Introductions

Over the weekend, as you'll note in the right-hand sidebar, we have added 2 new bloggers to Renascentes Musae, both experts on Lutheran higher education: Erik Ankerberg and Carl P.E. Springer.

Ankerberg is Associate Professor of English at Wisconsin Lutheran College. He holds the Ph.D. in English from Marquette University. Springer, Professor of Classics at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, holds the Ph.D. in classics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Between the three of us, we have decades of experience in higher education, both as students and as faculty, a great many of those years spent in Lutheran higher education: Northwestern College (Springer), Concordia Ann Arbor, Concordia River Forest, and Wisconsin Lutheran College (Ankerberg), and St. Olaf College, Bethany Lutheran Theological Seminary, and Bethany Lutheran College (Bruss). In addition, we share an abiding zeal for the Lutheran intellectual tradition, literae humaniores, "the languages," and confessional Lutheran theology. Over time, I have no doubt you will learn more about each of them from the links off this blog to their personal profiles.

As you can see from what's above and what has been posted elsewhere on this blog, Renascentes Musae is something of an "ecumenical" endeavor: it is a blog for (and now of) Christians of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession regardless of their synodical affiliation. We support every embrace of the Wittenberg ideal no matter where it may be found. Indeed, two of us are Missourians, another a Wisconsinite. Two of us were raised in Missouri (not the same 2 as are in Missouri today), one by a long-standing Missouri Synod family, the other in a family that came to Missouri from the ALC; the third of us was raised a Protéstant, if my recall serves me correctly. All three of us have been educated in synodical institutions of higher education: one of us in the ELS and erstwhile ALC, one in the LCMS, the third in WELS. Two of us are laity; one is ordained. Two of us have the Ph.D. from secular land-grant institutions, one from a Jesuit institution. Perhaps these facts bear witness to the strength and persuasiveness of the Lutheran intellectual and theological tradition: it has the power, as a shared inheritance, to make possible this conversation across synodical lines and institutional affiliations.

In any case, I have every confidence that the addition of these two writers will in every way enhance the content of what is written and increase the blog's appeal to established readers--and to readers as yet unidentified--as Renascentes Musae continues to offer historically, theologically, and intellectually well-grounded ideas for reprising the Wittenberg ideal in Lutheran higher education in North America in the 3rd millennium. Gott hilf uns allen!