Jeanne Boeh is a professor of Economics at Augsburg University

As some of you may know and some of you may even care; Adam Smith, the father of economics, is buried in Edinburgh. One of PBS’s well known and admired hosts is the travel author Rick Steve’s. I was aghast to read his explication of how to find Adam Smith’s grave in Edinburgh.

People’s Story-This interesting exhibition traces the conditions of the working class through the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries.  Curiously, while this museum is dedicated to the proletariat, immediately around the back (embedded in the wall of the museum is the tomb of Adam Smith-the author of Wealth of Nations and the father of modern free market capitalism(1723-1790). [i]

This was surprising because it suggests a very poor understanding of Adam Smith and his philosophy. While Smith’s quote about butcher’s or bakers is well known:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.  We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.[ii]

Today he would write, it is not from the benevolence of the smartphone maker or the barista…However, other and even more important quotes are not in the common lexicon. This is significant because Adam Smith is often portrayed incorrectly as an apologist for all things business. Rick Steve’s must believe this distortion. In reality, Adam Smith was suspicious of all unchecked powers including business.

People of the same trade seldom meet together,

even for merriment and diversion, but the

conversation ends in a conspiracy against

the public, or in some contrivance to raise

prices.  [iii]

Adam Smith wrote his most famous book: The Wealth of Nations because he wanted more people and more nations to become “wealthy.” Smith was an opponent of England’s then crony capitalism system of mercantilism. He set out to disprove the notion that the richest nation is the one with the most gold and/or Silver. Instead Adam Smith wrote:

A nation is not made wealthy by childish

accumulation of shiny metals, but it is

enriched by the economic prosperity

of its people.  [iv]

He also wrote that:

No society can surely be flourishing and

happy of which by far the greater part of

the numbers are poor and miserable. [v]

How does an economist reconcile Adam Smith and our work at Augsburg? 

One of our tagline lines is “We are called” which harkens to the whole notion of vocation. Martin Luther greatly expanded our idea of what is a vocation including the thought our job was not our sole vocation but we could have more than one simultaneously, e.g., spouse and parent. You could even have a vocation as a business person because it was not the position that made it a vocation but how you performed the job and for whom. Just a hint, it should be for the glory of God not only for an income.

Recently, Augsburg was mentioned as a college offering more possibilities for low income students at the recent White House Conference on College Opportunity. This whole push to have more students pursue higher education reflects the view that more education means higher lifetime income and a better life. Fortunately, this is mostly true.

Our vocation is to help our students develop their potential and to help them develop the skills and tools necessary to succeed not only in their first but also in their later vocations during their lifetime. This sometimes means suggesting to our advisees that another major might be more appropriate. I believe it also means that we don’t, despite the constant pressure of enrollment needs, reduce our standards. As a former professor in one of my classes said, a few (remember few is a relative term) years ago, I’m not coming down you are coming up. Being at Augsburg, we would, of course, phrase it more diplomatically.

At the recent White House Conference, Michelle Obama noted that the value of an education mostly depends on the work the student puts into it. This implies that when a student complains about their poor grade, you have to gently point out they only spent ten minutes on the assignment and consequently a poor grade doesn’t say anything about their potential only their effort. I believe we need to respect our students and ourselves enough to continue to demand their best efforts regardless of their initial starting point and to demand the same of ourselves.

I always tell people that our students are diverse in every way. We do have low income first generation college student but they are not majority of our students especially when you also count the AFA and the graduate programs. After all, our graduate programs have as students nurses, doctors and software engineers. It is imperative to fully develop the talents of all of our students.

Our students are very heterogeneous and while this makes teaching here rewarding; it also means more hours must be spent on each class and each student than at some other schools. This reality, while wearying, is necessary in order to fully respect our students and ourselves as we fulfill our vocation and help them in one of their current vocations as a student.

In conclusion, I am going to quote a prayer by a Tacoma, Washington Lutheran pastor, Glenn Obenberger:

Through a proper understanding of vocation in this life, we too need to value the vocations our neighbors have that serve us and how we in turn through ours serve them. We confess in the explanation of the First Article of the Apostles’ Creed: “[God] has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still preserves them; that He richly and daily provides me with food and clothing, home and family, property and goods, and all that I need to support this body and life; that He protects me from all danger, guards and keeps me from all evil.” God gives us these gifts and preserves them through such vocations as doctors, nurses, farmers, millers, bakers, grocers, tailors, realtors, parents, police, firefighters, college faculty and staff and the like. Through our vocations, we have the high privilege of being God’s hands, mouth, and heart of flesh in our world today showing His love and compassion to all.[vi]

Amen

The post This I Believe, February 2014: Jeanne Boeh appeared first on Bernhard Christensen Center for Vocation.

Melissa A. Hensley is an assistant professor in the Social Work department.

