared with one 1892: another, and found a worthy archive.

Without question, they admired each It is always easy to make all other’s work tremendously, and saw philosophy point one particular in their respective projects a parallel moral and all history adorn one impulse and fervor. The letters show particular tale; but I may be them to be distinctly informal with each forgiven the reminder that the other, but the content of the letters was best speculative philosophy sets sometimes almost too programmatic— forth the solidarity of the human detailing how and when they would race; that the highest moralists next meet up, who was going to pay have taught that without the whom for a given lecture--what today advance and improvement of would invariably be handled in a text the whole, no man can hope for message or e-mail. Still, the reciprocal any lasting improvement in his and deep respect is readily apparent, own moral or material individual whether the details are mundane or condition; and that the subjective philosophical. necessity for Social Settlements is therefore identical with that The find of the month was when necessity, which urges us on I discovered that in 1925, when toward social and individual Addams was 65 and Wald was 58, they salvation (Twenty Years at Hull vacationed together in Mexico. That House 66). could provide a natural setting for their 36

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conversation, although I had imagined that it would have more drama if it were set in 1931, on the eve of Addams winning the Nobel. At this point, whatever moment in time they share, on stage they can capture their rich history in terms of some of America’s most distinctive moments: the founding of the NAACP, and women’s long wait for the vote. They will debate why everyone is so afraid—then as now—of the word “socialist.” They will talk about the women they loved, and why the American cities—now and then--are in need of greater hospitality to a host of immigrants. Mostly, they will be two women wearing hats and having tea, inventing a world no one has seen, but is still worth imagining.

PHOTO COURTESY OF CHARLIE LANGTON

surgery played a role in how much typing and use of the keyboard I could do.

Rebecca Traister, our 2019 Farwell Distinguished Lecturer and the author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, could name any number of candidates who might eloquently represent the tradition of American feminists whose passion for human rights and dignity fueled significant social reforms. As Traister notes: “There is, of course, a long history of women who, in moments of political or personal crisis, make the revolutionary decision to not be nice, though the personal and political implications of this choice have rarely been obscure” (148). This might be the reason that the two women I want to place on stage are not mentioned in Traister’s book—they were “good and mad,” to be sure, but they were also good and polite, and garnered sufficient support and help from the dominant male voices of their day to make their groundbreaking feminism emphatic but hardly rude. Politeness is hardly a dramatic virtue, but I do hope this play can capture the deep faith these two women shared in American progressivism, and to keep their optimism and hope alive for the next generation of their feminist lovers and sisters.

Get Lost—The Philosopher Follows Her Nose

by HOLLY MOORE, Associate Professor of Philosophy

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wrote my sabbatical application in the summer of 2017. I was setting out to write a ‘grown up’ version of my dissertation, a book that would summarize what I’ve learned about the role of imitation in Plato’s work. I was eager to get to work on this, especially since I had not had the opportunity to revisit the work of my dissertation explicitly since I defended Plato’s Analogical Thought in 2009.

Professionally, it was important to me to write a book, and this seemed like the one I was best prepared to write.

But just because you’re prepared for something doesn’t mean it’s what you’re supposed to do.

I was on my way home from attending a feminist philosophy conference in the spring before my sabbatical was to begin, when I had a realization about my research trajectory. My work not only should be more political, it already was. I’d just never framed it that way. My interest in methodology, in the way philosophy gets done, has direct application to the politics of philosophy as a discipline.

333 Through professional connections I’d made at a conference at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2016, I’d received an invitation to conduct some of my sabbatical research with the “Philosophy, Science and the Sciences” research cluster, one of the interdisciplinary research incubators

hosted by Humboldt University. Taking advantage of this residency, I allowed the collections available to me in Berlin to inform my research. One of my original intentions had been to study the graphic depictions of the various crafts on Greek pottery of the classical era to get a better sense of the way “technē” functioned as a regulative notion for Plato’s defense of philosophy as a source of knowledge.

But the more I looked at the depiction of manual crafts on classical era pottery at the Altes Museum, the more my attention was drawn to the depiction of slaves. Indeed, the vast majority of craftspeople, at least in classical Athens, were themselves slaves. This led me to notice that slaves were seemingly everywhere in the collection, from scenes of daily life to those from the Trojan war and the stories of the gods. Since I was already in Germany, I decided to take advantage of my proximity to another excellent collection of classical artifacts in the museums of Munich in order to expand the number and sources of depictions of slaves under my consideration.

This primary source research deeply influenced the focus of my research on Plato’s dialogues, leading me to alter my book project’s direction to a study of the slave characters of Plato’s dialogues.

At the same time as my research into the primary sources of Classical Greek material culture yielded a new focus, my work with Plato’s dialogues began to offer some surprisingly similar insights. I had originally Detail of an Attic amphora (c. 500 BCE) at the Staatliche been interested in the appeals Antikensammlungen (The National Antiquities Collection) in that Plato’s characters make Munich. The owl is a marker of Athena, patron goddess of Athens, to freedom as central to the and also the symbol of the Paideia program.

