Spring 2022 Agora

Agora

THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE

SPRING 2022

LUTHER COLLEGE, DECORAH, IOWA

LUTHER COLLEGE: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE

Martin Klammer, editor

SPRING 2022 VOLUME 34 NUMBER 2

Bonnie Tunnicliff Johnson, production editor

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

LUTHER COLLEGE

PAIDEIA Seeking Wisdom in Community

The primary Agora contributors are Luther College faculty; writing is also solicited from other college community members and, occasionally, from outside writers. Agora was established in 1988

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

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

Contents Reflections Before the Faculty

Cover:

Climbing New Mountaintops David Faldet .......................................................................................................... 3

Ricardo Portilla ('25), Nancy Le ('24), and Sebastian Zavala ('25) share a moment in the Oneota Market. Luther College image by Hannah Pietrick Photography

A Season to Gather and Scatter Gregory Peterson...................................................................................................... 4

Special Essay A Luther College Campus Historic District: Really?

Mark Z. Muggli ..................................................................................................... 6

Paideia Texts and Issues Decolonizing the Music Theory Classroom Brooke Joyce........................................................................................................... 14

Sabbaticals Luther's Economic Impact on Winneshiek County Steve Holland........................................................................................................ 20 A Sabbatical Saga Rachel Brummel.................................................................................................... 24 Another Sabbatical Goes Awry Martin Klammer................................................................................................... 28

Chapel Talk E G B O K (February 25, 2022) Jonathon Struve..................................................................................................... 30 Beyond the Wilderness (March 4, 2022) Melissa Bills.......................................................................................................... 32 Greatness is a Process (April 22, 2022) Dave Mitchell........................................................................................................ 34 Finding Joy in the Middle of Things (April 29, 2022) Megan Buckingham............................................................................................... 37

Poems Swifts David Faldet......................................................................................................... 39 Sumer is Icumen In Diane Scholl.......................................................................................................... 40

Introduction

by MARTIN KLAMMER, Professor of English, Editor of Agora

Combined, their affiliation with Luther College goes back 100 years (no kidding!). David grew up in Decorah and as a boy poked around the campus where his parents worked, as he recalled in his retirement speech.

His mother ran the Luther Gift Shop, later called Askeladden’s Butikk, and his father, who worked for Northwestern Bell, took care of the college’s phone system. David graduated from Luther in 1979 and returned to teach here in 1989. Gregory graduated in 1983 and returned in 2005 to teach and play organ for chapel and college ceremonies, such as convocation and baccalaureate. But to appreciate David and Gregory, all I really need to do is tell you about one Sunday in early May.

tures” for the department to read before our one-day retreat in June when he, happily, will be with Rachel in England, doing research for his book project and walking the landscapes they love.

At the reception afterwards Gregory’s former student, John Stender (‘12), organist and Director of Music at First Presbyterian Church in Rochester, Minnesota, offered a moving tribute to Gregory. John’s encomium concluded with a surprise announcement: Gregory would be honored with new commissioned work for organ by internationally renowned American composer Libby Larsen. John spearheaded the fundraising for the commission of “Liturgical Suite,” the working title of Larsen’s composition.

IMAGE COURTESY BONNIE T. JOHNSON

In this issue we recognize and honor this year’s two retirees: David Faldet, Professor of English, and Gregory Peterson, Professor of Music and College Organist.

David was also recently feted by colleagues, former students, and friends, but in a more lighthearted way. Lise Kildegaard, our colleague in English, organized a special surprise. As David walked out of his final Paideia class in 113 Main, about 50 of us cheered with shouts, applause, and noisemakers, and then—to David’s clear delight—a low-brass student quartet honored him with a short piece.

When I checked my email that morning the first thing I saw was a David Faldet is surprised by the crowd in the hallway note from David to the department: after his last class in May “thoughts about the major.” We in English have gotten more serious about The affection shown by friends and colThat same afternoon Gregory Peterson revising our major, with the prospect of leagues to David and Gregory will not and his colleagues offered a diverse a smaller department and revisions to be surprising to those who know them. musical program at First Lutheran the college’s general education curIn their teaching, service, scholarship, Church: Bach, Mozart, Dvorak, Distler, riculum. “I’m attaching some parting and creativity they have been exemplary and American composers John Weaver thoughts about curriculum," David citizens of Luther College. In the pages and Libby Larsen. At various points wrote. "Thanks for indulging me!” I following, we are happy to include in in the program Gregory was joined by clicked on the attachment. David’s this issue the brief addresses David and Carol Hester (flute), Andrew Whitfield “thoughts” consisted of four single-space Gregory gave at the beginning of faculty (baritone), Igor Kalnin (violin), Spenpages on how we might re-imagine our meetings this semester. cer Martin (violin and viola), and Kacy introductory or “gateway” course and Go well, David and Gregory. You will Clopton (cello). Gregory closed the diversify our offerings, based on the be missed! program with a performance of Bach’s changing nature of the discipline and Fugue in E-Flat Major (“St. Anne”), of today’s students. He included a brief at the conclusion of which the audihistory of the teaching of literature at ence joined in a standing ovation—for Luther College, both when David was Gregory’s performance and the entire a student (1970s) and when he came to program, but also, I felt, for what he has teach a decade later. He also attached a meant to Luther and Decorah. scholar’s essay on “Post-Colonial Litera2

Agora/Spring 2022

Climbing New Mountaintops

by DAVID FALDET, Professor of English

I

’m giving the opening reflection this morning because come May I’m retiring. It’s my first and last chance for this.

As I think about retirement, I know I am going to miss the way talking daily with 18-22-year-olds has kept me young.

For example, a morning in January 1999 found me in Ireland climbing Knocknarea, a steep and commanding prominence overlooking Sligo to the east and in the opposite direction the waters around Great Seal Bank on the western coast of Ireland. The destination to which my students and I were headed was a 5,000-year-old stone burial cairn at its crest, known as the resting place of Queen Maeve, one of the legendary figures celebrated in the poetry of William Butler Yeats.

My policy has always been “leave no one behind.” On this rugged climb that meant staying close to my student Kim, who struggled and panted up the hill, often needing to stop and rest, sometimes choking back tears, while more athletic students sped to the breathtaking view at the summit. Though it was touch and go, we made it, Kim and I, both relishing her accomplishment.

That night at dinner in Sligo, snow was falling in the street outside as I joined a group of the students at a pizza café.

Between bites, Kim put down her slice, looked up at me, and said, “By the way, David, what do we do if you die?”

Since study abroad in those days was a seat-of-the pants operation, with little contingency planning and no second in command, I’ll have to admit, the question took me completely off guard.

It should not have. I was hired by the English Department in 1989, by thenchair Dennis Jones, a man who had been my American Novel class professor when I was a student here. I remember

vividly the drive back to the La Crosse airport at the end of my job interview, where, though Dennis came from Texas and I from northern Iowa, we compared our family histories, recognizing many startling similarities. A little over a year later, at the end of the first year of my contract, I wished Dennis all the best in the stairway of Main as he left to lead a walking tour of Norway with his wife Beth. On that trip, as their group arrived at a resting point in the climb from a valley, and picked some blueberries, before beginning an even steeper ascent to a glacier, Dennis turned to Beth and two friends and said: “Isn’t this just beautiful? Aren’t we so blessed?”

Five minutes later Dennis was dead from a massive heart attack.

Dennis’s death shook me, and has marked me with grief, almost as profoundly as the death of my own father.

How did it mark me? Well, in part it meant that in the now over 30 years since I lost Dennis I have tried to bring some of his easy-going generosity and good humor to life in the faculty. I missed that in him, and I didn’t want to lose it. I wanted to help keep that part of Luther life intact. But I also modeled myself on something else in Dennis.

He began Luther schooled in American classics like Faulkner and Hawthorne.

By the time I knew him, he was teaching African American and Caribbean literature because he knew that students needed and demanded them, and the times demanded them. For myself, I’ve gone from being a Victorianist to teaching Irish, Native American, and Postcolonial literature and the whole range of what the Paideia program has thrown at me, trying to change as Dennis did.

As for that café table in Sligo, while the snow continued to fall outside, after a moment of open-mouthed silence from me and nervous laughter from the students I said, “Kim, if I drop dead, call

David Faldet Luther. And until help gets here, I’d like Ross and Robin (two senior students) to be in charge.”

Today we face challenges in higher education and at Luther. We need to hang on to and strengthen what we value while at the same time changing for a new generation of students, a new generation of faculty, and a sometimes unrecognizable world.

Loss can make us stronger. And challenge does make us stronger. Kim, in the end, was ecstatic because she made it up Knocknarea,when she didn’t believe she could.

Ross and Robin, thank goodness, didn’t have to take over my J-term. They are now a high school teacher and a nurse.

Me—once Dennis Jones’s student— I’m now a retiring colleague eulogizing his memory. Luther College—once an all-boys prep school and pre-seminary institution for a Norwegian-speaking community new to this continent—we move forward today holding on to and strengthening what matters, but inevitably giving it necessary rejuvenation, always challenging our students, giving them the strength needed to climb the new mountaintops that we—all of us— face. Thank you.

Spring 2022/Agora

3

A Season to Gather and Scatter

by GREGORY PETERSON, Professor of Music and College Organist

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 There is a time for everything, a season for every purpose under heaven: a season to be born and a season to die; a season to plant and a season to harvest; a season to hurt and a season to heal; a season to tear down and a season to build up; a season to cry and a season to laugh; a season to mourn and a season to dance; a season to scatter stones and a season to gather them; a season for holding close and a season for holding back; a season to seek and a season to lose; a season to keep and a season to throw away; a season to tear and a season to mend; a season to be silent and a season to speak; a season to love and a season to hate; a season for hostilities and a season for peace.

T

he writer of Ecclesiastes uses contrary pairs, a literary device using opposites to represent the totality and variety we experience in the world, our country, communities, and daily living.

Some of these seasons are long, and others too short. Lately, it seems, the seasons for death and mourning, hurting, crying, tearing apart, hating, and hostilities continue holding sway over us. We long for, and need seasons of planting and harvesting, building up, laughing, dancing, and mending. We long for a lengthy season of love, and of peace.

As I look back over my 40-year affiliation with Luther College – from student, to alumnus, to faculty member soon to be emeritus – I’m in a season of remembering, which means there must also be a season of forgetting. I wonder 4

Agora/Spring 2022

about how much we really remember, and perhaps, how much more we forget.

However, it is more than reminiscing.

We are turning over the reins to the next generation, one that will continue to tear down and build up; keep and throw away; gather and scatter. I purposefully changed Ecclesiastes’ order of those last two pairs of verbs. We need to do a lot more gathering, so that we may continue to scatter well-educated, intellectually curious, creative, empathetic, global citizens into a world desperately in need of them, as we have been doing for the past 161 years. Quoting Professor Emeritus Wilfred Bunge, “Because it is a community of faith and learning, Luther College directs all intellectual development to [a]…vision of service.

Shaping a responsible life through learning is central to its purpose” (Luther College: Who We Are, 2002). Thus, we have thousands of alumni making a difference in teaching and learning, medicine and the sciences, including the building of hospitals and medical communities, ministry, social services and the well-being of all, the arts, music, and much more, serving the common good. This is a hallmark of Luther College and Lutheran higher education in general. In this, our community must be singular. It is fundamental to who we are and what we do.

Perhaps forgetting is passive, but remembering is not, or at least shouldn’t be. As a Lutheran, I am drawn to the Greek word anamnesis (Attic Greek), a key concept in liturgical theology – recalling [God’s deeds], but with action.

It can mean entering into…a mystery or wonder. The liturgy is action: taking, blessing, breaking, sharing. Do this to remember…so, in remembering we act.

(Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, 1945) An April 17 article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune titled “Code-red moment”

Gregory Peterson highlighting the national enrollment decline in higher education, declines in Minnesota institutions, and most specifically St. Cloud State University, drew this editorial response from Robbyn Wacker, president of St. Cloud State: “Instead of pointing out that the enrollment trends that were predicted a decade ago have materialized, let’s shift our perspective to what is going right. Let’s start hearing more stories about what is happening…to address these shifts in higher education, and what we are doing to address new and pressing needs in our communities and around the world. Let’s stop looking in the rearview mirror and focus on what’s next” (Star Tribune, April 21, 2022).

This is our challenge, one that can and will be met, hopefully by not just forgetting and throwing away, or through pithy labels, or flavors of the day, but with doubled down zeal on who we are, where we’ve been, what we’ve done, and all that is good, with a commitment to the particularities of this place yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

A dear friend of mine, the poet and mystic Susan Palo Cherwien (19532021), who we lost too early to cancer last December, in one of her most-often sung hymns, inspires with these words: Rise, remember well the future God has called us to receive; present by God’s loving nurture, Spirited then let us live.

Alleluia, alleluia; Spirit, grace by whom we live.1 May it be so. Soli Deo Gloria!

Notes 1. Evangelical Lutheran Worship, 548

Spring 2022/Agora

5

A Luther College Campus Historic District: Really?

by MARK Z. MUGGLI, Professor Emeritus of English and Decorah Historic Preservation Commission Chair

I’m interested here in another Great Society program, the groundbreaking 1966 National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). It’s less important than many of those other programs, but still worth studying. First, because it illuminates some program features that make for long-term viability. And, second, locally, because it underpins the 2021 Luther College Campus Historic District—one of only a handful of Midwest campus historic districts.

The National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) The NHPA had precedents (see Hamar and Sprinkle). Still, the NHPA can without much exaggeration be called the beginning of America’s national historic preservation program. The program has been modified, but mostly by being expanded. And often by opposing political parties. A few highlights: • The original 1966 act established a National Register of Historic Places 6

Agora/Spring 2022

(NRHP) and individual State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPO).

• In 1976, Republican President Gerald Ford ratified the Historic Tax Credits program, which provides financial rehabilitation support for some NRHP properties. (In 2017 the Trump tax reduction bill threatened these tax credits. But a bipartisan congressional group saved the program. One of the group’s leaders was Iowa’s 1st Congressional District representative Rod Blum, typically a fiscal far-far-righter, but who in this case acknowledged the rejuvenation the historic tax credit program had brought to his hometown Dubuque, and perhaps recognized the financial benefits it had delivered to some of his major supporters.)

• In 1980, Democrat Jimmy Carter ratified a new Certified Local Government (CLG) program that established local agencies like the 1985 Winneshiek County Historic Preservation Commission and the 2007 Decorah Historic Preservation Commission.

The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) To almost everyone’s surprise, a National Register of Historic Places listing is only honorific. Unlike some local or state listings that require design/renovation reviews, a property can be listed on the NRHP one day and demolished the next. That’s pretty much what happened in 2007 with Decorah’s 1896 East Side School. So that’s the first sad lesson about political viability: a program without teeth will be less controversial than one with strict consequences. Or perhaps the lesson is more subtle: the ideal program doesn’t have teeth, but is thought by most outsiders that it does!

