In this issue of Intersections we continue our recent focus on the Lutheran view of education. The papers that form the basis for this issue were presented at the 2006 conference on “The Vocation of a Lutheran College,” where the theme was “Liberal Learning and Professional Preparation.” This continued the discussion from the 2005 conference where the theme was “The Lutheran Calling in Education.” All of these efforts were meant to contribute to the new ELCA Social Statement on Education. A second draft of that statement will be distributed in the spring of 2007, and come to the 2007 ELCA Churchwide Assembly for approval. We who work for the ELCA unit for Vocation and Education are very grateful for the many faculty members and administrators at the colleges and universities that are related to the ELCA who took this opportunity to contribute to this formal statement of what the ELCA stands for in the area of education.
The next conference will be held at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois in the first days of August 2007, and the theme will be “The Vocation of a Lutheran College—Engaging the World.” When this issue of Intersections is distributed there should still be time for you to contact your provost or academic dean to see whether you can be part of the delegation from your institution to that conference. Although the list of speakers is not yet finalized as I write these comments, I feel confident in predicting that we will have some great discussions of how the colleges that are related to the ELCA can avoid being caught in a bubble of inward looking self-centeredness. One of the reasons for the excellence of Lutheran colleges is that Martin Luther wanted the church and its members to contribute to their extended communities and not isolate themselves from their communities and their needs. One of the measures of the quality of Lutheran colleges should be the extent to which their students get rid of the blinders that most of us develop by growing up in a limited, even homogenous, environment. That is what the students need. That is what the colleges need. That is what the church needs.
Living in God’s Amazing Grace,
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
Haak introduces the issue’s essays by Stanley N. Olson, Kathryn L. Johnson, Gail Summer, Lake Lambert, and Steven C. Bahls; argues that on Lutheran campuses, professional programs in business, education, and nursing are not “second-class citizens” but integral to the institution’s vocation; cites Olson’s mantra (“Because of Christ, the world; because of the world, vocation; because of vocation, education”); and thanks Matt Marohl for assisting with the editing.
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Article
Vocation and the Vocation of a Lutheran College (Cows, Colleges and Contentment)
Stanley Olson
Drawing on a childhood image of contented cows on Lutheran-owned farmland in Northfield, Olson—Executive Director of the ELCA Vocation and Education unit—asks whether Lutheran colleges are content because they draw nourishment from the Lutheran tradition, or merely because they happen to be standing on Lutheran soil. He proposes the mantra “Because of Christ, the world; because of the world, vocation; because of vocation, education,” and traces what each clause demands of the colleges and universities of the ELCA.
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Article
Freedom of a Christian-College: Looking through the Lens of Vocation
Kathryn L. Johnson
Johnson, Paul Tudor Jones Professor of Church History at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, re-reads Luther’s 1520 treatise The Freedom of a Christian as a paradigm for the “freedom of a Christian college” amid the pressures of professional preparation. She traces Luther’s paradoxical claim that a Christian is “a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none” and at the same time “a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all,” and argues that the same dialectic frees a Lutheran college to engage the professions without being captured by them.
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Article
Professional Education/Liberal Arts Education: Not a Case of Either-Or but Both-And
Gail Summer
Summer, Dean of Academic Programs at Lenoir-Rhyne College, traces the historical interweaving of liberal arts and professional education in American higher education (using the rise of engineering as a case study) and argues that the standard “either-or” framing of liberal arts versus professional preparation misreads both. At Lutheran colleges, the “both-and” relationship is shaped by a Lutheran understanding of vocation in which professional programs are integral to, not in tension with, the liberal arts.
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Article
The Divide Within (Not Between) Liberal Arts and Professional Education
Lake Lambert
Lambert, then Board of Regents Chair in Ethics at Wartburg College and Project Director for the “Discovering and Claiming our Callings Initiative,” argues that the real divide in higher education runs not between the liberal arts and the professions but within each — between teaching that forms students for callings and teaching that merely transmits content or credential. He calls Lutheran colleges to recover, across both liberal arts and professional disciplines, a shared commitment to vocational formation grounded in the Lutheran tradition.
