Here we are this beautiful morning in March, at a nexus of three currents of life pulling us into their rhythms. First, it is spring in Minnesota, and we can feel the earth starting to stir, starting to grow and green. Second, as faculty, staff and students we’re back from spring break heading into the final seven weeks of school. There is a lot of work to be done, and we may be uncertain about what the future holds, nevertheless, we know that the future will come, the end of the school year will be upon us before we know it, and we’ll be on our way even if we don’t know where we’ll be going. Third, for those of us who find strength and meaning in the church, we’re fresh from the joy and the drama of Holy Week and its passion—the crucifixion, the empty grave, and the resurrection. In this third rhythm, as with the rhythms of spring and the school year, we find ourselves asking “What is happening now? Where is this current pulling us?”
In the midst of these three currents, one might be forgiven for feeling somewhat overwhelmed! Spring, at least for me, is quite enough. It is difficult for me to concentrate. My senses are awakening after the longest slumber. I can smell the earth that has been dormant for too long coming back to life and hear the birds that have been absent. The cycle of birth and life is beginning again, and it makes me giddy.
Perhaps we might content ourselves with celebrating this rebirth of spring. Perhaps we ought to refuse attempts to synthesize its meaning with our own personal journeys, or the mythos of a religious narrative. Maybe spring should be protected against a religious desire to baptize and control it’s unruly energy. ee cummings, for example, seems to urge this resistance when he writes to the earth:
“ how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods
(but true to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic lover
thou answerest them only with spring)” (O sweet spontaneous)
Alternatively, if the brute naturalism of cummings is unpersuasive, we might try to connect spring with the rhythms of the Christian life, reading into its significance the innocence of the garden, as does Gerald Manley Hopkins when he wonders,
what is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet beginning
In Eden garden –
Have, get, before it cloy
Before it cloud, Christ, land, and sour with sinning
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy. (Spring)
But suppose you hesitate at this tug of spring; you might not find it so innocent. With Edna St. Vincent Millay, you might acknowledge that
The smell of the earth is good
It is apparent that there is no death
And yet, as she does, you might require better answers, noting
But what does that signify?
Not only underground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots…
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April comes like an idiot,
babbling and strewing flowers.
I leave it to you to decide which current you feel most strongly today, whether you feel swept up by the pulse and eternal rhythm of nature, or can also feel the pull of career, academy, and religious narrative. Regardless, we find ourselves here together this morning in the midst of spring and the Easter season, being called into a future that is redolent with promises of unruly growth, graduation and vocation, a future that is coming but a future that we cannot predict or control.
And the passage from Scripture read this morning, I’d like to suggest, speaks beautifully to our situation. A fragment of a poem taken from the Song of Songs, it offers another poetic voice to add to those I’ve mentioned. (Actually it offers two voices, two rather bold young lovers, a bride and a bridegroom in the P.C. version.
The young woman imagines her beloved, and in her anticipation compares him to spring itself bursting forth in the land, a gazelle bounding over the hills, the very picture of exquisite desire.
And in that bucolic setting, she tells us, she hears her beloved calling to her. He uses the occasion of the tempestuous promise of spring, to call:
Rise up, my darling; my fair one, come away.
For see, the winter is past! ….
Rise up, my darling; my fair one, come away.
To where is she being called? Why can’t he come to her where she is? And, if, following our Jewish and Christian forbearers, we read ourselves into this fragment somehow, we must also ask: To where are we being called in the spring? And who is calling us? And if we respond, will we be found?
With the right kind of imagination, I think, we ought to read ourselves and this spring morning into this biblical passage. Whether you manage to feel all three of the currents carrying us forward this morning or only one or two, I would like to suggest that at this very moment you are being stirred up to the rush and rhythm of something like love, provoked by a promise, called out of yourself by someone else.
Even if we were to focus only on the academic current, the language of love should hardly seem strange. The erotic attraction of truth and beauty and goodness has been an essential element of true liberal-arts learning since Plato penned dialogues like the Symposium and the Phaedrus. You may not realize it, but when you sit down to contemplate that end of the semester seminar paper, I’m suggesting, you’re being called by a kind of love. And how implausible is it really, to extend this excitement to the sense of spiritual journey that your life ought to have—how surprised should you be to discover that your late night jaunt to the L & M, or your chance encounter with a homeless woman on a street corner in the city was a moment for you to experience the agitation of new life presenting itself to you as awakening desire. Why can’t this call be understood in terms of the promise and frustrations of love?
Finally, suppose that you understand your spring, your academic search for knowledge, and your spiritual search for vocation in the context of Easter, suppose that you are flush with the surprise and joy of an empty grave. Consider the astonishing mix of terror and joy the two disciples felt as a result of their encounter on the road to Emmaus. Is it really so implausible to understand the provocations lying in wait for you this season in the same way? As hoped for but unpredictable meetings with the new surprising life to be found in your risen Lord?