Despite being honorific, the NRHP designation has great cultural cachet.

I’ll suggest two possible reasons. First

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

S

ome historians argue that Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” was the most wide-reaching domestic legislation in American history. But different parts of the program have had different histories. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act have been repeatedly decimated.

The 1963 Clean Air Act, the 1964 Wilderness Act, the 1965 Motor Vehicle Pollution Act, the 1965 National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts, the 1966 Endangered Species Act, and the 1967 Public Broadcasting System have been political lightning rods, but have survived. And the 1965 Medicaid/Medicare package, two national “cultural centers” (one is the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), and many dozens of education, transportation, and safety programs are taken for granted as seemingly permanent features of American life.

Mark Muggli of all, the original NHPA standards remain unchanged. The four criteria for “Significance” and the seven criteria for “Integrity” all remain, along with their accompanying explanations, even where the language is awkward or obscure1.

This continuity of standards promises a level, unchanging playing field. Second, the NRHP includes a rigorous nomination process involving local nominators, the local CLG, the State Historic Preservation Office, the State Nominations Review Committee, and the National Park Service, often with volunteer researchers and paid consultants along the way. Even a smooth nomination takes two years. More complicated nominations can take several. Many nominations are never completed. I once thought a National Register nomination was something like threading a small needle—challenging, but clear-cut and manageable. Nominating a complicated property or an historic district is actually more like hand-stitching a complete suit—jacket, pants, and shirt, and often including underwear, socks, and neck scarf.

My first DHPC meeting in late 2014 was deflating, since only two of the seven members were present. Without a quorum, then-chair Philip Younger (husband of then-Luther faculty member Nancy Simpson-Younger) and I just chatted. He outlined two possible DHPC projects: raising $100,000$250,000 for a downtown building restoration fund, or getting the downtown on the National Register. I gulped.

I had a brief image of Philip and me cornering hard-pressed downtown business people, using a carefully honed good-cop/bad-cop setup to pressure them into creating our restoration fund by contributing any extra $50,000 they had lying around. I quickly suggested we take a shot at the National Register.

Philip agreed. And a few months later he moved to the state of Washington.

In 2017, over two and a half years later, the Decorah Commercial Historic Dis-

trict had been included on the National Register. When I went through our Commission files, I learned that this had been a local preservationist dream ever since the Broadway-Phelps Park Historic District had been established in 1976. I also learned that a consultant had in 2003 concluded that Decorah’s downtown was not a viable historic district. And I also learned that when DHPC hosted the 2012 annual statewide Iowa Preservation Summit, after much planning by Laurann Gilbertson, Kyrl Henderson (‘71), Lise Hedstrom, and others, the visiting SHPO staff suggested that Decorah’s downtown might well provide a viable district.

Who knows how much SHPO’s judgment was colored by their staying in the newly restored Hotel Winneshiek, or by their lunches in the historic-cool La Rana? So, yes, however fixed the standards and processes, individuals and changing situations do affect outcomes.

Establishing the Decorah Commercial district, with its 130 properties, was complex and demanding. We worked simultaneously on a much smaller, but more frustrating project to expand the Broadway-Phelps HD to include St. Benedict Church and the Public Library (née Federal Post Office). I therefore swore off more National Register work, and the DHPC began in

2017 to “catalog and celebrate the work of Charles Altfillisch,” a local engineer/ architect who had more impact on Decorah’s built environment than any other single individual.

The Luther College Campus Historic District Working on Altfillisch led us to Altfillisch’s Luther College Main III. And before we knew it, Ryan Engelman (then on the Student Life staff and just coming off of a historic preservation position in Dubuque) and I had been asked by a joint Luther College/DHPC steering committee to co-lead a Luther College Campus Historic District nomination. Ryan agreed. And a few months later he moved to Minneapolis.

Before he moved, Ryan and I developed a campus “Site Inventory,” a NRHP exploratory format that requires photographs and some basic documentation.

Our Site Inventory had two emphases.

First, the many mid-twentieth-century Luther buildings that had only recently met the NRHP “fifty-year rule,” a standard in some earlier U.S. preservation programs that was codified in the 1966 NHPA. Ryan and I partly wanted to counteract the popular Midwestern view that “historic” means “late nineteenthcentury Victorian.” Our emphasis on more recent campus architecture also

LUTHER COLLEGE ARCHIVES

Given the swarms of local, state, and federal history and preservation organizations, all with their own abbreviations, it is understandable that even wellinformed citizens are ill-informed about the National Historic Preservation Act. When I, for example, first joined the Decorah Historic Preservation Commission, as a tentative post-retirement commitment, I knew the difference between a hawk and a handsaw (see the voluminous commentary on Hamlet 2.2.365-74). But I couldn’t have distinguished the DHPC from the WCHPC, nor the WCHS (Winneshiek County Historical Society) from the DGA (Decorah Genealogy Association). I vaguely assumed the National Trust was a government agency. I called the National “Register” a “Registry.” And I surely didn’t know what it would take to get a property Register-listed. (I did, to be fair, have a longstanding passion for buildings old and new. My longanticipated memoirs will document how my interests were fed, first by the 1906 house I grew up in; later by the nineteenth-century Victorian brick house that my sister and her husband restored, and where my wife and I were married in 1976; more recently by our restoration of our 1896 Decorah home; and throughout by the privilege of much international travel.)

Early photo of Main III, ca. 1950s Spring 2022/Agora

7

IMAGE COURTESY OF LORI STANLEY

Brandt Hall, the first Luther purposebuilt women’s dormitory. Mary Lou did thorough, professional research. And given her death at 86 in April 2021, it was her last major project in a long, research-filled career.

Luther College's first National Register property: the ca. 1857 Ashmore Jewell Barn

We hoped the Iowa SHPO would rave.

Instead, it grudgingly acknowledged that Luther “might” be a designatable district. But that was all the encouragement we needed. Next step: hire a consultant. We were fortunate that Jan Olive Full, an Iowa City historic preservation specialist who had led the Decorah Commercial district nomination, was willing to apply, and also submitted the low bid. ( Jan’s Loyola University Ph.D. on Midwest Norwegian immigration patterns made her a natural fit for both districts. She’s also a savvy architectural historian and a seasoned National Register consultant.)

What followed in summer 2018 was a blitzkrieg of local research. Volunteer researchers are crucial to this kind of project. Without them, consultant fees would be astronomical. And local researchers often bring specialized knowledge that outside consultants can’t immediately match. We were blessed with around twenty volunteers from the Decorah Historic Preservation Commission and from the Decorah and Luther communities. Naming names is problematic, since some researchers volunteered heroic amounts of time, while 8

Agora/Spring 2022

others, for completely understandable reasons, had to bow out even before they had assembled the necessary files.

In any case, a hearty, hand-clapping thank-you to all these volunteers.

Without them, nothing. (Thanks also, of course, to the DHPC and the Luther College administration for supporting the project.)

I must acknowledge college archivist Hayley Jackson, since she indefatigably provided the Luther Archive files whether they were indefatigably used or not. And I can’t help mentioning Professor Emerita of English Mary Hull Mohr, who out of her feminist convictions volunteered to research

Probably unknown to many Lutherites, Luther already had two NRHP properties. In 1979, perhaps to push the college to repair buildings then falling into disrepair, student Rebecca Hanson— evidently encouraged by anthropology professor Dale Henning—successfully nominated the Luther College Farm, a half-dozen buildings surrounding the 1857 Ashmore-Jewell Barn. At that time, a property could be listed on the National Register without the property owner’s permission, and from what I’ve heard, this was not a Luther College initiative. (The story of the farm’s striking restoration in the 1990s by Hans Peter Joregensen belongs to another essay.) Then in 1984, in preparation for a major building renovation, researchers led by then-assistant registrar Mary (Housker) Klimesh (‘76) placed the 1921 Koren Library on the Register.

Both nominations are available on the DHPC website <www.decorahia.org/ historic-preservation/decorah-historicsite>.

LUTHER COLLEGE ARCHIVES

highlighted the remarkable Altfillisch record of having designed all Luther buildings between the 1926 Preus Gymnasium and the 1966 Miller and Dieseth Halls. Second, we wanted to raise up Luther’s distinctive Jens Jensen landscape.

By late fall 2018 we had a box of files documenting all extant college buildings, the landscape, and various campus “objects” like sculptures.

Koren Library, built in 1921

Most early U.S. historic preservation was focused on individual buildings, although a few cities did establish historic districts from the 1920s onwards.

The 1966 NHPA encouraged historic districts, but provided few guidelines.

There is a story that Decorah resident Lucille Price dreamed of a Decorah historic district, but that the Iowa historic district legislation wasn’t yet in place. So she pushed local Iowa representative Semor Tofte to sponsor the necessary legislation. And soon after, in 1976, Broadway-Phelps became one of the earlier historic districts in Iowa. The Broadway-Phelps nomination was based on local research by the Luther College AAUW (The American Association of University Women). The nomination is signed by Price, “with assistance of Marlys Svendsen-Roesler, Division of Historic Preservation Staff member.”

This level of named involvement of SHPO staff is, because of regular staffing cuts, no longer possible. (According to Library Emeritus Professor Duane Fenstermann, Svendsen [‘75] later became the first full-time City Historic Preservation Director in Iowa.) A comparison of the length and depth of the Broadway-Phelps and Decorah Commercial historic district nominations demonstrates how much expectations have increased in the last forty years.

But district boundaries should not be “gerrymandered” in order to squeeze individual buildings in or out. Part of the game here is that buildings within a district have since around 1980 been designated as “contributing” and “noncontributing,” and a viable district must include a preponderance of contributing buildings. It’s therefore a disadvantage to incorporate areas with scads of noncontributing buildings.

So what are the natural boundaries of Luther College?

Those many beautiful acres of green hills and rocky valleys that surround the Luther campus were clearly not going to be included, given their paucity of buildings of any kind. And the Luther Farm only became Luther’s in 1935, and is already individually listed on the Register, so there was no good reason to stretch the district east across College Drive.

What about the lower campus? It was first developed in the late 1950s and the primary building, the 1963 athletic center, has been renovated often enough that it doesn’t retain historic integrity.

Our consultant was especially bothered by the athletic center’s very unhistoric blue roof and its matching blue football field. But would excluding the athletic

center and adjacent playing fields also exclude the 1966 Tower and 1991 Farwell dorms? I wanted to exclude Farwell, partly because it is so recent and would therefore be non-contributing; I wanted to include the Towers, partly because they meet the fifty-year rule, but especially because they are such distinctive buildings and are the brainchild of Charles Altfillisch, who was the impetus for this whole National Register project in the first place. So I made the case that Farwell Hall, although its bridge links to the upper campus, is essentially part of the newer, lower campus, where the bulk of its mass lies. But the Tower dorms, despite having foundations below the bluff like Farwell, actually feel like part of the upper campus. That’s one happy result of a project like this: it makes you see buildings and their relationships in new ways.

By this point, then, we were leaning towards a district organized around the historic upper campus, with its natural geologic border running along the bluff line to the west and north, and roughly contiguous with the original 32 acres selected by Ulrik Vilhelm Koren in 1861.

Still, boundary issues remained.

Clearly the Center for the Arts and the Jenson-Noble Hall of Music, although

Individual buildings typically have obvious physical boundaries, usually their property lines. The NHPA emphasizes that a visitor should also be able to sense a district’s boundaries. Geological boundaries are easily recognized. Many districts have notable anchoring buildings that mark potential boundaries. Broadway-Phelps HD, for example, runs along Broadway from the monumental Decorah Lutheran Church and the old county jail and the Courthouse, up through to the end of Phelps Park, which includes the one-of-a-kind Schulze Brick Kiln.

The downtown Commercial district runs on Water Street--along with three intersecting one-block spurs--from the classic brick three-story 1876 Arlington Hotel/Vesterheim building on the west through to the rare gingerbready 1888 wooden train depot on the east.

LUTHER COLLEGE ARCHIVES

Boundaries

Dieseth Hall was the first of the Towers to be built, with construction beginning in 1966.

Spring 2022/Agora

9

non-contributing because of their age, were part of the historic upper campus and would be included.

But what about the Luther houses along Center Street? Most were built by college professors, are all now collegeowned, and are mostly used for student and faculty housing. Still, they wouldn’t be included, since they were not originally college buildings.

And what about the Luther houses along High Street?

• Sperati House was built in 1905 by Carlo Sperati (‘88) when he returned to Luther as a faculty member. It was later used as the Farwell and Anderson president’s house. And, besides, the building hovers close to the CFA. It gets included.

• Gjerset House, built for the first college president, Laur. Larsen, in 1897 as he neared his 1902 retirement—and the first permanent president’s residence, after forty years of residence in Main I and II—seemed a natural to include.

• And if you draw a more or less straight north/south line along that eastern boundary (including Gjerset, but excluding the Center Street houses), you’ll have included the 1927 Tudor Revival college house at 408 High Street, just east of the Jensen-Noble Music building. The house is significant because in 1932 it became the residence of President Preus. Wilfred Bunge had told me the house was built by the col10

Agora/Spring 2022

Significance A National Register property has four areas of potential significance: A. History B. Association with important people C. Architecture D. Archaeology

nominations had shifted to Criterion A “History”—that is, toward the social, political, economic world that a building or district epitomizes. In fact our consultant checked both the “History” and “Architecture” boxes for Significance on the Commercial District nomination, but was asked by the State Historic Preservation Office to un-check “Architecture.” On the Luther project, the same consultant checked “History” as the source of Significance, but was told

by SHPO to also check “Architecture.”

Evidently our argument about Luther’s important mid-century buildings had resonated.

In NRHP nominations, significance is grounded in a particular “period of significance.” For Luther, the beginning date was easy: at its 1861 founding Luther became the first NorwegianAmerican institution to grant a baccalaureate degree. Being first made Luther influential, through inspiring later Norwegian-American colleges like St. Olaf, Concordia (Moorhead), and Pacific Lutheran, and by providing these colleges with presidents, faculty, and staff from its own ranks and alumni.

This founding era is embodied in the oldest surviving Luther building, the 1867 Brandt Parsonage (a.k.a. Campus

Like most pre-1966 historic preservation, most early National Register nominations emphasized architecture (Criterion C). The Broadway-Phelps nomination includes some local history, but says that “The district’s significance rests primarily in the fact that it encapsulizes, intact, examples of virtually all of the major architectural movements found in the American Midwest from the 1850s to 1910, with scattered examples of later styles.” By the time of the Decorah Commercial District (2017), perhaps because so many architectural gems nationally had already been NRHPlisted under CriteLuther College Pastor Nils Brandt and family in front of the rion C, the focus of 1867 Brandt Parsonage, known today as Campus House

LUTHER COLLEGE ARCHIVES

IMAGE COURTESY OF BONNIE T. JOHNSON

Tudor Revival house at 408 High Street

lege registrar J. Magnus Rohne, the father of one of Will’s Luther classmates. The public assessor (incorrectly) dates the house to 1925.

