DESERT HARVEST—Spring 2006
Vol. 14, No. 1

ALL HAIL, ANONYMOUS!
$1 million halfway-mark achieved
by Professor Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Director

   One morning in December, Luise Betterton went downstairs as usual to collect the mail. Late in the year, and after our autumn newsletter has gone out, contributions to the Oberman Chair/Library Endowment do appear; it was not surprising that she found two of our self-addressed envelopes waiting. She casually opened one of these and gasped when a cashier’s check for $50,000 came out, unaccompanied by a letter or any other indication of the giver’s identity. Written at the bottom of the check was the simple notation that it was given in honor of Dr. Morris Martin, who had just celebrated his 95th birthday. Luise hastened to show this marvel to me, and together we sought Dean Donnerstein, who shared our wonderment and pleasure. Ginny Healy, Senior Director of Development of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, said that, in her long experience as a fund-raiser, this was the largest check to arrive casually in the U.S. mail.
   We are much beholden to anonymous donors. The $300,000 challenge that we are currently in the process of matching was offered by another Anonymous—although in this case Luise and I know who the Oberman Endowment’s benefactor is. Whether we know or don’t know, how are we to thank people who through their largesse have made it possible for me to announce to you that on February 20, 2006— by chance, with a gift from Laura and Archibald Brown—our common endeavor, yours and ours, crossed the $1-million mark? We are now on the “downhill leg” of our race toward the $2 million minimum needed to endow a chair at the UA.
   Anonymous, I extol you! I cannot write you individual letters of thanks and post them off to your home addresses. And so I announce my gratitude in this forum, openly, publicly, confident that the members of the Division's Board of Advisors and its Fundraising Committee wish to join me. We all sing your praises! We hope you live long and continue to prosper!
   In a larger sense, every one of us donors can rejoice in the success of this worthy enterprise.  Every single gift, from $5 to $300,000, has been crucial to reaching the present phase. We are not quite on the home stretch  . . .  but is that the end in view there in the far distance? I'll get my field glasses and look again.
   I wish you all a most rewarding, restorative summer season.

20th Annual Town and Gown Lecture and Banquet
Greeley on evangelicals
by Lizzy Ellis-Marino, master's student

   On February 15, the Division was proud to welcome the Rev. Dr. Andrew Greeley,  distinguished author and sociologist, to speak as the 20th Town and Gown lecturer. For the first time in Town and Gown history, the lecture was incorporated into a benefit dinner for the acquisition of the Heiko A. Oberman research library and the endowment of an accompanying professorial chair. That night, the Division and Father Greeley played host to close to 150 people.
   The topic of Father Greeley's lecture was evangelical Christians in America, with particular emphasis on African-American Evangelicals. The basis for his talk was research from the National Research Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, where he is an associate. Besides people who self-identify as “evangelical Christians,” the center includes Southern Baptists, Missouri and Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, Charismatic Christians and Mormons in this category.
   According to Greeley, evangelical denominations are considered by many inside the movement to be the “true heirs of the Reformation.” Despite the considerable media attention paid to them, the center estimates this group to be about one percent of the population.
   Nevertheless, one percent of the American population is a sizable number of people. According to Greeley’s research, evangelicals are a surprisingly diverse group. The old stereotypes of uneducated, poor southerners are simply irrelevant to today’s evangelical community, which is as educated as mainstream America, and is represented across the economic board. African-American evangelicals buck the stereotypes even more. They are a much more cohesive group and are also more conservative religiously. Conversely, they are much less conservative politically, which Father Greeley attributes to their long-standing association with social justice issues such as civil rights.
   The findings of Father Greeley discussed form the basis of his forthcoming book, The Facts about Conservative Christians. As a sociologist and a Catholic priest, Greeley deals with religious questions daily and has a perspective on religion that is quite different from my own. As historians, we tend to see religion as developing over time, with aspects of religious thought having long heritages. Father Greeley, however, is collecting data that point towards the striking diversity of contemporary thought. These data, which will doubtlessly be used by future historians looking to understand our times, are an invaluable tool to those interested in questions regarding American religion.

