Some say childhood ends in the period between high school
and college, that in growing up you make a trade off
like bartering baseball cards with the neighbor, “I’ll give you late night talks with friends
foooor a career in education. Or how ’bout two Wet Willy’s for a Jack Daniels?”
It seems fair, maybe, that this should be, as I twist
the shower knobs and test the water with a single sandled foot. I step
into the warm stream, stand a moment before bathing.I’ve given four years to this higher education, four years closer
to some hidden knowledge, four years farther from what I once knew,
four years of reading Emerson, watching “The Simpsons,”
thinking, Me fail English? That’s unpossible. The chimes ring
in the afternoon sun. It’s noon and the ding-ding-BONG of the bells
pulls me to the heart of the warm, bubbling campus.Around the grassy courtyard, strewn bodies teach strewn bodies
about relationships, advice about hard topics coming all too easy.
They read a poem, write a song, talk the physics of cigarette ash
and how long it can grow before falling, clumped or floating
on the wind, from their scissored fingers. Along the worn brick paths
professors walk side by side with students, taste an apple
between classes, hear the latest political news, or ask
squirrelly freshmen, “What is love?” They don’t know, of course,
that the answer doesn’t start, “Love is,” but rather “Love can be.”For now I spend evenings with friends, say, “You should have heard
what this kid in my second period class said,” or just play Tecmo
Super Bowl on the original Nintendo, an old school game for those
trying to remember their old school days.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg notes that while the primary source of articles for Intersections is the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, this issue draws on participants in the Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education, whose Lutheran Brotherhood and Lilly Endowment grants have been exhausted but which has been continued through DHES, the colleges, and especially St. Olaf’s release of DeAne Lagerquist to direct it. He draws attention to editor Tom Christenson’s new book The Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education (Augsburg Fortress).
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson reflects on the scarcity of time in over-committed academic lives and posts a tongue-in-cheek help-wanted advertisement for his own successor as editor. He introduces the issue’s four authors as “three friends and one new acquaintance” whose work addresses Lutheran higher education, the significance of Paul Ricoeur, the implications of being a reformation community, and the perils of teaching ethics.
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Article
Academic Vocation: What the Lutheran University has to Offer
Wendy McCredie
Writing as a practicing Lutheran, a trained literary scholar, and the associate director for interpretation at the ELCA churchwide office, McCredie articulates a vocation for ELCA colleges and universities grounded in the dialogical tension Gilbert Meilaender names between “bonds of particular love” and “a love which is open to every neighbor.” Drawing on Berube and Nelson, Marsden, Pelikan, Schwehn, Toulmin, Simmons, Hughes, MacIntyre, and Wolterstorff, she argues that Lutheran tradition resists both the easy separation and the collapse of sacred and secular, that human reason errs while God’s grace makes action possible, and that listening to the marginalized and to those outside the tradition is itself a theology of the cross enacted in classroom and collegial life.
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Article
Dual Citizenship in Athens and Jerusalem: Ricoeur's Hermeneutics and the Promise of Lutheran Higher Education
Mark C. Mattes
Mattes proposes a Lutheran model of Christian higher education that develops conversation between faith and learning while preserving the integrity of each, in contrast to Reformed, Roman Catholic, and Mennonite/free-church alternatives. Drawing extensively on Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval, his account of myth and symbol, and his understanding of truth as manifestation rather than mere correspondence, Mattes argues that issues of faith can be genuinely public; that the four phenomenological contours of dialogue—risk, listening, mutuality, and open-endedness—mark authentic Lutheran pedagogy; and that Lutheran education is best served when it charts a path between accommodationist and sectarian responses to the liberal-rationalist tradition.
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Reflection
Reflections on Lutheran Identity on Reformation Sunday
Thomas W. Martin
Beginning with an “intellectual vertigo” experienced when his celebrant announced that “today the Church gathers to celebrate the Reformation,” Martin—a biblical scholar who has belonged to four Protestant denominations—asks how Lutherans should tell their own foundational myth. He argues that the Reformation was a mixed bag whose dark side includes a century of religious warfare and the killing of Anabaptists; that Luther himself is too mythic a figure to monopolize; and that distinguishing “constitutive” from “prophetic” reading (after James Sanders) opens the way to a Reformation Sunday told “together with” rather than “over and against” the rest of the Church—one that mixes repentance for the dark with celebration of the glory.
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Article
The Ought
Ned Wisnefske
Wisnefske observes that students and faculty raise contradictory objections to moral education—that students are already morally formed, and that teachers must not form them—and argues that both share the same fear of “the Ought.” He proposes that the Ought is best encountered not in front of us but behind us, nudging us, as we exercise impartiality, sympathy, and free will and discover that the persons participating in moral inquiry deserve respect; the Ought can then reform our past formations and transform our wants, so that it is never too late, or a mistake, to be shaped by it.
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Reflection
Danya Tazyeen
Danya Tazyeen
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Tazyeen, a Pakistani-American Muslim student at Augustana College, reads Qur’an 49:13 — that God made us into peoples and tribes “that you may know one another” — as a charge to break down fear with open dialogue and to see one another as flawed and relatable fellow human beings.
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Reflection
Dreaming God's Dream: A Sermon on Isaiah 56:1-2, 6-8
Stephan K. Turnbull
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Preached at the 2008 “Savvy with Substance” Convocation of the ELCA at Central Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, this sermon by parish pastor Stephan K. Turnbull (First Lutheran Church, White Bear Lake) sets the small dreams of pastors and academics—balanced budgets, peaceful congregations, coherent midterm papers—over against the prophet’s dream in Isaiah 56 of a God who gathers all nations to a house of prayer for all peoples. Turnbull calls educators, preachers, and church leaders to articulate God’s dream of getting the world back through the dying of Jesus the Messiah and the resurrection’s first fruits of new creation.
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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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Poem
Things That Renew Hope
Sig Royspern
No. 8 · Winter 2000
Inspired by Andrew Greeley’s Religion as Poetry, which defines religion as hope-renewing experiences and the stories, symbols, rituals, and images that preserve them, Rauspern offers a list-poem of small renewals of hope: lovers kissing in the street, the first snowfall of each year, compost and spring sprouts and Jewish humor, kids’ summer mischief, a mother nursing her baby on the bus, small jazz ensembles, two old men reconciling without remembering why, an unscheduled gift, the blues, a child taking him by the hand, and a gray-haired man who threw his cellular phone in the river.
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Article
Community-Building On Campus and Beyond
Krista E. Hughes
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Hughes describes Newberry College’s effort to build a “culture of community” that mirrors South Carolina’s demographics while reckoning with the institution’s founding ties to slavery — and names the challenges and promising city-college collaborations that shape this ongoing work.
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Article
Risky Speech–Gifted Friendships
Sonja Hagander
No. 44 · Fall 2016
Augsburg College Pastor Sonja Hagander reflects on pastoral care across faith traditions — from a campus chapel service after the 2008 murder of Muslim student Achmednur Ali, to her decade-long friendship with Jewish colleague Barbara Lehmann — and reads the Gospel of John as a roadmap for interfaith friendships marked by love, free speech, public space, and a willingness to risk being changed.