In this issue of Intersections we feature articles based on presentations made at the 2005 conference on “The Vocation of a Lutheran College.” Those presentations were focused on the upcoming ELCA Social Statement on Education. At that time we had before us a study document from the Task Force that is working on that social statement. Now we have a first draft of the statement itself: “Our Calling in Education”. If you have not seen that draft, I urge you to download it from the ELCA website at www.elca.org/socialstatements/education.
The task force would like you to respond to the draft. Please send them your response before October 15, 2006. There is a response form at the end of the draft document. The task force will study the responses, and then produce a second draft, which will be submitted to the 2007 ELCA Churchwide Assembly for approval. This is the way the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America establishes its policies: a study, hearings and feedback, a first draft, more hearings and feedback, a second draft, final consideration by a representative body. It is a very democratic process, but like all democratic processes, it only works well if a large and representative set of citizens/members is engaged, gets informed, and participates in the process.
I worry about how many people will participate in this process because at the same time another ELCA Task Force is working on a social statement on sexuality, with a timeline culminating in the 2009 Churchwide Assembly. My impression is that many more people care about what the official position of the ELCA will be on sexual issues than about our stand on educational issues. But for Martin Luther, and for us as who work at or with Lutheran educational institutions, education is as important as sex. It is likely that the social statement on education will establish the priorities of the ELCA unit for Vocation and Education, and that it will urge the colleges that are related to the church to do certain things and not do other things. So please, take the time to become an informed citizen, think about the issues raised in the first draft, and tell us what you think before the October 15 deadline. After an election, it does not help to say “Oh, I should have voted, but I just never got around to it.”
Living in God’s Amazing Grace,
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
Haak previews the issue’s four essays by Marcia Bunge, Paul Dovre, Samuel Torvend, and Cheryl Budlong — each engaging the ELCA Task Force on Education’s study document and first draft of the social statement on Lutheran education — and invites readers to bring their distinctive voices as professional educators at Lutheran institutions into the conversation before the October 15 deadline. He also invites submissions to Intersections and directs readers to LauraOMelia@augustana.edu to be added to the direct mailing list.
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Article
"Our Calling in Education": Working Together to Generate a Strong Social Statement on Public Schools, Lutheran Schools and Colleges, and the Faith Formation of Children and Young People
Marcia Bunge
Bunge, Professor of Theology and Humanities at Christ College, Valparaiso University, makes two claims about the ELCA’s forthcoming social statement on education: first, that it should be built on a robust Lutheran understanding of vocation, addressing four common misconceptions (vocation as occupation, as self-fulfillment, as ordained ministry, and as “vo-tech”) and recovering the breadth of Luther’s teaching; and second, that the statement should narrow its focus to three urgent areas affecting children and young people — public schools, Lutheran schools and colleges, and faith formation — rather than addressing the full lifespan of education in equal depth.
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Article
The Lutheran Calling in Education: Context and Prospect
Paul J. Dovre
Dovre, President Emeritus of Concordia College and co-chair of the ELCA Task Force on Education, undertakes three tasks: focusing on the current social context (young people’s spiritual lives, the state of mainline denominations, the family map, schools, communities, and higher education); reflecting on why Lutherans care about education (creation in God’s image, vocation, Luther’s legacy, the priesthood of all believers, civic righteousness, and hope); and considering the prospects and possibilities for addressing the calling (biblical, confessional, theological, and pedagogical legacies; the renewal of apostolic ministry, the Christian-college renaissance, K–12 reform, and the congregational education explosion).
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Article
Lutheran Education in the None Zone
Samuel Torvend
Torvend, Associate Professor of Religion at Pacific Lutheran University, argues that any ELCA social statement on education must speak not only to those raised within the cultural and theological traditions of ELCA Lutheranism but also to the diverse communities of the “none zone” — the Pacific Northwest and other regions where religious affiliation is increasingly unaffiliated. The statement must therefore equip Lutheran colleges, congregations, and schools for engagement with religious pluralism and cultural diversity rather than presuming a Lutheran cultural baseline.