But until I discovered a short Decorah Newspaper article, none of us had known that it was designed for Rohne in 1927—by Charles Altfillisch! Eureka!

Another Altfillisch property on the Luther campus, and now a part of the proposed Historic District, even without gerrymandering.

LUTHER COLLEGE ARCHIVES

Larson Hall, built in 1907, with original roofline and entryways

As Professor Emeritus of Religion and Classics Wilfred Bunge and I worked with our consultant to periodize this long hundred-year history, we settled on two key turning points: first, the college’s 1931 dropping of its Classical Curriculum (a move closely tied to the college’s 1936 shift towards co-education); and, second, the gradual waning of the college’s ethnic identification, symbolized by the 1963-81 presidency of E. D. Farwell, the college’s first nonNorwegian-American president.

Before the 1960s, architectural and historic significance was identified with national importance. The 1966 NHPA introduced a novel distinction between “national, state, and local” significance that led to a great expansion of the National Register. It is at first jarring to see the “local significance” box checked on the Luther Campus nomination— “What? Only ‘local’? Aren’t we more important than that?” (The Decorah Commercial HD is also “locally significant.”) Truth be told, it’s always easier to prove “local” significance than “statewide” or “national,” and once a nomination is listed, the level of significance is for most purposes invisible.

if a building or district isn’t “significant” for its architecture, its architecture is foundational. Thus in addition to establishing each building’s history, the nomination evaluates each building’s “integrity”--the degree to which it still conveys its original character. The NHPA identifies seven aspects of integrity: “location, setting, design, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association.”

(Of course many Luther buildings with obvious integrity are not “contributing properties” because they don’t meet the fifty-year rule.)

Those final two qualities of integrity, “feeling’” and “association,” may seem almost comically impressionistic, but it’s actually a strength that the National Register allows—even insists upon— acknowledging that an art form like architecture has a subjective, emotional

In consultant Jan Olive Full’s opinion, three Luther properties potentially qualify for “individual nomination,” in addition to being “contributing” properties in this district nomination: the 1867 Brandt Parsonage, the 1933/36 Larsen/Pioneer Memorial, and the 1952 Main III. After years of championing the qualities of Charles Altfillisch’s 1952 Bauhaus-inspired International Style Main III, I felt vindicated by Jan’s judgment. And if Luther College ever manages a full-scale restoration of the building’s exterior (along with some much needed interior modernization), I think others will shed some of their nostalgia for the more ornate Main I and II, and come to realize that Main III is a classic building in its own right.

Luther needs to recapture the excitement that led the editors to dedicate the 1952 Pioneer Yearbook to this important new building. Main III’s central tower evokes the mostly decorative, non-functional towers of I and II, but announces

LUTHER COLLEGE ARCHIVES

House). The nomination’s end date is the college’s last fifty-year-old building, the 1969 Preus Library.

dimension. Yes, the 1907 Larsen Hall has lost its original front entryway, and the stone roofline cornice has been reworked and stuccoed over, and the east entrance has been filled in with glass block, and there are additions to the rear—but it does still “feel” like an important historic campus building and it exudes its “associations” with the college’s optimism as it built its first free-standing accommodations for students after almost forty years of housing students (and most teachers and administrators) in Main I and II.

Integrity With a district’s boundaries set and its significance explained, a National Register nomination describes the extant buildings that embody the district. Even

Architectural sketch of Olson Hall by Charles Altfillisch, featuring the original windows, circa 1950s Spring 2022/Agora

11

its own modern functionality and solidity. The south wing’s south entryway and window openings are distinctive.

Unlike the small, raised entryways of I and II, Main III’s central entry is large, open, and close to the ground. For years people have said to me, “Main [III] is just a couple of boxes thrown together.”

True, and so are most buildings, more or less. It’s the differing sizes of these three boxes, the differing angles at which they fit together, and their acres of glass that create such a strong, transparent, blufflining, arm-welcoming symbol of the whole campus.

The judgment that Luther’s campus is significant for its architecture as well as its history, and the nomination’s appreciation for Luther’s mid-century buildings, especially for Main III, all more than satisfy the first goal of Ryan Engelman’s and my 2017 Site Inventory.

Landscapes are inherently different from buildings: a building’s integrity usually depends on how little humans have intervened to change the exterior; a landscape design’s integrity depends on how much humans have managed the inevitable natural changes.

Local resident Jim Iversen, Iowa State Aerospace Engineering Professor Emeritus, and Luther English Professor David Faldet (‘79) did a marvelous job documenting the original Jensen design and its current state. Drawing on the earlier work of Luther History Professor Emeritus John Christianson and on the 1987 Harrington/Grese landscape/ campus plan, Iversen’s and Faldet’s detailed research, map overlays, photographs, and tree and stonework census constitute a major contribution to our understanding of Jensen’s Luther work.

(One by-product of a National Register nomination is the high quality research that it sometimes generates. The Luther NHRP files reside in the Luther College Archives as a permanent resource for future researchers. Christianson’s and Harrington/Grese’s work are also available there.)

Although Iversen and Faldet acknowledged particular changes, they 12

Agora/Spring 2022

LUTHER COLLEGE ARCHIVES

And our second goal, to raise up Luther’s Jens Jensen landscape? That’s a little more complicated.

Jens Jensen’s original landscape plan for Luther College, traces of which still exist as design elements on the Luther campus concluded that a surprising amount of Jensen’s original plan survived on the Luther campus. Faldet quoted Harrington/Grese’s conclusion that “The majority of [the] design elements that Jensen initiated at Luther College over 70 years ago . . . can be recognized as existing on the campus today” (4).

Unfortunately, as noted by our consultant, Harrington and Grese in other places referred to these “existing design elements” as “traces.” At one point they acknowledged that “it is uncertain as to how much of [ Jensen’s] plans were actually implemented” in the first place (H/G 1) and noted that in the twenty years prior to their study (1965-1985), new buildings and roadways, replacement of aged plants, and new plantings had “resulted in a movement away from Jensen’s concepts” (H/G 9).

As I’ve hinted, the National Historic Preservation Act draws strength from

the commitment of local, state, and federal government personnel. That can also be one of its challenges. The director of the Iowa State Historic Preservation Office at the time of the Luther nomination was an architectural historian who had co-written with Robert Grese the National Historic Landscape nomination of the Jensen-designed landscape for the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan. She was very interested in and aware of Jensen’s work at Luther, but, in the end, could not be convinced that the existing Jensen landscape was complete enough to constitute a “contributing” element. This was a major disappointment, but not something we could do anything about. As established in the National Historic Preservation Act, the individual SHPOs play a central gate-keeping role in the development of National Register nominations.

Our consultant nevertheless artfully incorporated substantial Jensen materials into the Luther nomination. Drawing on her own dissertation research on Norwegian immigration patterns, she discussed the prairie/oak savannah intersection as the original Luther College setting. She demonstrated that Jensen drew upon that natural setting for his landscape designs. She identified the changes Jensen’s plan brought to the campus, and, using the work of Christianson, Iversen, and Faldet, documented subsequent changes to Luther’s campus, including additions of the last thirty-five years that are indebted to the Jensen legacy. The final result is that the Luther College Campus Historic District designation fully acknowledges the significance of Jens Jensen’s work, even though his contributions aren’t a “contributing element” in the nomination.

The Future And what does this National Register designation mean for the future?

Maybe not much. Since the National Register does not restrict an owner’s property rights, Luther might continue the modernizations that have maimed some campus buildings and undermined the Jensen plan. Most buildings are at their best when they are built. At that point they reflect the combined attentiveness, artistry, and spirit of both designers and owners. Main III typifies the diminishment caused by minor tinkering and major “improvements.”

The windows have been altered from the original design, though window openings remain mostly intact. On the interior, the biggest problems are claustrophobic lowered ceilings, space squeezes caused by a badly-designed air conditioning system, and the loss of the sixth floor lounge. Olson Hall has suffered similarly, although less obviously.

Loyalty and Koren, on the other hand, have been beautifully rehabilitated back to something resembling their original condition. And the extensive 2008 Valders Hall renovation did preserve the distinctive south-facing Altfillisch entryway and canopy. So there’s always hope that NRHP designation will make us more careful with all our campus buildings, including our Midcentury classics.

But the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act also had a larger educational purpose. Along with the high-minded intentions of other Great Society programs like PBS, NEH, and NEA, and the Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and Endangered Species acts, the NHPA intended to make us a better people–to help us appreciate our common history, and to more fully live our founding ideals. The NHPA in particular was meant to draw upon local, state, and federal energies to help us recognize our architectural legacy, and to invigorate it for the future.

Architecture is the most public and widely-available of the arts. You don’t have to buy a ticket. You just need to look around and live within the power of the buildings and designed landscapes that have been gifted to you. So maybe, just maybe, the Luther Campus designation as a National Register historic district will make us all more aware of the artful environment in which we are fortunate to work and live.

A Brief Annotated Bibliography Two scholarly sources available at Preus Library that I have found useful: David Hamer, History in Urban Places: The Historic Districts of the United States (Ohio State UP, 1998), and John H. Sprinkle, Jr., Crafting Preservation Criteria: The National Register of Historic Places and American Historic Preservation (Routledge, 2014).

All Decorah NRHP nominations are linked from the DHPC city webpage https://www.decorahia.org/historicpreservation/decorah-historic-sites.

Federal Rehabilitation standards and the hundreds of accompanying bulletins illuminate NHPA’s intellectual and practical implications. The latest standards edition is at https://www. nps.gov/tps/standards/treatmentguidelines-2017.pdf.

For the work of Charles Altfillisch, including a survey of his dozen-plus Luther buildings, see the new DHPC Altfillisch Historic Tour, a combination of a small printed brochure and extensive website materials: https://www. decorahia.org/historic-preservation/ historic-tours.

Notes 1. The standards are widely available, including in NPS Bulletin 15: https://www.nps. gov/subjects/nationalregister/upload/NRB15_web508.pdf

Spring 2022/Agora

13

Decolonizing the Music Theory Classroom

by BROOKE JOYCE, Professor of Music

Editor's note: this lecture was part of the 2021-22 Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture series Decolonizing Paideia? Revising the Products and Processes of Education.

Prelude (Music example: opening of Oscar Peterson’s version of “Night Train”)

M

y guess is that you liked what I just played. It has such a vivid character, such great harmonies, and we love those cool slides in the right hand. Can we learn why this excerpt is so satisfying, perhaps by applying some principals of traditional music theory?

Well, the glissandi and tremolos are expressions—that is, surface details that are part of performance practice. Music theory, as it is taught today, doesn’t really delve into that area of musical expression. Theory is mostly concerned with harmony.

So, what about the harmonies? Well, this is problematic. The underlying chord progression here is a 12-bar blues, which, in this key, usually sounds something like this: (Music example: 12 bar blues in G) That probably sounds familiar to you. It is the backbone of much jazz and popular music created in the last century. It has three chords, in this key G7, C7, and D7. But traditional music theory tells us that when we add a 7th to a chord, so, from a G to a G7, that 7th is dissonant and needs to resolve down by step—it shouldn’t just get appended on a triad. So, we’ve already broken a cardinal rule.

The other problem is that this 12-bar blues contains an extra chord, an Am7 chord, as we’ll hear in the next 12-bar phrase…except in the excerpt I played, 14

Agora/Spring 2022

it’s been replaced by what we call a tri-tone substitution, resulting in an Eb7 chord. In essence, the piece begins with a subtle harmonic variation of the progression before we even hear the main tune.

In short, traditional music theory has very little to illuminate here. And this is no obscure piece—this is the transcription of Oscar Peterson’s version of “Night Train,” recorded in 1963 and one of the most highly regarded and loved albums from three master musicians.

Part 1: What is Music Theory?

If you are an aspiring collegiate music major in the United States, you will most likely be required to take two years-worth of classes called “Music Theory.” This is true across most colleges, universities and conservatories.

Some bachelor of arts programs may require a bit less, and some conservatories (and some specialized majors, like music theory or composition) may require more. The two-year sequence has been the standard for at least five decades.

Here at Luther, two years are required of music majors, with an optional fifth semester offered occasionally.

The term “music theory” is a misnomer for two important reasons. First of all, the ideas presented and methodology used are not treated as mere theories— they are broadly understood to be selfevident truths. And though most course titles don’t provide qualifiers, when we say “music theory” at the collegiate level, what we really mean is “the harmonic style of eighteenth and early nineteenth century European musicians.”

(Musical example: Schubert excerpt) And there is one particular eighteenth century musician whose work started us on the path we trod today, and that is Jean-Phillipe Rameau, a French

Brooke Joyce composer and music theorist who lived from 1683-1764. Rameau wrote a treatise on musical harmony, published in 1722, that begins by reasserting ideas espoused by ancient Greek musicians who derived musical intervals from the overtone series. The second book of Rameau’s treatise culminates in a systematic discussion of harmony that places the triad at the center of musical structure.

We can quickly trace his line of inquiry.

Listen to this note on the piano: (Musical example: low C) If I were to make this string vibrate in equal parts by lightly touching on the string, I would hear these series of pitches result: (Musical example: overtones C-C-G-CE-G-Bb-C) Or, if I play those notes on the piano: (Musical example: C-C-G-C-E-G-Bb-C) These are the first eight partials of the overtone series, just as the Greek philosopher Pythagoras described them.

Note that partials 4-5-6 form a triad, in this case, C-E-G, which we call a C major chord.

to some of the “rules” that music students are so familiar with: • Music tends to start and end on the tonic harmony • The tonic harmony can be followed by any other harmony • Subdominant harmonies tend to lead to dominant harmonies, which tend to lead (or resolve) to the tonic harmony.

IMAGE IN PUBLIC DOMAIN

For historical reasons, Rameau presents many of his musical examples in the form of short, four-voice chorales. To this day, music students write many exercises as SATB chorales, obeying many of the same contrapuntal guidelines conveyed by Rameau, but which often originated in the music of earlier composers, such as Giovanni da Palestrina (1525-1594).

Jean-Philippe Rameau Medieval philosophers, often channeling the ancient Greeks, suggested various ways to use the overtone series to create musical scales and modes. By the time of Rameau, a tuning system of equal temperament was gaining traction, making it possible for a musician to play in the major and minor keys with which we are familiar today. Rameau went several steps further. He posited that the bottom note of our C major triad is the foundation, or root, of the sonority, and that when we write music in the key of C, a C major chord is “home,” or the tonic triad. He further theorized that the triad that lies the interval of a perfect fifth above C major, which is G major, is the dominant harmony, one that tends to lead back to the tonic.

