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Lutheran 101: Welcome to Lake Wobegon
If you make a habit of listening to Public Radio’s A Prairie Home Companion on Saturday afternoons, you’ve heard Garrison Keillor poke gentle fun at Lutherans and Lutheranness.
It’s satire, to be sure -- but like any good satire, it contains more than a kernel of truth.
Lutherans are, in general, industrious, mild-mannered, modest and self-deprecating—except when there’s something to sing about, and then just try to keep us quiet! We don’t eat nearly as much marshmallow-studded Jello as Keillor would have you believe, but he’s right about the coffee. And what he says about the mythical Minnesota - Scandinavian community of Lake Wobegon is true of us: our women are strong, our men are good-looking, and we surely believe all our children are above average.
On our campuses, we strive to help all our students, Lutheran or not, discover their own “above-averageness”: not just academic potential, but the place where that intersects with personal values. Our colleges are many and diverse, but if we can be said to have one universal mission, it is to send our graduates into the world with a sense of purpose in life, fortified with the understanding that achievement and acting ethically are inseparably intertwined in a life well lived.
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