From its inception, this journal has been published in order to contribute to an ongoing discussion of why there is such a thing as Lutheran higher education. Many people wonder why the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America still sponsors colleges and universities, and many wonder why colleges and universities still choose to maintain a relationship with a church.
Some of the answers to these questions have been presented at the annual conferences called “The Vocation of a Lutheran College,” and then those presentations have been given wider circulation by being published in Intersections.
But the discussion does not take place only at those conferences. Last year St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, celebrated its 125 years of existence by publishing a book, Called to Serve, edited by Pamela Schwandt, available from St. Olaf’s college bookstore, with many excellent articles about these questions. The college also hosted several other events, and I had the pleasure to attend a conference where the Lutheran identity of the college and the relationship between the college and the church was discussed. Those presentations led to some interesting discussions, and at the end of the conference some other participants suggested to me that the presentations deserved wider circulation. I agreed, and so it was decided to publish an issue of Intersections that was not based on the “Vocation” conferences, but dealt with the same theme as the “Vocation” conferences.
Both the conference and the book take the specific history of St. Olaf as the point of departure. But in both, many arguments are made that would apply to any Lutheran college, and the theology and educational perspectives behind the presentations have general relevance. Therefore, we hope that you will find that the articles in this issue help clarify what it is about our church related colleges that make them excellent institutions for the higher education of students of any faith, and excellent examples of how the church should respond to the needs of the people.
September, 2000
Arne Selbyg
Director for Colleges and Universities
ELCA-DHES
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson recommends the St. Olaf 125th-anniversary volume Called to Serve—edited by Pamela Schwandt with Gary de Krey and L. DeAne Lagerquist—particularly Walter Sundberg’s “What Does It Mean To be Lutheran?” and Darrell Jodock’s “The Lutheran Tradition and the Liberal Arts College.” He notes that the volume’s biographical sketches of Lars Boe, F. Melius Christiansen, Ole Rolvaag, Emil Ellingson, Agnes Larson, John Berntsen, Arne Flaten, and Howard and Edna Hong show, against an outsourcing age, that the life of an institution like St. Olaf is the committed life of the people who work there.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Article
From Alien to Citizen
Arne Selbyg
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Selbyg reflects on three experiences of being educated for citizenship—growing up in Norway under the legacy of Lutheran pastors and public school teachers who resisted the Nazi occupation, arriving in America as a resident alien, and becoming a naturalized American citizen—and proposes the jazz ensemble as a better metaphor for American society than the melting pot, one in which different citizens learn skills, study other instruments, and dialog with one another in service to the common music.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 27 · Spring 2008
Selbyg, retiring this summer as Director for ELCA Colleges and Universities, reflects on his decade serving as spokesperson between the church and its twenty-eight colleges and universities, and argues that the link between the colleges and the church has grown stronger over the last ten years — sustained by supportive church leaders like Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, and a Lutheran theology of higher education whose principles (questioning authority, returning to the sources, including the excluded, serving the neighbor) remain a strong basis for operating colleges and universities in the twenty-first century.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Selbyg notes that, while a stated purpose of Intersections over its twelve years and twenty-six issues has been the intersection of faith, learning, and teaching, surprisingly few articles have addressed how Lutheran faculty teach and why — and credits the editor for assembling essays from authors whose teaching has benefited from the ELCA Wittenberg Center, on the eve of the City of Wittenberg’s “Luther Decade” leading up to the 2017 Reformation anniversary.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 25 · Spring 2007
Selbyg notes that most papers in this issue grew out of a pan-Lutheran conference organized by the Association of Lutheran College Faculties in fall 2006 rather than the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, and argues that the ELCA’s ecumenical posture—truthful but open to learning from others—is a good foundation for institutions of higher education whose faculty likewise profess while remaining subject to change based on new research and insights.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 24 · Fall 2006
Selbyg situates this issue in the ongoing ELCA conversation about education that began with the 2005 conference and is feeding into the second draft of the ELCA Social Statement on Education, previews the 2007 conference (“The Vocation of a Lutheran College — Engaging the World”) at Augustana College, Rock Island, and lifts up Luther’s insistence that the church and its members contribute to their wider communities rather than retreat into self-centered enclaves.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 23 · Summer 2006
Selbyg features articles based on presentations at the 2005 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference focused on the upcoming ELCA Social Statement on Education, and urges members of the ELCA higher-education community to download the first draft (“Our Calling in Education”) from the ELCA website and submit feedback to the Task Force on Education before the October 15 deadline. He worries that the sexuality social statement on a 2009 timeline will draw more attention than the education statement, but reminds readers that, for Martin Luther and for those who work in Lutheran higher education, education is as important as sex.
