At several points in the addresses that make up this issue the authors refer to the St. Olaf 125th Anniversary Volume, Called to Serve, edited by Pamela Schwandt and co-edited by Gary de Krey and L. DeAne Lagerquist. This volume contains some fine essays on the Lutheran character of higher education and the vocation of the Lutheran Church College. Two essays in particular make important contributions to this ongoing discussion: “What Does It Mean To be Lutheran?” by Walter Sundberg and “The Lutheran Tradition and the Liberal Arts College” by Darrell Jodock. But what interested me most about the St. Olaf volume were the numerous biographies of persons who found their vocation at St. Olaf. For many people the story and the reality of St. Olaf is the story of Lars Boe, president; F. Melius Christiansen, choir director; Ole Rolvaag, novelist and teacher of literature; Emil Ellingson, chemist; Agnes Larson, historian; John Berntsen, superintendent of buildings and grounds; Arne Flaten, artist; Howard & Edna Hong, Kierkegaard scholars; etc. As one reads these short biographies it becomes clear to what degree the life of an institution like St. Olaf is the committed life of the people who work there. In this economics shaped age, in an age when ever more services are “outsourced”, we are tempted to think like a personnel director, and to suppose that an employee is merely a place holder, the person who is hired to do X for Y amount of time for Z dollars. The stories of these people show clearly what a thoroughly inadequate view that is. What a different place St. Olaf would have been without the choral tradition of a Christiansen, without the sculpture and person of Arne Flaten, without the scholarly discipline of Agnes Larson and the Hongs, without the inspired leadership of Lars Boe, without the long-term care of John Berntsen, and so on and on. It is truly unimaginable. We are inclined to say, “but that’s what St. Olaf is.”
So Called to Serve is aptly named. This book is a study in the meaning of vocation for it details concretely the ways in which persons and community and purpose and needs and gifts are co-creators and co-realizers of each other. Kristine Carlson, St. Olaf alumna and now Lutheran pastor in Minneapolis, concludes her short contribution to the volume with this reflection:
We Lutherans assert that ‘the finite is capable of bearing the infinite.’ … this is important for our understanding of vocation: that who we are, what we do in the ordinary, daily events of our lives, conveys Christ. This is the perspective on vocation I began to see at St. Olaf.
Reading this volume we begin to see it too.
Tom Christenson
Capital University
-
Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg explains that, while Intersections usually publishes papers from the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conferences, this issue gathers presentations from a St. Olaf 125th-anniversary conference—a companion to the volume Called to Serve edited by Pamela Schwandt—because the theology and educational perspectives behind them apply to any Lutheran college and clarify what makes ELCA church-related colleges excellent institutions for students of any faith.
-
Article
Faith, Understanding, and Action
Paul J. Dovre
Dovre frames the St. Olaf 125th anniversary—originally read as part of a presentation with the St. Olaf Cantorei and organist Paul Manz—around T.F. Gullixson’s story of an immigrant woman who “turned her face to the west wind” and the 1874 gathering at the Holden parsonage of B.J. Muus, Harold Thorson, O.K. Finseth, K.P. Haugen, and O.O. Osmondson. He weaves Anselm’s “faith seeks understanding,” Harold H. Ditmanson on the universal relevance of Christian faith, and the music of Venatius Honorius Fortunatas, John Rutter, Herbert Brokering, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and John Tavener into a meditation on faith as motive, understanding as modus, and action as consequence, against the “ill winds” of poverty, child homicide, AIDS, and consumer gluttony.
-
Article
Toward an Adequate Theology of Christian Higher Education
Robert Benne
Drawing on his forthcoming Eerdmans volume Quality With Soul—Thriving Ventures in Christian Higher Education, which studies St. Olaf, Valparaiso, Notre Dame, Baylor, Wheaton, and Calvin, Benne argues that these schools have kept their souls because a critical mass of boards, administrators, faculty, and students treat the Christian account as comprehensive, unsurpassable, and central. He critiques four inadequate theologies of Christian higher education—pietism, liberal theology (Whitehead, Henry Nelson Weiman, the “values” turn, and accommodation to diversity and multiculturalism), “First Article” approaches (including Merrill Cunninggim’s Methodist version and a Lutheran two-kingdoms quietism), and reactionary/triumphalist theology—and contrasts the Catholic (Notre Dame), Reformed (Calvin, Wheaton, Baylor), and Lutheran (St. Olaf, Valpo) ways of relating faith and learning, calling Lutherans to recover “Christ and culture in paradox” as serious extended conversation rather than as a lazy excuse.
