Colleges Lead Way: Curiosity, Faith, Discernment, Mission are Key

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

Wilhelm introduces himself as the new Director for Colleges and Universities and publisher of Intersections, thanks his predecessor Arne Selbyg, and previews an issue devoted to the aims and purposes of Lutheran higher education—reflections from Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, two pieces from Wartburg College’s fall 2008 campus conversation about being a college of the church (his own essay and the Benne/Christenson dialogue), and a sermon by Lake Lambert III preached in the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

From the Editor

Robert D. Haak

Haak frames the issue around “Lutheran conversations,” centered on the exchange between Robert Benne and Tom Christenson at Wartburg College’s ongoing campus conversation about what it means to be a “college of the church,” alongside Mark Wilhelm’s historical and social context, Lake Lambert’s sermon, and Bishop Mark Hanson’s short piece reprinted from The Lutheran—and points readers to the Lutheran Academy of Scholars seminar at Harvard as a place to continue the conversation.

Even Lutheranism Can Be Cool Now: Changes in Religion and American Culture

Mark Wilhelm

Wilhelm names two major changes in the role of religion in American culture—the rise of a rhetoric of religious individualism, exemplified by “Sheilaism” in Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, and a proliferation of religious options driven by the democratization of authority, the end and beginning of ethnicity, the success of ecumenism, and the information revolution—and draws implications for Lutheran-related higher education, including support for Stephen Prothero’s call for core religious literacy and a confident reclaiming of each college’s religious heritage as a platform for engaging the religious diversity of America.

Point / Counterpoint: What It Means to be a "College of the Church"

Robert Benne, Tom Christenson

Moderated by Wartburg College pastor Larry Trachte and introduced by Kathryn Kleinhans, this Wartburg campus conversation between Robert Benne (Roanoke College) and Thomas Christenson (Capital University) probes what it means to be a college of the church—Benne emphasizing ethos, vocation, and the Christian intellectual tradition over against secularization and generic education, and Christenson lifting up persistent vocational questions, the gift of difference, and induction into a community of discourse—and finds large common ground around hiring for mission, pedagogy that asks deep questions, and the courage to claim a living religious tradition while inviting everyone to the banquet.

Saving Minds

Lake Lambert

In a sermon preached in the Castle Church in Wittenberg during Wartburg College’s 2006 faculty and staff development seminar, Lambert names two sins of the mind—coveting and mental sloth (in both its rigid refusal to think and its mindless relativism)—and, drawing on Luther’s Large Catechism and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart,” calls Christians to receive the wisdom that comes when faith puts knowledge into action, sustained by the hope of the resurrection.

Negotiating Legitimate and Conflicting Values

Eboo Patel, Katie Bringman Baxter, Mark S. Hanson

No. 44 · Fall 2016

In a closing-day conversation at the 2016 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, Mark Hanson and Eboo Patel — moderated by Katie Bringman Baxter of Interfaith Youth Core — share case studies in which legitimate religious values come into tension with one another, and make the case that Lutheran colleges should teach interfaith leadership through the hard cases rather than the easy ones.

Living at the Intersection of Fear and Hope

Mark S. Hanson

No. 32 · Spring 2010

Hanson draws on his January 2009 ELCA/ELCIC visit to Jordan, Israel, and Palestine—a Hebron Quran that did not burn, fifth graders dancing at the Hope School, a conversation with King Abdullah II—to frame the vocation of Lutheran higher education at the intersection of fear and hope. Engaging Brueggemann, Sittler, Buechner, Auden, Strandjord, Douglas John Hall, W. Robert Connor, Lewis Mudge, and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, he argues that Lutheran colleges are called to critical inquiry that does not collapse into a hermeneutic of suspicion, to a “thinking faith” that resists religious fundamentalism, and to communities of discernment that work for the common good.

Reflections on Our Shared Commitments

Mark S. Hanson

No. 25 · Spring 2007

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.