Going one step further, the triad that is a perfect 5th below C major, which is F major, is the subdominant triad, which tends to lead to the dominant. Thus, we have our primary building blocks of tonic, subdominant, and dominant harmonies, known to musicians as the I, IV, and V chords.

(Musical example: progression) Rameau, both as theorist and composer, alongside his contemporaries, codified a harmonic language that would soon lead

(Musical example: Palestrina excerpt) In other words, much of the musical training provided to young musicians today, at least in the music theory classroom, comes from a 300-year-old treatise informed by 500-year-old contrapuntal music, nearly all of which was composed by white Western European men.

To put that assertion in relief, consider one of the bestselling music theory textbooks in circulation today, and the one we’ve used at Luther for many years, called The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis. The latest edition runs 911 pages. We cover material in roughly 865 of those pages. About 660 of those pages, or about 76 percent, concerns musical structures in widespread use at the turn of the nineteenth century in Western Europe. To put it another way, three out of four semesters of music theory is focused on music from the time of Napoleon’s march through Europe.

This seems odd, even to me, who has taught a section of theory and/or ear-training at Luther College almost every semester for the past 17 years.

Moreover, as a practitioner of contemporary concert music and a listener of many varied musical genres, I know that virtually no living composer, outside of academia and some isolated musical corners, adheres closely to the tenets of the harmonic style of eighteenth and early nineteenth century European musicians.

And yet, this tiny sliver of historical musical activity informs so much of what we claim to understand about music in general. It is not unusual for classicallytrained musicians to apply eighteenth century European harmonic labels to jazz or various sub-genres of popular music, for example. In some cases, those labels can be helpful and illuminating; often, however, they are ill-suited to help make sense of the music. In such a scenario, when the theory doesn’t fit the music, one can reach the erroneous conclusion that the music must be “primitive,” “flawed,” or “unrefined” (these, by the way, are all terms which have been used to describe jazz).

Part 2: Who has colonized our classroom?

Musically speaking, the land we call the United States has a unique history.

Though vestiges of ancient Indigenous cultures remain, particularly in place names such as Iowa and Waukon, and descendants of Indigenous people live both on reservations and among the general population, very little Indigenous music forms a part of our current cultural landscape. There are many reasons for this, some having to do with forced migration, war, and loss of cultural capital, as well as the reality that for many Indigenous cultures, music is inseparable from dance and ritual.

The notion of attending a “concert” of Indigenous music often doesn’t make much sense.

Instead, much of our musical landscape is informed by people who settled on this land, including those who came willingly and those who arrived as enslaved people. The British settlers who first established colonies on the East Coast brought their folk traditions with them, and through the twentieth century, one could, for example, identify particular and distinct fiddling tradiSpring 2022/Agora

15

tions as practiced in the hollows of Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. (I’m referring here to particular ethnomusicological research undertaken by Alan Lomax and others in the early to midtwentieth century, and I’m not sure one would find as many standard bearers of those traditions in 2022.) Folk tunes, like “The Ballad of Captain Kidd,” became the model for new popular songs in the colonies, and eventually, that tune became the protype for the hymn tune “Wondrous Love.”

(Musical example: Hamilton excerpt)

Settlers also brought aspects of European concert music culture, and during the Revolutionary War period, the first Americanborn composers, such as William Billings, began to publish instrumental and choral music in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.

(Musical example: “When Jesus Wept”) Enslaved people also brought their cultural traditions to America. Work songs, plantation songs, spirituals and other musical genres accompanied day to day life in the eighteenth and nineteenth American south. In the late nineteenth century, the first true popular music craze in American history occurs with the advent of Ragtime.

(Musical example: “Pineapple Rag”) Almost simultaneously, by the turn of the twentieth century, the Delta Blues was one of the preeminent musical genres, and when it became part of the cultural landscape of New Orleans, a process of cultural creolization occurred, and a new musical form was soon born: jazz.

(Musical example: “West End Blues”) We’ve now arrived at the turn of the twentieth century, and barely a mention of any of the music I’ve just described and played has made its way into our curriculum. Scott Joplin appears in our current textbook, mainly because his music often uses a particular chromatic harmony that we often find in nine16

Agora/Spring 2022

IMAGE IN PUBLIC DOMAIN

(Musical examples: “Captain Kidd” and “Wondrous Love”)

Scott Joplin teenth century European concert music, known to second-year music theory students as the flat 6th.

(Musical example: “Pineapple Rag”) Don’t get me wrong—I’m very happy that his “Pineapple Rag” is used as a musical example in our textbook. I commend the authors for adding more and more examples of female and BIPOC composers in the latest edition of their book. But the context in which we find Joplin is not a discussion of stride piano figuration, melodic invention, or syncopated rhythms (which are, I feel, equally or more important musical elements than harmony in Joplin’s music).

Instead, he is, I fear, a token example of a BIPOC composer who happens to include a harmony also loved by Schubert.

(Musical example: Schubert excerpt) This seems to be the current process for diversifying the music theory classroom—we remain shackled to an ancient theoretical system and occasionally send a kite to something more contemporary, perhaps something by a BIPOC musician. I’ve done it often myself—that b6 chord also shows up in Hamilton:

Theorist Phillip Ewell calls this music theory’s “white racial frame”—that is, the underlying systems we teach are almost entirely based on white European composers from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and music that operates under different rules (albeit rules that often run parallel to traditional music theory) is simply not present, or present only in a much truncated form. In our theory textbook, only two out of 40 chapters deal specifically with popular and jazz music.

But music seems to be an anomaly among creative disciplines. My colleagues who teach studio art all independently described a similar pedagogical approach to the past—they start by considering a contemporary artist, and then highlight an element from the work that might echo an idea from the near or distant past. But the contemporary work is the focus, not the historical precedent.

In the theater domain, Professor Bobby Vrtis describes a contemporary actor’s training as starting with the work of Stanislavski in the early twentieth century. But this theory has been adapted and changed over time, and the other theoretical work an actor might encounter could have been developed within the last 50 years or less. In teaching creative writing, Professor Amy Weldon draws on a variety of traditions and resources, including research by cognitive neuroscientists, to help her students write creatively and effectively for the widest possible audience.

I used the word “shackled” earlier, because I believe that those of us who teach music theory often feel bound to its historical gravity. It is a compelling conception of musical harmony, and it is very helpful in understanding certain types of musical expression. But it is inadequate in helping us understand music that doesn’t conform to its assumptions.

Fortunately, much of the theory and its nomenclature can be massaged and utilized with other music. I’d like to turn now to a Billboard Hot 100 hit released about 1 year ago.

Part 3: "Leave the Door Open" for Blue Magic (Musical excerpt: “Leave the Door Open”) This song is “Leave the Door Open” by Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak, who together comprise the duo Silk Sonic. If you listen to this song, and especially if you watch the music video or their appearance at the 2021 Grammy awards, you might notice that they are consciously inhabiting the musical and cultural space of the early 1970s and The Sound of Philadelphia. More specifically, I believe this song is an homage to Blue Magic’s hit single “Sideshow” from 1974. The genre references and cosmetic similarities are fairly easy to spot, but at another, deeper level, there are particular harmonic choices made in each song that make them kindred spirits. If we tilt Rameau’s theoretical lens ever so slightly, maybe we can spot them.

reach a strong dominant harmony and then sink back to a subdominant. Here is the end of the verse of “Sideshow,” leading to the chorus: (Musical example: “Sideshow” excerpt) Here the key is G major, but again, we hardly get a whiff of it. Instead, the verse ends with a strong motion to the dominant harmony, built on the note D, followed by a move to the subdominant, built on C. In traditional music theory, this would be labeled a retrogression, something to avoid. In these two songs, however, the effect is expressive and effective.

Fmaj7 – G/F – Em7 – Am7 – Ebmaj7 – Abmaj7 – Gm7 – Fm7 – G/F And then, because we’re “leaving the door open” but haven’t yet sealed the deal, we don’t capitalize on that dominant harmony when we move to the chorus, but instead, sink back to Fmaj7, the subdominant chord. Finally, at the end of the chorus, we land on Cmaj7, the tonic chord for a total of 4 beats, before moving on.

As it turns out, popular music in a variety of genres contains vestiges of traditional harmonic motion but in entirely new contexts. Just take the idea of a pre-dominant chord moving to a dominant and then to a tonic. Traditionally, that would sound like this:

(Musical example: “Leave the Door Open” excerpt) That turnaround chord, A7b9, seems to harken back even further than 1974, as this was a favorite Motown sonority when the destination was a Dm chord, as in “Baby Love.”

(Musical example: ii-V-I progression in traditional and jazz voicing) But if you’re a pop musician, you might reach the tonic like this: (Musical example: bIV-bVII-I progression)

(Musical excerpt: “Baby Love” excerpt)

Even John Williams, who turned 90 years old on February 8, uses this cadence in the Ewok celebration scene in Return of the Jedi:

The connections between Silk Sonic and Blue Magic are obvious if you watch videos of both groups in action and also pay attention to the variety of instruments used in each group. Harmonically, though, these songs are linked at their core, in that each barely presents the tonic chord, preferring instead to

(Musical example: “Ewok Celebration” excerpt) Part 4: The Music of Hip Hop

CC BY-SA 4.0 WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

“Leave the Door Open’s” home key is C major, although you wouldn’t necessarily guess it from the circuitous harmonic progression traced by the verse, prechorus, and chorus. Each phrase begins with the subdominant IV chord, usually in the form of Fmaj7. In fact, the intro, verse, and chorus all share the same progression: Fmaj7, G/F, Em7, Am7.

It’s a rather circular progression that has the effect of making the return to the F chord always sound a little wistful, as if the music is longing to move beyond its boundaries. And when it does, in the pre-chorus, it moves somewhere completely unexpected, creating one of the great harmonic tributaries in recent song writing:

Silk Sonic: Bruno Mars at left, Anderson .Paak on right

According to several recent surveys conducted by Statistica, YPluse, and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, Hip-Hop is the most popular music genre in the United States among Generation Z, and the second most popular in the world, close behind pop music, especially K-pop. The popularity of Hip-Hop was on full display at this year’s Superbowl half time show, which featured rappers Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, 50 Cent, and Kendrick Lamar, performing some of their best-known songs. (By the way, Eminem’s drummer was Anderson .Paak). When Lamar was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for composition in 2018 Spring 2022/Agora

17

FUZHEADO, CC BY-SA 4.0 CREATIVE COMMONS

the lyrics. Not only is this approach more fruitful for rap than a traditional text/music analysis, it also better reflects the way in which the music was originally conceived. The best way to analyze many rap songs may be to examine not how the music supports the text, but how the text supports the music.”

Another notable difference we encounter with Hip Hop is the formal structure—since the accompaniment is typically constructed of looped rhythmic phrases, the form is often cyclical rather than goal-directed (as is true of most concert music).

Consider, for example, the chorus of Big Boi’s 2003 song, “Tomb of the Boom.”

I’m using Kyle Adams’ transcription here to help our discussion.

The excerpt in question consists of a 4-measure loop with three accompanimental layers:

Kendrick Lamar at the 2018 Pulitzer Prize ceremony

A synth pad that descends by step

for his album “Damn,” it became clear to me that I needed to learn about this music, which I’m embarrassed to admit had rarely had a place in my listening habits, much less my teaching portfolio.

A drum kit, which I’ll sort of beat-box.

There are some stumbling blocks when studying Hip Hop through a music theory lens. Because the music is typically constructed from borrowed samples of other people’s music or with constructed beats, it can be difficult to define the composer of a given rap song. The rapper is the poet, but the role of composer is often filled by a producer, who assembles samples in collaboration with the rapper. Lamar’s “Damn” is unusual, however, in that most of the music was created specifically for the album.

But it is still true that the musical landscape, aside from the rap, is usually created first in Hip Hop songwriting.

This is an inversion of the text/music relationship we find in the classical art song, where the text is created first by a poet and then set by a composer. As theorist Kyle Adams suggests: “Analysis of rap therefore requires a shift in focus, whereby we examine the music first, to see which rhythms, groupings, or motives are then used in 18

Agora/Spring 2022

A syncopated, funk bass line Together, they sound a bit like this: (Musical example: “Tomb of the Boom” excerpt) Note that the drum kit plays the same rhythm in each measure. The synth pad presents long notes in measures 1-3, and then short notes in measure 4, filling out the bar. The bass line cuts out in the final bar. Listen one more time.

(Musical example: “Tomb of the Boom” excerpt) Now imagine this rap happening at the same time (I will try to rap and play the synth part at the same time)…

(Musical example: “Tomb of the Boom” excerpt) Did you notice how the final beat in each bar is a long note, and that each word on that beat rhymes? Listen to the drum beat again, and then the rap for the first measure…

(Musical example: “Tomb of the Boom” excerpt) The rap has been written so that the first line coincides exactly with the rhythm played by the drum kit. The

prosody is perfect and takes advantage of the hit on beat 4. That hit is preserved in lines 2 through 4, and in fact, the final word in each line of text rhymes. To further emphasize the complex interaction between text and accompaniment in line 4, the funk bass cuts out so we can hear Big Boi rap his syncopated line.

This is one 11 second excerpt from a single song written in 2003. I hope I’ve conveyed the complex relationship between text and music in this excerpt, and how fruitful this music can be for both musical and textual analysis, two things we often do in music theory class when we discuss music that includes sung or spoken words.

Part 5: Why do this work I have focused our discussion today on how we might adapt aspects of our current theoretical framework to music that has been marginalized in our music theory classrooms. I’ve tried to give examples of such music I feel is rich in content and meaning, but I haven’t made an argument yet as to why we should make the effort to diversify our curriculum in this way. On the one hand, I think a compelling case can be made that current undergraduate music students inhabit a world in which classical music is an ever-shrinking part of the musical landscape, and to best prepare for the diverse musical world we live in, students need many more tools than we are currently providing. If we were to simply focus our curricula on the educational standards that our future music educators are expected to use as learning goals, we would emphasize composition, jazz, popular and global music rather than classical harmony and counterpoint. If we want our graduates to be successful in their music-related jobs, we need to equip them with the right toolkit. A recent alum shared with me last week that “just training yourself as a concert musician is not enough.

We should validate musical experiences outside the concert tradition.” This is the economic argument.

But an even more compelling and urgent argument is the moral one. For far too long, the only voices seen and heard in our music theory curriculum have

been white males, most of whom died decades or even centuries ago. They have long had seats at our collective table.

Do we have the creativity and the will to set a few more places at the table? As a student member of the music department’s antiracism task force recently shared with me: “In our education courses we learn about the concept of Windows and Mirrors. A window allows you to look inside another person’s experience, someone different from you.

A mirror reflects your own culture. We need to see ourselves and each other in educational processes. For BIPOC students, rarely is there a mirror. For white students, all they experience are mirrors, and they miss out on the windows.”

Do we have the creativity and the will to set a few more places at the table?