-
Article
Education for Peace and Justice
David J. O'Brien
O’Brien surveys justice and peace education in Catholic higher education from Vatican II through the 1980s pastoral letters on nuclear weapons and the American economy, contrasting evangelical radicals (“what would Jesus do?”) with comfortable accomodationists, and argues that Catholic social teaching remains the church’s “best-kept secret.” Drawing on Bryan Hehir, David Hollenbach, Pope John XXIII, Patricia Hample’s “placing ourselves in the world to be of use,” and Martin Luther King’s last book on the “world house,” he develops pastoral care, solidarity (rooted in the mystical Body of Christ), and a realistic vocation-and-citizenship as the three needed responses for Catholic and Lutheran colleges alike.
-
Article
The Literature of Spiritual Reflection and Social Action
Shirley Hershey Showalter
Showalter, president of Goshen College, opens with Garrison Keillor’s “Singing with the Lutherans” and Walter Sundberg’s account of the Anabaptist “radical reformers” to locate Mennonite identity in a theology of suffering, humility, narrative, and song—tracing it through John S. Coffman’s 1904 “The Spirit of Progress,” Harold S. Bender’s 1944 “Anabaptist Vision,” John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, and J. Lawrence Burkholder. She uses her Senior Seminar “Pedagogy of the Holy Spirit” reading of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Madeleine L’Engle’s “Be a namer” and Walter Wink on the angels of institutions, and a Goshen Study-Service Term (SST) journal entry by student David Roth returning from Haiti—closing with two poems by Sarah Klassen—to argue for naming as the redemptive practice of church-related education.
-
Reflection
Vocation
Matt Peterson
In a chapel homily, St. Olaf student Matt Peterson quotes former St. Olaf professor Howard Hong’s 1955 Our Church and the World—“the tragedy is that we seem to have lost the full grasp of the Christian vocation”—to argue that vocation, from the Latin vocare, is centrally a call into daily communion with God and into continually becoming Christian, not the title of a successful career marked by GPA, win-loss records, honorary degrees, or net worth. Drawing on Anthony Bloom on prayer that must be lived, he indicts the dread of Monday, the “come hell or high water” demand for production, and the “faith community” that we take on faith.
-
Article
The Vocation of Intersections on its Twentieth Birthday
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak, Tom Christenson
No. 43 · Spring 2016
The three editors of Intersections — Bob Haak, Jason Mahn, and Tom Christenson (in spirit, following his death in 2013) — trace the twenty-year vocation of the journal itself: its 1996 birth at Capital University; its coming-of-age years of debate over institutional markers, two-kingdoms theology, and Lutheran identity; the ascendancy of “education for vocation” as the central marker of Lutheran higher education; and its ongoing identity in relation to a changing ELCA and to the broader cultural conversation about purpose, wholeness, and the vocation of higher education.
-
Article
Point / Counterpoint: What It Means to be a "College of the Church"
Robert Benne, Tom Christenson
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Moderated by Wartburg College pastor Larry Trachte and introduced by Kathryn Kleinhans, this Wartburg campus conversation between Robert Benne (Roanoke College) and Thomas Christenson (Capital University) probes what it means to be a college of the church—Benne emphasizing ethos, vocation, and the Christian intellectual tradition over against secularization and generic education, and Christenson lifting up persistent vocational questions, the gift of difference, and induction into a community of discourse—and finds large common ground around hiring for mission, pedagogy that asks deep questions, and the courage to claim a living religious tradition while inviting everyone to the banquet.
-
Article
Education as a Christian (Lutheran) Calling
Tom Christenson
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Christenson opens with an imaginative reconstruction of early Christian communities as radically egalitarian, pacifist, communitarian gatherings within the Roman Empire and argues that such communities are natural homes for the educational vocation. Naming two temptations for contemporary Christian higher education—the parochial Bible school and “Generic U”—he uses his friend Sig Rauspern’s tree metaphor to insist that a university is Christian in its trunk and roots rather than in grafted-on branches. Drawing on Wendell Berry, Jacob Bronowski, Walter Wink, Douglas John Hall, and his own Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education, he names faithful criticism, engaged suspiciousness, simul justus et peccator, and a fallible, love-related Lutheran epistemology as the particular gifts Lutherans bring to the Christian educational calling.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 21 · Summer 2005
In his valedictory letter as outgoing editor, Christenson recounts the 1994 origins of Intersections, when he took the idea to Naomi Linnell and Jim Unglaube at DHES and persuaded the council of presidents to launch the journal on a shoestring with printing paid by DHES and everything else by Capital University. He summarizes the issue’s contents—papers from the 2004 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference plus two commissioned pieces from former DHES directors Bob Sorensen and Leonard Schulze—and thanks the student copy editors and Capital’s presidents and provosts who sustained the publication.
