Well, Of Course

It is time to get rid of the humanities as unproductive, useless money drains. Gradgrind has been making the case for years. The numbers! The facts! And now we have this from the maven of humanism, Stanley Fish, in an Opinionator column of his in the New York Times several weeks ago [click here for the article]: “I have always had trouble believing in the high-minded case for a core curriculum—that it preserves and transmits the best that has been thought and said—but I believe fully in the core curriculum as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists.”

Thomas Gradgrind

Well, there you have it. Milan Kundera has one of his characters, Paul, say that Europeans will never be able to fight another war because they don’t believe in anything anymore. That is, the French can’t and won’t fight for the French way of life because they don’t believe in it (at least against other nations; I’m not saying anything about torching their neighbors’ businesses and bashing the windshields out of tante Yvette’s car, an altogether understandable way to preserve one’s way of life). Nor can perhaps the most-listened-to (or heard) of the humanists in the U.S. today make a case for the humanities that is anything else than a French temper-tantrum at his friends losing their jobs.

But let me put it to you: why would you do anything else—if you didn’t believe in it?

This is what has been slowly choking the life out of the humanities. Once the Gradgrind argument became vogue—that is, once we bought the idea that facts, numbers, etc., should determine the good of the humanities—it was only a matter of time.

Ironically, the humanities have in some sense been a millennia-long protest against a view of the world that is “just the facts, ma’am.” Their very existence, their very own articulation of their raison d’être, is that they give access to some other non-quantifiable, qualitative dimension of human life: that of the soul, that mysterious thing we all know we have but whose existence we cannot prove by empirical measure.

Humanism, in fact, and Wittenberg humanism in particular, prizes this unproven thing, this thing whose existence has no demonstrable measure, as the center of human life, as the definitional element of humans. Luther defines the human being by his aristotelian potential in his Disputatio de homine: hominem posse justificari—man has the ability to be justified. Here he lays a theological finger on the distinctive element of human beings as overagainst all other creatures. Humans have the ability either (failingly) to justify their own existence before God, or to receive from God the justification for their existence. All other things have their account. It is humans alone who seek—and either make up or blessedly receive—an account. In other words, it is humans alone who are possessed of a soul, a soul caught in immeasurable existential Anfechtung or temptatio. And that’s why we need the humanities—to help us live in this strange place, between God and the animals, between good and evil, between infinite beauty and unspeakable horror amidst the truths and deceptions, the scant justices and barbarous injustices involved in human life.

That’s what we think. But if that account makes no sense to you, at least the humanities keep a few of Stanley Fish’s friends employed. 

World-Class Liberal Arts for Lutherans

The point RenMus has been attempting to make—with some success, we hope!—is that a new way in Lutheran higher education can and must be found. Worn out are those attempts to turn essentially parochial institutions into the multi-use, “everything-to-everyone,” institutions we see today. In fact, the success rate for Lutheran colleges that have become everything to everyone if only they might win a few for their coffers is dismally low. The Church’s interest in higher education really cannot be anything other than “a theologically conversant and literate laity and clergy.” All other “objectives” of higher education can be met by large state universities. So let’s leave those objectives to them and attend to our own interests.

Liz Reisberg makes a similar point in today’s Inside Higher Ed in an article titled, “If not a world class research university, then perhaps world class liberal arts?” The piece hinges on two arguments. First, world-class research university is coterminous with big bucks; liberal arts education is relatively much less costly. Second, given the tortuous route of a typcial worker’s “career” these days, liberal arts education is poised today as at no other time to be useful.

Mutatis mutandis, the same arguments Reisberg makes can be directly applied to Lutheran higher education. Chasing the latest professional program is always going to be much more costly than sticking with a solid liberal arts curriculum—and the payoff disappointing to the effort given. And since Lutheran higher education educates for one’s vocation, Lutheranly understood, and not one’s “vocation,” understood as “career,” it uses the human arts (artes humaniores) to that end on the premise that one learns to be a human better by reading Thucydides than by learning the precepts of marketing.

