From the Publisher

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

Christenson, feeling like a proud parent, welcomes readers to the inaugural issue and acknowledges three people without whom the publication would still be just an idea: Naomi Linnel of the ELCA office for Higher Education and Schools, publisher Jim Unglaube, and Capital University president Josiah Blackmore. He invites readers’ reactions, suggestions, and active involvement as editors, reviewers, authors, artists, and critics in shaping the dialogue across the ELCA college and university family.

The Future of Lutheran Higher Education

Mark Schwehn

Schwehn’s keynote, framed against Otto Paul Kretzmann’s October 1940 inaugural at Valparaiso, organizes itself around four topics: the idea of a Christian University (Lutheran schools as a tributary of the Christian intellectual tradition, voices in a conversation in the spirit of H. Richard Niebuhr and Alasdair MacIntyre rather than phases of James Burtchaell’s devolutionary scheme); the pursuit of truth (against Foucauldian reduction of truth to power, with Hilary Putnam, toward a cruciform discipleship that discovers truth ambulando); the critique of knowledge (developing Christian theories of knowing in conversation with Benne, Lotz, Wolterstorff, LeClerc, and Augustine); and Christianity and liberal learning (objectivity refurbished as Thomas Haskell’s ascetic self-discipline, and the recovery of texts that have claims upon us).

"Whose Future?" or "Social Justice and the Lutheran Academy?"

Marsha Heck

Heck argues that the future of Lutheran higher education lies less in defining Lutheran distinctiveness than in moral action grounded in face-to-face relationships with others. Drawing on David Lotz’s two-kingdoms theology of citizenship, Ernest Simmons’s relational reading of Luther, Arthur Preisinger’s indictment of the German Lutheran misreading of two kingdoms during the Third Reich, Starla Stensaas of Dana College, and Paulo Freire’s dialectic of empowerment, she calls Lutheran colleges to integrate moral reflection with moral action—to move students’ muscles against what is not true as well as to feel truths in their bones.

Knowing and a Tradition to be Known

Kurt Keljo

Keljo, University Pastor at Capital, embraces Schwehn’s vocational call but challenges his epistemological framing. We are called to bear witness to the Truth more than to pursue it; truth and power need not be dissociated when power is understood cruciform-ly as love and service; alongside objectivity, a case can be made from the tradition for connected knowing (image of God, idolatry, repentance, Incarnation). Christians offer not a particular epistemology but a foundation for epistemology—a tradition to be known. He closes with James Fowler’s four marks of the “public church”: particularly Christian, prepared for pluralism, balancing intimacy with public engagement, and unafraid of ideological pluralism in confident, nondefensive civility.

Lutheran Colleges: The Context for the Conversation

Thomas Templeton Taylor

Taylor of Wittenberg engages Schwehn’s first argument by sketching the institutional predicament of Lutheran colleges through three converging forces: the collapse of differences among old-line Protestant groups in the wake of ELCA-era ecumenism (with Robert Wuthnow); the secularization of American higher education described by George Marsden; and the post-war decline of liberal arts colleges under pressure to professionalize. The result is an “in-between stage” in which Lutheran colleges retain rhetoric without substance. Following Richard John Neuhaus’s “Eleven Theses,” he argues that, for a time at least, Lutheran colleges’ institutional affiliations must remain actively Lutheran if they are to remain in any sense Christian.

Renewing Our Journey: Some Thoughts on Pursuing the Truth

John Rehl

Rehl, a Capital University graduate pursuing doctorates in theology at Chicago and in economics at Wisconsin, takes up Schwehn’s invitation to think again on the nature of truth. He sets aside truth as information, as object, and as mere words; recasts the church-related college’s task as a renewed emphasis on classroom teaching (Kierkegaard’s teacher as midwife) and on brave, articulate professors. He calls for moral education in courage, discipline, patience, and love, illustrates the costs of the fact-value split with examples from economics, and argues that we honor Lutheran heritage not by preserving it as a museum piece but by testing it—Luther’s theology of the cross over a theology of glory—and by preparing students for a world of Untruth, strengthened (with Julian of Norwich) by the promise that they will not be overwhelmed.

Diversity and Dialogue: Gustavus Adolphus College

Florence D. Amamoto

Amamoto, a third-generation Japanese-American Buddhist who teaches American literature at Gustavus Adolphus and regularly attends daily chapel, writes as an “inside outsider.” Engaging Schwehn’s closing call to refurbish the Lutheran college, she argues that church-related colleges are vitally important to society, that “refurbishing” must take up diversity, and describes how Lutheranism is manifest at Gustavus: Christ Chapel as the highest point on campus, the ecumenical chapel program led for thirty years by Chaplain Richard Elvee, the Nobel Conferences that pair scientists with philosophers and theologians, the First-term Seminar and Tuesday Conversations, the India study-abroad program organized by Deane Curtin, and the Sponberg Chair in Ethics. She names the pressures of money, secularization, and the publications-driven push for “excellence” that threaten this creative tension.