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By ‘the politics of philosophy’ I do not mean theories about political systems, ideas and problems. Instead, I mean to emphasize the way that, because of how philosophy has become the discipline it is, and the way Plato’s philosophy stands at the inauguration of disciplinarity itself, philosophy has political impacts both within and beyond academic discourse. My work on the role of imitation in Plato’s work was not irrelevant to this, but it remained in many ways too obedient to the text of the dialogues and insufficiently

critical about the way Plato was producing not only a philosophy of images but an image of philosophy within his works. I set out, then, to study more closely this construction of the image of philosophy, of its relations to other competitive discourses, and the nature of Plato’s defense of philosophy as a discipline.

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identity of the philosopher. While reading for discussions of freedom, I was unsurprised to find paired with this many references to enslavement as freedom’s antithesis. I initially ignored this, however, because it seemed too obvious to need special study. But the more I read instances of an appeal to freedom and found this associated with philosophers, the more I also found not simply references to slavery but also the figures of slaves, as it were, haunting the space where the dialogues defended philosophy.

I often tell my students that philosophy isn’t so much about the answers as it is the questions. But in between the two is a great deal of sniffing. If you don’t follow your nose, you’ll never find your way to the good stuff. Developing strong philosophical instincts is the most important skill I seek to cultivate in my students. And, like all the things I try to teach my students, it’s something I’m still working on myself, something that gets better the more I try to learn along with my students how it is that we do this thing called philosophy.

There’s a point in many research projects where you have to be honest with yourself and admit that what you thought you were doing is not what you’re ultimately working on. Midway through my residency in Berlin, I presented a prospective version of my book project, which concentrated on Plato’s role in producing an ideology of philosophy’s value based on its rigor. Although the response to the presentation was very positive and illuminating, by articulating the format of that project it became clear that it needed more focus, so I finally decided to start following the tracks of the slave characters of the dialogues. And that’s when everything started to make sense. It was as if all the ideas I’d been working on finally found their home. By centering my study on the slaves who speak, I now had a focus and a form for a coherent study of the dialogues, which grounded my interest in the ideological function of the defense of the philosopher in a treatment of the rhetorical form of Plato’s use of slave characters.

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The Altes Museum in Berlin, viewed from the Lustgarten.

Importantly, by focusing on the way Plato employs slave characters to project a vision of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ slaves, I have identified a rhetorical structure that was operating at a very different level than simply the discussions portrayed in the dialogues. That is, in concentrating on the speech of the slaves, I could now see the way that Plato was constructing a framework for defining the philosopher as superior to the sophist not because his freedom was opposed to the sophist’s slavish dependence upon an audience, but rather because his freedom was itself a kind of virtuous enslavement to the truth. Moreover, I also now see that this early conceptualization of enlightenment through discipline depends not only upon an embedded notion of enslavement but that this depiction is itself carried out through the dramatic engagement with slave characters.

333 Upon my return from Berlin, I spent two weeks in a research residency at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard’s classics research library in Washington, D.C. With assistance from Prof.

Gregory Nagy, the Center’s director, and the exceptional staff of the library, I was able to complete a very focused study of their collection for the purposes of establishing the baseline research for each dialogue I am treating in my

manuscript. The level of scholarship and research capability afforded by such a well-curated and extensive collection was unparalleled and something I have never before experienced as a researcher.

Having had this opportunity has given me a great deal more confidence in my ability to produce a book that will have an impact not simply in my own field of philosophy but also, I hope, in the field of classics as well.

The most important thing I discovered while conducting this research is that no one has produced such a study of Plato’s dialogues, neither of its slave characters nor of its rhetoric of slavery.

Much attention has been paid to both Plato’s invocations of freedom (though these are relatively few) as well as to the role of slavery in his political theory. But the slaves who speak in the dialogues have received astonishingly little attention. The most egregious example is the ‘slave boy’ of the Meno. Although this slave speaks for a large portion of the dialogue, most editions of the text do not list him as a character. Moreover, treatments of “the slave boy demonstration” make no attempt to assess the slave’s speech as anything other than a prop for Socrates (and thereby Plato). That is, the interpretations of the text serve to resubordinate the character as a slave.

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I believe it is our function as interpreters not simply to be obedient readers but to subject the text itself to question and critique, such that we might see how the text produces the demands that make us obedient in the first place. Although Plato is trading on the tropes of the culture and drama of his day, these are remarkably redolent of longstanding tropes of anti-Black racism that continue to haunt contemporary American society and politics: the backtalking, impertinent, lazy, pleasureloving slave and the docile, tractable, helpful slave, seemingly satisfied in their own enslavement, the transparent vessel of a master’s mind and agency.

Addressing these issues is not simply a matter of changing a culture and a climate but also of the patterns and structures that inform scholarship.

