Sprigs of Mint

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

Selbyg notes that ELCA colleges and universities have remained more loyal to the church than the institutions of many other denominations and announces that with this issue Tom Christenson’s nine-year service as editor of Intersections comes to an end, with Bob Haak of Augustana College in Rock Island assuming the editorship and institutional support shifting from Capital to Augustana.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Emily Dickinson in Columbus, Ohio

Caitlin McHugh

No. 17 · Summer 2003

McHugh imagines Emily Dickinson waking up on a COTA bus to find “the world had ended, and her violets were gone forever,” then escaping the crowd to wander High Street, taste “actual brewed liquor,” quit “the act of reclusive-drama queen-ghost,” and finally smash a bouquet of violets when she realizes that “Beauty had not stopped for her death, but crawled bravely onward.”

The Skeptical Theologian's Dictionary

Carl Skrade, Spencer Porter

No. 4 · Winter 1998

Porter and Skrade offer selections from a mock-lexicon of theological terms: answer, church, faith, God, grace, hope, justification, love, prayer, sin, soul, and theology, among others. Each entry begins with a standard definition and then unsettles it—answer reminds the reader that in theology and poetry the questions matter more than their answers; church alternates between “the mystical Body of Christ” and ordinary human gatherings whose machinery often obscures the gospel; God is the One whose name we are told not to take in vain and yet whose name we keep using; prayer is communion with God yet often degenerates into a list of demands. The form’s irony exposes the gap between the language of theology and its lived realities—a sober, witty corrective for Lutheran classrooms and chapels alike.

Poetry: Rituals for an Uninvented Religion / On the Recently Discovered Mass Grave of Mice

Kevin Griffith

No. 6 · Winter 1999

Two poems by Kevin Griffith of Capital University: “Rituals for an Uninvented Religion,” a seven-part liturgical bestiary of made-up customs (lead-filling cups in June, masks for the dying, two bottom-feeding August fish, wax grave markers with wicks, the leap-day child, and the carnival-free day of judgment), and “On the Recently Discovered Mass Grave of Mice,” prompted by New Zealand shepherds’ uncovering of 300,000 mouse skeletons, on the bones “each light as a child’s first question” and the “graveyard rush” we share with the good flock.

Two Poems: The Dark Angels / Decorative Cooking

Gary Fincke

No. 3 · Summer 1997

Two poems by Gary Fincke of Susquehanna University: “The Dark Angels,” a return to the sidewalk in front of the father’s razed bakery in Etna, the soot-pocked windows, the Saturday trash fire, the last eclair on the work room’s folding chair; and “Decorative Cooking,” the mother’s story of St. Julitta, Betty Crocker’s “New Design for Happiness,” the Sunday dinners of shaped Jellos and anise Magi cookies, the visit of the former pastor returned to Pittsburgh to declaim the death of God, and the father who lays evergreen crosses by the mother’s headstone in the Garden of Dreams.

Drunks in a Midnight Choir

Kevin Griffith

No. 15 · Winter 2002

A pantoum-like Christmas-season poem in which red-robed choristers, flasks clinking and hands trembling, mangle the words of carols beneath “the midnight sky, your endless dark coat,” trusting that “it’s the season to forgive what’s vile” and that even wise men praise the humble and make glad.

Original Song Lyrics: "Just a Little"

Mike Blair

No. 48 · Fall 2018

Lyrics for an original song inspired by biblical images and stories, by Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” and by the faith, hope, love, and courage of immigrant friends and neighbors — led as a devotion during the 2018 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference.

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.