ABOUT THIS BOOK

Called to Reckon offers a non-traditional history of Augustana College by centering the narratives of racially and ethnically diverse students and educators often overlooked in the institution’s past. The book traces how the college, founded by Swedish Lutherans with a mission to educate for the common good and “serve the neighbor so that all may flourish,” has been challenged to live up to these values over its 160-year history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jane E. Simonsen is a professor of history and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and the Richard A. Swanson Chair of Social Thought at Augustana College. She is the author of Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919.

Contributions by Steven Bahls, Robert Burke, Lizandra Gomez-Ramirez, Lauren Hammond-Ford, Sarah Lashley, Jason Mahn, Harrison Phillis, Mark Safstrom, Monica M. Smith, Christopher Strunk, and Andrea Talentino.

REVIEWS

“What happens when a college creates time and space to think about the ways that it has changed over its history? The result is beautifully documented in this book: a reframing of the institution’s story that gives credit to the past, confesses mistakes made along the way, and re-situates the institution in its (markedly different) twenty-first century setting. Academic leaders at all levels, and across the entire higher education landscape, have much to learn from this institution’s remarkable effort.”—David S. Cunningham, author of Reading is Believing and editor of Vocation Across the Academy

“In a world grappling with ecological despair, divisive paradigms, and spiritual disconnection, this book offers a luminous and grounded vision for hope. It calls us back into the sacredness of inclusion and deeper reflection. This is not only a work of literary beauty—it is a theological and pedagogical reckoning.”—Lamont Anthony Wells, executive director of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Stephen Bahls

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Naming Our Ghosts

Harrison Phillis and Jane Simonsen

1. Towards Right Relations with Native Neighbors

Jane Simonsen

2. Serving Students and Neighbors: Community Implications of Campus Expansion

Sarah Lashley

3. Performing Blackness: A History in Three Acts

Lauren Hammond-Ford and Jane Simonsen

4. Institutionalizing Voices of the Marginalized: A Journey toward Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice

Monica M. Smith

5. Contested Counterspaces: Creating Latinos/x Unidos at a Midwestern College

Chris Strunk and Lizandra Gomez-Ramirez

6. Queering the Landscape: Radical Hospitality at the “Good Life” College

Robert Burke

7. Toward a Pedagogy of Accompaniment: Transformative Community, Spiritual Formation, and Augustana's Useable Past

Mark Safstrom

8. The Value(s) of Lutheran Liberal Arts in a Neoliberal Age

Jason A. Mahn

Epilogue

Andrea Talentino

Bibliography