Disciplinarity is an inherently conservative activity, so efforts to change the structures that inhabit a discipline must themselves address what gave rise to those structures. It is not simply the case that philosophy is white supremacist because it occurs in a white supremacist world. Philosophy is to a large degree the means by which white supremacy has been justified and institutionalized. As a philosopher and an anti-racist, it is my duty to critique the ways that my discipline has not only participated in but contributed to the foundations of white supremacist thinking.

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Both the discipline of classics and that of philosophy are notoriously exclusionary disciplines, retaining some of the lowest percentages of nonwhite members in each discipline’s major professional organizations.

Although this fact has finally garnered some attention from these disciplines’ members, this has come only under significant pressure arising from public outcry, most notably in response to the egregious and overt racism displayed at last year’s conference of the premier national Classics association, held in San Diego. Dr. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a faculty member in Classics at Princeton who is of Dominican descent, was

speaking on “The Future of Classics” and challenging the discipline’s defense of whiteness, which he demonstrated by referring to an instance of racebased policing of conference space in the days prior. During the Q & A he was told by a white female scholar, who was defending the traditional view that the classical world is the foundation of European culture, that Prof. Peralta had gotten his job “only because he was Black.” Despite explicit repudiation of her statement both during and following the event, Peralta contends that this outburst is simply an overt expression of the racist assumptions that implicitly inform the anxieties of many of the discipline’s members and, more importantly, their ‘principled’ concerns about the future of the discipline.

Holly Moore

While Plato was not a white supremacist under any kind of definition of the term, my research has led me to the view that Plato established a logic of slavery that transcended the institution as such and that this logic not only came to inhabit the understanding of philosophy as a discipline but that it deeply shaped the Western scientific ideology that knowledge is a kind of mastery. The effects of this are broad and deep and go toward

understanding not only the justification of many kinds of human degradation but also of other exploitative mindsets that unfairly distribute precarity and vulnerability to certain populations more than others.

333 Overall, what I learned about research while on my sabbatical is that you cannot find your way unless you’ve allowed yourself to get lost. Getting lost takes time; it takes the time and space of reflection and speculation, of reading and writing, of looking so that you may see, of searching so that you may find.

Had I not had a full year to immerse myself in this constellation of questions, had I not allowed myself to embrace more explicitly the call to address the politics of doing philosophy, of being a philosopher, I would have never seen the forest within those trees.

I am deeply grateful for having had the opportunity to do the kind of thinking that could bring me to produce a work like the book I’m writing. In addition to the sabbatical funding I received from the College, the indispensable support provided by a grant from the Doris and Ragnvald Ylvisaker Endowment for Faculty Growth as well as the Paideia Endowment were crucial to my ability to complete a full year of sabbatical. This experience has enriched not only my own scholarship but my sense of calling as a teacher and as a professional in the field of philosophy. To discover that one really does have something important to contribute to one’s discipline, even when that is a critique of the origins of disciplinarity itself, is a humbling achievement, and one I’m pleased to share with the broader Luther community.

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Papaw’s Tuning Fork, Mother’s Piano, and Daddy’s Saxophone SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

“Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?”

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Isaiah 43: 18-19

hat’s missing in this exhortation communicated by the prophet Isaiah is the between and the from. In these lines, there are two black and white choices: old or new. In order to appreciate the new, the old must first be discarded. But the way most of us learn lessons or gain experience or become more mature in our faith or relationships or politics is by adapting the old for the new—by letting the new grow from the old, not kicking it to the curb.

My first childhood memories are formational and foundational ones—the kind that tell you in retrospect why you became who you are. In the first, I’m a couple of years old, and I’m lying on the floor partly under the piano bench in our living room. The four wooden legs enclose the upper part of my body, and my cheek is on that scratchy sculpted carpet of the late 1950s. I can see the tree trunks of my father’s legs to one side and, if I turn my head, my mother’s bare legs with the hem of her skirt trembling with her movement under the edge of the bench. One of my hands is on my father’s foot as it taps out rhythm for his saxophone, and one hand is on my mother’s foot, as it pumps the sustain pedal of the piano in accompaniment. The floor vibrates under me as they play, and I feel safe as their feet speak to my hands and I start to drift away…not to sleep, but to a kind of child version of meditation…a place between: between my father and mother, between waking and sleeping. I gave up my childhood, but I carry that musical memory in my bones.

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Later, I’m at my grandfather’s church: Old Euseba Missionary Baptist in Bee Branch, Arkansas, population 63. Again, I’m lying on the floor, this time a dusty wooden one between two pews. I can see the base of the pulpit from which my grandfather roars about sin and repentance. I can’t see him, because my face is pressed to the boards in terror.

But I know that vein is bulging in his neck, and I know the sweat is running down his face, as he tells stories of the fires of hell and the blood of the Lamb and my own unworthiness. I can feel a slight breeze from the dozens of paperboard fans swaying slowly in every hand, and in Papaw’s dramatic pauses, I hear the drone of dirt daubers—mud wasps—as they float-fly in the air. A place between: between my grandfather the preacher, who has me cowering, and that same man, after church, who smells of Old Spice and Corn Husker’s Lotion, who sneaks a peach fried pie for me before the big boys get theirs, and who will hit a tuning fork against his knee and hold it to my ear so we can get the right note together for “I’m in the Lord’s Army.” Between the Law and the Gospel, between Hell and Heaven.

