When I meet with my counterparts in other denominations, they are sometimes envious that the colleges and universities that are related to the ELCA have remained very loyal to the church and to Lutheran traditions and principles of higher education, compared to what has happened to many colleges and universities that once were related to Baptist, Congregationalist, Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, or other church bodies. I know of only one college in the USA that has formally severed its ties to the Lutheran church (Hartwick College in New York in 1968). There are other Lutheran colleges that want to avoid too close an embrace by the church as an institution, but they continue to honor the Lutheran ideals for higher education.
One of the main places where these Lutheran ideals are developed is in this journal, Intersections. And since its founding in 1996, the journal has been edited by Dr. Tom Christenson, professor of philosophy at Capital University, and has been supported by that institution. This issue marks the ending of that service. Beginning with the next issue, the editor will be Dr. Bob Haak, professor of religion at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois; and Augustana will help the church with its publication.
For the ELCA this is quite a change. Tom has been an outstanding editor, and we are very grateful to him. He has done all the practical things, so we have not had to worry at all about getting the journal out; this has been outsourcing at its best. But more importantly, he has set an editorial tone that his faculty colleagues at colleges and universities across the country have responded to with enthusiasm, and he has generated articles and other content for the journal so we have had to increase the frequency of publication. Sometimes he has done cover art; sometimes he has added poetry. But in many ways this has been his journal, and through this journal he has strengthened the Lutheran identity of twenty-eight colleges and universities. Tom, we deeply appreciate all you have done for Lutheran higher education through this journal during these nine years, and we thank you for your service.
Living in God’s amazing grace,
Arne Selbyg
Director, ELCA Colleges and Universities
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
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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Article
Changes
W. Robert Sorensen
Writing as former executive director of the Division for Higher Education and Schools, Sorensen places the DHES within the threefold movement of Luther’s Reformation—university, church, and individual piety—and recounts how the Division cohered its work with colleges, universities, campus ministries, and schools around Joseph Sittler’s definition of education as “movement into a larger world.” Drawing on Huston Smith’s “primordial tradition,” the Namibian student program, work in India and Palestine, and the Bergendoff series of publications, he raises a twofold concern about the proposed merger of DHES into a Division for Vocation and Education: whether the new structure will signal the core significance of education in the heritage and life of the church, and whether it can carry forward the effectiveness and scope of DHES’ work.
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Article
The Church in Education? Education in the Church? Ten Theses on Why These Questions Matter
Leonard G. Schulze
Writing in the months before the August 2005 Churchwide Assembly that will decommission DHES, Schulze frames his vision for the division as ten Lutheran-style theses, each followed by Luther’s catechetical question “What does this mean?” He argues that critical thinking and moral deliberation are in the Lutheran gene pool; that Luther’s devotion to learning was an expression of Christian vocation; that the rise of the research university and the binary public meaning of “evangelical” have marginalized church-related colleges; that DHES has been wrongly perceived as marginal; and that the reformed concept of vocation must drive the soon-to-be-created program unit for Vocation and Education. An appendix reproduces the 2005 DHES strategic planning overview.
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Article
Private University, Public Witness: Life in the "None Zone"
Loren J. Anderson
Drawing on sixteen years at Concordia College in Moorhead and twelve at Pacific Lutheran University, Anderson contrasts the Lutheran heartland with the Pacific Northwest’s “None Zone”—Patricia Killen and Mark Silk’s name for the country’s least churched region—and argues that a faithful Lutheran witness is possible in this changing context. He proposes five callings for the colleges—an academic program shaped by both educational philosophy and Lutheran theology, vibrant campus communities of faith and learning, inclusiveness and ecumenical outreach, global vision, and vocational exploration—and closes by sketching PLU’s shift toward “partnership” congregations and a new Center of Religion, Culture and Society in the Western United States.
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Reflection
Finding Words That Matter (Proverbs 1:20-21; 4:10-13)
Harvard Stevens Jr.
In a brief homiletic reflection on Proverbs, Stevens addresses Lutheran educators as “merchants of wisdom” competing with a crowded contemporary marketplace of internet, cable TV, and rap music alongside “Hedonism 101,” “Advanced Voyeurism,” and “Pure Escapism.” Recounting an evening with a Carthage student poetry club, he shares the poem wisdom whispered to him there and offers thanks for the high calling to teach “words that matter.”