In conclusion, let me return to the Song of Songs and observe an important point essential to understanding the kind of love that the text urges. While I’ve invited us all to read the text with imagination, we cheat ourselves if we spiritualize and allegorize too much or too quickly. Particularly as Christians, we may read the Songs as an allegory of Christ and the church; even so, I don’t think we should ignore the fact that the language of love here is the language of love in the spring, it is the language of flirtation, it depends on felt desire in its raw form—insistent, straining, delighting in and surrendering to and searching out the concrete details. She has more hope than cummings will allow. While the lover who calls the woman may be a symbol of Christ to Christians or God to Jews, the main character of the Songs is not the woman’s lover. It is undoubtedly the woman herself, and while she is young, she is not an innocent child to be comforted by a father figure who will keep her safe and secure. So the poet of the Songs offers a counter to Hopkins as well as cummings. It is this bold woman’s desire and her trust in this desire that is felt most vividly in the Songs. And if you read the rest of the Songs, you discover that her felt desire is not easily resolved. Hers is not a love of blessed assurance. Thus, while she is more hopeful than St. Vincent Millay, she does not respond to her request for better answers with pat guarantees. The woman searches for her lover, she tries to answer his call, but she does not seem to find him nor is it clear that she is finally found. This is not to say that she is not truly both lover and beloved; it is only to avoid simplifying or sentimentalizing the desire and love that animates her.
What does it mean then to read the Songs in the spring at St. Olaf? Like the woman in the Songs, you are being caught up in something and called by an elusive promise. “It is spring,” the voice says, “rise up and come away.” This love that can animate us may not be easy or smooth, but it is there if we pay attention and respond, it is coursing through our lives, pulling us into its current, as sure as spring is coming and as sure as our lives will continue to unfold and, we hope and pray, blossom.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
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 Editor
Robert D. Haak
Haak frames the issue around the question of what holds the twenty-eight ELCA colleges together amid their geographic, economic, and theological diversity, introducing Mark Hanson’s address to the assembled college presidents, Randall Balmer’s outsider perspective on the commonalities of Christian liberal arts, José Marichal and Pamela Brubaker on diversity rooted in community and globe, Storm Bailey’s argument that being Lutheran is precisely what makes us embrace diversity, and Jaime Schillinger’s St. Olaf chapel reflection on the formative power of worship and liturgy.
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Article
Reflections on Our Shared Commitments
Mark S. Hanson
Originally delivered to the Lutheran Educational Conference of North America in March 2007, Hanson’s address describes the ELCA as “an ecology of interdependent ecosystems” and locates the church’s relationship to its twenty-eight colleges and universities in a shared mission rather than in older anxieties about church-relatedness. Drawing on Wittenberg’s Lutheran Identity Study, Augustana’s “Five Faith Commitments,” Pamela Jolicoeur’s Concordia address, W. Robert Connor on “big questions,” Joseph Sittler on grace, Walter Brueggemann on fear, Jonathan Strandjord on being “other-wise,” and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s Public Church for the Life of the World, he names four marks of shared mission: communities of free inquiry, encouragement of religious expression in a diverse society, education for the common good, and the formation of leaders for church and religious communities worldwide.
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Editorial
Guest Editor
Madeleine Forell Marshall
Marshall introduces the four papers in this issue from the 70th annual meeting of the Association of Lutheran College Faculties, held at California Lutheran University in October 2006 on the theme “Identity and Diversity in the Lutheran College.” She notes a geographic pattern—the two East Coast contributors (Balmer and Bailey) defend Christian liberal arts against perceived suspicion, while the two Westerners (Marichal and Brubaker) treat Lutheran identity as advantage and diversity as a Lutheran given—and announces the 2007 ALCF meeting at Newberry College on “Beyond ‘Whatever’: Values Based Learning in Lutheran Higher Education.”
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Article
Sojourners in a Pluralistic Land: The Promise and Peril of Christian Higher Education
Randall Balmer
Balmer, a Barnard scholar of American evangelicalism reared in evangelical parsonages and formed at Trinity College in the Chicago suburbs, defends public education even as he champions Christian higher education as a “halfway house” for students moving from religious subculture into a pluralistic world. Drawing on his own undergraduate experience, his books Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory and Thy Kingdom Come, and a chastening visit to Patrick Henry College, he names three perils of Christian higher education—the Scylla of secularism (intellectual arrogance allergic to piety), the Charybdis of sectarianism (intellectual dishonesty as exemplified by intelligent design’s special pleading), and insularity—and prescribes mentors, primary sources, internships outside the subculture, and a broader, intergenerational pluralism on campus.
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Article
Lutheran Identity, Academic Integrity, and Religious Diversity
Storm Bailey
Bailey argues that one might rightly say of a college “that’s a pretty good school because it’s religious,” defending the proposition under three headings: academic and curricular virtues, free inquiry, and religious diversity. Drawing on Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden, Richard Hughes on the Lutheran tradition’s “most potent theological resources” for the life of the mind, Parker Palmer, Lendol Calder, Mill’s On Liberty, Newman’s Idea of a University, and the AAUP’s 1940 Statement, he proposes a “critical mass” alternative in which the Lutheran commitment to truth-seeking and self-critique itself requires—rather than tolerates—a religiously diverse faculty whose opposing voices are needed for the mission to flourish.