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Reflection
A View From the Other Side
Daisybelle Thomas-Quinney
No. 8 · Winter 2000
Thomas-Quinney—an ordained Church of God minister and adjunct in Religion at Thiel College—offers “a view from the other side” as a non-Lutheran African American “outsider and novice”: her bittersweet 1995 arrival at Thiel, her swift discovery (alongside one African American secretary, one Hispanic professor, and thirty-eight African American students recruited largely as athletes) of a “chilly” campus unprepared to nurture the very minority students it had recruited, her examination of Thiel’s 1875 founding and the Augsburg Confession Article IV right-hand/left-hand kingdoms, the parables of mustard seed and yeast from Matthew 13, and Bishop James Crumbly’s 1985 LCA manual Inclusiveness and Diversity: Gifts of God. Drawing on Bruce Reichenbach, Samuel Hazo, and Josephine D. Davis’s Coloring the Halls of Ivy, she concludes that the Lutheran center cannot hold “as is” but has “great possibility” when the mission statement is actually followed.
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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.”
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Article
Resistance in the Age of Trump: An Interview with Ivonne Wallace Fuentes
Jason A. Mahn, M. Ivonne Wallace Fuentes
No. 45 · Spring 2017
In conversation with Jason Mahn, Roanoke College historian Ivonne Wallace Fuentes describes how she launched a local chapter of Indivisible after the 2016 election, how the skills of teaching and historical research carry over into grassroots advocacy, and how her sense of vocation (vocare) has become intertwined with the work of advocacy (advocare).
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Article
Why Diversity and Civic Engagement Don't Talk to Each Other on College Campuses: The Need for Public Work
Jose Marichal
No. 25 · Spring 2007
Marichal opens with Thurgood Marshall’s line from Milliken v. Bradley and traces the “decoupling” of campus diversity and civic engagement initiatives back to their shared grounding in Benjamin Barber’s “thin” or pluralist democracy. Reviewing CIRCLE data on youth political disengagement, the limits of mandatory volunteerism, and persistent residential segregation, and drawing on Mary Ann Glendon, Lani Guinier, Caryn McTighe Musil, and Richard Rorty, he argues that only Harry Boyte’s notion of “public work” can bind diversity and civic engagement together—and contends that Lutheran colleges, with their understanding of vocation as call into the world, are uniquely positioned to build that infrastructure.
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Article
Women Presidents in Higher Education: How They Experience Their Calling
Aimee Goldschmidt, Gary McLean, Katherine A. Tunheim
No. 42 · Fall 2015
Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifteen women college presidents and a transformative-learning-theory framework, Tunheim, McLean, and Goldschmidt trace a three-stage journey — identifying, interpreting, and pursuing the call — and ask what the language of vocation contributes to the preparation and mentoring of women leaders in higher education.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 8 · Winter 2000
Christenson marks the eighth edition of Intersections, expresses gratitude to the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools and especially to the soon-retiring Bob Sorenson for backing the journal, the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conferences, and the Lutheran Academy of Scholars, and introduces an issue that gathers analyses and arguments from both insiders to Lutheran theology and outsiders, from veterans of the institutions and recent arrivals—voices that together remind us that what is and what ought to be need to inform each other.