While the first point is one going to the proper management of limited resources, the latter is really a theological, not a merely aesthetic, issue. The Wittenberg Reformers were convinced that the higher education entailment of the Lutheran Reformation was a radical approach to the Western intellectual tradition through the sources themselves. To be sure, other approaches to higher education were wildly popular at their time; Melanchthon could complain with the best of us that students eschewed the liberal arts and chose instead what was “universally more saleable.” But for the Wittenberg Reformers, higher education was a matter of best preparing students to live under God’s call in a world and under orders created by God for men and their benefit. It was not, finally, business prowess or bureaucratic advancement that made for a life well-lived in the Wittenberg way; rather, a life well-lived in the Wittenberg way was one with a deeply cognizant sense of being located in a specific time and place, gifted with a certain wisdom handed down from antiquity and with an eschatological horizon that meant that this world was not all there was. That was the end to which the Wittenberg Reformers put the artes humaniores.

And that’s the end to which their modern heirs should continue to educate. Indeed, Thucydides is still the father of political philosophy, and the eschatological horizon hasn’t changed a bit. It’s only that we heirs of Wittenberg seem to have lost our way between our past and our future. But by approaching things like Wittenbergers, that is, by understanding what we ought to do now based upon where we have come from, based upon what we already know, we can find our way again. 

Melanchthon and the “Tradition” of Natural Law

At the risk of greatly oversimplifying things, Christianity has treated pagan antiquity in one of two major ways. On the one hand, the pagan antiquities have a long and noble history of coming in for heavy weather in the realm of Christian thought (think: Tertullian). On the other hand, Augustine, for example, thought of the heritage of pagan antiquity as “Egyptian gold,” something to be appropriated by the Church for its purposes. More recently, C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man elaborates his understanding of the natural law (whose clearest distillation is found in the divine Decalogue, Ex. 20) and its representation within not only the cultural tradition of the West, but also of the manifold cultures of the world. Abolition of Man, in other words, represents something of an apologetic for the Christian use of pagan source material.

Within the cacophony raised by Luther’s screeds against Aristotle and pagan philosophy (which he regarded—rightly—as having been misappropriated by scholastic theology) it is difficult to hear anything but a Tertullian-esque stance. But if you listen more closely, you can discover that the situation on the ground in Wittenberg was much more nuanced. Even as Luther was dropping some of his juicier anti-Aristotle comments, his colleague Philipp Melanchthon was working out a theory for the inclusion of the pagan humanities in the Wittenberg arts/philosophy faculty. His ability to do so was opened up by nothing less than Luther’s coming to clarity, in the early 1520s, on the Scriptural distinction between Law and Gospel. Now, with some qualification, the Law could be seen reflected and taught in antique pagan ethics, literature, and philosophy (so Melanchthon).

But how did this come to be? Melanchthon offers a tradition-theory for the presence of the natural law in the pagan works of the West:

[Homer] says, “Ill deeds do not attain to virtue, and even a slow man catches up with a fast one” [Od. 7.329]—that evil deeds do not lead to success or have a good outcome, and that the wicked man, however fast he may be and however versed in deceit, is nevertheless caught, and even by one who is lame. There is no doubt that this kind of saying was first uttered by the holy fathers [i.e., the patriarchs] and transmitted to posterity. Then they were passed on from one to the other, one could say from hand to hand, and finally extended to the men by whom they were included in these written monuments [the classical heritage], so that, put in an illustrious and perspicuous place, they could be kept in the memory of all posterity and beheld with admiration. [“Preface to Homer,” Kusukawa & Salazar, 43; brackets 1, 3, and 4 added]

Herein Melanchthon supplies at least a partial answer to the question on the minds of many a Wittenberg student who had developed Luther’s venemous attacks on Aristotelianizing scholasticism into a self-chosen educational program that rejected all learning but the theological.

Why does pagan learning matter? Because it evidences God’s providential guardianship of His Law, so that, here on earth and among men, the pagan authors can and in fact do offer no little guidance for a proper life. Indeed, because God has made all His established orders holy by, well, establishing them (that of the Church, of the household, of the state), savvy living within those orders is also a holy thing. And the pagan authors can excellently serve this end. Egyptian gold, indeed.

[Graphic: The Blinding of Paul, epitaph for Veit Winsheim, who delivered “Preface to Homer;” City Church, Wittenberg]

Kilcrease on Faith and Reason

Readers of renascentes Musae will certainly be interested in Jack Kilcrease's disentangling of the sometimes conflicting, and nearly always mis-represented, data on the role of reason in the theological anthropology of the Wittenberg Reformation: whipping boy or useful friend? His post is aptly titled "Luther on Faith and Reason: A Primer."

