From the Publisher

From the Editor

Robert D. Haak

Haak introduces himself as the new editor inheriting the journal from Tom Christenson and frames the issue around the question of what ELCA colleges might contribute to conversations about human sexuality. He summarizes the contributions of Yeager, Benne, Williams, Bussie, and Nack, and shares previously uncollected National Study of Youth and Religion data on the sexual attitudes and behaviors of Lutheran teens—including that 25% of regularly-attending ELCA teens report the church has done nothing to help them with their sexuality.

A Church, the Human Condition, and the Fissured Face of Peace

D. M. Yeager

Yeager, a member of the ELCA Task Force for Studies on Sexuality, reflects on lessons for the church’s educational mission in the wake of the 2005 Churchwide Assembly. Drawing on Macquarrie’s The Concept of Peace, Polanyi on the personal coefficient of knowledge, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and responses to the task force report from Roy Harrisville III and Larry Rasmussen, she proposes “the fissured face of peace”—peace as the absence of hostility rather than disagreement—and maps how Arendt’s five conditions of human existence (life, earth, natality, mortality, worldliness, plurality) might shape Lutheran colleges’ curricula in history, epistemology, and the sociology of knowledge so that graduates can disagree without hostility and embrace the slow work of reformation.

Sexuality over the Lifespan—Social Trends Pose Moral Dilemmas for Communities of Faith

Adina Nack

Nack, a sociologist who presented to the ELCA Task Force for Studies on Sexuality, surveys empirical research on three life-stages flagged by the Task Force as particularly contested—premarital sexuality among adolescents and young adults, sexuality after divorce and within single parenting, and sexuality in late adulthood. Drawing on the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the Office of the Surgeon General, AARP, National Council on the Aging, and the World Health Organization’s 2002 definition of sexual health, she closes each section with questions about the church’s role in education, blessing of committed nonmarital relationships, and dismantling stereotypes about aging and sexuality.

Ethical Deliberation and the Biblical Text—A Lutheran Contribution to Reading the Bible

Ritva Williams

Williams articulates a Lutheran “critical traditionalist hermeneutic”—a phrase borrowed from her Hebrew Bible professor Robert Polzin—that honors Scripture as queen while keeping Christ as its king, and tests it by critiquing Robert Gagnon’s use of Romans 1:18-32 in The Bible and Homosexual Practice. Drawing on Lazareth, Lotz, Philip Esler’s Conflict and Identity in Romans, Stanley Stowers’ Rereading Romans, and Ben Witherington III, she proposes an alternative reading in which Paul recites a Hellenistic-Jewish ethnic caricature in 1:18-32 only to overturn it in 2:1-16, making the passage a critique of self-righteous stereotyping rather than the foundation of a moral doctrine on same-sex intercourse.

Scarred Epistemologies: What a Theology of the Cross Has to Say about the Gay Marriage Ban

Jacqueline Bussie

Responding to Robert Benne’s claim (citing Gilbert Meilander and Wolfhart Pannenberg) that one cannot defend gay marriage on biblical or confessional grounds, Bussie reads three theses of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation alongside Moltmann’s Crucified God and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail to argue that the theologia crucis—with its insistence on calling the thing what it is, its acknowledgment of scarred epistemologies and simul justus et peccator, and its refusal to domesticate God—exposes the Ohio Defense of Marriage Act as scapegoating, selective literalism, and an unjust law that the Christian conscience must reject.

What Could the Lutheran Colleges and Universities Contribute to the ELCA Discussion of Sexuality—But What Would They Actually Contribute?

Robert Benne

Benne hopes that Lutheran colleges might model fair moral discourse on sexuality by gathering a balanced mix of what James Davison Hunter calls “orthodox” and “progressive” voices from religion and social-science faculties, with the Great Tradition treated as the default position. He doubts this is what would actually happen: citing Klein, Stern, and Western’s research showing a ten-to-one liberal-to-conservative ratio in social-science and humanities associations, he suspects Lutheran faculties skew further left than other private colleges and would simply reinforce the ELCA’s already-progressive seminary and churchwide leadership.

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.