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Article
Why Diversity and Civic Engagement Don't Talk to Each Other on College Campuses: The Need for Public Work
Jose Marichal
Marichal opens with Thurgood Marshall’s line from Milliken v. Bradley and traces the “decoupling” of campus diversity and civic engagement initiatives back to their shared grounding in Benjamin Barber’s “thin” or pluralist democracy. Reviewing CIRCLE data on youth political disengagement, the limits of mandatory volunteerism, and persistent residential segregation, and drawing on Mary Ann Glendon, Lani Guinier, Caryn McTighe Musil, and Richard Rorty, he argues that only Harry Boyte’s notion of “public work” can bind diversity and civic engagement together—and contends that Lutheran colleges, with their understanding of vocation as call into the world, are uniquely positioned to build that infrastructure.
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Article
Rich and Poor in an Era of Globalized Religion and Economies: Challenges to Lutheran Colleges
Pamela K. Brubaker
Brubaker opens with two World Council of Churches communion stories—a generous Aymara potato meal in Bolivia and a gated invitation-only lunch at a prosperous immigrant German Lutheran church in Brazil—to frame the question of which stance Lutheran colleges will adopt toward diversity. Drawing on Richard Hughes and Ernest Simmons on Lutheran “ecumenical confessionalism,” Linell Cady, Ulrich Beck, Held and McGrew, the World Bank’s 2006 Equity and Development report, Mark Juergensmeyer’s Global Religions, Harvey Cox on the Market as God, the WCC’s “economy of life” / AGAPE document, and Larry Rasmussen on universal human rights, she argues that part of the academic work of Lutheran colleges is to educate for critical citizenship by questioning neo-liberal assumptions and equipping students to claim social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights for the whole human family.
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Article
Called for Life — Affirming Vocational Discernment
Richard L. Torgerson
No. 31 · Winter 2010
Torgerson introduces the “Called for Life” project, a three-year, $278,437 Lilly Endowment-funded collaboration among Luther, Augsburg, and Augustana that—in partnership with Luther Seminary’s Centered Life initiative and Wilder Research—rigorously assessed the effectiveness of campus vocation programs, examining whether students’ exposure to and understanding of calling had increased, and what program elements were most effective in shaping discernment.
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Article
The Vocation of Intersections on its Twentieth Birthday
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak, Tom Christenson
No. 43 · Spring 2016
The three editors of Intersections — Bob Haak, Jason Mahn, and Tom Christenson (in spirit, following his death in 2013) — trace the twenty-year vocation of the journal itself: its 1996 birth at Capital University; its coming-of-age years of debate over institutional markers, two-kingdoms theology, and Lutheran identity; the ascendancy of “education for vocation” as the central marker of Lutheran higher education; and its ongoing identity in relation to a changing ELCA and to the broader cultural conversation about purpose, wholeness, and the vocation of higher education.
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Article
Freedom of a Christian-College: Looking through the Lens of Vocation
Kathryn L. Johnson
No. 24 · Fall 2006
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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Book Review
In Search of a Calling: The College's Role in Shaping Identity
Karla G. Bohmbach
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Bohmbach reviews Thomas O. Buford’s In Search of a Calling: The College’s Role in Shaping Identity (Mercer University Press, 1995), which diagnoses a meaning-crisis among college students and traces two historical aspects of “calling”: the biblical, communitarian aspect rooted in the Hebrew Bible and the practical, individualistic aspect rooted in the Renaissance. She praises Buford’s reconstruction of imago dei as imagination rather than copy of God’s rationality, his broad disciplinary range (biblical studies, theology, educational psychology, business management), and his identification of the tension between freedom and limitation as the field of calling. She is sharply critical, however, of his final chapter’s wariness of canon-revisionists and multiculturalists, his caricature of “special-interest groups,” and his presumption of a homogeneous student body—a presumption that, she argues, never matched American college reality and matches it less today.
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Article
Journey Conversations
Amy Zalik Larson, Sheila Radford-Hill
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Larson and Radford-Hill describe Luther College’s Journey Conversations Project, a four-phase contemplative practice — quiet, listen, speak, respond — rooted in the Lutheran call to be true to one’s own faith while welcoming all faiths or none, and illustrate its fruit through faith journey stories from Luther students Sukeji Mikaya (South Sudan), Habibullah Rezai (Afghanistan), and Gifty Arthur (Ghana).
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Response
On the Outside Looking Out: A Personal and Social Psychological Response
Chuck Huff
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Huff of St. Olaf—a self-described “Metho-Bap-terian” from the South educated at Bob Jones University—offers a personal response to Bouman’s themes (welcoming the rejection of biblical inerrancy, the distinction between gospel and scripture in the homosexuality debate, the gospel-in-the-creeds reading that releases him from Hellenistic conundrums, and the recasting of justification by faith as meaning rather than insurance policy) and a social-psychological response in which a planned study of campus social networks at St. Olaf was discontinued when preliminary interviews revealed that everyone—storied Lutherans, secular faculty, feminists, fundamentalists—felt like outsiders. Continuing the tradition requires constructing a conversation that is thoughtful, fair, inclusive, charitable, focussed, and still true to the tradition.