If someone did a word count of the articles that have been published in INTERSECTIONS from the very first issue until this one to see what this journal is all about, I feel confident that the word “vocation” would be among the top three. Vocation is a central concept for Lutherans, and this journal grew out of an effort to make it also a central concept at the colleges and universities that are related to the ELCA. Therefore, many leaders at those universities and colleges became excited when the Lilly Endowment, Inc. decided to start a major new initiative in the area of “Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation.” They invited church related colleges and universities in the United States to submit grant proposals for programs that would help students examine the relationship between their faith and vocational choices, provide more opportunities for young people to explore ministry as their life’s work, and enhance the college’s capacity to prepare a new generation of leaders for church and society. It seemed like an initiative that was tailor-made for our institutions.
And sure enough, in the first round of competition two Lutheran colleges and universities received implementation grants, the next year three more colleges were successful, and last fall four Lutheran colleges and universities were selected as recipients of these grants. We extend warm congratulations to Augsburg College, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois; Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota; Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota; Luther College, Decorah, Iowa; Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington; St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota; Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana; and Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa, for their successful development of plans to encourage vocational discernment among their students. These institutions will now receive grants from the Lilly Endowment of approximately two million dollars each over a five year period to accomplish the goals that they set out in their grant applications. An investment like that should have great benefits for the students from those colleges, and for the church.
These colleges already have an excellent track record of motivating their students to attend seminary and pursue church careers, maybe Lilly used that as a factor in their selection process. But it is important for institutions related to the ELCA to remember that we see just as much potential for callings to careers of vocational service if our students choose to become accountants, nurses, police officers or home makers. Since Lutherans believe in the “priesthood of all believers,” we can use our talents to serve God and his creation to the utmost of our ability in any setting, and be leaders of our church and of society in any career.
Arne Selbyg
Director, ELCA Colleges and Universities
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson previews this issue’s papers from the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference—Curt Thompson on “the Lutheran knot,” Carol Gilbertson on the creative dimensions of language, Bruce Heggen on theological vocabulary in the state university, Susan Poppe on the boundaries of campus freedom, and Sig Royspern’s oracular gems—welcomes Robert Benne’s response to the previous issue as a sign that Intersections is becoming a locus of continuing conversation, and confesses his reluctant consent to appear on the cover.
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Article
Do You Teach in a Different Manner at a Lutheran College? Unraveling the Lutheran Knot and Highlighting the Glory in the Theology of the Cross
Curtis L. Thompson
Thompson argues that being Lutheran means having a “knot in the stomach”—a dialectical “Yes and No” tension between law and gospel, two kingdoms, Word and world—and that this knot is held together by Luther’s theology of the cross supplemented by an under-appreciated theology of glory in which God shines through human beings and creation. He then traces how the Lutheran knot shapes his teaching at Thiel College in the Religion department, the first-year team-taught “History of Western Humanities,” the second-year “Science and Our Global Heritage,” and his work as Co-Director of Thiel’s Global Institute, concluding that only such “dialectical doublespeak” leaves him with the “at-once dreaded and delightful dis-ease of the Lutheran knot.”
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Article
Honoring the Word: Lutherans and Creative Writing
Carol Gilbertson
Gilbertson argues that “honoring the Word” in Lutheran colleges means cherishing the sacred power of human language as God’s gift across three sites—the chapel talk, the classroom of wonder, and the poem—and illustrates her argument by reading aloud her own poems: “The Refiner’s Fire and Leaping Calves,” “Late June,” “Early June,” “Sweet July,” “Good Friday,” “Pondering These Things,” “The Limbs of Words,” and “Night Rising,” drawing on Darrell Jodock, John Updike, Martha Nussbaum, George Steiner, and T. S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages” to claim writing as a Christian vocation that “incarnate[s] the unseen sacred.”
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Article
Writing Toward the Night Complete: Teaching and Working at the Public, Secular Institution
Bruce Allen Heggen
Heggen, Lutheran Campus Ministry pastor and adjunct English professor at the University of Delaware, builds on a freshman’s essay closing line—“All in all our night was complete”—to argue that even in the secular public university one can “teach hope” as a critical principle by drawing on Douglas John Hall’s Heideggerian distinction between calculative and meditative thought, the Frankfurt School’s instrumental versus substantialist reason, Luther’s theology of the cross, Parker Palmer’s “obedience to truth,” bell hooks, Lionel Basney, Shelley Shaver, and Donald Sheehan’s Frost Place “principle of compassion.” The classroom and Lutheran campus ministry together can become “communities of memory and hope” that, like the artist student’s Fourth of July, hold together danger, people getting together, explosions, and lots of fun.