My grandfather is no more. But his fiery rigor and his playfulness, as well as his passion for storytelling, are planted in my bones.

Even later, I’m in a knot of cousins and aunts and uncles, standing at attention as someone calls out number 82 in the Heavenly Highway Hymnal. The basses call “I’ll have a new home of love eternal with the redeemed of God to stand, there’ll be no more sorrow, no strife.

Yes, raised in the likeness of my Savior, ready to live in gloryland, I’ll have a new body…” and I join the sopranos, my little girl voice mimicking the warbly voices of my aunts as they respond “Praise the Lord, I’ll have a new life.

Glory, glory, never sad, no more pain,

LUTHER COLLEGE PHOTO BUREAU /AARON LURTH ’08

by JENIFER K. WARD, President of Luther College

Jenifer K. Ward there’ll be no more strife, in his likeness I’ll be glad, praise the Lord, I’ll have a new life.” And once again, I’m in a place between: between the pain and groaning and sadness of the text, on the one hand, and on the other, the boundless joy and love and exuberance of the rollicking music and of this family singing it together. My childlike faith is gone. But a faith, my adult faith, and love for my family, from whom I’m very different in many ways as an adult, are like the drone of a bass line resonating in my bones.

These song texts of my childhood contrast the present time and place, marked by the trials of life in this earthly tent, with a different time—in the past, when Jesus died for us, or the future, when we won’t be alone—and about a different place from where we are, just over there, just over Jordan, just over in the gloryland, where we will have a heavenly mansion and a crown and be with Jesus, if we will only allow ourselves to be plunged into a fountain of his blood. And yet: you have never

heard such hilarity and laughter and wallowing in present pleasure as when my family lives in these dark texts, standing in quartets around just a few dog-eared hymnbooks.

A place between: I was raised to see myself smack in the middle of the hair-raising narrative of being plunged into blood and the fiery pits of hell. But here’s something else I learned: that God’s grace swirled out of my Aunt Marketa’s voice and Papaw’s tuning fork, and Mother’s piano, and Daddy’s saxophone. Grace wove itself between the members of a community of family that believed, together, that there was something great that bound them all to each other and to all who had come before and to all who would follow after, even though we disagreed on politics and whether women could preach, and which aunt made the best biscuits. Even as I was moving away from the theology of my childhood, I was moving toward a rich understanding of paradox that would lead me to Lutheranism and maybe even to this place.

“Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?”

this earth, since salvation was already present through grace. The former thing fit my family, but it chafed me as I got older. When I did confirmation study and became a Lutheran as an adult, I certainly didn’t give up the former things of old. I didn’t give up my family, or sing any less joyfully with them about some glad morning when this life would be over and we would fly away to heaven. Even in our theological differences there was overlap. There was and is grace.

That grace bound my voice to theirs then, and binds my voice today to all of yours, as well, and yours to those on either side of you, regardless of how you pray or to whom. How will we perceive the new things, the new friendships across difference that were there as seeds in the former things, the things we brought from home, the experiences and relationships and ways of being that marked our lives before THIS day and THIS place? And when we consider the possibilities of the new things, as individuals and as this community, how can we keep from singing?

Amen.

Let’s consider those lines again more carefully. “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?”

When we concentrate too intently on the opposite words old and new, we miss that in that second sentence, there is a rich space BETWEEN: “I am about to do a new thing” signals something not yet realized; only an intention; something we can’t yet see, but only perceive. The former things of old, in other words, are the very ground from which the “new thing” must emerge.

In my own life of faith, the former things of old were about my Missionary Baptist upbringing. It was a mostly black and white theological approach focused on the “other side” more than the here and now; that emphasized the avoidance of sin for salvation as a ticket to get to the gloryland more than the need to live in the gray zone of paradox and seek justice and inclusion even on Fall 2019/Agora

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The New Thing Upon this Earth SEPTEMBER 13, 2019

by NANCY K. BARRY, Professor of English

My turn today will examine a different nuance of Isaiah’s words. My question to the prophet is a simple one: suppose the new thing isn’t so friendly? Suppose it’s a Friday the 13th kind of thing?

Suppose the new thing is a challenge beyond our mind’s imagining, and doesn’t seem to come from a beneficent God at all?

I have lived in the same house in Decorah since 1990—a Sears Craftsman style bungalow that has one thing on its lot that is completely unwelcome to me: a towering walnut tree. Walnut trees can be impressive in their size and scope—their branches spurt out in all directions, and so they offer great shade in the summer. But the previous owner did warn me about the tree—he told me it would rain walnuts in the autumn, but “only every other year,” he promised. He could have been a prophet, promising me new things, in the form of these green, round orbs that fall to earth in a mess. When they land in my yard, all the neighborhood squirrels send the message, “It’s happy hour at the Barry house,” and so they extract the nuts, and the round covering comes apart and the juice inside squirts all over everything with this black, ink-like dye. Every two years, like clockwork, I think: “WHO NEEDS THIS TREE?” The other day the tree was so flippant, it answered me by aiming a walnut right at my head as I walked to the garage.