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Article
Liberal Arts and Professional Education: A Call for Philosopher-Servants
Steven C. Bahls
Bahls, President of Augustana College (Rock Island), calls for a renewed commitment at Lutheran colleges to form “philosopher-servants” — graduates whose grounding in the liberal arts and the liberating gospel equips them for thoughtful service in business, education, nursing, and the other professions. Their impact, he argues, is “a good thing and a fact that we can be proud of as those who labor in Lutheran higher education.”
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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. 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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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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Article
Lutheran Heritage Across the Curriculum: Reflections from a Faculty/Staff Development Seminar
Cynthia Bane, Fred Waldstein, Kathryn A. Kleinhans, Penni Pier
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Four Wartburg College colleagues share fruits of the 2006 Lilly-funded “Discovering and Claiming Our Callings” faculty/staff development seminar in Wittenberg, Eisenach, and Neuendettelsau. Kleinhans frames the curriculum and books used; Bane (psychology) finds Lutheran convictions about the value of humans, the affirmation of creation, and the universality of sin congruent with her discipline; Pier (communication arts) reads Luther as a model of dialectical rhetoric that gives educators permission to challenge students with uncomfortable ideas; and Waldstein (political science) reflects on the paradox of humility and self-confidence in Luther and on the Luther-Melanchthon collaboration as a model for the seminar group’s own work.
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Institutional Focus
Putting Principles into Practice: An Interview with Kenneth Foster about Concordia's Sustainability Council
Kenneth Foster
No. 36 · Fall 2012
Foster, chair of Concordia College’s President’s Sustainability Council, describes the Council’s formation under President William Craft in 2011 as a re-energization of stalled task-force work, its coordination with grass-roots campus initiatives, and its strategy of moving from principles to practice in stewardship of natural resources at a Lutheran liberal arts college.
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Reflection
VLHE—Wednesday Morning Sacred Pause
Ann Rosendale
No. 62 · Fall 2025
8 min audio
Rosendale draws on Esther 4:14 and the Lutheran practice of holding death and resurrection together — with “and” as the hardest word — to argue that the calling of Lutheran higher education for “just such a time as this” requires us to remember and name out loud that ours are places where God is at work.
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Response
Of Imaginary Cows and a White Toy Sheep: The Freedom of a Christian College
Ryan La Hurd
No. 6 · Winter 1999
La Hurd, president of Lenoir-Rhyne and a former Thiel English professor and Augsburg academic dean, responds to Christenson by insisting (with Robert Kegan’s story of Tommy’s imaginary cattle farm) that a college is composed of people but is not itself a person, and so cannot share in Luther’s freedom of the Christian. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, George Marsden, Mark Schwehn, Jacques Barzun, and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable, he distinguishes the “imagined college” (the gift-economy realm of teaching and the alma mater) from the “real college” (the commodity-economy realm of fund-raising, deferred maintenance, and federal aid reconciliation that does not have such freedom)—and ends with Pablo Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry” and the marvelous white toy sheep offered through a hole in a fence.
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Article
An Apostolate of Hope
David L. Tiede
No. 32 · Spring 2010
Tiede argues that the vocation of a Lutheran college is to be “an apostolate of hope” oriented by three metrics of our time: 12,000 (the Dow), 350 (parts per million of CO2), and $1.25 (the daily income of 1.4 billion people in extreme poverty). Drawing on Darrell Jodock’s “third path” for church-related colleges, Larry Rasmussen’s Batalden lectures, Mark Tranvik, Douglas John Hall, Bill McKibben, Stephen Privett, Peter Singer, and Augsburg’s Center for Global Education, he proposes that justification by faith, critical pluralism, stewardship of God’s earth, and love and justice for our students together prepare wise leaders to renew the future.
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Article
A Lutheran Dialectical Model for Higher Education
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 37 · Spring 2013
Drawing on “The Freedom of a Christian,” simul justus et peccator, Richard Hughes, Joseph Sittler, Martha Nussbaum, and Tom Christenson, Simmons argues that the Lutheran tradition informs an open, dialectical educational model that holds Christian and academic freedom together. He locates vocation at the intersection of the practical (why are you here?) and the existential (why are you here?) and proposes Lutheran higher education as education for self-transcendence and leadership Soli Deo Gloria.