From the Publisher

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.

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.

Currents

Jaime Schillinger

Preached in St. Olaf chapel on March 29, 2005, Schillinger reads three “currents” pulling on her hearers—Minnesota spring, the academic year’s final stretch, and Holy Week’s passion and resurrection—against poetic voices from ee cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, before turning to the Song of Songs to suggest that this nexus calls students into the rhythms of love, awakened desire, and an elusive, unresolved promise that animates academic, spiritual, and vocational search alike.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

Higher Education in the Age of Trump

Daniel B. Braaten

No. 45 · Spring 2017

Braaten surveys what the Trump administration has and has not done on higher education — from the selection of Betsy DeVos and a rumored Falwell-led task force to the travel ban and expanded deportation priorities — and argues that Lutheran colleges, guided by the ELCA’s social message on immigration, have a special obligation to consider what they will do to protect their most vulnerable students.

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.”

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.

The Ought

Ned Wisnefske

No. 19 · Summer 2004

Wisnefske observes that students and faculty raise contradictory objections to moral education—that students are already morally formed, and that teachers must not form them—and argues that both share the same fear of “the Ought.” He proposes that the Ought is best encountered not in front of us but behind us, nudging us, as we exercise impartiality, sympathy, and free will and discover that the persons participating in moral inquiry deserve respect; the Ought can then reform our past formations and transform our wants, so that it is never too late, or a mistake, to be shaped by it.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

No. 11 · Spring 2001

Christenson explains that this issue “borrows everything from other sources”—Richard Hughes’s talk at Pepperdine president Andrew K. Benton’s inauguration, Nicholas Wolterstorff’s and Storm Bailey’s essays from the AAUP’s Academe, and Catherine McMullen’s Concordia talk—and defends the blatant borrowing as appropriate to faculty work, hoping new faculty will find in these pieces a corrective to common misconceptions about faith-related education and academic freedom.

You Don't Seem Angry: Methodological Confessions Of A Lutheran Lay-Woman

L. DeAne Lagerquist

No. 5 · Summer 1998

Lagerquist, opening from a colleague’s 1981 observation about her M.A. thesis on four female abolitionists, traces her path from feminist historian and battered women’s shelter advocate through the University of Chicago’s obsession with method to a more self-conscious account of her own. The method grows out of four Lutheran themes—original sin (caution and humility), the eighth commandment against bearing false witness (generosity and forgiveness), the neighbor as “little Christ” (cooperative interpretation), and vocation (interpretation as calling, located alongside feeding the hungry and visiting the lonely)—and shapes her ongoing work on a history of Lutherans in the United States with a plot about learning to live with diversity.