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Article
"Our Calling in Education": An Educator's Perspective
Cheryl Budlong
Budlong, Professor of Education at Wartburg College, asks educators to reexamine their ‘mental models’ of what education itself means in light of the rapidly expanding literature on how young people learn. Drawing on Malcolm Gladwell, Eric Jensen, Ruby Payne, Judith Harris, Robert Slavin, and the AACTE’s Leading a Profession retrospective on the AACTE agenda 1980–2005, she calls on Lutheran educators to articulate vocation intentionally in their classrooms and to ground curricular and pedagogical reform in Wartburg’s focus on Discovering our 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. 22 · Spring 2006
Selbyg notes that both the ELCA and Intersections have undergone major changes this year—the Division for Higher Education and Schools is gone, replaced by the Educational Partnerships and Institutions group within the Vocation and Education unit, and the journal has a new editor (Robert Haak), a new home at Augustana College, a new printer, and a new design. He commends the issue’s focus on human sexuality and points readers to the first draft of Our Calling in Education.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 16 · Winter 2003
Christenson previews this issue’s papers from the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference—Curt Thompson on “the Lutheran knot,” Carol Gilbertson on the creative dimensions of language, Bruce Heggen on theological vocabulary in the state university, Susan Poppe on the boundaries of campus freedom, and Sig Royspern’s oracular gems—welcomes Robert Benne’s response to the previous issue as a sign that Intersections is becoming a locus of continuing conversation, and confesses his reluctant consent to appear on the cover.
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Article
Semper Reformanda: Lutheran Higher Education in the Anthropocene
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 43 · Spring 2016
Simmons enumerates the ELCA initiatives over the past twenty years that have helped Lutheran higher education retrieve a Christian understanding of vocation, then argues that the looming reality of human-caused climate change — the geological epoch of the Anthropocene — now requires Lutheran liberal arts education to prepare students for “planetary citizenship” as sustainability leaders, drawing on the classical Trivium, Luther’s panentheism, and a quantum-physics-inflected theology of divine entanglement and hope.
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Article
Freedom, Humor, and Community: A Lutheran Vision for Higher Education
Darrell Jodock
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Jodock’s inaugural lecture for the Bernhardson chair at Gustavus Adolphus develops three interlocking themes drawn from the Lutheran tradition as a deeper grounding for the liberal arts college than contemporary American assumptions. A sense of humor rests on Luther’s discovery that God takes the initiative—Luther could call himself a beggar, joke about the epistle of James, and credit Wittenberg beer for the Reformation—and underwrites the freedom of inquiry that John Updike traces to Grace Lutheran Sunday School in Shillington. Community, grounded in Augsburg Confession VII and Luther’s 1524 letter to the German city councils, makes the college a community of discourse pursuing wisdom rather than “the same old blockheads.” Freedom is both “freedom from” and “freedom for,” illustrated by Nechama Tec’s Polish Holocaust rescuers and by Jodock’s Holocaust-class corporate role-play in which students voted to build a factory in a death camp rather than risk losing their board seats—a vivid case for educating toward “a passion for justice.”
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Article
Finding Purpose in Chaos: Reflection In and Beyond the Public Health Classroom
Lena R. Hann
No. 52 · Fall 2020
When the pandemic hit her new public health professionalism course, Hann recalibrated her teaching from the “how” of professional preparation to the “why” of vocational reflection — and recounts how Augustana public health students and alumni found purpose in the chaos through food banks, disaster response, palliative care, and research on health inequities.
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Article
Vocational Leadership
Darrell Jodock
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Jodock proposes “vocational leadership” as a name for a distinctive educational value at the heart of a Lutheran college — one that seeks to benefit the neighbor and the community, inspires and invites others to participate in that service, and is institutionally anchored in the Lutheran concept of vocation. He unpacks twelve facets of vocational leadership and ties them to Luther’s own leadership around indulgences, public schooling, and beggary.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Mahn narrates a year of crisscrossing pandemics — Covid-19, economic collapse, partisan politics, and the long pandemic of white supremacy revealed anew by the murder of George Floyd — and argues that Lutheran liberal arts schools, by educating for vocation, are uniquely poised to help students respond with character and capable callings.