-
Book Review
Review of Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Christenson reviews Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans, 2004), edited by C.W. Joldersma and G.G. Stronks. After recounting his own early prejudice against Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and his subsequent conversion through Art in Action, he focuses on two threads: Wolterstorff’s expansive reading of shalom—not merely peace but justice, community, communal responsibility, and delight—as the overall goal of Christian collegiate education, and the influence of Abraham Kuyper’s claim of “privileged cognitive access” for Christian inquirers, which Wolterstorff demonstrates rather than declares.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Christenson introduces an issue featuring “young and old, angry and encouraging, prophetic and hopeful” voices unified by the assumption that Christians engaged in thinking and educating will ask hard questions: how to raise concerns about militarism and the new American “imperialism,” what a Lutheran law school will say about training a new generation of attorneys, and what Lutheran colleges communicate to undergrads about vocation. Such faithful criticism, he argues, is part of who Lutheran institutions are.
-
Article
Making the Common Good Common
René Johnson
No. 42 · Fall 2015
Johnson reflects on the Servant Leadership House for women at Finlandia University — from a sweaty trip to the local landfill to weekly habits of campus presence — to argue that the common good becomes truly common when it is embedded in the ordinary details of vocational living, and that Luther’s sense of neighbor calls servant leaders to “little bits of good” as well as to more radical pursuits of justice.
-
Article
The Church in Education? Education in the Church? Ten Theses on Why These Questions Matter
Leonard G. Schulze
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Writing in the months before the August 2005 Churchwide Assembly that will decommission DHES, Schulze frames his vision for the division as ten Lutheran-style theses, each followed by Luther’s catechetical question “What does this mean?” He argues that critical thinking and moral deliberation are in the Lutheran gene pool; that Luther’s devotion to learning was an expression of Christian vocation; that the rise of the research university and the binary public meaning of “evangelical” have marginalized church-related colleges; that DHES has been wrongly perceived as marginal; and that the reformed concept of vocation must drive the soon-to-be-created program unit for Vocation and Education. An appendix reproduces the 2005 DHES strategic planning overview.
-
Article
A Lutheran Dialectical Model for Higher Education
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 37 · Spring 2013
Drawing on “The Freedom of a Christian,” simul justus et peccator, Richard Hughes, Joseph Sittler, Martha Nussbaum, and Tom Christenson, Simmons argues that the Lutheran tradition informs an open, dialectical educational model that holds Christian and academic freedom together. He locates vocation at the intersection of the practical (why are you here?) and the existential (why are you here?) and proposes Lutheran higher education as education for self-transcendence and leadership Soli Deo Gloria.
-
Response
“You Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Will Set You Free”: A Scientist’s Response
Ben Huddle
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Huddle of Roanoke College proposes adding a sixth theme to Bouman’s five—the scientific method—as a tool for knowing the Truth not available to Luther but central to twentieth- and twenty-first-century learning. Diagramming the continuous cycle of observations, laws, theories, and predictions, he argues that scientists must be ethical and that scholars in other fields must understand the scientific method (lest environmentalists ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics). A Lutheran college, he concludes, should treasure both the religious and the scientific tradition: stifling either loses meaning or significance, and the Lutheran tradition is therefore biblical, catholic, evangelical, sacramental, scientific, and world-affirming.
-
Article
Making Dry Bones Stand: Lutheran Higher Education at Century's End
Diane Scholl
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Scholl reads John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” the banishment of Anne Hutchinson, de Crevecoeur’s American farmer, Olaudah Equiano, Phyllis Wheatley, and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter alongside Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones to ask how a Lutheran college can be a community that holds difference and commonality together. Drawing on Ernest Simmons’s warning against collapsing into either dogmatic absolutism or thoroughgoing relativism and Bruce Reichenbach’s companion essay in this issue, she identifies five features of shared life at a Lutheran college—the liberal arts, political process, the arts, the community of caring, and the recognition of difference and the right to dissent—and argues that the necessary tension between individualism and corporate identity, framed by theological vision, is “our best legacy and our best hope for the future.”
-
Reflection
Why All This Talk About Vocation?
Madyson Ray
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Ray, a junior at Midland University and the only student attendee at the 2022 conference, reflects on four workshops — on teaching womanist thought, on supporting student-athletes, on resistance to the word “vocation,” and on vocational reflection — and brings home concrete ideas including a women’s-history scavenger hunt and semester-long vocational reflections.