In the music department, we strive to create a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere for all students, staff, and faculty.

That sentiment should go beyond the important work of hospitality and congeniality. When a student enters one of our learning spaces, they should expect to both see some part of themselves reflected in the curriculum, as well as learn about a person, group, or culture outside of their identity. I will close with a short anecdote, shared with me by a recent music alumna. She remembered how an instructor had once brought a small excerpt of Rwandan folk music into her ear training class to help demonstrate a particular concept. After that class, she wept when she realized that it was the first time she had ever encountered part of her own culture in a classroom. For the instructor, that bit of music was intended as a window, albeit a small one, for the majority-white class.

For the black student, daughter of recent immigrants and one of the handful of students of color in the music department, it was a welcome mirror.

Spring 2022/Agora

19

Luther's Economic Impact on Winneshiek County

by STEVE HOLLAND, Professor of Economics

P

eople who live in a college town most likely have a sense that the college is important to the health of the local economy. Most of the college’s employees are residents of the town and their spending supports small, local businesses. Students and alumni shop, eat, and provide a welcome energy to the downtown area. College spending further increases demand for the goods and services of local businesses.

Graduates provide businesses a skilled work force. Music, sporting events, and lectures on campus contribute vitality to the community’s social life.

Wise college administrators understand that the health of a local economy is just as important to the college as the college is to the local economy. They want a Main Street that gives prospective students a positive first impression, a community that is a desirable place for faculty and staff to live, and an economy that can support a good insurance agent and a reliable building contractor.

Like many of my colleagues, I had to adjust my sabbatical plans in response to the pandemic. Realizing that travel would be unlikely, I began to think about what I could do locally. About that time, one of Luther’s administrators asked me if anyone had ever done a study of Luther’s impact on the local economy. They hadn’t. This question kept coming up, however, and I eventually agreed to use my sabbatical to attempt to figure it out. What follows is a summary of that work.

It also involved estimating the ripple effects of that spending. Local businesses respond to increased demand by purchasing supplies from other businesses and paying for more hours of labor. Employees spend their additional income by purchasing homes, shopping at grocery stores, and paying local taxes.

This is often called the multiplier effect.

The sum of that initial round of spending plus the secondary spending that results from the multiplier is the total economic impact of Luther.

For this project, I estimated Luther’s impact on Winneshiek County from June 2018 to May 2019, the last full fiscal year before the COVID-19 pandemic. When the impact of Luther’s spending, student spending, and visitor spending are added up, the presence of Luther was estimated to have increased the county’s GDP by $58.9 million, which supported an estimated 951 jobs—564 jobs at Luther plus 387 additional jobs in the community. Putting these numbers in context, Luther College was responsible, directly or indirectly, for 5.8% of Winneshiek County’s GDP, and this supported about one out of every 16.5 jobs (6%) in the county.

Luther’s Impact An economic impact study typically tries to quantify the impact of some interesting event on the local economy.

Quantifying Luther’s impact involved an examination of spending by the college, its students, and its visitors.

20

Agora/Spring 2022

Tables 1 and 2

Steve Holland Luther Operations The effect of Luther’s operations was far larger than the impacts of student and visitor spending. Luther’s operating expenses in the 2018-19 fiscal year were $74.5 million (Luther, Consolidated Financial Statements). Over $45 million of that amount, or 60.8% of Luther’s expenditures, was paid to individuals, businesses, or organizations living or operating in Winneshiek County. Most

of that local spending, about $36.2 million, was paid to employees, who then spent a portion of that income in the local economy. The remaining $9.1 million of local spending is attributable to operating expenses that were paid for local goods and services. Table 2 (above) describes Luther’s local spending as a percent of its total expenditures.

Student Spending Student spending was based upon Luther’s 2018-19 enrollment of roughly 2000 students (Luther, Assessment and Institutional Research) and a review of previous student spending estimates from around the country. The total impact, a $1.5 million increase in local GDP and an increase of 42.71 jobs, not surprisingly falls on the food and drink industries, rental housing, and retail (primarily clothing, gasoline, and grocery).

Visitor Spending This study focused on six categories of Luther-related visitors to Winneshiek County: admissions visits, Christmas at Luther, Homecoming, Center Stage Series, Commencement, Dorian camps and festivals. Using Luther’s data on the number of visitors, I estimated visitors’ total contribution to the county’s GDP to be just over $2 million, which supports about 47.48 jobs. This is undoubtedly an undercount of visitor impact because my analysis does not include events such as move-in days, parents’ weekend, sport camps, music and dance performances, student theater, sporting events, lectures, cultural activities, and casual visits by friends and family of Luther students and staff. These events are likely to have a meaningful impact on the local economy, but there are no easily accessible data to support their inclusion in this study.

The Multiplier The results of this study imply multipliers for GDP of around 1.33. In other words, every dollar of additional demand generated by Luther’s presence in Winneshiek County in 2018-19 led to a $1.33 increase in GDP—the initial dollar spent plus another $0.33 due to

the ripple effects. This does not necessarily mean that if Luther increased its spending by $1 million there would be a $1.33 million increase in economic activity in the county, because it depends upon how Luther (or its students or visitors) spends that money. For example, a dollar spent at a local insurance agency increases output in the county by $2.46, while a dollar spent at a local grocery store increases local output by only $1.44 (IMPLAN). A dollar spent outside the county has no effect. The multiplier of 1.33 implied by this study is the result of the total mix of spending

by Luther, its students, and its visitors in 2018-19.

Additional Impacts on Winneshiek County The economic effects described in the previous section do not capture all of the impacts Luther has on Winneshiek County and Decorah.

Government Revenue In addition to the impact on the county’s economic activity, Luther’s presence creates revenue for local governments. In 2018-19, Luther paid nearly $390,000 to the City of Decorah, primarily for sewer, water, and internet services. Luther, despite being a non-profit entity, also pays local taxes, primarily for vehicle registration fees and property taxes on its wind turbine and some college houses. However, it is estimated that Luther indirectly generated about $1,139,504 in local tax revenue for county government, municipalities, and school districts. About 90% of this tax revenue came from residential property and commercial property taxes. For example, local property taxes are increased when a Luther employee purchases a home. Similarly, increased spending in the community induced by the presence of the college might support a new business, which then pays local property taxes on its building.

About 8% of the government revenue was generated by sales tax.

Local Workforce Luther graduates hundreds of young people into the workforce each year.

These highly educated workers bring value to the workforce in the form of skill, creativity, and energy—what economists refer to as “human capital.”

Much of the benefit of human capital is enjoyed by the individual worker in the form of higher wages and more pleasant work, but some human capital benefits the community. Economists have found that these “education spillovers” can benefit the community by making co-workers more productive, increasing innovation, reducing crime, improving public health, and contributing to a stronger sense of civic responsibility.

There are many Luther graduates living and working in Winneshiek County.

At the time of this study, the Luther alumni directory listed 1,115 Luther graduates with a Decorah address (in addition to 47 in Calmar, 23 in Ossian, and many more in other parts of the county). Graduates work in business, manufacturing, agriculture, education, health care, and other industries. The families of Luther staff also contribute to the local labor force. Their contributions undoubtedly benefit the community, and the availability of skilled workers in the local labor pool helps local businesses.

Social Impacts Finally, Luther’s presence is likely to improve the quality of life of local residents in ways unrelated to issues of income and output. For example, community members often attend lectures, arts, sports, and entertainment events at Luther that would not otherwise be available if the college did not exist. In addition, Luther has hundreds of acres of natural spaces that provide both aesthetic and recreational benefits to community members. Even though these quality of life benefits are difficult to reliably quantify, they are nonetheless real and are attributable to Luther’s presence in the community.

It must also be recognized that the impact of the people Luther has drawn to the community may not be unambiguously good. Luther occupies 1,000 acres of prime real estate and has drawn hundreds of new families to the county.

This likely contributes to higher housing prices in Decorah by both reducing the Spring 2022/Agora

21

supply of land for housing and increasing the demand for housing. Further, when Luther graduates and the family of Luther employees enter the local labor force, this increased competition for jobs can put downward pressure on wages unless the growing demand from a larger population also increases the number of workers needed. More people can also increase congestion (e.g., traffic and parking) and put extra demands on public services and infrastructure, although much of that impact could be mitigated by increased government revenue. These questions are beyond the scope of this study, but there are almost certainly meaningful effects from a Luther-induced increase in population.

Discussion of Luther’s Impact One of the primary goals of this study was to prompt conversation about the connections between Luther and the Winneshiek County community. The following observations are not comprehensive but are intended to help start that conversation.

1. The largest impact on the local economy comes from compensation and the subsequent spending by Luther employees.

The purchase of local goods and services

by Luther, its students, and its visitors has a significant impact on the local economy, but the vast majority of this impact comes via the payment of compensation to Luther employees. As

Figure 1 illustrates, of the roughly $59 million that Luther’s presence adds to the county’s GDP, $50 million of that is attributable to Luther’s compensation and the ripple effects from Luther employees spending this income at local businesses. This is more than 85% of the estimated increase in regional GDP. Therefore, it is not a surprise that many of the Winneshiek County industries most affected by Luther’s presence— banking, health care, real estate, etc.— are those that rely on demand from local residents.

Luther’s staffing often fluctuates in response to changes in enrollment and other factors, and I estimated that a multiplier of 1.25 could be used to calculate a rough impact on the local economy. For example, if Luther decreases total compensation to its employees by $100,000, we should expect about a $125,000 decrease in the county’s GDP. Similarly, if Luther’s staffing decreases by one person, we should expect the total number of jobs in the county to fall by 1.25 (the Luther job plus another 0.25 jobs in the community).

2. Luther’s impact on the local economy is not evenly distributed.

Luther has a significant impact on a portion of the local economy—primarily in the service, hospitality, retail, and real estate sectors. However, large portions of the local economy have fewer direct connections to Luther and are impacted less by its presence. Here are a few key observations from the study:

• 24.5% of Luther’s impact is felt by one industry—full service restaurants—that represents only 0.84% of the county’s total economic output; • 50% of Luther’s impact was concentrated in eight industries that collectively represent less than 13% of Winneshiek County’s output; • Nearly all (90%) of Luther’s impact on the local economy falls on industries that collectively make up 47% of county output.

This implies there are other sectors of Winneshiek County’s economy that are largely unaffected by Luther. Agriculture, manufacturing, and commercial construction make up 40% of output in the county, yet Luther’s presence increased output in those sectors by a total of 0.05%.

3. Luther has limited opportunities to spend more locally.

A large fraction of Luther’s compensation expense stays in Winneshiek County (86%) but only 28.1% of its other expenses stay in the county. Are there opportunities to increase Luther’s local spending by either using more local suppliers or by developing local industries to serve the college?

Table 3 (right) shows the nine categories of Luther’s expenses for which more than $300,000 was paid to vendors outside of Winneshiek County in 201819. Some payments would be impossible to keep local, such as travel expenses, membership fees, and payments to other colleges for dependent tuition. Others, such as energy expenses, Luther is already working to bring into the county.

The remaining expenses, such as professional and processing services, supplies, and equipment, could be purchased locally if the required goods and services are available within the county, so a more detailed review of local purchasing opportunities for these expenses might be justified if the college wished to increase its local economic impact.

Conclusion This project showed that Luther College was responsible, directly or indirectly, for about 5.8% of Winneshiek County’s GDP and about 6% of its jobs

22

Agora/Spring 2022

Table 3 in 2018-19. To make those numbers less abstract, at the peak of the Great Recession of 2007-09 Winneshiek County GDP fell by almost exactly 5.8% which, at that point, was the largest decline in the post-war era. The significance of Luther’s contribution to the local economy must be taken seriously, especially since the results of this study almost certainly understate Luther’s true impact on the region.

Research shows that the prosperity of rural communities depends on their ability to identify unique local assets and fashion strategies that build on those assets (Brookings). This study of Luther’s impact on Winneshiek County has shown that Luther is an important part of the local economy and, consequently, should figure prominently in local economic development plans. It has also shown that Luther is linked to local businesses and residents in a complex system of mutual reliance. Luther cannot remain healthy unless the community around it is also healthy.

College administrators and community leaders may ultimately be in the best position to draw further conclusions from this study. I hope my research will assist and encourage further discussion by serving as a map that locates Luther’s place in the local economic ecosystem and charts the many ways that the people and businesses of our community need each other if we are to continue to thrive.

References IMPLAN Group LLC. IMPLAN 2020.

Huntersville, NC. IMPLAN.com.

Love, Hanna and Mike Powe. 2020.

Why Main Streets are a key driver of equitable economic recovery in rural America. Brookings.

Luther College, Consolidated Financial Statements as of and for the years ending May 31, 2019 and 2018, https:// www.luther.edu/financial-services/ assets/Luther_College_2019_Audit___ Short_form.pdf.

____________, 2018-19 Common Data Set, https://www.luther.edu/ir/common-dataset/2018-2019/.

Luther College Assessment and Institutional Research, Fall Enrollment Comparison 2014-18, https://www. luther.edu/ir/assets/luther_college_ enrollments__2014_2018__20180911__ CENSUS__with_color_highlights.pdf.

Luther College Financial Services, June 19, 2020, 2018-19 Transactions Dataset.

Luther College Human Resources, Aug. 14, 2020, Blind 2018-19 Compensation Dataset.

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Table 1.1.6. Real Gross Domestic Product, Chained Dollars, accessed Jan. 3, 2021, https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm ?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&1921=sur vey#reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&1921 =survey.

U.S. Census Bureau, Winneshiek County, Quick Facts, accessed Jan. 3, 2021, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/ winneshiekcountyiowa.

Spring 2022/Agora

23

Hope in the Anthropocene

by RACHEL F. BRUMMEL, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Political Science

T

he Story of my Sabbatical

A sabbatical holds mythical weight for junior faculty members. I saw my first sabbatical as an opportunity to catch up on everything and come out on the other side a better scholar, teacher, parent, and generally a much-improved human. So there is pressure—and mostly self-imposed pressure, in my case—to absolutely optimize this precious time given. To rest as much as one can rest, to read and reflect, to clean out all the closets, to be a productive scholar, and to emerge reinvigorated enough to last you the next seven years. I had plans (oh, I had plans!).

As is the way, the story of this first sabbatical came with a few subplots (I didn’t get to those closets, for example), two of which I’ll touch on here.

Subplot 1: It took me a while to find my sabbatical project.

There are many different kinds of scholars in the academy, and I come out of a tradition of applied research, both in terms of training and my own predispositions. As an environmental social scientist, I’ve focused on conducting research that speaks directly to how we can better organize ourselves—our communities, our institutions, and our policies—to respond to environmental challenges. But in the years since I started at Luther and in the years when I was approaching my first sabbatical, I had become a scholar who saw herself as a teacher first. When I thought about potential research in environmental policy, I couldn’t conjure up a project that inspired me, nor one where I thought I could really have an impact. In truth, years of teaching environmental policy in the gridlocked then rapidly eroding landscape of US environmental politics had hardened me. I was losing my sense of outrage, as well as my agency.