At the feet of visiting scholars
Professor Erika Rummel, Wilfrid Laurier University
by Tom Donlan, doctoral student
  

   Just before the start of the spring semester, Division students were treated to a mini-seminar by Erika Rummel, professor emerita at Wilfrid Laurier University. Rummel, an internationally recognized Erasmus scholar who currently works on the comprehensive Erasmus edition at the University of Toronto, led conversations on medieval universities, Renaissance humanism, and the relation between late medieval New Learning and the Protestant Reformation.
   Through a study of original charter documents for the University of Paris, we learned about the challenges that Europe’s first universities faced at their inception in the thirteenth-century.  In these new, independent academic communities, it took decades to formalize policies ranging from class space and fees to bribery and drinking in class. Even more important, Professor Rummel emphasized the dominance of scholastic theology in medieval universities. At the heart of this discipline was Aristotelian logic, with which students and professors measured theological theses against counter-theses in order to grasp doctrinal teachings on God, morality, and the Church.
   Our next discussion highlighted the rise of humanism (at the time referred to as New Learning) in medieval universities and the resistance mounted against it by both scholastic theologians and Church authority. In the late Medieval era, a minority of scholars boldly denounced scholasticism as crude intellectual nonsense and campaigned for a pedgogy based on classical Greek and Roman learning. These Renaissance humanists preferred Ciceronian to medieval Latin, and early Christian thinkers to medieval authorities such as Abelard, Lombard, and Aquinas.
   In the primary texts assigned by Professor Rummel, we read that the chief purpose of a humanist education could vary considerably. According to Petrus Paulus Vergerius, the fourteenth-century Italian teacher, the study of letters and antiquity fostered personal virtue in the individual and contributed to the betterment of the state as well. In letters to friends and colleagues, Erasmus argued that humanistic learning involved nothing less than the knowledge and glorification of Christ. Nearly all humanists were united, however, in their passion for the languages of antiquity, history, and eloquence.
   According to Professor Rummel, theologians resented the challenge that Renaissance scholars posed to the authority of tradition and the scholastic method. Nothing infuriated the scholastics more, however, than when the humanists began to apply their historical and philological skills to sacred texts, a scholarly territory they deemed forbidden to all but themselves.  Eventually, a “cultural war” of sorts took form, as humanists and scholastics publicly condemned one another and worked furiously to minimize each other’s influence in both academia and the Church. Within the crucible of the Humanist-Scholastic debate, New Learning became increasingly associated with the proto-Protestant stirrings of the 1510s and early 1520s. According to Professor Rummel, while there was considerable overlap between humanism and the Reformation (disdain for scholastic theology, calls for reform, textual criticism of Scripture), the movements were intellectually and culturally quite disparate.
   Erika Rummel is an energetic and inspiring scholar. We would be lucky to have her back for further study of this complex and fascinating topic.

At the feet of visiting scholars
Professor Andrew Colin Gow, University of Alberta, Edmonton
by Sean Clark, master's student

   As I have written in these pages before, one of the best things about my affiliation with the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies is being able to sit at the feet of the many distinguished visiting scholars who regularly pass through our door. And so it was, as we sat down in Founding Director Professor Heiko A. Oberman’s former office on a warm Monday in January to discuss some of the intricacies of late medieval philosophy and theology with Professor Andrew Colin Gow.
   Professor Gow is quite familiar with the Division, having himself received his Ph.D. from the UA in 1993 under the direction of Professor Oberman. In that same year, he was appointed to the faculty of history and classics at the University of Alberta, where he has taught ever since. Professor Gow has a stunningly broad range of intellectual and academic interests. Trained as an intellectual and cultural historian, he has researched and written on topics as diverse as early modern anti-Semitism, apocalypticism, witch-hunts, biblical translation and exegesis, and most recently, cartography.
   Our assignment for this mini-seminar was to read one of Heiko Oberman’s earliest books, The Harvest of Medieval Theology, originally published in 1963. While Professor Oberman is best known, of course, for being one of the greatest Luther scholars of the twentieth century, early in his career his intellectual

