Dr. Richard Swanson
Professor of Religion, Philosophy and Classics
B.A., St. Olaf College
M. Div., Luther Seminary
Ph. D., Luther Seminary

Where did you grow up and go to school? How did you come to Augustana?
I grew up walking with my father in the hills and fields around Lake Benton, Minnesota, walking and noticing the world. My father taught me that every plant, every animal, every landform was a window that opened on the universe. The elements in the rocks I collected could also be found in the stars. The biggest things I could see were made up of sub-atomic particles so small I could not adequately imagine them. The living things around me were shaped by codes hidden in DNA. I learned about Crick and Watson when my father drew me the DNA double helix on a napkin at dinner when I was 9 or 10. When I was 6 or so I remember learning about Gregor Mendel and the genetics of peas when my father drew diagrams tracing dominant and recessive traits, again on paper napkins at dinner. My poor mother.

How did life's path lead you to Augustana? Why do you stay?
I have been fortunate to have had some remarkable teachers. During my undergraduate work, I studied the history of Philosophy with Howard Hong, one of the leading Kierkegaard scholars in the world. On the first day of class, Dr. Hong read to us a snippet from Aristotle's Metaphysics: "All philosophy begins in wonder." Dr. Hong noticed that while children respond to the world with awestruck wonder, adults have this wonder eroded out of them. "The purpose of the course," he said, "is to help you recover your sense of wonder so you may become philosophers, lovers of wisdom." It worked. I found my way to Augustana College through a great many random interactions, but Howard Hong and his love of wisdom and his teaching may be the single most significant reason I am here.

I stay here because of the remarkable students with whom I work. Students of mine follow their education to law school, medical school, and all manner of other callings. Some of my advisees have gone on to do graduate work at the leading theological schools in the world. One of my students is currently working in Kenya helping to resettle refugees. Augustana students choose careers that allow them to serve in admirable ways. And those of us who are privileged to teach here get to share in preparing them for their lives of accomplishment. I look out at first-year students and wonder which of them will change the way children learn in school, which of them will contribute to medical knowledge, which of them will find ways to serve that astound us all.

Why should a student consider studying religion at Augustana?
In the Religion corridor, there is a sign: "A Religion Major is someone who loves theological questions and fearlessly pursues them." I like that statement.

Every field of study depends on asking and answering sharper and sharper questions. Studying religion, regardless of your major field of study, sharpens your ability to ask questions, and hones your sense of the larger dimensions of the questions you ask. In my field, even questions that start small grow to embrace questions about hope, and responsibility, and the meaning of life. Too often religious voices stand at the edge of issues they do not understand and offer scolding prohibitions. Studying religion at Augustana College will develop your ability to ask big questions from inside your professional work (where you have to take a stand on issues you understand), no matter what your field of study and work. It will develop your ability to understand the ways that religious study can open your mind, not just close it.

And you should study religion at Augustana College especially if you intend to do graduate work in religion. Our graduates go on to pursue their educations at premier institutions: Harvard, Princeton, Emory, Duke, Claremont, Yale, Union-New York. Not long ago one of our graduates, now studying at one of those premier graduate schools, sent me a note thanking us for the preparation she got at Augustana. She said that after Augustana, her first year of graduate work had been easy. That is what we aim for.

Is a liberal arts education important for religion majors? For students in general?
A liberal arts education aims to develop whole human strength, not just narrow skills. There is a need for skills; that is clear. But real accomplishment requires whole human strength. It is no accident that research shows that leaders in business and other fields come most often from liberal arts backgrounds. Leadership and innovation require whole human strength.

The liberal arts also teach humility. All the fields of study that make up the liberal arts are essential for the life of the human community. We cannot live without chemists and businessfolk, artists and politicians, physicians and teachers. But that does not mean that any student (or faculty member) at Augustana College is highly gifted in all of these fields. If fact, it means the opposite. My students who study biology or government know more about those fields than I do. The same is true for students who study English or music. And yet we gather to study, to challenge each other, and to strengthen each other. And we learn to respect each other as we struggle together to understand ideas and issues that others among us understand easily and deeply. Free and full human life requires more arts than I can master, but it also requires those arts that I can indeed master. And so we challenge each other, and thank each other for the challenge.