24

Agora/Spring 2022

So one night in a classic “awake at 2 am” moment, I asked myself: What did I really want to learn on my sabbatical?

When I asked the question that way, my answer was clear. I wanted to learn how to be a better teacher to my students.

And I wanted to learn how to be a better teacher for my students. You should know that my students are primarily young people passionately engaged in the study of a cruel truth: the environment they love is rapidly degrading and no one is doing enough about it.

We are driving species to extinction, humans are responsible for changing the climate in dangerous ways, and all of this is impacting the stability of our present and future. In particular, the vulnerable, including Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), those living in the Global South, and youth and future generations are bearing or will bear the disproportionate burden of these environmental crises. My students’ world when they are 40 will be environmentally more tumultuous than mine.

Students are passionately engaged in the study of a cruel truth: the environment they love is rapidly degrading.

That is heavy. And our students carry that weight as they navigate their own decisions of who and how they want to be in the world. They are thinking about the contours of environmental degradation as they decide where to live after graduation and if they want children to be a part of their futures. This weight is also a weight of responsibility. Many of my students, for example, feel existential pressure to live a big life and to start

Rachel Brummel “saving the world” immediately upon leaving college.

But there is both injustice and danger in seeing youth as “saviors of the environment.” My students are of a generation set to bear significant climate change impacts, but are not the generation most responsible for changing the climate.

My students often hear older relatives describe them as their “hope for the future.” This tricky territory. I believe my students can and will create a more environmentally just world, but I also bristle that their generation is being seen instrumentally as our final hope.

As their teacher, I hold the tension of wanting to cultivate in them the skills to promote positive environmental change, but also feeling the anger of injustice that the world looks to them to save it. There is also danger in asking them to do too much, to fix it all. This can be paralyzing and can undercut one generation’s capacity to do the work that we all need to do together.

This is all to say, there is a lot of emotion involved in matters of the environment. Indeed, over the past decade,

researchers have deepened their inquiry into the affective elements of environmental change, including explorations of eco-grief, climate anxiety, and the role of hope in environmental action.

In a recent global survey of 16-25-yearolds, for example, nearly 60% of youth indicated feeling “very worried” or “extremely worried” about climate change.

Further, 45% of all respondents said that this feeling of climate anxiety negatively affected their daily functioning.1 This should be sobering for us all. In my own experience, I’ve seen students become disillusioned, burnt out, I’ve seen their mental health eroding, and I’ve seen them become nihilistic. They can lose their outrage and agency, too.

Asking students to do too much can be paralyzing and can undercut the work that we all need to do together.

So this was my middle of the night sabbatical inspiration: I wanted to think deeply about the emotional elements of teaching about the environment. I wanted to explore how we can help students understand the reality of what we are facing, without eroding their sense of agency to shape a different reality.

What are the best pedagogical practices to build that agency and even hope?

Can I teach about the environment without bumming out my students?

My sabbatical proposal involved traveling the country to talk to environmental studies professors and students who were deeply engaged in the same questions I was. I wanted to survey the landscape, learn from others, share with others, and ultimately synthesize this research in a way that was accessible to all.

ploring the equity dimensions of transportation electrification in Minnesota.

This was a fulfilling work that gave me that opportunity to influence local, state, and regional policy. But I still had those pedagogical questions that I didn’t want to fully set aside. So I decided to explore emotion and hope in the Anthropocene alongside my students in a classroom setting, rather than through an independent research project. And now, what started as a concession to COVID has ultimately led to powerful conversations with my students and colleagues that I hope will outlast the boundaries of my thwarted first sabbatical project.

The Class: Hope in the Anthropocene This spring, a year after I had intended to undertake this work as a part of my sabbatical, I sat with 18 students in our Environmental Studies senior seminar on the first day of a class called “Hope in the Anthropocene.” Hope was a knowable and compelling entry point and reflected the emotional nature of the semester’s inquiry. But, I knew many of my students would enter the course— based upon the title—with expectations that this class was intended primarily to give them hope. That part I wasn’t so sure of. Like this essay, the course title really should have had a question mark at the end. So in a nod to Tina Turner and the ambiguity of my own feelings about hope, the course subtitle on my syllabus read “What’s hope got to do with it?” Indeed, on the first day of class I was careful to explain that we would be exploring the question of hope— what it

is, if we need it to act, and what it does for us individually, and collectively. In truth, I had my own hopes that “hope” might be a byproduct of our work together, but I kept that student learning outcome off the syllabus.

The course itself is broadly structured into three sections: 1) emotions and the environment, 2) hope and environmental action, and 3) the future of the Anthropocene. And why “the Anthropocene?” The concept of the Anthropocene was proposed a couple decades ago as a way to describe what some scientists argue is a new epoch of geologic time. An epoch where—even millions of years from now—it would be possible to tell from the geologic record that humans dramatically reshaped the natural environment. But the idea of the Anthropocene also has gained traction in the social sciences and humanities as a way to explore the ethics and politics of a human-dominated planet. Taken together, “Hope in the Anthropocene” asks us to interrogate what it means to be a feeling human on a changing planet.

IMAGES COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

In the first portion of the course, we spent time wrapping our minds around the role of emotions in the environment. We read Sarah Jacquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: Keeping Your Cool on a Warming Planet, a book that speaks directly to the emotional experience of being a student in what Ray calls “the climate generation.”

My students saw their own emotional trajectories reflected in Ray’s theory of “the affective arc of environmental studies curriculum,” which is drawn from Ray’s experience as an environmental studies professor. She has repeatedly seen students enter college idealistic about “saving the planet” but soon thereafter lose their innocence, move through Subplot 2: COVID periods of guilt and nihilism, before retreatYou know how this one goes. ing to self-care (she calls Those plans I had were thwartthis the “baking cookies ed, alongside the plans of 7.8 phase”) and then idebillion of my fellow humans. ally cultivating a hopeful So ultimately I took on another resilience. As a class, we A selection of readings from the Hope in the Anthropocene class project for my sabbatical, exSpring 2022/Agora

25

also discussed the power of naming new emotions for the Anthropocene through reading portions of Glenn Albrecht’s Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Students resonated with previous unnamed emotions such as “topoaversion” (fear of returning to a place you once loved) and “euterria” (the feeling of oneness with Earth’s forces). We also read several studies on eco-grief, climate anxiety, and the mental health aspects of environmental change. While stark, the fact that there is extensive research documenting the mental health impacts of environmental change validated my students’ experience, but also gave us all an understanding of the scope of the problem at hand.

After building that emotional grounding, we moved on to directly interrogating the slippery concept of hope.

We explored the psychology of hope and environmental action and began to grasp hope as a multi-dimensional concept (more on that below). We thought through the politics of hope and the collective experience of hope while reading portions of Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark. Further, we spent time critiquing our apparent need for hope, ruminating on Paul Kingsnorth’s quotation “I find that this obsession with ‘hope’ is part of [the] problem.

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon.” Then before spring break, we suspended our dissection of hope and luxuriated in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. This isn’t a book about hope, but it is a book that cultivates hope. We had excellent conversations about why.

Hope, we’ve learned, is tied to our desired outcomes for an uncertain future, so in the last portion of the class, we— in the words of Rebecca Solnit—“gave ourselves to the future.”² Because the future can be murky, we started with a particular discussion of the ethical and environmental dimensions of the decision to have children (or not) as a part of our futures. Next, we explored science as a way of knowing the future and read summaries of the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We also read speculative fiction—including ex26

Agora/Spring 2022

cerpts from Dale Jamieson and Bonnie Nadzam’s Love in the Anthropocene and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future as a way to envision and interrogate possible futures. As I write this essay, we are about to begin the last weeks of the course where we’ll think explicitly about different models for how we— individually and collectively—might continue to cope and live as humans on a changing planet.

Throughout all of this, I’ve tried to make space for students to move between “the academic” and “the personal.” We occasionally check in with each other using a somewhat tongue-in-cheek “Hope-o-Meter” where we individually rate our hope levels on a scale of 0-10.

Using our own class as a case study, we’ve learned that hope varies widely by person, but our class averages remain relatively steady, ranging between 4.3 and 5.2 (it has gone up slightly over the course of the semester, in case you are wondering). Additionally, students have reflected on their own “affective arc” of studying the environment at Luther.

Right now, I have a folder of “future fiction” my students have written that I’m eager to read. And for the last assignment of the semester, I’ll ask students to reflect upon their insights from the class and what those insights might mean for their own futures. I’ve been privileged to spend this time with an amazing group of students and to gain a glimpse into their hearts and minds. This class has been more important for me, too.

Some Running Reflections I am still very much in the process of teaching “Hope in the Anthropocene” as well as reflecting on what it has meant. Because of this, bullet-points are probably the most appropriate reflective format for where I’m sitting. But, I will attempt some reflections to close: • Most foundationally, conversations about our emotions need to be a part of how we talk about and teach about the environment. How we feel about the environment affects not only how we think about the environment, but also how we understand ourselves as agents of change (or not). Through acknowledging and normalizing emotions about environmental change, students reinforce their emotionality as shared experience, thus building their sense of agency and perhaps cultivating hope.

• Hope is distinct from optimism.

Optimism is grounded in the certainty that everything will be okay.

Hope acknowledges that the future is uncertain. The strongest forms of hope compel us to see ourselves as actors in influencing and shaping that uncertain future.

• Hope comes through action. There will not be some magical time when hope shines on us and the conditions become perfect for us to act. Hope is work.

Flip-charts from a class exercise on what we had learned about hope

The Environmental Studies 485: Hope in the Anthropocene class does a final reflection exercise.

• We should be thoughtful about why we want or think we need hope. We need to avoid seeing “hope” as an outcome in itself. Hope, in its weakest forms, can tie us to the status quo and a version of the world that hasn’t served our environment—nor our relationship with it—particularly well.

• Acknowledging environmental loss and grief can be empowering. On the day in class we read a series of worst-case scenarios for climate change, we felt a lightness in acknowledging that we can’t, in fact, fix it all. This recognition gave students a sense of “Okay, now what?” which was both clarifying and motivating.

• As I suspected on the first day of class, I probably can’t teach hope.

My work as a teacher is to create the conditions for hope. Providing skills and opportunities for students to develop their agency is primary and hope may be a welcome side-effect.

I end this essay with sincere gratitude for my entire ENVS 485: Hope in the Anthropocene class, as well as for Jon Jensen and Laura Peterson, my partners in a perpetual hallway conversation about how to be better teachers. Let’s all keep talking.

NOTES 1. Hickman and Marks, et al. (2021) Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey. Lancet Planet Health 5: e563573.

2. Rebecca Solnit writes in her book Hope in the Dark that “To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable."

• And finally, hope forms in community.

I want to build on that last point as a way to close. When I think back to where this project—and where this essay—started, I’m deeply grateful I didn’t attempt this work as a solo undertaking within the confines of a sabbatical.

Being able to explore these issues in community, with my community, has been integral to building a bit of my own hope for the Anthropocene. So, Spring 2022/Agora

27

Another Sabbatical Gone Awry

by MARTIN KLAMMER, Professor of English

S

abbaticals can and often do wander from their intended outcomes, and yet can be productive.

One such sabbatical was in 2005-06, when I proposed to teach a course titled “Race and Social Identities” in the University of Cape Town’s master’s program in Diversity Studies (I did) and write a scholarly essay on a book by Jan Christian Smuts, twice premier of South Africa, on Walt Whitman (I did not).

Instead, I spent much of the sabbatical interviewing and transcribing the words of midwife-activist-mother Blanche La Guma, which we developed into her memoir, In the Dark with My Dress on Fire: My Life in Cape Town, London, Havana, and Home Again, published in 2010 by Jacana Media, Cape Town.

I mention this diversion because of what happened this last sabbatical, spring 2021. I had planned to write an essay on the South African novel And They Didn’t Die (1990) by Lauretta Ngcobo, arguing that it is a feminist rewriting and critique of Alan Paton’s famous novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948). But while re-reading Paton’s novel, my eye was caught by the Smuts book sitting on my bookshelf: Walt Whitman: A Study in the Evolution of Personality. This is the same book that was to have been the focus of my 2005-06 sabbatical, and it has been gnawing at me far longer than that. The book was given to me thirty years ago by my dissertation advisor at Iowa, Ed Folsom, a renowned Whitman scholar, who knew of my interest in South African history and literature. So last spring, setting Paton aside, I began to read Smuts’s book as well as biographies of Smuts and many of his letters (seven volumes). Given that Smuts was theorizing about the “evolution” of Whitman’s personality in the late nineteenth century, I also reread Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (which we have taught in Paideia) and initiated myself in the 28

Agora/Spring 2022

development of personality theory in the field of psychology. I thought (and hoped) something would emerge from my immersion in scholarship on Smuts and his interest in Walt Whitman, whom I wrote about in Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass (1995) and various articles on race and slavery. Why this project interests me is largely due to the unlikely pairing of Whitman, our famously innovative and influential nineteenth century American poet, and Smuts, a conservative national and international leader who shaped twentieth century global democratic institutions even as he headed a racist, segregationist government at home.

Jan Christian Smuts (1870-1950) is arguably the second most important South African of the twentieth century after Nelson Mandela (1918-2013).

His life story is legendary. Born and raised on an Afrikaner farm north of Cape Town, Smuts studied science and literature at Victoria College (now Stellenbosch University), then won a scholarship to study law at Cambridge University, where he continued to read widely. While at Cambridge, Smuts found himself drawn to the life and writing of Whitman, whom he came to see as a “kindred spirit” by their common Dutch ancestry, “democratic” convictions (but for racial inclusion and equality), and spirituality rooted in a love of nature. While at Cambridge, Smuts wrote his 70,000-word book on Whitman, but could not find a publisher. Returning to Cape Town in 1895, he then continued to live his remarkable life: journalist for the Cape Times newspaper, lawyer, and state attorney in the Transvaal Republic, all before the age of 30; commando leader of the Afrikaners in the Boer War (18991902) against the British, with whom he then worked to form the Union of South Africa in 1910; military leader in

Martin Klammer both world wars; twice prime minister of South Africa (1919-24 and 193948); and international stateman who helped establish after each world war, respectively, the League of Nations and the United Nations. Meanwhile, Smuts developed his philosophical concept of holism in Holism and Evolution (1926), an idea first articulated in his book on Whitman. In 1948 Smuts and the United Party were defeated by the farright Nationalist Party, leading to 46 years of apartheid before the election of Nelson Mandela as president in a fully democratic South Africa in 1994.

My interest in the Smuts-Whitman connection began as racial, since I have written on Whitman and race. But as I read Smuts’s book I began to think of a richer connection in terms of their spiritual or religious attitudes and beliefs.