I lead a monthly “Empowerment Workshop” at a mental health agency in a nearby county.  The people who attend the group choose the topic for discussion each month, focusing on self-care, wellness, and recovery from serious mental illness.

Recently, I was facilitating a discussion on building self-esteem. The group members and I were discussing a worksheet that we’d all completed. The worksheet asked us to list positive qualities we possessed, compliments we’d received recently, and challenges that we had overcome. As we were taking turns sharing our responses, the conversation came around to a middle-aged woman seated at the back of the conference room. She stated that she could not think of anything good about herself. I was surprised at first, but I tried to respond in an encouraging way.

This triggered much sadness because I have known so many people with mental illness who have had similar struggles with self-worth. Societal stigma and discrimination, along with the distress of depression and other symptoms, can thwart efforts at self-care and destroy self-confidence. This ongoing struggle with self-esteem can interfere with even the most determined efforts to recover.

Given this situation, what do I believe? I believe that every person, even those with severe disabilities, have God-given attributes that are meant to be shared in community. I believe that all of us have a right to be treated with respect and compassion. Disabilities or chronic illnesses do not render us less deserving of fair treatment.

I believe that God has created each unique individual in order to build a more vibrant community. I believe that as a Christian, I am responsible for extending love, respect, compassion, and hospitality to everyone I meet. I believe that all of us can contribute to God’s community.

What about the woman in my self-esteem group? I expressed my sadness to her regarding the fact that she could not see the good in herself.  I also urged her to hang on to the worksheet and to think about the questions it asked. I encouraged her to ask people that she knows and trusts to share their observations of her good qualities with her. I encouraged her not to give up, but to seek the good in herself and her life. We all have strengths and gifts to share with each other. Thank God for community, wellness, and recovery!

The post This I Believe, December 2013: Melissa Hensley appeared first on Bernhard Christensen Center for Vocation.

Douglas E. Green is a professor in the English Department

On a spring faculty-staff retreat, about fifteen years ago, the late Dean Marie McNeff, who knew my complicated Judeo-Christian (specifically Jewish-Catholic) background, asked me what I believed.  I told her, “I’m an agnostic who prays.”

I thought I was being very clever, but in fact I was exhibiting a trait shared by a growing number of Americans. According to reports on a recent Pew poll,[1] agnostics and atheists—the “nones”—have become more and more common in the U.S.  And a lot of us non-believers pray.

But what does that mean?  In my case, the impulse to pray is culturally conditioned: Though both sides of my family were Jewish, I was raised a devout Catholic by my mother, who had converted to the faith, and went to Catholic schools until college.  As a child, when I stayed with my father’s parents, I followed my Orthodox Jewish grandfather around the living room of his Queens apartment as he prayed in his tefillin and prayer shawl. I carried a little white Hebrew-English prayer book my grandmother gave me that—marvel of marvels!—you had to read backwards. I droned—and butchered—transliterated Hebrew in imitation of my grandfather. My brothers and sister sometimes marched behind me—all of us moaning and bobbing.  Later, I became an altar boy right before the Latin mass gave way to vernacular English.  To this day, when I do something I regret, I mutter, “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”  Oddly, my contrition feels more authentic in ritual Latin.

So I’ve never intuited from my impulse to pray, or even from prayers that came true, the existence of Another, a Higher Power.  My praying seems thoroughly conditioned by an upbringing in and between two compelling religious traditions; the occasional fulfillment of my prayers, mere coincidence.  But the deep, sincere faith I experienced in my youth and have witnessed all my life in my mother and others has also prevented me from denying the possibility of such a Power: I know firsthand the comfort such faith offers and the goodness that so often flows from it.

Unfortunately, the possibility of a higher power no longer seems comforting: if god exists, I’ve got issues with that deity.  It really boils down to the age-old problem of theodicy: How can god permit evil and the coincident suffering it causes, especially among the innocent?  Though I know there are many compelling answers to this question, I can’t help but withhold trust in such a being.  When I feel most hopeless, I don’t even want to acknowledge the possibility of such an Unfeeling Omnipotence.

Even to me, that response sounds petty and petulant, adolescent rather than mature.  And yet, because I’m a poet and love—actually believe in—literature, I have no compunction about praying.  Why?  Because there’s a kinship between prayer and poetry.

My spirit soars when I read Gerard Manley Hopkins, the 19^th-century Anglo-Catholic cleric, and his ecstatic prayer of thanks—“Glory be to God for dappled things.”  I feel the ominous and terrifying awe of Yeats’s “Second Coming”: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” That poem speaks as clearly to our unfulfilled yearnings and anxiety about the unknown, as it did to the early 20^th ����Գٳܰ���’s.

And then there’s Dickinson’s mysterious meditation on loss and death:

My life closed twice before its close—

It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil

A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive

As these that twice befell.

