The first three offerings in this issue were first given as talks at the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference held the summer of 2000 at Dana College in Blair, Nebraska. Leonard Schulze had been asked to keynote the conference before he had become the executive director of DHES. So we thought we were getting a faculty member as speaker but got our new division leader as well.
These pieces illustrate the advantage of hearing a diversity of voices. Each speaks to the call of learning and teaching in a different voice informed by personality, experience, as well as by academic discipline and work experience. We hope that they provoke our readers as much as they provoked those of us who heard them as presentations.
Speaking of provocations, let me recommend to you two books I have recently read. 1.) Peter C. Hodgson. God’s Wisdom: Toward a Theology of Education, Westminster John Knox Press (1995). This is not a book about theological education, but a book that attempts to see the task of education (generally considered—it’s not just about faith-related education) as a movement toward God. The consequence of this vision changes both how we understand the task of education and how we understand the relation of God to the world. Irenaeus’s axiom may be as adequate a summary of Hodgson’s view as anything: “The glory of God is human beings made fully alive … the aliveness of human beings is in beholding God.” 2.) Douglas Sloan. Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education, Westminster John Knox Press (1994). This book was recommended to me by Paul Dovre and I thank him for putting me in touch with it. It focuses on the relation between faith and knowledge in higher education and the historical process by which these two ideas have become pretty thoroughly dissociated from each other. This dissociation left faith-related institutions hard-pressed to explain what it meant to be a college / university related essentially to a faith tradition. Sloan reads the history of theology in the 20th century as attempts to answer that question and he believes that the attempts have, for the most part, failed. Sloan thinks that the relevance has been lost and that we need to rethink our epistemology, the way we think about knowledge, in order to recover it. This is a challenging book which invites responses from thinkers in the sciences as well as in philosophy and theology.
Tom Christenson
Capital University
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg reports that the Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation and the Lilly Endowment have funded the Lutheran Academy of Scholars, which since 1999 has gathered ten to twelve Lutheran scholars at Harvard for two-week summer seminars under Ronald Thiemann (themes: “Finding Our Voice—Christian Faith and Critical Vision” in 1999–2000 and “The Lutheran Public Intellectual: Faith, Reason and the Arts” in 2001), and announces that the academy will move to Berkeley in 2002 under Ted Peters to take up the intersection of faith and science.
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Article
Teaching as a Form of Servant Leadership
Leonard G. Schulze
Schulze defines teaching as a paradoxical “servant leadership” rooted in the etymology of educare, e-ducere, Erziehung, and Bildung, surveys representative models of the teacher (Plato’s cave, the Theatetus midwife, Socrates of the Apology, and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed), and proposes a four-fold taxonomy of learning—information, critical thinking, praxis, and teleology—each requiring its own form of teacherly leadership. He closes with ten Wittenberg-style theses for teachers at Lutheran colleges, including that the Gospel liberates us from using knowledge as power, that disputatio is an expression of faith, and that we are called to lead students from the tyrannies of ignorance, rote knowledge, incompetence, and anomy to the freedoms of awareness, critical understanding, skillful action, and purposive lives in community.
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Article
The Vocation of a Lutheran College
L. DeAne Lagerquist
Lagerquist places the twenty-eight ELCA-affiliated colleges in the context of American higher education from Harvard (1636) through the “old time college,” the post-Civil-War research university, and the postwar expansion—drawing on Christopher Lucas, Philip Schaff’s Neo-Lutheran/moderate/Old Lutheran categorization, Sydney Ahlstrom’s scholastic/pietistic/critical currents, Luther’s appeal to the German nobility, Lewis Hyde’s gift economy, and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. She proposes five characteristic practices (the school as learning community, study of Bible and Christian tradition, participation in the arts as makers and audience, application of learning in service, and on-campus Christian worship) grounded in Lutheran teaching about grace, image-and-fall, gratitude, and revelation through created “masks,” and four virtues these practices engender in graduates—loving gratitude, faithful wisdom, bold freedom, and hopeful humility.