For the true subject of Smuts’s exploration of the “evolution” of Whitman’s “personality” is Whitman’s developing spirituality. Relying solely on Whitman’s poetry and autobiographical prose, and a brief early biography of Whitman, who died just two years earlier in 1892,

IMAGES COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA

Walt Whitman,1863

Jan Christiaan Smuts, 1934

Smuts argued that Whitman’s evolution was primarily spiritual, from periods of “naturalism” to “emotionalism” to “applied spiritualism” and finally to a “pure or religious spiritualism” in the last two decades of his life.

had in fact expressed in the first volume of Leaves of Grass published in 1855.

Reading Smuts’s book is tough sledding.

At times the writing is complex because his ideas are complex, and thus rewarding. But at other times his writing is vague and muddled, like that of an eager student trying to mask a lack of understanding (which is precisely what, at age 25, he might have been). In carefully tracking Smuts’s use of quotations from Whitman, I discovered that several times he deleted poetic stanzas (sometimes having to do with sex) or inverted their order, so as to create Whitman texts that support his analysis. This isn’t just bad scholarship, it’s unethical, and I think a full auditing of his use and misuse of Whitman would interest historians regarding Smuts’s moral and intellectual development.

Beyond these ethical issues, I think Smuts is flat-out wrong in his analysis of Whitman’s “evolution.” Certainly the content and emphases of Whitman’ spiritual beliefs changed to some extent over time. But Smuts’s linear, periodized, and unnuanced view of Whitman just doesn’t ring true for me.

For example, some of the spiritual ideas that Smuts attributes to Whitman in his later life, when he suffered a disabling stroke following the Civil War, the poet

The value of Smuts’s book for me is the central question he asks: how did Whitman evolve spiritually over the course of his life? That question set me on a whole new task, relatively late in the sabbatical.

For while Smuts could only speculate on the historical sequence of Whitman’s poems, a century of scholarship has given us the real evolution of Whitman’s writings—not only when each poem was published, but how he continually revised poems and rearranged them with each succeeding edition of Leaves of Grass until the final one in 1891, called the Deathbed edition. During the sabbatical I reread each of Whitman’s poems in the order in which they were published, identifying those which address spiritual or religious ideas, broadly speaking, and exploring how Whitman’s spirituality might be said to have evolved. Not surprisingly, many of these have to do with death: how do we make sense of death, our death? Or is it the end? Whitman seems to have a variety of answers. One of the more prominent ones is that we are eternal spirit and that our bodies are a temporal, physical manifestation of that spirit, which may have been embodied previously, and may be embodied again. His recurring metaphor for this phenomenon is that we are “struck from the float forever held in solution,” an image from his transcendent (for me) poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Having grown up

on Long Island, Whitman spent much of his youth in the sea and along the shoreline. Like bits of wood and seadrift that wash onto the shore, we have materialized out of the eternal oceanic ethos, and with death will be washed back again. On a more material level, Whitman believed that the decomposition of our bodies is part of the eternal cycle of nature, and that our compost will nourish the soil and bring about new life (“Song of Myself ” section 6 and “This Compost”).

Much more could be said—for instance, how Whitman often wrote of the relationship between his soul and his body (beginning with his first poem “Song of Myself ” where the two merge in an ecstatic sexual union) or how for Whitman American democracy itself is a religion, a “faith” built on trust in each other and in the promises of our founding documents. This is all to say that the scope and the momentum of my sabbatical increased as I found a focus I now wish to pursue: writing my own analysis of the spiritual “evolution” of Walt Whitman, inspired by Jan Christian Smuts’s earlier, largely misguided effort. I do not know at this point what form my scholarship will take, or where it will lead, but I am eager to continue.

Whitman himself beckons me: Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

“Song of Myself ”

Spring 2022/Agora

29

EGBOK

by JONATHON STRUVE, Instructor in Music and Paideia

Matthew 6:25-34 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you— you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

W

hen I chose this passage, Russia had not attacked and invaded Ukraine. When I chose this passage, people hadn’t chosen to protest the inclusive community we strive to be at Luther College, particularly those of us in the queer community. And that’s just this week. And that’s not to mention the papers I’m supposed to be grading, the pages you’re supposed to be reading, the worries of inflation, the burdens of conflict between room30

Agora/Spring 2022

FEBRUARY 25, 2022

mates, friends, family members or colleagues, health concerns for ourselves, our neighbors, and our family members, and the list goes on. All of us are sitting here carrying burdens of anxiety, turmoil, stress, grief, and pain.

And so, when Jesus tells people to stop worrying, my first response is—How? Or, “Yeah, sure, I’ll get right on that.

Stop worrying. Got it.”

When I was in high school, my homeroom teacher had a sign posted in his classroom. In big letters it said: E G B O K – “Everything’s gonna be ok.” And maybe this passage from Matthew is Jesus’ version of “E G B O K.” In the midst of everything we face, we don’t have to worry, because God sees us. God loves us, and God will provide.

And yet, it’s often hard for us to believe that message in the midst of the burdens we bear. Certainly college campuses can be incubuses of worry and anxiety. Sometimes it seems like professors are experts in maximizing pain and pressure, although I promise you that we, well, most of us anyway, are not actually driven by malice. And it often seems like there’s never enough time for everything we have to do. And then, when we see war break out in Ukraine, with images of missiles firing and people huddled together in subway tunnels to escape the attacks, we might feel a tinge of guilt. How can I feel bad about my 80-page reading when people are literally fleeing their homes? Why am I complaining about the slow driver on my way to work when people elsewhere have lost their jobs, their homes, and their lives in natural disasters, wars, and conflicts? And, what can I possibly do about any of it?

It’s tempting to ignore the responsibilities and problems we face. If it’s too much to bear, we sometimes think it would be easier to avoid those things

Jonathon Struve which are causing us stress. However, it is also true that doing nothing doesn’t make worry go away, and it doesn’t make our responsibilities disappear. So, Jesus isn’t just telling his disciples to stop worrying, as though we can simply turn off worry like a switch. And he definitely isn’t telling us to do nothing and ignore our burdens and responsibilities. Instead, Jesus is recognizing just how the anxiety, fear, and burdens we each carry can paralyze us. Think about how you feel when you’re anxious and how your body responds. It creates tension, it makes it hard to breathe, and we feel stuck.

What this passage from Matthew expresses is both a recognition of the paralyzing power of worry and fear AND an assurance that we can have the freedom to let go of our burdens and have faith.

Worry and anxiety prevent us from doing what needs to be done. They hold us back, keeping us bound. Jesus’s words show that he understands that there are “enough cares for today” for us to bear. And we need to be equipped to act and we need to be in the right frame of mind to accomplish what is required of

us. But to do that we also need to know that we have the support and freedom to act with courage and boldness against injustice and those who seem bent on causing chaos, fear, and anxiety.

The assurance in this passage is this: you are not alone, you matter, and you can and do have what it takes to face the cares of the world, and you are free to know that whatever happens, you will be taken care of. But this promise also means that we have another job to do; it means that we need to show up for one another, to support one another and to make sure that others see that they matter too. We have to be the ones who care.

In big letters it said: E G B O K – “Everything’s gonna be ok.”

I originally wanted to focus my talk on my aunt Norma because she, of anyone I’ve ever known, understood what it was to live a life without fear and anxiety, and because of this, she also was free to give of herself and show others that they mattered to her. She was a master gardener who took pride in her gorgeous flower beds and bountiful vegetable harvests, and she was an amateur painter who loved painting landscapes.

And for over 70 years, she played organ and piano for church services nearly every Sunday. I talk about her because she knew the promise Jesus makes here—she didn’t let worry consume her, and you just knew it. She exuded an infectious joy for life and selfless care for others.

that I’ve experienced recently. But I’m also certain my aunt experienced times where she felt weighed down by the burdens she carried. And yet, that anxiety didn’t have the final say. She chose to live in the freedom and strength that comes from demonstrating to others that they are loved and that they are deserving of abundant life. And so, when I think of someone who lived with grace and strength and power, who led by example, I think of my Aunt Norma and NOT those who wield power bent on destruction. And when I think of someone who knew what it meant to affirm the goodness and worthiness of others and who saw the presence of God even in the midst of suffering and hardship, I think of her.

Jesus challenges his disciples and us to show up and be a part of the forces that help dissipate the worries of those around us as far as we are able. Demonstrate grace, show patience, be the one who unbinds the cares and burdens that paralyze us. Show others that they matter. Make this world one where we are free to love one another and this earth, where we have the courage to stand up to those who would rather embrace rage and destruction. And go forth knowing that in spite of everything, even when it seems like nothing is going right, everything is indeed going to be ok.

I remember that she always had a new song for me to sing whenever I’d come to visit that she thought would be perfect for me. One of the songs I remember well was “Thy Holy Wings,” a hymn of hope and healing which I will forever associate with her.

I know that the last couple of years have taken a toll on me, just as they have on most of us. And, when I think about my aunt, I know that I haven’t been successful in staving off the worry and anxiety Spring 2022/Agora

31

Beyond the Wilderness MARCH 4, 2022

by MELISSA BILLS, Campus Pastor and Director of College Ministries

Luke 4:1-21 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”

Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee. When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was 32

Agora/Spring 2022

given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

T

he Christian church has just crossed into the season of Lent, which is a season where we are encouraged to engage in the spiritual postures of self-reflection, humility, and penitence. Similar to our readings for Ash Wednesday, which ask us to be honest with ourselves about our mortality, today’s reading, which is the reading for the first Sunday in Lent, asks us to face openly the very human temptations toward greed and power that divide us from God and from one another.

The devil offers Jesus three temptations in the wilderness: exploitation of food, or basic needs; exploitation of power; exploitation of God’s favor.

“Fill your own belly with good things, no matter the hungry bellies on the other side of the desert,” the tempter suggests.

“Make the nations bow down to you, even if you have to sell your soul to do it,” the tempter offers.

“Call down God’s favor for your own whims, and exploit your divinity for your own gains,” the tempter encourages.

Dear ones, we are living in a world right now that is showing us very clearly what happens when those with power exploit their power to seek to fill their own

Melissa Bills bellies; when they exploit and trample the vulnerable as a show of power; when they exploit narratives of faith and divine will to justify themselves and their actions.

A war is unfolding before our eyes that is a maneuver of flexing power for power’s sake. A pandemic is still plaguing us, in part because we are tempted to feed our own desires for “normal life” ahead of the needs of those who are most vulnerable. Our national politics are in shambles because we keep equating one political party or another as doing God’s divine will, and because winning power has become more important than just about anything else.

I don’t know whether Jesus was actually tempted or swayed by any of the devil’s offerings, but I do know that Jesus, in the wilderness, was faced with the very things that he urges us, with his very life, to guard against. Jesus draws us beyond wilderness temptations to give us an alternative vision for the world.

When Jesus returns from the desert, he goes to the synagogue. He seeks out words of scripture—not the ones he used to go toe-to-toe with the tempter, but words of promise from the prophet Isaiah. He proclaims: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Over and against a world tempted toward exploitation, greed, and power, Jesus lives out words of comfort, hope, and justice for the vulnerable.

Over and against claiming the favor of God for selfish purposes, Jesus proclaims God’s favor for all, and especially for those who have been trampled, exiled, marginalized.

Over and against a narrative of “mightmakes-right,” Jesus gives his life for liberation and healing out of concern for others, beyond concern for self.

Jesus draws us beyond wilderness temptations to give us an alternative vision for the world.

Jesus—in his teachings, his leadings, and in his very body—rejects the wilderness idea that we will find satisfaction and peace in life through serving ourselves.

our world broken. They always leave death counts.

And so Jesus says, “blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry, blessed are the persecuted.” And what he means is “remember the poor, remember the hungry, remember the persecuted and the refugee and the immigrant, the children in poverty and the ones with preexisting conditions; remember the ones in detention centers, the ones drowning in debt, the ones without an advocate.”

When we follow Jesus in bringing good news and hope to these neighbors, we will find that our world will become more and more a place of hope and of joy, a place of peace and of kindness. We are the ones who are called to be the counter-narrative to exploitation and greed. We are the ones who are called to live out a better plot-line, where all are satisfied, secure, safe.

I invite you this season, and beyond, to open your heart to the ways that God is calling you beyond yourself; the ways that God is filling your heart to the brim with love and grace and mercy so that these things might spill over and bless the world; the ways that you are a vessel for the Spirit; the way that you are being led beyond the temptations of this world to a promised land of peace, joy, and provision for all God’s children and all God’s creation. May you overflow with compassion, and may you go forth to bear hope into this wilderness world.

Instead, Jesus tells us, over and over again, that peace and joy come into the world through seeking the good of others. This is the theme of Jesus’s life and teaching: urging us to turn from selfishness and arrogance and greed, that we might instead serve one another.

Not because it gains us spiritual brownie points, but because it makes our world a closer version of what God intended it to be. Jesus knows, and our world knows, that temptations and exploitations of power always end poorly. They always do damage. They always leave Spring 2022/Agora

33

Greatness is a Process

by DAVE MITCHELL, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Head Wrestling Coach

G

ood morning! On Friday, March 11, Donovan Corn competed at the NCAA Division III Wrestling Championships proudly wearing his royal Luther blue singlet. He had 30+ teammates and a number of additional friends and family in attendance cheering him on.

Donovan was seeded 5th at the NCAA Tournament and pinned his first opponent to advance to the quarterfinals.

In a hard-fought match in the quarters, Donovan lost to the #4 seed 3-1, setting up one more match about sixty minutes later that he needed to win to earn All-American honors. Donovan took the mat confident he would win, and his coaches shared that confidence.

He took control of the match early and he was controlling his opponent, winning 2-1. But in an unexpected turn of events, Donovan’s opponent executed a move that put Donovan onto his back and secured a victory by fall, eliminating Donovan from the tournament and denying him All-American honors. It was devastating for Donovan and for all of us there supporting him. A famous 1970s ABC sports announcer, Howard Cosell, had a famous tagline: “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” And Donovan and his team and fans certainly felt all of those things that day!

About an hour after Donovan was eliminated from the tournament, we went to get food at a local restaurant in Cedar Rapids. I pulled into a parking spot behind a car that had this window sticker in the back window: “Greatness is a process.” You see, I believe God puts things and people in our lives to help us at the times we need them, but it is up to us to recognize them. I believe it was more than just coincidence that within minutes after Donovan’s tough loss, God was reminding me that “greatness is a process.” Greatness isn’t achieved overnight and we often times face 34

Agora/Spring 2022

APRIL 22, 2022

major setbacks before achieving it. It is a journey and we can get sidetracked and discouraged when adversity sets in, or we can use that adversity to instill new vigor in pursuit of greatness. That bumper sticker helped me quickly refocus my attention on what needed to be done to help Donovan and the rest of our Luther College Wrestling program continue to grow. The mantra “Greatness is a Process” has been a driving force behind our work as coaches and wrestlers the past few weeks and it will continue to drive our work throughout the summer and fall. Greatness isn’t achieved because we want it to be achieved. Greatness is the result of doing the things that need to be done at the time they need to be done to achieve it.