Do you feel that study abroad is important for undergraduates? Why?
Put simply: yes. Put more elaborately: yes, absolutely. Leaders in every professional field in the next two decades will work in a world that is flat, to steal Thomas L. Friedman's phrase. Friedman may overstate some things, and misunderstand others, but the world is a web, more tightly interconnected than ever. Study abroad gives undergraduates a first experience exploring the interconnections.

Have you taught or studied in another country?
I spent a summer during my doctoral studies living and studying in Germany. I was there to study the language, and I did indeed study nouns and verbs, subjunctives and imperatives. But far more important, I studied the people and culture of which I became a part, at least as a visitor. I went to the grocery store and bought food that was like the food I bought at home, but different. I went to church and heard sermons that were a little like sermons I had heard in the States. but they were still very different. And one Sunday I was invited to join the congregation for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the ordination of a former pastor. There was coffee, just like at home. There was cake, almost like at home. There was the same polite crush of people in the fellowship hall congratulating the pastor. There was the same looking-back-over-the-years-of-my-life-and-ministry speech I had heard at other gatherings back home.

And then things took a turn.

The pastor was reflecting on the difficulties of the war years. There was a bit of nervousness in the crowd, because memories of war are complicated in any case, and more so in Germany. The pastor forged ahead. He talked about the hardships he had seen as a young man in the Panzerkorps. Now the discomfort in the room was palpable, and I heard someone whisper to remind him that there was an American in the room, an American pastor, at that.

The retired pastor looked right at me and went on with his reminiscences. He talked about his days in seminary, and he talked about his good friend, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged for resisting the Nazi government. He talked about how Bonhoeffer had been wrong. "They call him some kind of hero," said the pastor, "but where was he after the war when his family was hungry and they needed him? You know what it was like after the war when we were all hungry and living in ruined houses in ruined cities." There was a murmur of memory that went through the room, a murmur that knew I was listening. "Where was the great hero then? I say duty to family comes first.

And then the pastor thanked the crowd and all went back to their "Kaffee und Kuchen."

And I left quietly to think about what I had just shared.

Do you have a favorite class to teach at Augustana? Why?
That's like asking me which of our four children is my favorite child. The answer to both questions (unhelpfully): Yes.

I love any class that involves gathering together to discover questions worth asking, and working together to develop adequate answers. So I love my Introductory Course (Religion 110), because introductions deal with the largest questions, the longest sweeps of time and ideas. I love the Jesus course (Religion 214), because of the discoveries that come with embodied performance of the gospels. I love the Paul course (Religion 215) because the course draws students into the discipline of becoming considerate readers of Paul's ancient letters. I love my course in interpretive theory (Religion 229), because any course that swings from interpreting Cinderella stories to analyzing Abraham stories will shoot off some interesting sparks. I love the course I call Hope and the Future (Religion 218) because the final projects are stunning. And I love teaching the UMAIE course, "Peopling Paradise: Migrants, Missionaries, and Money," because of the joy of teaching together with Dr. Mike Mullin from the History Department (he developed the course and invited me to join it). It also doesn't hurt that we teach the course in Hawai'i. In January.

Do you have current research interests? Do students help with the research?
If the gospels are sheet music, recorded cues for embodied performance, what happens when you perform them and don't just read them silently?

For the past several years, I have been working with a team of actors to answer that question. Our work has attracted some attention, and we have been asked to perform and present papers and workshops from Albuquerque to Atlanta to Chicago to Boston to Tacoma to Toronto. We have been asked twice to present our work at an Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, a gathering of perhaps 10,000 scholars from all over the world. As a result of our work, I have been asked to serve as co-chair of the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media Section for the Society of Biblical Literature, a group of scholars committed (among other things) to exploring and developing an emerging interpretive method called "Performance Criticism."

Also as a result of our work, I was asked to write a series of Performance Critical commentaries, one for each of the gospels. I am presently at work on the final volume in this series, Provoking the Gospel of John: A Storyteller's Commentary, for the Pilgrim Press.

In all of this work, Augustana students have been my actors and collaborators. They work with me to do the basic research that leads both to our public performances and to my scholarly writing. When we present our work at scholarly conferences (regional, national, and international), they come along and share the presentation with me. That means that they share the Q&A session afterwards, as well. The first time we presented our work for the Society of Biblical Literature, a question came from the audience about some details in our interpretive work. Since this was something one of the students had worked on particularly closely, I threw the question to her. After the session, the questioner, one of the leading scholars in the field of gospel studies, asked me where in the world I found such astounding students. I told her that I found them in the sophomore and junior classes at Augustana College.