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Poem
Sprigs of Mint
Caitlin McHugh
McHugh meditates on three light green mint stalks dying in a plastic cup of water in her window frame’s shadow, drawing a parallel between the neglected mint, the “tainted papers” of her unread journals, and the time that both holds her back and drives her forward.
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Article
Money, Sex and Power: An Exploration of Some Controversial Issues in the Public Witness of the Church
Pamela K. Brubaker
Brubaker explores two controversial issues in the church’s public witness—homosexuality and economic life—and the challenges they present for both church and college. Drawing on Beverly Harrison, Elizabeth Bounds, Ron Thiemann, Linell Cady, Marcia Bunge, Richard Hughes, Darrell Jodock, Ernest Simmons, Karen Bloomquist, Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher, and Larry Rasmussen, and on episodes at California Lutheran University around “Harmony Week” and Bishop Paul Egertson’s participation in Anita Hill’s ordination, she argues that colleges related to the ELCA are called to educate for “critical citizenship” by hosting rigorous, bold, and unfettered debate—including debate over the neo-liberal globalism that she names a form of economic fundamentalism.
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Article
Education as a Christian (Lutheran) Calling
Tom Christenson
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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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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Response
Feeling at Home: Dimensions of Faculty Life
Jane Hokanson Hawks
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Hawks of Midland Lutheran College responds to Bouman by reflecting on her path from a Lutheran childhood through the BSN at St. Olaf and thirteen years at four non-church-related institutions to her present home at Midland, where teaching at a Lutheran institution finally feels “right.” Bouman’s framing of the five themes as the Lutheran argument about what it means to be human helped her ad-hoc committee articulate the spiritual role in Midland’s new faculty mentoring program (recently funded by the Lilly Foundation), and grounds her work as a nurse educator confronting the daily humanness of grief, joy, ethical dilemmas, and care across cultural and religious difference.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 48 · Fall 2018
Wilhelm frames the issue by reflecting on the Letter of James and the Lutheran tradition of “calling a thing what it is” — arguing that the standards of academic discourse, deeply rooted in Lutheran insistence on frankness and honesty alongside concern for the common good, give NECU institutions a solid platform for sustaining honest but not hateful discourse about divisive issues.
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Article
The New (con)Texts of Jewish-Christian Engagement
Karla R. Suomala
No. 33 · Spring 2011
Suomala surveys four contemporary contexts of Jewish-Christian engagement on American college campuses — campus populations, Jewish studies curricula, the changing nature of Jewish identity among Millennials, and the shift from formal Jewish-Christian dialogue toward broader religious pluralism — and argues that at Lutheran colleges this success story can serve as a model for engaging the other religious neighbors who increasingly form part of our society.
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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
No. 16 · Winter 2003
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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Institutional Focus
Continuing the Dialogue: Augustana College
Sandra C. Looney
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Looney describes Augustana College, Sioux Falls, debating and renaming its values—Christian, Liberal Arts, Community, Excellence, Service—under the leadership of religion professor Dr. Arthur Olsen and the T’N’T (“Through Thick and Thin”) committee, in the wake of ELCA Region III’s “What Does It Mean to be a College of the Church?” conversations. She describes Augustana’s 56% Lutheran student body, daily 10 a.m. chapel, dual Christmas Vespers in Our Savior’s Lutheran Church and St. Joseph’s Cathedral, the Capstone classes on moral and aesthetic issues, and the ongoing work of enlarging Augustana’s conversation to include Native American, Jewish, and Islamic voices.
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Book Review
Paul Dovre, ed.: The Future of Religious Colleges
Baird Tipson
No. 15 · Winter 2002
Tipson, president of Wittenberg University, reviews Paul Dovre’s edited proceedings of the October 2000 Harvard Conference on the Future of Religious Colleges (Eerdmans, 2002), summarizing essays by Douglas Sloan on the failure of the “two-realm theory of truth,” George Marsden on faith-shaped scholarship, DeAne Lagerquist, Father David O’Connell, Mark Noll, Robert Benne, Mark Roche on Notre Dame, Joel Carpenter on neo-Calvinist Kuyperianism, and Mark Schwehn on a Lutheran “college-related church” and the centrality of vocation. Against Benne’s suggestion that only two or three robustly Lutheran colleges can be sustained, Tipson defends a less robust but still authentically Lutheran model embodied at places like Wittenberg, Gettysburg, and Roanoke, arguing for the enlightenment commitment to subjecting all truth claims to rigorous criticism and for hiring Marsden-style faith-shaped scholars rather than counting Lutheran heads.