Suppose the new thing isn’t exactly welcome? Suppose it seems to us more like a nuisance, a hurricane, or a guest 42

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we would never welcome into our lives?

To make matters worse, it’s the very health of the walnut tree that creates its bother, and let’s be clear, in the grand scheme of things that’s what those inkstained walnuts are—even if you love the nuts that they yield: a nuisance, a reminder that the natural world may be bountiful, but not always beautiful, and that the ebb and flow of time that other prophet talked about (“to everything, there is a season”) brings with it a scale of wants and want nots. Or as the poet Robert Frost says: “Come the fall, we name the fall.”

Suppose what the new thing brings us is more calamitous? Less a nuisance, and more a heart-rendering pain?

One week ago, I stood with members of my family as we buried my oldest nephew, Bryan. He was 36 years old, and the new thing that came into his life 18 months ago was cancer. He fought it with a phalanx of doctors, radiation, chemotherapy, more drugs to counter the effect of the chemotherapy, and as each month went by there was an occasional glimmer of good news, but then unrelenting bad news. The “emperor of all maladies” began in his colon and spread to his bones, and to other parts of his body. When I saw him for the last time, in mid-August, I was stunned by how weak his one full frame had become. His fight with those treatments reminded me of my own bout with breast cancer 18 years ago, and the way I felt I was rolling the dice with each chemotherapy treatment: “Maybe today these toxins are killing me. Maybe tomorrow these toxins will keep me alive.”

For Bryan, the modern medical miracle that I celebrated did not appear. He died on August 27, and my sister and Bryan’s father were left to do the impossible task of burying their only child. What

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or the past week in chapel we have heard each speaker recite the words from Isaiah 43:19 –“Do not remember the former things nor consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”

Nancy K. Barry if the new thing brings with it nothing but grief, a heart-wrenching sorrow that stops even the living dead in our tracks and makes us cry out, like the prophet Jeremiah: “Is there no balm in Gilead?

Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?”

At Bryan’s funeral, we began the service with a reminder of his baptism, the holy water that marked him for life everlasting, and throughout the funeral the gentle sound of that water flowing was a backdrop to all our prayers. We heard words from the Book of Wisdom and the admonition of St. Paul in his letter to Corinthians who reminded us that the body is not our home, but simply a way station to the eternal life we inherit by virtue of God’s grace, God’s mercy.

But all I could think of was his body in THIS world—all during his lovely childhood, when he was a devilishly cute blond-headed boy with handsome eyes—a mouth that was quick to grin and a healthy body that was ready for anything. No one during those years

could have imagined how the unlucky wheel of cancer would pluck him up and land him hard in the basket that spun around for 18 months and then settle on the spot that had the word death scripted upon it.

He has joined the ranks of others who have died too soon. Like Mathew, a Luther student who in 1996 went out with friends to Dunning’s Spring to climb the rocks, only to have the ledge give way and his hand slip which resulted in a fall that killed him. Or Eric, an Iowa City artist who was working in his studio one night, when someone drove by and saw the door ajar and so called the police. The police officer, rushing into the studio space, didn’t stop to ask if the man inside was the artist and owner, he saw only a man holding something that looked like a gun and so he fired his weapon and killed Eric, who was simply standing there holding a phone. These two men are buried quite close to one another in an Iowa City cemetery, and when I walk there, I call it “the graves of young men who died too soon.” Now, a thousand miles away in Baltimore, I have my own nephew’s plot to add to it.

The poet Emily Dickinson was fond of comparing our emotional life to small creatures, and in one lyric poem she tells us, “Grief is a mouse.” But by the end of the poem, she knows that “grief is tongueless,” and that’s what I felt, all during the funeral, as I bit down hard and pleaded with God, just once, I bargained, show me this everlasting life—this place that we go to, that’s better than this; the dark side of nothing, the right side of bliss. I dared God to make THIS make me a true believer, but all I could do was swallow that tongueless grief that had indeed become an animal within me, lodged in my throat, my lungs, my heart.

Every time I felt that sadness pool up in me, I looked at my sister, and thought, for her, I had to survive this. I prayed that for her, for the rest of her life, let there be nothing but love, kindness, understanding. Indeed, a new life, one that is riddled with loss but still endures and finds faith in something. “Hope,” the same poet tells us, “is the thing that perches in the soul, and sings the tune

without the words, and never stops at all.”

One thing we must do in this loss beyond our understanding is remember their names: Ascension, and Bryan, and Eric, and Mathew, and John Bale, and remember that their lives were the good news and the new thing upon this earth.

Even in their death we must believe in some new thing, maybe in some everlasting sphere. Our faith wants to believe that, but I believe in the space right here, where we grieve without our tongues and we do our best to keep hope alive and love one another.