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

Those last two lines have become a cliché, but they’re really a paradox: we all know the hell of parting—from leave-taking to dying—and have had our fill of it, but in what senses is “parting…all we know of” heaven?  The lines glance at Shakespeare’s “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” but also offer death, quite conventionally in Christian terms, as the gateway to heaven.  Is Dickinson serious or ironic?  Would she, “to dumb Forgetfulness a prey, / This pleasing anxious being [have] resign’d”[2]?  The troubling subtleties beneath the surface of Dickinson’s last two lines belie their seeming ease—and hence capture a dis-ease with our short tenure on the world’s stage.

Whenever I read George Herbert’s “Love (III),” the last poem in The Temple, his 17^th-century collection of religious meditations on the church (earthly, human, and eternal) I believe that ‘communion’ with others, with and through a Love that transcends our earthly understanding, is possible:

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack’d anything.

“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;

Love said, “You shall be he.”

“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,

I cannot look on thee.”

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.”

“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”

“My dear, then I will serve.”

“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”

So I did sit and eat.

These very human creations, these works of art, are what I believe in.  If there is Something Higher, I don’t think that it’s out there waiting to be petitioned—the answer to our prayers.  It resides in whatever prompts us to do better, to foster human and humane community, to strive toward beauty and truth and to find those qualities in each other.  If there’s a greater being or power, it resides in Wordsworth’s “intimations of immortality” or Frost’s rare, ephemeral vision of “something” at the bottom of a well: “Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.”

And that will have to do.  It will have to be enough.  For me, faith means accepting, and caring for, this smaller world—the earthy and earthly scope of our lives—and learning “what to make of a diminished thing.”[3]

The post This I Believe, November 2013: Doug Green appeared first on Bernhard Christensen Center for Vocation.

by Lori Peterson, Associate Vice President and Dean of Graduate and Professional Studies

A few years ago, I was part of a group of faculty and staff at Augsburg that gathered to reflect on our individual sense of vocation and our collective sense of calling as a College.  It was an inspiring, deeply reflective set of days spent reading, thinking, and sharing.  One of our culminating experiences was to write a “This I Believe” essay, based on the popular 1950’s radio series hosted by Edward R. Murrow.  The exercise of writing and the essays that emerged were powerful.  In reflection on the work of writing my essay, though, it seems to me that there is a difference between articulating what we believe (know to be true) and what we believe in.  For me, believing in something is the definition of faith.

As I look back at my life, I can see that I’ve spent a fair amount of time and energy in exploration of belief, but feel I’ve spent a lesser amount of time exploring what it means to believe in something [to have faith] and just what it is I believe in.  I guess it could be said that I have explored ways to believe in many ‘genres,’ primarily but not exclusively Christian.  I was baptized and in early years attended a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church.  Then, because my parents felt conflicted in the Missouri Synod, I grew up and was confirmed in a United Church of Christ (Congregational) environment where I sang in the adult choir, taught Sunday school, and in general, enjoyed a sense of belonging to a faith community.  During my early college years, I attended Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship gatherings and Assembly of God church services with my roommate – they were just so much more vocal and expressive (e.g., fun) than my staid UCC experience.  Soon, however, the novelty wore off and I found myself yearning for a more reflective environment, so I returned to the UCC.  Then, as part of the transition to married life (the first round), I agreed to take classes and join the Catholic Church.  A conflict of belief related to the practice of the confession (and conflict in the marriage) had me again back at my home UCC church.  Fast forward a few years when I was introduced to the ELCA upon moving to Minneapolis-St. Paul, and I’d come full circle back to the Lutheran belief system.  In more recent years, experiences such as living in Japan, spending time on the Rose Bud Indian Reservation and teaching business students about religious diversity in the workplace have all allowed me to further explore the belief systems of Shintoism, Buddhism, indigenous spirituality, Judaism, and Islam.

Back to the This I Believe essay I wrote just a few years ago. As part of the essay, I stated that I believe there is comfort that can be present in trial, even the trial of surviving the wrenching death of a daughter; a comfort that does not necessarily provide answers.  I did not state specifically where I believe this comfort comes from.  What I can say now, upon further reflection and as a product of all of the exploration that I have described above, is I am convicted it comes from some being beyond me and that this being is ultimately benevolent.  It is a part of and at the root of all creation. I have met, felt, and heard this being.  It is in me and in you; in my dog, cat and horse friends; in my shady basswood tree and the prairie grass that blows in the wind; and it is in the love we share among us. It was made manifest in the personhood of Jesus Christ, and it was present in Mohammed and the Buffalo Calf Woman.  It is a holy spirit, and I believe in its presence as a comforter, guide, and wisdom giver.

The post This I Believe, October 2013: Lori Peterson appeared first on Bernhard Christensen Center for Vocation.