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Article
Perspectives on Institutional Service: All Hands on Deck
Ruth Henricks
Henricks, President and CEO of Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska, uses Annie Dillard’s image of Christians tourist-like on Deck C to call colleges and social ministry organizations to “all hands on deck” in a church standing at a threshold of shifting demographics—a growing rich-poor gap, a coming Hispanic majority, an aging baby-boom, dual-career families, contingency workers, and for-profit Lockheed Martin-style competitors entering human services. Drawing on Foster McCurley, Andrew Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive, Justo Gonzales’s Manana, Arthur Becker, Bob Bacher, David Tiede, and the ELCA constitution, she argues that SMOs and colleges are the “hands” of the body of Christ and asks whether we have courage to require Spanish, partner ecumenically, cut services to Caucasian clients, and lead the church from the front rather than the rear.
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Article
A River Runs Through It: CLU as a Church-Related University
A. Joseph Everson
Everson borrows Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and the small creek that flows through California Lutheran University’s Kingsman Park as images for the quiet stream of Christian tradition on campus, describes the dialectic of faith and reason (with a “Lord of Life” student congregation, two required religion courses, and a voluntary Wednesday chapel) as the “theology of paradox” that runs from Luther’s simul justus et peccator through Richard Solberg and Richard Hughes, and names six commitments that constitute the CLU ethos—academic freedom (Jeremiah 29:7 and John 8:32), vocation, service (Amos and Habitat for Humanity), grace and graciousness (Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice), diversity, and reverence (Proverbs 9 as awe and wonder).
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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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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Selbyg reports that Executive Director Leonard Schulze has challenged the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools to develop a comprehensive communications plan reaching high school students, college students, parents, pastors, and journalists, and invites Intersections readers to review the redesigned elcacolleges.org website, the “FREE STUFF” brochures, the journal’s advertisements in The Lutheran and related publications, Ernie Simmons’ new Augsburg-Fortress book Lutheran Higher Education: An Introduction, and the ELCA video magazine Mosaic—and to send in their own ideas.
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Article
The "V" Word: Different Dimensions of Vocation in a Religiously Diverse Classroom
Martha E. Stortz
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Stortz responds to a sea of blank stares when she used the word “vocation” in a religiously diverse required course by offering five metaphors — place, path, relationships, lens, and story — that point to different dimensions of vocation across the world’s religions and help students articulate their callings on their own terms.
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Article
Students in the Cloud: Creating Digital Citizens
Jose Marichal
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Marichal weighs the utopian and dystopian views of the “networked information economy,” drawing on Yochai Benkler, Manuel Castells, Henry Jenkins, Cass Sunstein, Robert Putnam, Nicholas Carr, and Andrew Keen to chart the promise and peril of life “in the cloud,” and proposes Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of phronesis—developed through Hubert Dreyfus’s five stages of skill acquisition—as the goal of digital citizenship for college faculty and their students.
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Article
Leadership in Lutheran Key at a Time of Pandemics
Deanna Thompson
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Thompson draws on Luther’s theology of the cross and Shelly Rambo’s theology of trauma to sketch a Lutheran model of leadership for a season of pandemics — one that is attentive to pain, responsive to need, and intentionally nourished by food, friends, and deep conversation.
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Article
Wilhelm Löhe and Higher Education
David Ratke
No. 30 · Fall 2009
Ratke recovers the educational vision of Wilhelm Löhe (1808–1872), spiritual father of Wartburg College and Wartburg Seminary, drawing on Löhe’s “Aphorismen über Schule und Schulunterricht” and other writings to argue that education is about the formation of whole persons by whole teachers in whole institutions, that all education is religious and never neutral, and that education is for eternity as well as the present — a vision in which the values of Christianity sanctify the so-called worldly means of education.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 45 · Spring 2017
Mahn introduces “Education in the Age of Trump” by recounting a difficult academic year on his own campus — the Augustana “chalking” incident, a Latinx Unidos rally, and post-election conversations with marginalized students and quietly conservative Trump supporters alike — and frames the issue’s essays as careful (re)imaginings of the vocation of Lutheran higher education in an anxious political climate.