When I flew back to Decorah last Sunday, rich in the sorrow shared with my family, my yard was a mess, littered with walnuts that had cracked open and spilled their black ink all over everything. Part of me wanted to grab the rake and start doing SOMETHING, to wipe away the muck and the stain. Scripture tells us that Adam and Eve, once exiled from the garden, were forced into a world of work, but I think the first thing they did was take a nap; so instead of raking the walnuts, I just went inside and went to bed, where I was blessed with that minor, small death we call sleep, to help soothe me past the grief.

I decided I would put the ink toward better use and send my sister a note, each day, to walk with her, to keep her company in the days and months ahead. Robert Frost once said, “Earth’s the right place for love; I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” We can celebrate the memory of those we’ve lost and resolve in our wayward souls to stop whining about small and stupid things. Did not the prophet know that sometimes the new thing would lead us right into the arms of death? And do we not have one another, to brace ourselves for such a fall?

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A New Thing?

by KRISTIN A. SWANSON, Professor of Religion

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ive years ago, if you had asked me what my favorite season of the year is, I would have answered “summer” with no hesitation.

I love everything about summer: fresh vegetables from the garden, long evenings, taking the dog out without having to bundle up, fishing our favorite lakes up north. And the fireflies – I love the fireflies! With a mid-June birthday, I feel like fireflies are my own personal birthday present. Five years ago, when the air would turn crisp and the green of the trees would fade to oranges and yellows and browns, I would feel a pang of melancholy, like I was losing a good friend. Recently, though, I’ve come to appreciate fall; instead of the pang of sadness, I feel a thrill of excitement.

I’m sure that my husband’s love of fall and our now shared enthusiasm for outdoor pursuits here in northeast Iowa have helped change my thinking.

With fading leaves come new issues of In-Fisherman and Iowa Game and Fish magazines, with articles about fall patterns for crappie and bass, or a duck forecast (which, let’s be honest, is a summary of the previous year’s weather).

We eagerly anticipate the new roadside pheasant count, take out last year’s journals to see where we fished, and scope out favorite locations to see whether there is enough water to hold ducks. The north wind that used to make me feel cold and melancholy now makes me wonder what may be blowing in or heading south.

I starting thinking about this new fall season because of the passage assigned to me for our fall chapel series, “A New Thing.” This theme comes from Isaiah 43:19, where we read, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” This verse is drawn from the message of a prophet whose 44

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work, scholars believe, is preserved in chapters 40-55 of the book of Isaiah.

My assigned passage is Isaiah 40:1-8, the opening verses of this prophetic collection. Here I am reading my own translation: 1. “Be reassuring, be reassuring, my people!” says your God.

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Isaiah 40:1-8

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2. “Speak soothingly to Jerusalem; and call out to her that her conflict has been brought to completion; that her sin is pardoned; and that she has paid double from the LORD’s hand for all her transgressions.”

3. A voice is calling: “In the wilderness, prepare a road for the LORD! In the desert, make level a highway for our God! 4. Every valley will be lifted up, and every mountain and hill will be brought low. The bumpy terrain will become level, and the rugged ground will become a broad plain.

5. The glory of the LORD will be revealed; and all flesh will see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

6. A voice says: “Cry!” And I said, “What should I cry?” “All flesh is grass, and its loyalty is like the flower of the field.

7. Grass dries up, flowers fade, when the LORD’s breath blows on them.

8. Grass dries up, flowers fade, but the promise of our God stands forever.”

“Second Isaiah” is the name given to this anonymous prophet. You may have noticed that there isn’t any PII in these opening verses: no name or location, like we often find in prophetic texts.

Kristin A. Swanson Within the fifteen chapters attributed to Second Isaiah, however, there are a number of contextual clues, including specific references to the Persian king Cyrus, that help scholars place this prophet in the 6th century BCE. To get at Second Isaiah’s anticipation of “a new thing” in this context, we need to back up a couple of centuries.

The prophets, as depicted in the Hebrew Bible, were social and political commentators. They were the pundits of their day, offering their commentaries on current events through a theological lens. In the eighth century BCE, prophets such as Amos and Isaiah of Jerusalem offered their messages in the midst of the Assyrian crisis. The Assyrians, a military machine based in northern Mesopotamia, made annual excursions westward and southward; by the mid-8th century, they were just outside the city of Damascus, and thus a looming threat to Israel and Judah.

Amos excoriated the elites of Samaria for their mistreatment of the poor, and invoked the prospect of an Assyrian invasion as God’s punishment for this

behavior. A century later, well after Israel had fallen to the Assyrians, a prophet from Judah named Jeremiah warned the people of Judah that God would use the Babylonians as a mechanism to punish the people for their behavior. When the Babylonians finally did enter Jerusalem and exile the elites to Babylonia, Jeremiah’s advice to them was to settle in: build houses, have children, and pray for the welfare of their Babylonian overlords. In time, God would redeem the exiles, he said.

For now, make yourselves at home.

