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Dr. Robert Sorensen

Ideas and Love

He can still hear the leaves crunching underfoot.

Over five decades ago, Bob Sorensen was a freshman at St. Olaf, a Lutheran college in Northfield, Minnesota. “It was a Saturday afternoon. It was absolutely gorgeous with the fall colors, the sky brilliantly blue. I was walking across campus on my way to the library. That was the last place in the world I wanted to go.”

On his mind was a girlfriend, sports, just about anything but Shakespeare’s Othello, which he needed to read that day.

“I sat down at a long table that was empty, by a window. I noticed sunlight coming in over my shoulder, lighting the pages of my book. And I read — about the black Othello, the white Desdemona, about love and betrayal. The words simply captured me.”

Bob finished reading the last page and put the book down. Day had become night. “I thought about this 16th-century writer who had sat down at a table, putting words into a story. And 400 years later, they had captured the mind and imagination of this northern Minnesota kid. I decided then and there that I wanted to find that experience again and again if I could — and I have.”

The “fascinating, transformational power of ideas” has shaped Bob Sorensen’s life and vocation. Senior pastor of St. Paul, 1978-1987, Bob went on to serve for 13 years as Executive Director for Education of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in Chicago.

Thirty years ago, in Bob’s first year at St. Paul, CommUniversity was his brainchild. He was inspired by “the communities of learning all around us,” he says. “Communities of higher education. The rich intellectual life in religious communities. Medical communities. Farming communities. The arts are full of wonderful, lovely ideas.”

Bob’s dream was to draw together those communities, to create an affordable, stimulating learning experience for Quad-City people. On four February Sundays for three decades, St. Ambrose University has been the place where this lifelong spirit of learning is cultivated in an array of college-level classes.
Bob is back from Maple Lake, Minnesota — where he lives nearly year-round with his wife Gwen — to keynote CommUniversity Sunday, Feb. 1.

He brings a lifetime “living on the edge between the academy and the church,” serving as campus chaplain, college professor, congregational pastor, and then the ELCA’s chief advocate for colleges, universities, schools, campus ministries, and church institutions. In this Sunday’s address, he’ll share his enthusiasm for connecting with a community of ideas.

“It’s much like the community we experience at St. Paul each week,” says Bob. “It’s a place where it’s possible to explore the deep things of the human mind and the deep longings of the human spirit.” Curiosity for ideas, big and small, take hold of Bob and transform him. And there’s also love.

Bob’s father was a pastor and his mother the organist for a small Lutheran church in Grand Forks, North Dakota. They fell in love and were married. When his mother was pregnant with Bob, his father died. A few years later, his older brother Teddy died at age four.

“These were brutal blows,” reflects Bob. “But I experienced how that little congregation loved my mother back to life. I knew there were times that she was not able to sing the hymns. And it didn’t matter, because the congregation sang for her. I saw how incredibly powerful the Gospel of Christ was as people lived it out — trying to be disciples of Jesus and loving one another.”

When Bob Sorensen left St. Paul in 1987 for a new call in Chicago, he “wanted St. Paul to be centered in the Gospel, a place that could be rooted in ideas and love.”

He celebrates how our Lutheran heritage feeds the mind and the spirit. He witnesses daily how ideas and love enrich the lives of people — and have sustained his zest for a lifetime of learning.

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"Let me keep my mind on what matters...which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. " ~Mary Oliver