Vocation, Vocationalism, and Liberal Education Lutheranly Conceived

One facet of American modernity that stands in sharp contrast to Lutheran theology is the reduction of vocation (vocatio, Beruf) to vocationalism. While it is not clear that all use of modern terminology built on the "vocat-" stem bears intentional animus toward the more fulsome, Lutheran theological sense of the term, it is the case that what moderns mean by one's "vocation" differs dramatically from what Lutherans mean by one's vocation. Untangling the mess, that is, extricating vocation from vocationalism, is thus a key element in building the theological and intellectual substructure of confessional Lutheran liberal education.

Again, the confessional documents come quickly to our aid in this endeavor. The human being, who is constituted by being addressed by God in His Word--both in His Law and in His Gospel--, is subject, first and foremost and universally, to God's directive, "You shall have no other gods before Me," meaning: "We should fear, love, and trust in God above all things." All else, all other human action, must, at least paradigmatically, flow from obedience to the First Commandment. Thus, for example, Commandment Four means that "we should fear and love God so that we do not despise or anger our parents and other authorities, but honor them, serve and obey them, love and cherish them." The human being addressed by God in His Word is also socially located, and that social location does not remove God's address to him. Rather, because he stands under God's universal address in the First Commandment, within his social location, his "station in life," his action within that realm flows from his first being addressed by the God who is to be feared, loved, and trusted above all things. In other words, no matter in what situation the Christian finds himself, he remains as he has always been: addressed by God, "called" by God. His vocation is therefore first and foremost to act in the way that a creature addressed by God is to act, by keeping the Ten Commandments. Note that there is no prescription for a certain career-path, no age-limit top or bottom, no boundary set but that set down by the fact of one's calling, one's being addressed by God.

Second, it is specifically under the Gospel that the God who presents Himself in the First Commandment demonstrates Himself to be worthy of the fear, love, and trust He demands. Put differently, Christ in His cross reveals the merciful heart of His Father. 1 Corinthians 2.16: "'Who has known the mind of God to take counsel with Him?' We have His mind--Christ." This self-disclosure of God the Father's heart in the cross of Christ evokes, calls forth, the confession that "God has made me and all creatures; He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, etc." The cross of Christ--that element of Pauline kerygma that the saint gleefully exclaims he had determined to know nothing other than among his hearers--becomes the flash-point, the locus of revelation, through which and in which the gracious will of God the Father is made known and through which and in which the Christian is able to confess, "God has made me and all creatures, etc." The Christian ethical entailment of this is simply a repeat of the chorus in the Ten Commandments. "We should fear and love God so that we don't..., but do...." ~ "For all this it is my duty to thank and praise, serve and obey Him." Again, no specified career path, no age limit. The Christian's vocation is determined by his being addressed by God, first in the Law and then in the Gospel.

The creedal explanation, however, "thank and praise, serve and obey," not only recalls the obligation laid upon me as a creature addressed by God and expressed in the Ten Commandments, but also reflects back to those gifts of God given to me under the First Article of the Creed. My thanks and praise, my service and obedience, to God, are carried out through the profitable use, the exercise, and the development of His gifts attached to me as addressed and confessing subject. This is how Luther puts it in the Explanation of the First Article in the Large Catechism, §19, 23:

Now, all that we have, and whatever else is in heaven and upon the earth, is daily given, preserved, and kept for us by God. Therefore, it is clearly suggested and concluded that it is our duty to love, praise, and thank Him for these things without ceasing [1 Thess. 5.17–18]. In short, we should serve Him with all these things, as He demands and has taught in the Ten Commandments.... In this way the heart would be warmed and kindled to be thankful, and to use all such good things to honor and praise God. [ed. Paul T. McCain, et al., Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, 2nd ed. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2006), pp. 400–401; bold print added]

Lutheran higher education thus falls (a) under the First Article of the Creed; and (b) within the realm of Christian vocation, not [Christian] vocationalism, and is that intellectual and social space wherein the gift of the reason is, in a special and focused way, profitably used, exercised, and developed. As such, confessional Lutheran higher education seeks to use tools uniquely adapted to the development of the mind to ends that honor and praise God, above all to aid the recipients of such an education to use their reason faithfully to confess the God of the Creed. In precisely this service, the Wittenberg Reformers enlisted the "human arts," the arts that are at the center of being a human being endowed with reason, the "liberal arts," and the best of the human arts that had come down through the Western tradition. This was undertaken without regard for one's station in life--undertaken without a sense of vocationalism, but in the pursuit of vocation, lutheranly understood. Even more specifically, it was undertaken in pursuit of the godly and profitable use, exercise, and development of that uniquely human quality and good, the reason.