Now fifty years later, we are in Second Isaiah’s context. The children and grandchildren of the exiles are living in community in Babylonia, preserving old traditions and creating new ones in their efforts to stay faithful to the LORD in the Babylonian context. Babylonia is in disarray – the Babylonian king Nabonidus managed to antagonize the powerful Marduk priesthood in Babylon, before himself moving to the Arabian Desert. Meanwhile, a new king, Cyrus the Great of Persia, is on the rise. His empire management strategies include repatriating exiled peoples to ancestral homelands, with the expectation that they would rebuild destroyed temples and provide local leadership. It was a clever way to instill loyalty while creating a revenue center for Persian taxation; it also provided a management structure that didn’t require as heavy oversight as had previous empire management systems.

obligation to restore the holy city. “If we have a chance to be in charge again, why not?” was another. Other reactions were “meh.” “It’s a long trip,” they said.

“Besides, we’ve settled in here just like Jeremiah said to do. How do we know this is the redemption he anticipated?”

We hear Second Isaiah’s response clearly in our passage: “Don’t worry about the trip!” he says. “God will pave a supersmooth super-highway to Judah! Tell Jerusalem we’re coming!”

A new thing? I don’t know. The theological construction that says that God chooses a foreign nation/ruler to do God’s work? That’s certainly not new, “and it’s getting kind of tiresome” is the reaction of other prophets and storytellers. A new overlord? Cyrus would be the third one within seventyfive years. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” to quote Pete Townshend.

Going to Judah as middle managers?

We are the new boss, same as the old boss. What seems new is old, and will become old again.

Yes, Second Isaiah seems to reply to me, I understand your perspective. Human understanding of God is incomplete and sometimes wrong-headed; rulers come and go. Grass dries up and flowers fade. But another way to look at it is that what was old, is new again. Grass dries up, and flowers fade, but then they bloom again. And again. And again.

God’s word, God’s promise of renewal, endures forever.

“I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” is the word of the LORD through Second Isaiah. I can imagine our prophet bouncing off the walls with anticipation at the possibilities a Persian conquest might bring. In verse 13 of chapter 45, Isaiah says, “I have aroused Cyrus in righteousness, and I will make all his paths straight; he shall build my city and set my exiles free, not for price or reward, says the LORD of hosts.”

It is interesting to imagine the reaction of the exilic community to Second Isaiah’s message. Last week I asked the Religion 101 students in my classes to do just that. Would they want to go to Judah? The response was mixed; one reaction was a sense of excitement and Fall 2019/Agora

45

Nevertheless, God Persists OCTOBER 31, 2019

by AMALIA VAGTS, Luther College Ministry Intern

Luke 18:1-8

T

his morning is Reformation Chapel. Reformation Day is celebrated on October 31st and is when some Christians commemorate the beginning of the reforming movement that led to a variety of Christian expressions, including Lutheran ones. Reformation is about the future, but we often celebrate it by honoring traditions tied to the past.

In many ways, theology can become a jumble of looking back to see what other people looking back have said and then trying to say it in a new way. Really what we are trying to do is tell the one true story again for new ears.

Last weekend, Pastor Annie, four Luther College students, and I participated in a retreat where we learned how to write and give testimony.

Our retreat leader, the Rev. Erik 46

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Christensen, began the retreat by saying, “It is my conviction that a true story, told well, can save a life.” And then, he showed us how this is the story of Christianity—a true story, told well, that gives new life.

Which brings us to the parable often referred to as “The Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge.” Or as I wanted to call it: “Nevertheless, she persisted.”

You may remember this phrase from the news cycle two years back. It came out of an exchange between two senators— one male, one female. The male senator unsuccessfully attempted to silence the female senator. As he conveyed later to reporters, “The Senator was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”1 Since then this phrase has become a rallying cry for people working against oppressive and harmful systems. We can imagine the judge in Jesus’s parable may have said something like this to his pals: “I kept refusing her appeal. She had no standing in my court. I wasn’t interested in her pursuit of justice. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

So I wanted to give my whole chapel talk today about a bunch of fierce women who persisted and changed the world. But if we read the parable carefully, we notice something unexpected. The judge does not experience a transformation or change of heart in this story. We don’t even know if the widow’s case was worthy.2 So where does that leave us? Is this a story about working for justice, or what?

The hard truth is we may not change the hearts of those who are unjust. We may not quickly change oppressive systems like racism and sexism, ableism and heteronormativity. We may have unclear motivations for our work.

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Jesus told the disciples a parable on the necessity of praying always and not losing heart: “Once there was a judge in a certain city who feared no one— not even God. A woman in that city who had been widowed kept coming to the judge and saying, ‘Give me legal protection from my opponent.’ For a time the judge refused, but finally the judge thought, ‘I care little for God or people, but this woman won’t leave me alone. I’d better give her the protection she seeks, or she’ll keep coming and wear me out!’” Jesus said, “Listen to what this corrupt judge is saying.

Won’t God then do justice to the chosen who call out day and night? Will God delay long over them? I tell you, God will give them swift justice. But when the Promised One comes, will faith be found anywhere on earth?”