Of the students who have worked with me in the past several years, one is working on an advanced degree in nursing, one is working toward a Ph.D. in history, one is a professional actor in San Francisco, one is a pastor, several are in seminary, one earned a Master's degree at Emory, one is at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, one is currently studying at Princeton on a full-tuition scholarship, and another is at Harvard, also on full scholarship. In fact, of the first eighteen students who were members of the project, thirteen have gone on (or are soon going on) to do graduate work at the Masters and Doctoral level.

We have pretty good people in the sophomore and junior classes at Augustana.

What are some of your interests outside of Augustana?
My family and I have gone canoeing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness every summer since 1985. I love the hard work of portaging. I love the metallic sound of rain on a still lake. I love the smell of black spruce and cedar swamps. I love the sound of wolves howling in the night. I love watching my children learn how to travel gently through the wilderness, leaving no trace.

Read any good books lately?
But which ones should I tell you about? I am usually reading four or five books simultaneously, some scholarly texts, some novels, some poetry, some things my students have recommended. A couple years ago, a student recommended that I read We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch. She was right. It was a book everyone MUST read.

Are there any accomplishments or things you are proud of that you'd like to share?
A few years ago my troupe of actors and I collaborated with the Augustana Choir to create a performance of selections from Bach's St. Matthew Passion. Whatever the choir did not sing, my actors performed, using what we had learned about embodied performance of biblical texts. This was the most terrifying challenge we had ever taken on, and required eighteen months of hard work to create. It was worth every second. And our shared performance was a benefit for childrens' care through South East Behavioral Health Services, which added an extra joy to the work.

The other thing I am proud of is something a student wrote as part of an online discussion in a course I was teaching. She wrote that the class was like physical conditioning for the mind. I like that.

Do you interact with students outside the classroom?
All the time. My research work with my actors in the Provoking the Gospel Storytelling Project is, of course, outside the classroom, and outside the box, as well. But beyond that, my wife and I firmly believe that the world needs more parties, so we regularly invite students over so we can cook dinner for them. Sometimes the groups are small, and we have five or ten students over for a French dinner with multiple courses. Sometimes the groups are rather large, like the time we had twenty-some students over to an eat-with-your-hands Ethiopian dinner. My wife is the queen of desserts, so there are always three or four (or five or six) different desserts when we invite students over to our house. Chocolate is prominently featured.

What five music cd's do you have in your office right now?
As anyone who might look at my iTunes library could attest, my musical tastes are so broad as to be ridiculous. On any given day I will migrate from Ghanaian drums to Beethoven to Bob Marley to Hawai'ian slack key guitar music. The largest single section in my library contains the music of Bob Dylan, new and old. How can you beat lines like: "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken"? They don't write songs like that anymore.

What is the most exciting or unexpected thing that you've experienced during your time at Augustana?
When I see students grab an idea and argue back, I get so excited I can't sleep at night. When I hear students arguing about ideas instead of gossiping about people, it makes my whole week.

If you could give prospective students one piece of advice as far as their college search, what would it be?
I don't follow directions very well. Here are five bits of advice:
1) Pursue an education, not just a degree.
2) Become a scholar in everything you set your hand to.
3) Breadth, breadth, breadth
4) Read, read, read
5) Ask a better question today than you did yesterday.

What one piece of advice do you give your current advisees?
I still can't follow instructions:
1) If the course is easy, run screaming from the room.
2) Study with Peter Schotten.
3) Study with Murray Haar.
4) Study with Sandra Looney.
5) Visit the Art Gallery in the Center for Visual Arts, and do it today.
6) Never miss an Augustana Choir concert.

What is the best thing about being a part of the Augustana community?
This is a community that challenges and supports, and that's true for our interactions with colleagues as well as with students. This is a community that grants us all freedom to experiment, and expects solid results from that experimentation. I love working with students as they come into their strength. I love working with colleagues as they grow into their prime. I love having the privilege to help this community as we work to make Augustana stronger than it has ever been.