gaze was cast more on the confused (or at least often confusing) terrain of late medieval and pre-Reformation thought. In Harvest, as it is affectionately known, Professor Oberman treats the nominalist philosophy of the “last of the scholastics,” the fifteenth-century German theologian Gabriel Biel. Nominalism took many forms and permutations in the medieval period, but its most basic tenet was the denial of universals. This is heady ground to be sure, where the intellectually faint of heart rightly fear to tread.
   Fortunately for us, we had a very knowledgeable and experienced guide in Professor Gow. Our discussion was wide-ranging and for the most part rather technical, but one of the main themes that revealed itself in the course of the afternoon was that the common, often confessionally motivated, portrayal of late-medieval theology as moribund, a mere dry husk of what it was under Aquinas, was untenable. Indeed, in his discussion of Biel, Oberman showed that when the texts are examined on their own merits, a great deal of continuity can be seen not only between late-medieval theology and that which came before, but also with the Protestant and Catholic reformation movements of the sixteenth century. Far from being a dim reflection of its former glory, late-medieval thought was in fact a rich and developing tradition.
   After several hours of deep discussion, we adjourned to ponder on our own the implications of Biel’s thought for the radical religious, social, and political changes that would wrack Europe in the centuries after his death in 1495. A more enjoyable and stimulating way to spend a Sunday afternoon can hardly be imagined, and our heartfelt thanks go to Professor Gow for so generously sharing with us his time and expertise.

Oh, for a dull moment!
Reflections on the first tenure-track year
by Victoria Christman, Luther College, Iowa, Division alumna

   On February 17, 2005, I returned home from the doctor having confirmed what I had suspected for a couple of weeks—I was pregnant. The baby was due in mid-October. My husband Robert, also a Division alumnus, was lecturing all day at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, where he had a one-year appointment. I made myself a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table. A few minutes later, the phone rang. It was the Dean of Luther College in Iowa, offering Robert and me a joint, tenure-track appointment in the history department. That evening Robert returned from work and asked how my day had been. “You'd better sit down,” I responded . . . .
   So here we are, all three of us, in Decorah, Iowa. After a gloriously uneventful pregnancy, during which I wrote and defended my dissertation, and Robert taught a total of 670 students (with no teaching assistants), and published two articles, Sophia Elizabeth Christman was born in the October of our first tenure-track semester at Luther College. She was such a cooperative baby, in fact, that she waited a week beyond her due date, to be born on the first day of mid-term break.
   Every professor will attest to the fact that the first year of teaching is hectic. Needless to say, ours has been no exception. The saving grace of our work here at Luther is that we occupy a joint-position. This means that we divide a regular teaching load between the two of us. We, therefore, teach two classes each per semester, plus a short, January-term class.
   This two-two load theoretically enables us to balance all the demands of our new life: teaching, research, and child-care. Luther is a small liberal arts college, loosely affiliated with the E.L.C.A.
church, and located close to the Mississippi River in the bluffs of northeast Iowa. Classes are small (never more than 25 students), and expectations for students and faculty are quite high. The college values teaching but does not disregard the research work of its faculty. Because it is a private institution with a healthy endowment, there is a research fund that provides monies for faculty to attend conferences and pursue their research interests. Life could certainly be worse.
   In many ways, we are a million miles away from our grad school days in Arizona. We clearly have more responsibilities on all levels, and the town of Decorah and Luther College are both minute in comparison to Tucson and the UA. But in many ways, we feel our “home” connection strongly. We have started an Early Modern Seminar here on campus, composed of five or six faculty members in various fields (history, English, philosophy), who study the Early Modern period. We meet monthly to read each other’s research and provide some helpful feedback. It is not dissimilar to the Division seminar, if somewhat less demanding! We also find that we are able to use our own research in the classroom. At the moment, I am teaching a course on “The European Inquisitions,” in which students are reading my own translations of archival documents I brought back from the Netherlands. We also guide various student research projects on topics related to Reformation history, in the course of which we are able to draw upon the mental libraries we acquired through many semesters of seminar book-reviews.
   It is hard to believe that so much has happened in just one year. We will certainly breathe a sigh of relief at the close of the semester, having survived all of the challenges, struggles, and thrills it brought us. Some would take the summer to stop and rest. Not us. Instead, we will load the family, baby and all, onto a plane and jet over to Europe for a summer of research. The academic life as we have experienced it thus far, is many things: frantic, stressful, invigorating, satisfying. It seems that the one thing it will never be is uneventful!

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