Amalia Vagts That’s not to say that we don’t or shouldn’t work for justice. So, yeah, I am going to tell some stories about fierce women. Like the story of Greta Thunberg, who in August of 2018, at 15 years old, walked out of her classes and sat outside the Swedish Parliament holding a sign that said “School Strike for Climate.” That was just a little over a year ago. And this September, as a result, an estimated 7.6 million people around the world, including Luther students, joined her in climate strikes.

We still have huge climate crisis issues.

We still have powerful people around the world who hold the key to change and who make fun of Greta instead of listening to her. Their hearts and minds have not been changed. And yet, millions of people have collectively started to change and talk about and respond to climate change in new ways.

A recent article in the Smithsonian magazine tells the nearly forgotten story of Henrietta Wood, who in 1878 sued the man who had wrongfully enslaved her for 21 years. The lawsuit took eight

years to get to trial. Henrietta may have thought she would never be heard.

When the jury returned their verdict they ruled in Henrietta Wood’s favor.

The $2,500 she received was far less than what she had requested, yet this remains the largest known amount granted by a U.S. Court in reparations for slavery. This was justice for Henrietta Wood, but it didn’t result in reparations for others. We still face systemic racism and the effects of slavery, the Jim Crow era, and white supremacy. And at the same time, the conversation around racism and reparations and white supremacy is changing.

This parable—and my inability to resist telling you stories about women who have persisted—can easily lead us to believe that if we work hard enough, or pray hard enough, or sing well enough, perform brilliantly enough, or protest long enough that we will achieve justice and earn God’s love.

There is no day like Reformation Day to remind you that you don’t earn God’s love. That you can’t earn God’s love.

We work for justice, but God delivers it. The path to justice may feel like a hopeless battle against systems that will never change. Your journey of faith may feel like you are calling out and not being heard. You may not get the result you want or hope for. But I don’t think this parable is about results. The point is that God persists in granting love, justice, and mercy to God’s people.

God’s justice is shalom: wholeness.

Completeness. Peace. “Will not God grant justice?” Jesus asks the crowd. The sacred stories of Scripture show God’s justice again and again, reminding us that God is loving, and just, and merciful. By learning and knowing these stories, we live our days trusting the faith God through the Spirit gives us in Christ Jesus.

your hunger is fed and your thirst is fulfilled. You are God’s true story, told well, giving new life. This is the story of God creating you in love and blessing you and calling you good. The story of God who goes through everything with you, all the way to death. And all the way to new life.

The world may get weary. Nevertheless, God persists. As we persist for worldly justice, God persists even more, grasping on to us, reforming death into life. We trust that the promised day of God’s justice will come...

The trees shall clap their hands; the dry lands gush with springs; The hills and mountains shall break forth with singing!

We shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace, As all the world in wonder echoes shalom..

Notes 1. Daniel Victor, “‘Nevertheless, she persisted’: How Senate’s Silencing of Warren Became a Meme.” New York Times, February 8, 2017. Accessed on 10/29/19

2. Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus:The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. HarperOne, 2015.

3. Moran, Lee “‘Incredibly Moving’ Photo of Greta Thunberg’s First Climate Strike Goes Viral” Huffington Post.

Accessed on 10-29-19.

4. www.globalclimatestrikes.net

5. McDaniel, W. Caleb. "In 1870, Henrietta Wood Sued for Reparations—and Won." Smithsonian. Accessed 10-29-19 6. McDaniel, W. Caleb.Ibid.

7. For more: Alexia Salvatierra and Peter Heitzel, Faith-Rooted Organizing: Mobilizing the Church in Service to the World (especially Ch.5), IVP Books, 2013.

8. Conversation with Rev. Anne EdisonAlbright about an early draft of this sermon led me to more clearly emphasize God’s persistence. Annie asked: “... does the Gospel assure us that, as we are persisting against the powers and principalities of this world, God is even more persistent, reaching toward us, working transformation in ways we may not be able to see?” I rephrased her important theological point in my final draft.

9. Mary Louise Bringle: “Light Dawns on a Weary World,” in Evangelical Lutheran Worship, 726. Based on Isaiah 55:1213.

Your story may be a fight for justice, or the reality of new diagnosis, or the loss of a beloved one. It may be about learning to tell your own truth. It may be about just getting through your day.

You show up again and again in this world—persisting for the world God dreams for all of us. Together we work to create the beloved community where all belong—where you belong. Where Fall 2019/Agora

47

October Fires

by CAROL GILBERTSON, Professor Emerita of English

Two months of drought made paltry crops and gardens.

Even those in town expressed a hope for rain, and we heard somber talk of fall with little color.

Now October, passion spent, will smolder in the mind like winter’s charred remains, its ravished trunks and limbs.

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Agora/Fall 2019

MARTIN KLAMMER

But when August and September parched the world to tinder, October’s smoky browns and underlying umbers flared like embers into blazing tongues.

And in the season’s fiery heart, the red-hot leaves consumed remains of green.

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