"Annoying the Student With Her Rights:" Human Life Coram Hominibus; Reflections on Vocation, Hope, and Politics

Caryn Riswold

No. 32 · Spring 2010

Riswold takes a student’s course-evaluation complaint that she had been “annoyed with her rights” about voting as the entry point for reflection on fear of change, mistrust of difference, and right-wing extremist violence—Poplawski, Von Brunn, Roeder, and the Sotomayor hearings. Drawing on Gerhard Ebeling’s reading of Luther’s fourfold relationality (coram Deo, mundo, meipso, hominibus), Brian Gerrish, Alister McGrath, Gustaf Wingren, Philip Hefner, Mary Rose O’Reilley, and bell hooks, she argues that the vocation of the Lutheran college is precisely to “annoy students with their rights” by forming them for socially responsible voice grounded in faith active in love.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

No. 8 · Winter 2000

Christenson marks the eighth edition of Intersections, expresses gratitude to the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools and especially to the soon-retiring Bob Sorenson for backing the journal, the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conferences, and the Lutheran Academy of Scholars, and introduces an issue that gathers analyses and arguments from both insiders to Lutheran theology and outsiders, from veterans of the institutions and recent arrivals—voices that together remind us that what is and what ought to be need to inform each other.

Otherwise

David Wee

No. 6 · Winter 1999

Wee’s September 3, 1997 St. Olaf Opening Convocation address takes its title from Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise” and asks why we gather: to celebrate the gifts of life, place, companionship, and the work we love, and to become “otherwise”—wise about the others in our midst. He honors his own St. Olaf teachers (Ditmanson, Shaw, Stiehlow, Jordahl, Paulson, Meyer, Hove, Clausen, Larson, Jorstad) and the gruff Latvian stamp scholar Gus Eglas and Sherlock Holmes expert Randy Cox, draws Huck Finn’s “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” and Flannery O’Connor’s grandmother into a single argument, and closes on Tim Lull’s expectation that a Lutheran college campus should display contentment, courage, and cheerfulness as a family member faces day-six post-bone-marrow-transplant—“the first day of the rest of your life.”

From Pietism to Paradox: The Development of a Lutheran Philosophy of Education

Philip Nordquist

No. 8 · Winter 2000

Nordquist traces a four-decade personal and institutional journey from the “Protestant triumphalism” and aggressive moralism of S. C. Eastvold’s 1950s Pacific Lutheran through the 1960 Ditmanson–Hong–Quanbeck volume The Christian Faith and the Liberal Arts, Gordon Lathrop’s 1972 PLU donor address grounding the university in two-kingdoms theology, the ALC’s 1975 Concordia workshop with Bill Narum, Bob Bertram, Harris Kaasa, and Sydney Ahlstrom’s case for the “critical” tradition over the scholastic and pietistic, the 1976 LCA statement distinguishing “Christian” from “church-related” education, and Richard Hughes’s 1997 Carthage address. He concludes that dialectical (two kingdoms) theology, Christian humanism alongside professional studies (the New American College model), Luther’s commitment to universal compulsory education, environmental and civic responsibility, and academic freedom together constitute the bequest of the Reformation—“Christ and culture in paradox” remains the best approach to education he knows.

Hospitality is Not Enough: Claims of Justice in the Work of Colleges and Universities

Paul C. Pribbenow

No. 35 · Spring 2012

Pribbenow argues that Augsburg’s incarnational motto — “And the Word became flesh” — grounds a calling beyond hospitality to justice. Drawing on Stephen Carter on civility, Letty Russell on just hospitality, Henri Nouwen, Parker Palmer, Michael Sandel, Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, and Teresa of Avila, he describes four components of Augsburg’s practice: education “off the main road,” co-created common life, abundance over entitlement, and the anchor-institution model in which colleges become economic and civic partners with their neighborhoods.

Diversity and Dialogue: Gustavus Adolphus College

Florence D. Amamoto

No. 1 · Summer 1996

Amamoto, a third-generation Japanese-American Buddhist who teaches American literature at Gustavus Adolphus and regularly attends daily chapel, writes as an “inside outsider.” Engaging Schwehn’s closing call to refurbish the Lutheran college, she argues that church-related colleges are vitally important to society, that “refurbishing” must take up diversity, and describes how Lutheranism is manifest at Gustavus: Christ Chapel as the highest point on campus, the ecumenical chapel program led for thirty years by Chaplain Richard Elvee, the Nobel Conferences that pair scientists with philosophers and theologians, the First-term Seminar and Tuesday Conversations, the India study-abroad program organized by Deane Curtin, and the Sponberg Chair in Ethics. She names the pressures of money, secularization, and the publications-driven push for “excellence” that threaten this creative tension.