Faith & Reason: Something Worth Thinking about...

Jim Peters, a good friend, fine Christian thinker, author of The Logic of the Heart, Professor of Philosophy at The University of the South and chair of the Department of Philosophy, has the following to say about the natty matter of faith and reason. Listen to it on Issues, Etc. Click here for the audio.

The Purposes of Liberal Education and What We Read

Most students I talk to who become psychology majors in college do it to find an answer to the secrets of human motivation: Why do humans do what they do? This impulse to turn to a quasi-science like psychology is, in the end, rather sophomoric. The question posed is sophisticated enough and driven by real curiosity. But seeking the answer in psychology short-circuits the pursuit by excluding other real contenders that explain human life, human motives, human “wiring,” man’s location in the kosmos, and man’s location in society. In fact, one could argue that what emerged in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries as the so-called “social sciences” are, in fact, narrow Enlightenment approaches to the questions and answers to the big questions that Western higher culture has concerned itself with from the inception. And those are the questions to which the higher liberal education, in part, directs itself. So from the perspective of liberal education, Thucydides matters because he is among the first to pose and attempt to answer the natty questions of human motivation, human nature, and the interaction of human agents. Vergil matters because he articulates in ways no modern civics book can the demands and complications of patriotism. The list goes on. Every profound modern attempt to drive at the nature of things, including that undertaken by liberal education, cannot do its work properly without first considering the ways of positing those questions and answering them offered heretofore.

Even if contemporary defenders of traditional liberal education are quick to retreat from admitting they’re thinking of, much less propounding, something we might call a “canon” (see, for example, the pusillanimity of Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, and Bruce S. Thornton in The Bonfire of the Humanities), traditional liberal education in fact not only countenances but even recommends and revels in a something, in this case, a list of books, that “measures up” to the perennial human questions (“canon,” κανών/kanón, in its original conception is a “measuring reed;” the “list” we think of when we think of the term “canon” is a “canon” only by metonymy, by applying the term used for the measuring stick to the thing measured). Even our thinking about human nature, the nature of God, what truth, beauty, and justice look like, is traditionally formed. I am concerned about these questions because they have been handed down to me as a denizen of 21^st century Western society. To approach these questions, it only makes sense to think about recognizably great answers to them by direct encounter with the texts that have broached them. This direct encounter with such texts not only whisks me quickly towards some profound answers, it also enables me to escape, if need be, the confines of the “traditional” answers: if I know, for example, that my intuitive sense that justice is simply whatever the one in power determines to be just has already been articulated—and refuted—by Plato in the Republic and the Gorgias, or at least for his own time, I am enabled to move past a pessimistic view of justice that really isn’t just and towards something that may, in fact, better grasp justice. If, however, I encounter “justice” in a term like “social justice” in a sociology class, I am stuck with, or rather mired in, its idiosyncratic definition, left to think that there’s only one way to answer what it is, and hence only one way to pursue it. Let me think about justice from the beginning, however, and I am much better prepared to understand what it is, its complications, and its promises.

That’s why theology, too, is a “traditional” discipline. It doesn’t make up answers to the nature of God or dream them up, it works in a triangle between the base text, Scripture, what great theologians have already thought about it, and the contemporary reader of both, who avails himself of the tools of the languages of Scripture, grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, to think it all through. Such an encounter shuts off blind alleys, or at least puts the reader on notice that one’s coming, opens avenues for understanding not immediately apparent, and, as above, whisks the student away quickly towards a more profound, if not also more complicated, answer. This is that credo ut intelligam et intelligo ut credam (“I believe in order to understand, and I understand to believe.”). Liberal education says that when faced with the question, “Why didn’t God choose to become an ass rather than a man to save mankind?” we’ve already got some pretty profound answers to the question (Anselm’s Cur deus homo? for example). It also says that Anselm’s answer can and should be read with critical appreciation and appreciative criticism, so that his answer can be accepted for what it is, refined, rejected, added to, or what have you. But Anselm’s answer, to continue with this example, keeps me from spinning my wheels or simply dismissing a question that begs for an answer.

