Four papers collected in this issue of Intersections represent the 70th annual meeting of the venerable Association of Lutheran College Faculties (ALCF) held at California Lutheran University in October 2006.
The topic of the meeting at CLU was intentionally and provocatively vague: Identity and Diversity in the Lutheran College. What identity? What diversity? What college? In fact, as the papers came in, Lutheran identity tended to be as much conceptual and pedagogical as historical. Differences among the colleges emerged in both the presentations and in the accompanying discussions.
These essays are observed from markedly distinct disciplinary and personal vantage points as well. Randall Balmer, the distinguished scholar of American evangelicalism and our keynote speaker, recalls his own experience as an undergraduate at a conservative evangelical college and considers that formation in light of his subsequent achievements and study of evangelical culture. His perspective from outside Lutheran higher education balances the insiders’ perspectives and may remind the reader that Lutherans are not the only purveyors of Christian liberal arts, and also that the wide world of evangelical religion is not quite as hostile as we might suppose.
Storm Bailey, our representative philosopher and a professor at Luther College, reflects on specifically Lutheran identity as contributing to notions of academic integrity, with particular attention to our understanding of academic freedom. Reporting on fruitful “Faith and Learning” discussions at Luther, he writes of the usefulness of faculty from different disciplines and diverse religious backgrounds addressing “Lutheran questions.”
In his essay, José Marichal, a CLU political scientist, observes the odd mutual failure of campus diversity initiatives to collaborate or even meaningfully to connect with those promoting service learning or other sorts of educational civic engagement. He maintains that a better understanding of both democracy and the Lutheran call into the world can and should draw these initiatives together, enhancing the education we offer our students.
Pamela Brubaker, who teaches ethics at CLU, projects our understanding of diversity onto a global screen, where the economics of globalization challenge and compromise universal human rights. As we seek to educate students for critical citizenship—a particularly Lutheran project—she maintains we can and must help them to understand and value the social, economic, cultural, civil and political rights of people.
From a California perspective (which the venue encouraged), I find it very interesting that, of the four talks collected here, the two delivered by scholar-teachers living and working “back East” seem most anxious about the academic standing of Christian liberal arts education. Professors Balmer and Bailey, while valiantly and persuasively championing the cause, assume a measure of suspicion and even antagonism toward Lutheran higher education. In contrast, Professors Marichal and Brubaker, our representative Westerners, assume Lutheran identity as a critical advantage, take diversity as a Lutheran given and proceed to define and elaborate some of the challenges. Perhaps the fact that we inhabit a region where white is a minority and monolithic Lutheran identity only a memory explains the difference. Certainly such geographical difference, if it is significant, supports the usefulness of ongoing national conversations made possible by the ALCF and by this journal. Indeed, the long series of conference topics and venues, available on the ALCF website reads like something of a cultural history of Lutheran higher education: http://www.lutherancolleges.org/alcf/history/about.htm.
A number of items that played an important part in this conference are lamentably missing from this collection, a reminder how ephemeral some of our most interesting projects and discussions often are. Four professors from Wartburg College [Cynthia Bane (Psychology), Kit Kleinhans (Religion), Penni Pier (Communication Arts) and Fred Waldstein (Political Science)] reported on a cross-curricular faculty and staff development seminar on the “Lutheran Heritage.” Then there was a dramatic dialogue written, performed and directed by their colleague Kathleen Book. Guy Erwin performed the role of Philip Melanchthon in “‘No Child Left Behind’ Meets Philip Melanchthon.” A concluding discussion encouraged classroom applications of the many ideas that we had entertained.
The 2007 annual meeting of the Association of Lutheran College Faculties will be held October 5-7, 2007 at Newberry College. This year’s theme is “Beyond ‘Whatever’: Values Based Learning in Lutheran Higher Education.”
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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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Reflection
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.
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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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Reflection
A Community That Connects
Conrad Bergendoff
No. 5 · Summer 1998
Excerpts from Conrad Bergendoff’s 1990 address at the opening of Augustana’s new library, prepared by David Crowe and published here as a memorial after Bergendoff’s death in December 1997. Bergendoff—Augustana class of 1915, president 1936–1962—recounts eighty years of Augustana memories, insists that “size is pretty much within you, not outside of you,” traces the institution’s bonds to Uppsala from 1860 (and the 1910 visit of the Rector Magnificat), and celebrates Augustana’s graduates “in practically every part of the world” as evidence that a small school can have a universal output.
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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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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.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 62 · Fall 2025
5 min audio
Windham-Hughes plays on the shared Latin root of “education” and “seduction” (ducere, to lead) to warn against the No-saying seductions of giving up or condemnation, and to call educators to the riskier Yes of showing up to build third-space communities of truth-telling and hope.
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Article
Fragmented in Faith: The Concerns and Hopes Found in Student Spirituality and Civic Engagement
Emma Bohmann, Monica Sitachitta
No. 63 · Spring 2026
11 min audio
Two Texas Lutheran University students reflect on the cyclical pattern of low spiritual and civic engagement on their campus and argue that distinguishing Lutheran values from Lutheran practice could open space for civic engagement to become a non-optional expression of neighbor-justice for all students.
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Reflection
Keeping Close from a Distance: Pandemic Reflections of a Library Coordinator
Carla Flengeris
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Flengeris reflects on a year of running Luther College’s library at the University of Regina from her basement and mourns the loss of the hourly walks through the stacks—the “roving reference” that, she realizes, were never disruptions to her work but were the work itself.