Continuing the Dialogue: Augustana College

Sandra C. Looney

Looney describes Augustana College, Sioux Falls, debating and renaming its values—Christian, Liberal Arts, Community, Excellence, Service—under the leadership of religion professor Dr. Arthur Olsen and the T’N’T (“Through Thick and Thin”) committee, in the wake of ELCA Region III’s “What Does It Mean to be a College of the Church?” conversations. She describes Augustana’s 56% Lutheran student body, daily 10 a.m. chapel, dual Christmas Vespers in Our Savior’s Lutheran Church and St. Joseph’s Cathedral, the Capstone classes on moral and aesthetic issues, and the ongoing work of enlarging Augustana’s conversation to include Native American, Jewish, and Islamic voices.

The Vocation of a Lutheran College: Some Transitional Thoughts

James M. Unglaube

No. 4 · Winter 1998

Unglaube offers final reflections on thirty years in Lutheran higher education as he leaves the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools to join Carthage College, his alma mater. He recalls colleague Richard Solberg’s influence, the closing of Upsala College in 1995, the Higher Education and Namibia program shared with Naomi Linnell, the growth of endowments from $70 million to $1 billion in 25 years, and the Vocation of a Lutheran College project he credits Paul Dovre with inspiring. He likens the twenty-eight ELCA colleges to flowers on a rose bush—same Lutheran tradition, each blossom different—requiring constant nurture if the partnership between church and college is to thrive.

From the Publisher

James M. Unglaube

No. 3 · Summer 1997

Unglaube opens the journal’s second year by previewing the 1997 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference at Carthage, which will examine the Lutheran tradition from outside (Richard Hughes of Pepperdine on the Lilly Endowment’s Models for Christian Higher Education; David Johnson, President of the University of Minnesota at Morris and Luther College graduate, on the tradition from the public sector) and inside (Ann Pederson of Augustana in Sioux Falls; Timothy Lull of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary), and previews Eric Eliason’s emerging proposal for an Academy of Scholars in Lutheran Higher Education modeled on NEH/NSF-style summer seminars.

From the Publisher

James M. Unglaube

No. 2 · Winter 1997

Unglaube reports on the second annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference of August 1996, where Walter Bouman of Trinity Lutheran Seminary addressed “What is Lutheran; What is the Lutheran Tradition” (biblical, catholic, evangelical, sacramental, world-affirming—the world “received, enjoyed, served as God’s Gift”). He previews presentations by Wendy McCredie of Texas Lutheran and Baird Tipson of Wittenberg on how the Lutheran tradition is embodied in its colleges, and Bob Vogel’s challenge in “Coherence—And Now what?” that the tradition comes to life in how faculty give expression to their beliefs and values in the classroom and with colleagues.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

No. 6 · Winter 1999

Christenson explains that three of the five papers from the 1998 Wittenberg Vocation of a Lutheran College conference appear here (with Robert Scholz and Cheryl Ney to follow in the next issue), passes on Andy Sheppard’s “Books for Belarus” appeal from Southwestern College, and reflects on Douglas John Hall’s The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity—its claim that disengagement from cultural dominance is the prerequisite for faithful re-engagement, and its retrieval of Christ’s metaphors of “a little salt, a little yeast, a little light” as a possible session topic for a future VLC Conference.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 14 · Summer 2002

Writing on behalf of the publisher, Sue Edison-Swift names vocation as one of the precious gifts Lutheran theology offers education, reflects on her first ELCA Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, and asks readers to gift future issues of Intersections with feedback—notes on what they read and skipped, and how they ended up with a copy.

Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives

William O'Brochta

No. 63 · Spring 2026

15 min audio

Guest editor William O’Brochta introduces the section by overviewing the ELCA’s call to civic engagement, recapping the Fall 2025 Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives conference at Texas Lutheran University, and previewing the participant essays that follow.

Vocation on Campus: Reading Mark Tranvik's Martin Luther and the Called Life at Pacific Lutheran University

Alex Lund, Michael Halvorson

No. 47 · Spring 2018

Halvorson and Lund — faculty member and student — review Mark Tranvik’s Martin Luther and the Called Life alongside PLU’s Wild Hope Center for Vocation, weighing the book’s warning against “vocation lite” against the challenge of speaking of God’s call to students in the Pacific Northwest’s “None Zone,” where most students have little exposure to Lutheranism.

The Prophetic Vocation and the Nature(s) of College: Reimagining College with Jim Farrell

Peder Jothen

No. 39 · Spring 2014

Jothen reads the late Jim Farrell’s The Nature of College as a prophetic critique of the dual nature(s) of college—its socio-cultural “normal” and its ecological habitat—and argues that Farrell’s call to model an “Anthropocene Responsibility” resonates with the prophetic dimension of Lutheran higher education. He proposes a re-imagined “About St. Olaf” that names vocation, ecological dependence, and personal involvement as the operative goods of college.

Conciliatory and Queer: The Radical Love of Lutheran Higher Education

Kiki Kosnick, Sharon Varallo

No. 50 · Fall 2019

Kosnick and Varallo reflect in conversation on how Augustana’s Five Faith Commitments and its conciliatory ecumenical roots in the Augsburg Confession have given them — a non-binary queer first-generation faculty member and a twenty-one-year veteran — the “street cred” to act on radical love, build bridges to imprisoned and non-binary communities, and discover that Augustana is welcoming not despite the fact that it is Lutheran, but because of it.