But what does a bumper sticker on a random car in Cedar Rapids have to do with our faith journey here at Luther College? And what might “Greatness is a Process” mean in terms of our relationship with God? Furthermore, what might that “process” look like? Well, I know a lot more about wrestling than I do about God and religion, and so I’m not sure I’m the one who can provide satisfactory answers to these questions for you! But over the next few minutes through some examples, life experiences and stories, I hope I can share an idea or two for you to consider in your personal faith journey.

In whatever we are trying to achieve greatness in, where should we start?

Probably with a vision. A goal. What is it we want to accomplish? We have to first decide we want to be great in some area. Have you decided an area you want to pursue greatness in? I’ll bet you have.

And if not yet, I hope you leave chapel this morning giving serious consideration to pursuing greatness in some (or all areas) of your life. What I also hope you give serious consideration to today

Dave Mitchell is pursuing greatness in your relationship with God. More on that in a bit.

Once we have that vision, that goal, that area we want to be great, then I think the next step is to establish a plan to achieve it. How can we go about achieving that greatness? What things need to be done and when do they need to be done to make it happen? What sacrifices will need to be made? What resources do we have available to help us achieve that greatness? All of these are questions we need to consider and plans that we need to make. Recall, greatness doesn’t just happen. It is a process to achieve it.

As an example, Donovan Corn has decided he wants to be an NCAA Division III National Wrestling Champion.

He has made the decision that he wants to be great and he is willing to make sacrifices to achieve it, as a number of other guys on our team have also decided. Donovan is on a choir trip today away from campus, so I am going to use

PHOTO COURTESY MARTIN KLAMMER

Dave Mitchell presents his chapel talk with help from Luther wrestlers. have a great professor, a great text, and great classmates working alongside of you to help you master the material.

I think our faith journey, our pursuit of greatness in our relationship with God and being a part of a faith community is very similar. Can we make it to heaven on our own with no other outside human support? Sure, we probably can.

But that journey is going to be very, very hard. We have a better chance, don’t you think, of staying the course and achieving greatness in our relationship with God if we have a pastor leading us, like a coach or professor? And if we are surrounded by others, fellow parishioners, who also have the same goal as us, supporting us like teammates, I

A Gallup Poll from 2020 found that only 47% of US adults are members of a church, marking the first time in over 80 years of Gallup conducting the poll that the number has fallen below 50%.

I think church membership is a little higher in the Midwest, but even locally I have heard lots of reasons from friends and colleagues of why they no longer attend regular church services. A couple of common ones are, “Well, sometimes when I go to a church service, I just don’t get anything out of it.” Or, “I am just busy and I don’t want to go.”

HTTPS://NEWS.GALLUP.COM/POLL/341963/

Tyler DiFiore as an example. I’m going to invite Tyler on the stage now. Tyler is an All-American wrestler and Scholar All-American for us. Tyler also has a vision of winning a National Title. He wants to achieve greatness. I believe Tyler’s pursuit of a National Title is similar to our faith journey which, we hope, ends with us in heaven. Now I know that analogy might sound like a major stretch for you right now, but hang with me here! Can Tyler win a National Title and achieve greatness as a wrestler by himself ? Yes. He probably can! He can watch videos, read books, shadow wrestle as he is doing here, and reach out to others for help from time to time. But it will be very, very, very hard for him to accomplish his goals on his own. He has a better chance of achieving his goal if he has a good wrestling partner to train with as he does here in Ryan Cripe.

And if he is surrounded by teammates who are focused on the same goal he is and they are supporting Tyler in pursuit of greatness, his chances of reaching his goal increase again. And his chances are greatly increased by having a coach that can lead Tyler’s training, help set up a plan for him and guide him on his journey. I have used Tyler and wrestling as the example here, but you could think about this in terms of a tough course content you are trying to master. Could you master it on your own? Yes, probably, but it going to be a lot easier of you

think our chances of achieving our goal increases again, don’t you? Tyler is a part of a team with teammates supporting him and coaches leading him. But if he doesn’t come to practice each day and work towards his goal, what good does that do? He will certainly fall short of his potential and may not reach his goal.

Being a member of a faith community with a pastor leading us and fellow parishioners supporting us is great. But just like Tyler needs to go to practice every day to take advantage of those resources, don’t we have a better chance of growing in our relationship with God and increase our chances of staying the course in our faith journey if we, too, attend regular services? So, Tyler’s process of achieving greatness in wrestling is somewhat similar to our process of achieving greatness in our relationship with God. We have to do what needs to be done at the time it needs to be done to keep getting closer to our goal. Thank you, Tyler and wrestlers…let’s give them a round of applause.

Graph of declining U.S. church membership from a Gallup poll Spring 2022/Agora

35

Believe me, there are many days Tyler and lots of his teammates don’t feel like they get anything out of wrestling practice and there are many, many days they probably don’t want to go! But they do go. Because they know, over time, it will make a difference in their pursuit of greatness. It will help them achieve their goal. I am sure there are times you don’t want to go to class. But you go, because you know, over time, it will make a difference on your success in the course. You do it because you know it is best for you in the long term. Couldn’t we approach attending church services in a similar way? I can tell you from my personal life experience, that over time, attending regular church services has had a very positive impact on my life. Like many of us, there are days I don’t want to go, but I go anyway. And I can honestly tell you that I have never walked out of mass saying, “Man, I wish I wouldn’t have gone to church today.”

Never. Just like I don’t think Tyler and his teammates have ever walked up to the Luther caf after practice and said to each other, “Man, I wish I would have skipped practice today.” Now there are days where I maybe don’t feel like I have been super inspired by the church service or the message, and maybe that’s how you are feeling today with my talk – not super inspired! But that is ok, I am confident you won’t walk out of here saying, “Man, I wish I wouldn’t have spent those 30 minutes at chapel.”

And maybe, just maybe one of you are feeling inspired by today’s chapel talk.

Those are the days, those are the times, when we attend a church service and we hear that message that does inspire us, it does speak directly to where we are in our lives, that it can help shape our life for the better forever. Remember earlier when I said believe God puts people and things in our lives to help us, but it is our job to recognize them? Have you ever missed a class and when it came to test time, the important material on the exam was covered on the doggon day you missed class? I think attending church services regularly is like that. We can’t recognize the people and things God is putting in our lives to help us if we aren’t regularly present at church services to see them!

36

Agora/Spring 2022

Sticker on car in Cedar Rapids lot Yes, greatness in all we do, including our relationship with God, is a process and that process requires some sacrifice and it’s going to come with setbacks. But as James tells us in Chapter 1, verses 2 through 4: Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, when you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

Together, right here at Luther College, we can help each other achieve greatness in God’s eyes. And with the guidance of our pastors, professors, coaches and friends, we can support and encourage each other along the road to greatness in all we do. Amen.

Finding Joy in the Middle of Things APRIL 29, 2022

by MEGAN BUCKINGHAM, Associate Director of Annual Giving

Luke 24: 13-25 Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?”

They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?”

He asked them, “What things?”

They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place.

Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.”

Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”

Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.

As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.

I

t’s three weeks from the end of the spring semester, and it seems like we’re in the middle of doing allthe-things! Final classes, labs, tests, and papers, grading...not to mention recitals, concerts, games, lectures, ceremonies, and presentations.

I keep trying to check items off my todo list, but every time I think I complete a task, Medusa-like, it somehow springs new heads and morphs into three new tasks.

It feels like everything is simultaneously happening far too quickly, and like the finish line is not coming nearly fast enough.

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably saying to yourself, “I just have to get through the next few days/weeks/ months.” I work in the Alumni and Development Office, and during our busy seasons—leading up to Homecoming and Giving Day—my colleagues and I will often encourage each other by saying, “It will be great! It’s going to be awesome! At the very least, soon it will be over!”

Megan Buckingham Soon it will be over.

Because, you know, it’s So. Great. To think about when it will be over. Completed. Resolved. Finished. It’s something we long for. We just know. In our bones. How good that will feel.

To turn in the final paper. Submit the last grades. To (finally!) pass the curriculum committee’s proposal. Or, in my case, to get that mailing out the door!

If we can just make it to the end. To summer break! Commencement! To Luther College carbon neutrality. To the end of COVID. To real structural change that advances racial justice.

Ok, let’s be real, my sights are usually set a lot lower than that last part of the list. At this moment, I’d be pretty happy if I could manage to get to the end of my to-do list for the very-small-sohow-can-it-possibly-be-this-complicated wedding we’re planning for this summer.

Spring 2022/Agora

37

It’s a lot of messy work to be in the middle of doing-all-the-things.

got us into this whole following-himaround-thing in the first place.

The two disciples must have felt very much in-the-middle-of-all-the-things as they walked the seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus on that first Easter.

I’d love to be able to say I understand how they felt. But I don’t think that’s quite fair.

In the middle of this mess, this uncertainty, these many-things-as-yet-undone, Jesus comes to the disciples on the roadway. And OF COURSE they’re too deeply in their own heads to recognize him.

Of course the disciples weren’t just managing messy to-do lists. They were in the middle of something even more deeply uncertain.

During their lives, the Roman Empire and Palestinian Jews were battling back and forth for control of Judea. And, most of the time, Rome was winning.

They lived in a deeply inequitable society. Some people had far more than they needed to live well, while many people didn’t have nearly enough.

They lived in disputed territory. Occupied territory.

And, like us, these disciples are folks who did not think all was right in the world. They knew things weren’t the way they should be. And they were trying to do something about it.

From my comfortable perch in beautiful (if far too chilly) Decorah, I’m not sure I have any right to relate to the disciples’ situation. But I do feel the urgency to get past this middle, and make it to the end of the story.

My to-do list matters! If I do it right, my work is supposed to make Luther College better, more affordable, more equitably accessible for students today and into the future.

Your final exam, paper, and projects are super important! (Professors: I swear I didn’t just say that for your benefit.)

They’re important for credit, yes, and the grade. And also to demonstrate and synthesize what you learned, so you’re ready to apply that new knowledge and skill for the sake of your own future and for the sake of the world.

They were trying to be part of the solution. Taking action to make the world better. I mean, they were pretty committed. They upended their lives to follow a prophet who promised change.

We are always in the middle of the story.

For us today, it’s easy to think of Easter as the end of Jesus’ story. The end of Lent. The end of winter (here’s hoping!). And because we see it as a happy ending, it’s also a new beginning: Easter launches the ministry of the apostles.

The start of Christianity. Spring?

And this is the relatively small stuff, right? We really, really can’t afford to wait for action on climate change. Or racial justice. We need change now, today, this minute. It might already be too late.

But for these disciples on the road, there’s no way Jesus’ death and news of his coming-back-to-life felt like resolution. I’m sure it was devastating, but I can’t help but imagine it also felt almost like a distraction.

There is SO MUCH we need to do.

So much to work on. So much that is urgent. So much that is wrong, that we need to make better. Jesus was supposed to help with that. Instead, he died…and maybe didn’t die…and that hasn’t solved any of the underlying problems that 38

Agora/Spring 2022

If it were us on that road, I’m not sure we’d want to be distracted, either. We just don’t have time for that right now.

But here’s the truth, for the disciples and for us: We are always in the middle of the story.

I’m no historian, but I think it’s safe to say that the Jews didn’t vanquish the Romans in the disciples’ lifetime. Even if we succeed in slowing climate change (a big if !) we’ll have to learn to adapt to the changes our actions have already inevitably wrought.

We are going to work on advancing racial justice our whole lives. Our whole lives.

Our to-do lists will never be empty.

The promise in this story on the road, the promise of Easter, isn’t revelation.

Or resolution. Nor is it a suggestion that we should step off the road, and put down the many-important-things. We shouldn’t.

The promise is that God—that Love, that Joy—will find us in the middle of it all.

Soon it will be over. But really, it won’t.

So let’s open our eyes. Let’s open our hearts. Relish the love, the joy we find in the middle-of-all-the-things.

And let’s continue on the road.

Swifts

by DAVID FALDET, Professor of English

Sitting on a summer evening at the patio table, I hear their sharp chippering as they cut, zigzag, and dive the air.

Swift: a bird name that’s poetry for how they knife the blue sky; for how they drink and feed; for how they couple as they fly; for how they sleep between wingbeats, lifted south by the fall’s first cold; on their flight to Iquitos and tree hollows of the Marañon.

When I feel heavy at the approach of night it buoys me to see the twinkling of their wings, catching the last low-angled sun.

But the first time was different.

Returning from two weeks away I carried our bags to the basement and saw the ledges splashed white.

Something had been at the windows fluttering against the hard, strange light. I found it decomposed on a stack of boxes it had stained: a bullet of feathers – sooty thing, with a tail of quills and fragile feet.

With a stick I pried its arc of wing and its long grim line of beak.

I found its picture in a book that said “It nests in chimneys.” Later, hearing a noise, I went down to look and found a new swift there.

Wings beat the dimness like a heart dislodged from its sheath of bone and flesh, growing till it fills the dark and bursts.

I got a broom and shooed it out.

Spring 2022/Agora

39

Sumer is Icumen In

by DIANE SCHOLL, Professor Emerita of English

Reprinted with permission of Eunoia Review The first poem I ever read myself, smelling of binder’s paste and the basement, my mother’s old anthology from the U so big it fell right through my hands.

I read again, again; it raised the scent of peat, of rain, wood smoke, sheep. A milky sun climbed low in the sky; a cuckoo broke the umber stillness. Time ran backwards like a projector in reverse, over fells and across black tarns, knee deep in moor grass, slipping on lichen. Words like stones rolled round and tripped my tongue.

It was a code that only we could crack.

“Sumer is icumen in,” she’d say, surprised, when early daffodils parted wet leaves in March. That first fat robin starting down our sidewalk made us think, not of Emily Dickinson in her wild seclusion, but gorse and rowan, thorn bush, ash.

“Sumer,” she said, teasing, “icumen in.”

Big overblown hydrangeas steeped the front yard in their heady scent; an ice cream man came cycling down our street, sycamores in full leaf. “Icumen in,” we laughed, the world, the whole world, contracting to a universe.

40

Agora/Spring 2022

Find the current issue and back issues of Agora online

Y

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

Changing your address? Want to stop receiving Agora?

If you do, please email or write us. Contact Agora at agora@luther.edu or write Agora, Main 215, Luther College, 700 College Dr., Decorah, IA 52101.

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

THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE Luther College, 700 College Drive, Decorah, Iowa 52101-1045 Address Service Requested

Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage PAID Rochester, MN Permit No. 289