So is there a canon? Yes, it’s one that corresponds to the profound and profoundly important perennial human questions by profoundly bringing the inquirer into direct contact with profound, if not always correct, answers.

Such was the shape of the Wittenberg curriculum in the faculty of the arts, made up as it was, of the artes humaniores, “the quite human arts.” At Wittenberg the answer to “What is man?” was enriched and complicated and challenged, inspiring further inquiry and thought, by Homer, Cicero, Horace, the Bible. It wasn’t good enough to think about the question using the Bible alone because, well, other humans had offered other profound answers to the question, answers that might or might not enrich, challenge, and complicate the biblical answer. Nor in Wittenberg was it good enough to answer the question using Homer, Cicero, or Horace alone, without the Bible, for the same reasons. The Bible might offer an excellent theological answer to anthropology; but it could not, perhaps, offer an answer to human political and social excellences, or at least in the same way that Homer, Cicero and Horace could. Notate bene, however, that what the Wittenberg Reformation rejected was the scholasticism of the late Medieval world that offered an attenuated encounter with these profound answers, if any at all. The scholasticism of the time provides an analogue to today’s hyper scholasticism manifested in the profusion of disciplines and subdisciplines, each more specialized than the next, that, in the end, only wind up short-circuiting the liberal educational impulse to have profound encounters with profound ideas through the...”canon.”

"Lutheran Civilization" and a Few Good Books

Some years ago I was teaching in Sewanee at The University of the South. That was during the depradations of what I’ll call the Spellings régime in the U.S. Department of Education. It seemed like every day there was more and more bad news spilling out of the agency. And the agency had the colleges by the you-know-whats. Federal money had long since become the unsalubrious life-blood of colleges and universities; and receiving it meant pleasing accreditation agencies. The news from the top, from Republicans suspicious that undergrads were being hopelessly brainwashed by useless liberal professors with nothing better to do than use their lecterns as bully-pulpits for Marxism and feminism and postmodernism, was that colleges and universities must now measure student outcomes. In other words, if a student set out to learn history, the colleges and universities needed to measure what the student had gained from his or her years of education. (Little did the Spellings régime realize how completely and dehumanizingly it had drunk down the Marxist-materialist thesis; see below).

Now, this isn’t a plug for useless education. So hold your horses. This is a critique of using fiat and mandate tied to financing to force quantifiable, socially and economically “productive” outcomes. In fact, it's a critique of quantifiable socially and economically productive outcomes. If you’ve caught the liberal arts bug yet, you’ll know where this is going.

Liberal education has never thought of itself in terms of social and economic “outcomes,” whatever those may be. It operates with a completely different framework. It says something like “you are what you read.” And so it reads. And it reads what has emerged over the years to typify, challenge, change, re-trench, reinvigorate, repristinate, etc., that which, in the most traditional of ways, is good, beautiful, and just. Notice you don’t see “quantifiably economically and socially productive” as one of the criteria.

To put it differently: we read Homer not to become better social workers or engineers, but to become better humans, or rather, to understand our own humanity (and if we do that, we'll probably become better social workers and engineers, but that's for another time). Why? Because Christian liberal education begins with the premise that the human being, who stands as the crown at the center of all the Triune God's erstwhile and ongoing creative activity, whom, as a race, God Himself in human flesh redeemed through the spilling of His blood, whom, socially broken, God Himself reintegrates into the communion with Himself and of His people through the rich and daily forgiveness of sins in the one, holy, sanctified Church—that that creature in its essence cannot, dare not, without great affront to God Himself, be boiled down to a cog or consumer unit in a world that, at the end of the day, is deprived of spirit and soul and remains nothing but material, the atoms exchanged in the ongoing ebb and flow of primal energy.

Talk about two fundamentally, radically different visions of humanity. In the one, mankind is no better than a squirrel, except that he can be trained better and more intentionally—a mere accident of an impersonal Big Bang with the added bonum of an instinct that can be tamed; in the other, mankind from Adam to the last person is endowed with body and soul and spirit and loved and given to unceasingly, in body, soul, and spirit, by a God who is a Personal Being whose very essence it is to love and give, first within in His Being, from Father to Son, and back, etc., but so infinitely that it spills forth toward created beings which, from their creation to their redemption to their sanctification are nothing if not given to by God.

