From the Publisher

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

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.

Mars, Mammon—and Other Options

Carl Skrade

In a wide-ranging public lecture from a Capital University Philosophy and Religion department series on “The Empire, Its Religions, and Some Alternatives,” Skrade distinguishes the military from militarism (using Oxford and Chalmers Johnson definitions), catalogs evidence of contemporary U.S. militarism—budget allocations, arms sales, the military-academic complex, post-1945 interventions, overseas bases, and Bush-era profiteering through Bechtel and Halliburton—and traces its roots in resource greed, racism, right-wing religiosity, and Augustinian incurvatus in se ipsum. After surveying the financial and human costs through testimony from Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam, Samuel Hynes’s The Soldier’s Tale, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, and Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey, he applies Vincent Ferraro’s seven principles of just war to Gulf II, reads Matthew 5:43-48 as a call to indiscriminate care, and proposes a www.religiousleft.org website to host a Christian alternative to Mars and Mammon.

Leading Students to Distinguish Between Career and Vocation: Reflections from a Lutheran Law School

Steven C. Bahls

Bahls, writing as former dean of the Capital University Law School, argues that most law students and many legal educators confuse vocation with career—asking “what kind of lawyer do you want to be?” rather than “who do I want to be?” Drawing on John O. Mudd’s five attributes of a well-prepared lawyer and Susan Daicoff’s empirical research on lawyer dissatisfaction and the “amoral professional role,” he turns to Ernest L. Simmons’s and Darrel Jodock’s articulations of Luther’s understanding of vocation and proposes five steps—reflection, assessment, vision, integrative thinking, and reassessment—along with explicit leadership from law school deans, engagement of career services offices, and leadership within the profession (illustrated by Capital’s joint venture with the Columbus Bar Association).

Luther's Theology of Learning: Discovering the Vocation of Today's Small Lutheran Liberal Arts College

Eric Childers

In an excerpt from his Wake Forest University Divinity School senior thesis, Childers profiles six students hand-picked by presidents and chaplains at Concordia College (Moorhead), Lenoir-Rhyne College, and Muhlenberg College—Nathan Gossai, Amy Nelson, Alison Schmidt, Ryan Sigmon, Julie Christianson, and Jeffrey Slotterback—as a living testament to Luther’s theology of learning. He then draws on Solberg, Mark R. Schwehn (in Paul J. Dovre’s The Future of Religious Colleges), Robert Benne, Ernest Simmons, Mark Noll, Richard Hughes, and James Burtchaell to argue that Lutheran colleges have not yet fully articulated their own theology of education and that their vocation is to embrace, engage, and galvanize a Lutheran tradition of learning rooted in the liberal arts, Scripture, the Confessions, and confident ecumenism.

Review of Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education

Tom Christenson

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.

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.

Reinventing Lutheran Liberal Arts: A Preliminary Report on Project DAVID

Ann Hill Duin, Eric Childers

No. 38 · Fall 2013

Duin and Childers introduce Project DAVID—Distinction, Analytics, Value, Innovation, Digital opportunity—as a framework for showcasing strategic reinvention across ELCA liberal arts institutions. Building on Childers’ College Identity Sagas and reading Selingo, Norris, and Popenici alongside the AAC&U, Adrian College, NITLE, and the Delta Cost Project, they pose framing questions about distinction, vocation, affordability, value propositions, two-track innovation, and BYOE technology that ELCA campuses can use to face their own “Goliath” moments.

Climate Justice, Environmental Racism, and a Lutheran Moral Vision

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda

No. 36 · Fall 2012

Moe-Lobeda argues that the vocation of a Lutheran college is to prepare students for Thomas Berry’s “great work”: forging a sustainable relationship between the human species and the planet while diminishing the gap between those who have too much and those who have not enough. She develops a three-fold “moral vision” rooted in Luther’s theology of the cross—seeing what is (climate injustice and environmental racism for what they are), seeing more just and sustainable alternatives, and seeing God’s saving presence at work—and offers it as a distinctive Lutheran contribution to the panhuman and interfaith challenge of our day.

Tat for Teat: Ratke Responds

David Ratke

No. 9 · Summer 2000

Ratke, agreeing with much of VonDohlen’s critique but contending that VonDohlen misreads both Luther and the two-realms doctrine, marshals Luther’s To the Christian Nobility, On the Freedom of a Christian, Temporal Authority, Whether Soldiers Too Can Be Saved, and the “Sermon on Keeping Children in School,” along with Walther von Loewenich, to argue that Luther was well aware of structurally differentiated society, made no claim to a monistic epistemology, and intended the two-realms doctrine to combat—not introduce—dualistic bifurcation between sacred and secular. Our identity is “not as either Christian or academic, but as Christian and scholar.”

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 18 · Fall 2003

Selbyg reports that the ELCA Church Council’s new strategic directions include the charge to “assist this church to bring forth and support faithful, wise, and courageous leaders whose vocations serve God’s mission in a pluralistic world,” and assures readers that Intersections, the Vocation of a Lutheran College conferences, and related programs will remain among the tools by which the churchwide organization reaches its strategic goals.

Keeping Close from a Distance: Pandemic Reflections of a Library Coordinator

Carla Flengeris

No. 53 · Spring 2021

Flengeris reflects on a year of running Luther College’s library at the University of Regina from her basement and mourns the loss of the hourly walks through the stacks—the “roving reference” that, she realizes, were never disruptions to her work but were the work itself.

On Sharing the Sacred Sauna

Rosemary Radford Ruether

No. 30 · Fall 2009

Reprinted from the National Catholic Reporter (August 1968), Ruether’s reflection from her time as a theologian on the faculty of Holden Village describes Lutheran community life in the mountains of northern Washington from a Catholic perspective — finding more catholicity in this Lutheran retreat than in many Roman Catholic communities — and culminates in a celebration of the Holden sauna as “the new sacrament, the new fellowship, the new theology.”