From the Publisher

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

Christenson draws on a ten-year alumni survey at Capital University showing that students most often credit practica, internships, travel-study, and service-learning—not classroom hours—as the places they best learned the university’s stated outcomes, and introduces this issue’s papers from the Summer 2003 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference on education and global outreach.

"The Earth is the Lord's And the Fullness Thereof": Six Theses Regarding Global Education at the Colleges of the Church

Christopher M. Thomforde

Thomforde surveys the breadth of global education across ELCA colleges—Susquehanna, Bethany, St. Olaf, Luther’s international students, Concordia’s language villages—and then frames its future around six theses: global education is a theological enterprise that teaches the First Commandment through dialog, wonder, and disillusionment; it necessitates coming to terms with “the stranger” and “hospitality” (drawing on Diana Eck); it is in, for, and against the world; it nurtures vocation and forms L. DeAne Lagerquist’s “cosmopolitan citizens”; it requires sympathetic engagement of faculty, staff, and administration in the spirit of pioneers like Ansgar Sovik; and it calls the ELCA colleges to exercise the gift of administration to bring greater clarity and collective coordination to the portfolio of programs offered across the twenty-eight institutions.

Service Beyond the Comfort Zone

Kathryn Wolford

Wolford names economic globalization and the growth of civil society as the two issues shaping Lutheran World Relief’s mission, illustrating with the Guatemalan storekeeper undercut by subsidized “gringo” chickens, fair-trade coffee and chocolate campaigns, and Charles Onyango-Obbo’s warning about anti-terrorism laws in fragile African democracies. Drawing on Darrell Jodock, Art Simon, and the Good Samaritan, she frames the global vocation of Lutheran colleges as inviting students past comfort zones of race, class, ethnicity, and ideas through service-learning that links mercy and justice, and closes with a concrete LWR partnership invitation including site visits, internships, fair-trade campus campaigns, and the “A Place for Peace in Colombia” advocacy program.

Educating for Peace: 21st Century Models for Thinking Globally and Acting Locally

Janet E. Rasmussen

Rasmussen opens with a rabbinic story about the one-step distance between East and West and describes Pacific Lutheran University’s four-phase “Global Education Continuum”—Introductory, Exploratory, Participatory, Integrative—developed with Teagle Foundation support and grounded in Perry, Bennett, and Musil. She illustrates intentional global/local partnership through three case studies: Barbara Temple-Thurston’s Trinidad-and-Salishan initiative; the China Partners Network with the Amity Foundation, Good Samaritan Hospital, and PLU’s Wang Center; and Ann Kelleher’s three-institution “Norway in Namibia” partnership with Hedmark University College, the University of Namibia, NAMAS, and the Ondao mobile schools for the Himba people. She closes with Daloz, Keen, Keen, and Parks’s Common Fire research and Lee Knefelkamp’s call to be “communities of peace.”

The Search for a Just Peace in a Globalized World

Munib A. Younan

Younan, Lutheran Bishop in Jerusalem, grounds Palestinian Christian identity in Incarnation theology and a Lutheran theology of grace and the cross, then surveys the Evangelical movement’s nineteenth-century legacy in the Middle East—the 1864 Arabic Bible, ELCJ schools, women’s ordination, and the Middle East Council of Churches. Engaging Edward Said’s critique of Samuel Huntington, he calls for international and local mutual-recognition agreements (including the Jerusalem Lutheran-Anglican agreement and a Lutheran-Reformed agreement in the Middle East), four marks of interfaith dialogue, and a sharp distinction between Lutheran “Evangelical” identity and the Dispensationalist evangelistic Right whose Israel-Palestine scenarios he names a heresy. He closes by proposing concrete scholarship, faculty exchange, and sabbatical partnerships between U.S. Lutheran colleges and the ELCJ’s churches, schools, and Dar al-Kalima Lutheran Academy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Lutheran Learning Paradigm

Paul J. Dovre

No. 34 · Fall 2011

Drawing on Hughes and Adrian’s Models of Christian Higher Education and on Ernest Simmons, Darrell Jodock, Tom Christenson, Robert Benne, and Richard Hughes, Dovre sketches a Lutheran learning paradigm shaped by four deep narratives—the biblical, the confessional, the theological, and the vocational—and traces their implications for curriculum (the study of scripture, theology, and vocation), for the religion faculty’s college-wide responsibility, and for pedagogy (moral deliberation, dialectic, paradox, the engagement of faith and the secular disciplines).

Vocation Outside of Career: Discovering Purpose through Comics

María Evelia Emerson

No. 53 · Spring 2021

Emerson recounts building an Augustana Vocational Discernment course around G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel series, using Kamala Khan’s juggling of family, friendship, faith, and superhero identity to help sophomores see vocation as not what they do for a living but how they want to live.

Why Interfaith Work is Not a Luxury: Lutherans as Neighboring Neighbors

Martha E. Stortz

No. 44 · Fall 2016

Stortz argues that interfaith work is not a luxury but a constitutive commitment of Lutheran higher education — institutions she describes as both “faith-based and interfaith-dependent.” Reading the parable of the Good Samaritan as both an intra-faith and inter-faith encounter, she offers a four-fold matrix of theological reflection, spiritual engagement, social action, and everyday experience as portals into the work of being neighbor.

Leadership in a Pandemic: Grace-Filled Lessons in Unprecedented Times

Marc Jerry

No. 53 · Spring 2021

Reflecting on his first year as president of Luther College at the University of Regina, Jerry argues that the best preparation for leading through a long crisis was not his economics or strategy training but seminary and pastoral formation—and that NECU institutions are called to a post-pandemic ministry of kindness, grace, and community.

Leaning-In to the Civic Lessons of Our Namesakes

A. Lanethea Mathews-Schultz

No. 63 · Spring 2026

6 min audio

Mathews-Schultz uses the civic legacy of the Muhlenberg family — from General Pete’s Revolutionary call to action to President Muhlenberg’s inaugural address on the “education of conscience” — to invite students at Muhlenberg College into a shared civic inheritance.

A Response to Paul Santmire: The Lutheran Liberal Arts College and Care for the Earth

Arthur A. Preisinger

No. 4 · Winter 1998

Preisinger commends much of Paul Santmire’s earlier essay—the critique of the “back-to-nature” cult, the call for a holistic environmental ethos, the suggestion of a cosmic liturgical praxis—but takes issue with Santmire’s reading of classical Lutheran social ethics. He argues that the two kingdoms doctrine was not a systematic Lutheran treatise (the term itself became common only in the 1930s), that the doctrine’s misuse by some twentieth-century German theologians does not condemn its proper use, and that the South African Council of Churches actually deployed the doctrine (correctly interpreted) against apartheid. Drawing on Karl Hertz, Ulrich Duchrow, Tom Strieter, and F. Edward Cranz, Preisinger defends the doctrine as complementary duality—left hand and right hand of God, governances to be distinguished but never separated—and concludes with Bill Lazareth that the skeletons in the Lutheran closet are not Luther but departures from Luther.