But back to the Spellings regime: what Margaret et al. formulated was the (perhaps unwitting?) death-knell of liberal education: a policy that forced colleges and universities—even Christian ones, even Lutheran ones!—to buy into the basic premise that humans are but cogs and consumer units. That was step one. Step two was to get rid of anyone she didn’t get a harumph out of.

That's when she, as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it, "barred the American Academy for Liberal Education [AALE] from accrediting new institutions or programs for at least a half year." Because they read books. And because they operated with a premise about being human that differed from the truncated Spellings vision. I'm glad to say the AALE seems to be doing better these days, even if it, and liberal education, are not yet out of the woods.

All of that by way of saying that in those days I was down in my cups (albeit, when figure of speech reprised reality, I opted for the Lutheran malt-and-hops version of "wherever two or three [Episcopalians] are gathered, there's a fifth"). It was at those times, that my colleague and good friend Chris McDonough would remind me, not without a bit of nationalist pride, that Irish monks once took to the hills with nothing more than the few books they could gather in their arms--this, of Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization lore.

It was just a few good books. I am reminded by this of so much of what we know about Lutheran history, but that rarely gets isolated like I'm going to do now. One thematic strand woven into the history and fabric of Lutheranism is that it is, finally, about a few good books, and all of them about One Good Book, aka The Good Book. It's about reading. It's about reading closely, and well, and taking seriously the claims books make on you. In the world of Scripture, words aren't just words, they're powerful things. They do what they say. God's words do what they say, and the correlate of this, one often overlooked, is that other words do what they say, too. You are what you read. In other words, if you're going to be a learned, eloquent, thoughtful Lutheran, you have to read like a learned, eloquent, thoughtful Lutheran.

That's why Lutherans care about books. The story of confessional Lutheranism in North America is the story of words and books. Words mattered. And words matter. You can't re-write the Augsburg Confession with Samuel Schmucker and remain Lutheran. The confessional Lutheran laity arrived in this country poor and destitute. But they had their books: their hymnbooks, their Small Catechisms, and their Bibles. Because words mattered, so did books.

But not all of them. Knowing a few good books well is worth a great deal more to being a learned, eloquent, thoughtful Lutheran than knowing many books.

Perhaps this serves as a principle in Lutheran higher education, then: books matter. Good books matter. Knowing how to read, and read well and intensively, matters. And if this serves as a principle of Lutheran higher education, then it stands that at the center of Lutheran higher education is the reading of good books. Lutheran higher education not only can, but even must, concentrate on this center.

This alleviates so much of the burden of institutional culture that has developed, in line with the materialist premise betrayed by the Spellings régime, in modern Lutheran higher education. It means that a good, confessional Lutheran education will focus not on the scholasticism of modernity (just as the reformed University of Wittenberg rejected the scholastic apparatus for a bracing encounter with primary texts). It means that a good, confessional Lutheran education won't replace reading good books with doing good deeds (read: service programs and the like). It means that a good, confessional Lutheran education can--even must--be constituted by the reading of good books.

This has curricular, and therefore institutional, repercussions. It means that the curriculum of the confessional Lutheran college can, may, must be devoted to the reading of a "few good books," to the classics of the West, the repository of what is, traditionally, good, beautiful, and just. It means that an institution can, may, must concentrate all its resources on just that.

And with that comes freedom. Such an education does not require massive, expensive facilities, but small, well-appointed seminar rooms; it does not require competing with business for its best minds, but dedicated, educated, eloquent, thoughtful Lutheran educators who think a few good books are important enough to forego a handsome salary (which does not mean they shouldn't be well paid, just not exorbitantly); it does not require amassing a student body of consumers for whom one college is better than another on the basis of its amenities, just students who wish to become learned, eloquent, and thoughtful Lutherans.

A venture like this promises to be small. But that's fine. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. And a few good books in the arms of fleeing Irish monks [read: learned, eloquent, thoughtful confessional Lutherans] are enough to preserve the modest thing we might call "Lutheran civilization," a civilization that, in its cultivated sense, is one of few good books, and of The Book.