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Article
The Impropriety of Jesus' Teaching: The Woman at the Well and The Vagina Monologues
Susan M. O'Shaughnessy
O’Shaughnessy Poppe dedicates her message to those who worked to put on Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues against administrative resistance and reads the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well alongside the testimony of a Bosnian rape survivor whose story Ensler asked to tell, arguing that the “impropriety” of Jesus—his scandalous recognition of those silenced by sexism, racism, war, custom, and the church—is the model for the mission of a college of the church to defend academic freedom and to break the chains of oppression by inflicting discomfort on the proper and pure.
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Poem
A Rainfall of Questions Collected in the Form of a Poem
Sig Royspern
Royspern offers fourteen oracular questions on aging, addiction to possessions, water striders, magnolias, slippery fish, moths and the moon, priests and leaf-rakers, weeds and flowers, the price of education, abandoned groceries, spiritual pilgrimage, melons and oats, similes, and the impossibility of finding a store that sells a spring wind.
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Response
Response to Bishop Olson and President Tipson
Robert Benne
Benne responds to two articles in the Winter 2002 Intersections: former Bishop Stanley Olson’s “The Marks of an ELCA College,” whose narrow reading of the two kingdoms cedes all epistemological claims to secular knowledge, and President Tipson’s engagement with The Future of Religious Colleges, whose “rather unchastened Enlightenment spirit” underestimates how loaded the social sciences and humanities are with their own philosophical and religious assumptions. Drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr, John Milbank, and William Buckley, Benne defends a “critical mass” of pervasively Lutheran colleges and calls on bishops and pastors to take the schools seriously lest they drift from their religious heritage.
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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
The Importance of Connection
Alex Piedras
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Piedras reflects on the 2023 “So that We, Too, May Flourish” Conference at Augsburg as a refreshing space for a weary DEI advocate — surfacing burnout, the Talking Circle on Indigenous Issues, and Dr. Monica Smith’s Racial Healing Circle as opportunities to recharge the soul and build authentic connections for the long journey.
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Institutional Focus
Putting Principles into Practice: An Interview with Kenneth Foster about Concordia's Sustainability Council
Kenneth Foster
No. 36 · Fall 2012
Foster, chair of Concordia College’s President’s Sustainability Council, describes the Council’s formation under President William Craft in 2011 as a re-energization of stalled task-force work, its coordination with grass-roots campus initiatives, and its strategy of moving from principles to practice in stewardship of natural resources at a Lutheran liberal arts college.
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Response
Of Imaginary Cows and a White Toy Sheep: The Freedom of a Christian College
Ryan La Hurd
No. 6 · Winter 1999
La Hurd, president of Lenoir-Rhyne and a former Thiel English professor and Augsburg academic dean, responds to Christenson by insisting (with Robert Kegan’s story of Tommy’s imaginary cattle farm) that a college is composed of people but is not itself a person, and so cannot share in Luther’s freedom of the Christian. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, George Marsden, Mark Schwehn, Jacques Barzun, and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable, he distinguishes the “imagined college” (the gift-economy realm of teaching and the alma mater) from the “real college” (the commodity-economy realm of fund-raising, deferred maintenance, and federal aid reconciliation that does not have such freedom)—and ends with Pablo Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry” and the marvelous white toy sheep offered through a hole in a fence.
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Article
Education for Peace and Justice
David J. O'Brien
No. 10 · Fall 2000
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
Views on Flourishing After the Age of Roe
Caryn Riswold, Mary J. Streufert
No. 57 · Spring 2023
Riswold and Streufert reflect on the Radcliffe Institute’s January 2023 conference “The Age of Roe” and argue that the ELCA’s 1991 Social Statement on Abortion and its 2019 statement Faith, Sexism, and Justice offer Lutheran higher education a third way to approach reproductive justice grounded in serving the neighbor so that all may flourish.
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Article
Creation, Justice, and Communio: Lutheran Insights Empowering Educational Access
Mary Elise Lowe
No. 60 · Fall 2024
In her VLHE keynote, Lowe names three Lutheran commitments — continuing creation, neighbor justice, and communio — as the “why” that empowers ELCA colleges and universities to pursue equitable access for students often left behind by persistence and graduation gaps.