This issue borrows everything from other sources. Richard Hughes piece originated as a speech given at the inauguration of the new president of Pepperdine University. Nick Wolterstorff’s and Storm Bailey’s essays originally appeared in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors, and Catherine McMullen’s originated as a talk given at Concordia College. Should we apologize for being such blatant borrowers?
I don’t think we need to worry about borrowing. There’s something appropriate in faculty recognizing how much they borrow from others. If we had to rely only on our own original ideas or words in the classroom, we wouldn’t have a whole lot to say. More important is how we use what we borrow, how it fits to illustrate the issues at hand, what we are lead to ponder as a result, and what we learn from it.
We’ve chosen to include these four pieces in this issue of INTERSECTIONS because they focus so well on things of great interest to us. It’s amazing to me how much Luther has influenced the thinking of Richard Hughes, for example, and the ways in which Lutheran themes might, by means of him, come to influence the focus of education at Pepperdine. It’s also interesting to see how Wolterstorff and Bailey have articulated issues of tremendous practical importance to faculty at all of our institutions. Perhaps new faculty at our institutions, by reading these pieces, will overcome some of the common misconceptions about what faith related education is all about and how it effects issues like academic freedom. Catherine McMullen’s article raises questions for all of our disciplines, not just journalism, and about the relations between the good, the bad and the ugly in each of them.
So, we hope you find these articles to be engaging, helpful, and sometimes at least, worth arguing with.
Tom Christenson
Capital University
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg admits that promoting Lutheran colleges and universities can feel Sisyphean—clueless faculty or staff, fundraising treadmills, students and parents treated poorly by admissions, pastors with no sense of the colleges’ mission—but reports that alumni satisfaction surveys, ELCA-college faculty seminars, an engaging bishop, Ernie Simmons’s Lutheran Higher Education: An Introduction, and renewed reader interest in Intersections all show the stone is not at the bottom of the hill.
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Article
The Idea of a Christian University
Richard Hughes
Hughes’s lecture at the inauguration of Andrew K. Benton as the seventh president of Pepperdine argues that a Pepperdine-wide “strategy of community-wide conversation,” carried by the new Pepperdine University Center for Faith and Learning, can sustain the school as a Christian university by leaning into the paradox of Christian particularity rather than around it. Drawing on the incarnation, the Matthew 5 and Luke 14 teachings of Jesus, the Quaker and Cane Ridge (Joseph Thomas) abolition traditions, Galatians 2 and Romans 8, and Luther’s simul Justus et peccator as the gospel that frees the scholar to be wrong, to doubt, and to confess “Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief,” he mines the Churches of Christ heritage—Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone, and John Rogers of Carlisle, Kentucky—as a unity-and-freedom tradition that grounds both diversity and academic freedom.
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Article
Ivory Tower or Holy Mountain? Faith and Academic Freedom
Nicholas Wolterstorff
Wolterstorff defines infringement of academic freedom as impairing a faculty member’s standing on account of the ideological content of her position, argues that academic freedom (like free speech) is “duly qualified” rather than absolute, and offers eight considerations bearing on religiously based institutions: Weber’s differentiation of Wissenschaft, religious pluralism within a liberal polity, the vitality of American civil society, a decentralized educational system, the “holistic” character of much American religion, the post-Kuhnian collapse of classical foundationalism and of the “generically human” academy, the fact that ideas matter, and the personhood violated by infringement (the desecration of an image of God). He concludes that the private sector offers wider academic freedom than the public, that religious qualifications are not inherently inappropriate (any more than St. John’s Great Books commitment), but that religiously based colleges too often apply them unjustly—arbitrarily, secretly, without recourse—and that the AAUP’s best service is model codes of procedure.
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Article
Uneasy Partners? Religion and Academics
Storm Bailey
Bailey, a philosopher at Luther College, takes up the reflex of describing church-related colleges as “pretty good in spite of the religion” and argues instead that religious commitment serves academic goals on three fronts: service as central academic purpose (Richard Hughes on Mennonite colleges in Models of Christian Higher Education), educational community (Plato’s dialogues, Parker Palmer, and Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden), and integration of knowledge across disciplines against Nelson and Watt’s “entrepreneurial disciplinarity.” He then defends academic freedom on Christian grounds by drawing on Mill’s On Liberty argument from fallibilism, the centrality of epistemic weakness in the Christian tradition, and Wolterstorff’s claim that to infringe academic freedom is to desecrate an image of God—making personal and institutional religious commitment a foundation, not a foe, of the liberal academic ideal.
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Article
Can a Christian Be a Journalist?
Catherine McMullen
McMullen recounts how Ernie Mancini’s alumni-program invitation forced her to articulate what a print-journalism major at Concordia might be, then surveys the annus horribilus of 1998—Chiquita and the Cincinnati Enquirer, CNN/Time’s retracted Tailwind story, Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle fired at the Boston Globe, Stephen Glass at The New Republic, and Matt Drudge and the White House scandal—before contrasting Concordia’s liberal-arts approach with Pat Robertson’s Regent University, whose “Christian journalism” produces one-sided vampire-cult stories and graduates who conclude journalism is no place for a Christian. Drawing on Richard Baker’s The Christian as a Journalist, Tom Christenson on the “law of niceness,” Ernie Simmons, Harmon Smith and Louis Hodges on Christian ethics, Robert Benne’s Lutheran four orders and his “Christian cobbler makes good shoes, not poor shoes with little crosses on them,” Mel Mencher, Robert Bugeja, Walter Cronkite, Pete Hamill, Jeremy Iggers, David Remnick, the Northwestern Death Row exoneration of Dennis Williams, Verneal Jimerson, and William Rainge, and Pulitzer citations for Katherine Boo, Eric Newhouse, George Dohrman, and Mark Schoofs, she argues that journalism is a Lutheran vocation and that Christian cobblers—and Christian journalists—make good shoes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Reflection
“Miracles are no longer required”—Life Writing as a Healing Tool
Barbara Reul
No. 57 · Spring 2023
A music historian and cancer survivor chronicles how a uterine cancer diagnosis in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted her vocation as a university professor, and how writing two open-access memoirs became an unexpected tool for healing body, mind, and soul.
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Editorial
From the Publisher & Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes, Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 63 · Spring 2026
6 min audio
Wells and Windham-Hughes frame vocation as “ground game” — the practical, public living-out of faith through civic engagement — and introduce the issue’s focus on how Lutheran higher education equips students to repair the world.
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Book Review
Unconventional Wisdom and Talking about God: A Review of Beckstrom’s Leading Lutheran Higher Education in a Secular Age
Ann Rosendale
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Rosendale reviews Brian Beckstrom’s Leading Lutheran Higher Education in a Secular Age, recommending its diagnosis of the gap between espoused and perceived Lutheran identity at ELCA schools and its prescription—Trinitarian Missiological Ecclesiology and a campus-wide willingness to talk explicitly about God.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Mahn introduces the “Called to Leadership” issue by worrying that training for leadership has become so ubiquitous in higher education as to be nearly meaningless, and recovers Luther’s sense of leadership as service — a calling to be a “slave” whose learning, power, and wisdom belong to the unlearned, the oppressed, and the foolish — as the shared mission of Lutheran colleges to train servant-leaders.
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Article
Low-Hanging Fruit, Moonshots, and Coffee: Dreaming Big Within and Beyond Our Limitations
Jeremy Myers
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Myers shares the process used by Augsburg’s Christensen Center for Vocation to help teams move from a shared experience to next steps — an Ignatian-rooted Awareness Examen followed by naming low-hanging fruit, moonshots, and the coffee conversations that build the coalition to make it all happen.