Lutheran Higher Education in Global Context: Called to Serve the World

R. Guy Erwin

No. 27 · Spring 2008

Erwin advances three theses on the global vocation of Lutheran higher education: that the vocation of a Lutheran college is to live out its mission in a service-oriented way; that Luther’s definition of vocation as love of neighbor must today have global dimensions; and that a Lutheran college best fulfills its vocation when it fosters a global perspective in its community, curriculum, and ethos. Drawing on Gustav Wingren and Luther’s catechisms, sermons on schooling, and three-realms ethics, he surveys the mission statements and websites of all twenty-eight ELCA colleges and universities for evidence of globalist commitment.

Diversity and Dialogue: Gustavus Adolphus College

Florence D. Amamoto

No. 1 · Summer 1996

Amamoto, a third-generation Japanese-American Buddhist who teaches American literature at Gustavus Adolphus and regularly attends daily chapel, writes as an “inside outsider.” Engaging Schwehn’s closing call to refurbish the Lutheran college, she argues that church-related colleges are vitally important to society, that “refurbishing” must take up diversity, and describes how Lutheranism is manifest at Gustavus: Christ Chapel as the highest point on campus, the ecumenical chapel program led for thirty years by Chaplain Richard Elvee, the Nobel Conferences that pair scientists with philosophers and theologians, the First-term Seminar and Tuesday Conversations, the India study-abroad program organized by Deane Curtin, and the Sponberg Chair in Ethics. She names the pressures of money, secularization, and the publications-driven push for “excellence” that threaten this creative tension.

'In, With, and Under:' The Tradition and the Teaching of Christian Ethics

Pamela K. Brubaker

No. 17 · Summer 2003

Brubaker describes how she teaches Introduction to Christian Ethics at California Lutheran University—a religiously diverse classroom where about 30% of students are Lutheran, 30% Roman Catholic, and many are “unchurched”—as a community of moral discourse rooted in the Lutheran dialectic of faith and reason. Drawing on Larry Rasmussen and Bruce Birch, Elizabeth Bettenhausen, Roger Crook, and Robert Benne’s typology of “Hot and Cool Connections” between church and politics, she walks through her course’s units on human sexuality, economic life, and war and peace—including the Bomb Shelter simulation, a mock Disney stockholders meeting on sweatshops, and a Congressional hearing on the School of the Americas—to show how ELCA social statements function as case studies in critical inquiry and education for citizenship.

A River Runs Through It: CLU as a Church-Related University

A. Joseph Everson

No. 12 · Summer 2001

Everson borrows Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and the small creek that flows through California Lutheran University’s Kingsman Park as images for the quiet stream of Christian tradition on campus, describes the dialectic of faith and reason (with a “Lord of Life” student congregation, two required religion courses, and a voluntary Wednesday chapel) as the “theology of paradox” that runs from Luther’s simul justus et peccator through Richard Solberg and Richard Hughes, and names six commitments that constitute the CLU ethos—academic freedom (Jeremiah 29:7 and John 8:32), vocation, service (Amos and Habitat for Humanity), grace and graciousness (Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice), diversity, and reverence (Proverbs 9 as awe and wonder).

Making the Common Good Common

René Johnson

No. 42 · Fall 2015

Johnson reflects on the Servant Leadership House for women at Finlandia University — from a sweaty trip to the local landfill to weekly habits of campus presence — to argue that the common good becomes truly common when it is embedded in the ordinary details of vocational living, and that Luther’s sense of neighbor calls servant leaders to “little bits of good” as well as to more radical pursuits of justice.

Committed to Paradox

Caryn Riswold

No. 60 · Fall 2024

Riswold lifts up paradox — saint and sinner, lord and servant, Rooted and Open — as a distinctive Lutheran root that lets institutions honor the complicated truth of who their students are and embrace the messy, ever-reforming work of access and accessibility as a theology of the cross.