Lutheran conversations—that’s the theme for this issue. The most obvious connection to the contents is centered on the enlightening conversation between Robert Benne and Tom Christenson that is included in this issue. This exchange, and the preceding comments of Mark Wilhelm, are part of a larger Lutheran conversation that is happening at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa this year as they again ask themselves the question “what does it mean to be a ‘college of the church’.” This question is particularly important as they search for new leadership, but it is important to all of us as we go about our work as Lutheran colleges. What does that mean in real life? Benne and Christenson add their voices to the conversation. Those who might have expected sparks to fly between these two strong voices might well be surprised at the large area of commonality which they share. These commonalities are surely part of what defines a Lutheran college or university, as does the fact that we have strong opinions about such issues.
Mark Wilhelm also spoke at Wartburg College. He aids our conversation by placing what we are about in a broader historical and social context. Again, this is (or should be) a characteristic of good Lutheran conversation. Lutherans believe that we are called into conversation with the world, not simply to some otherworldly experience. Wilhelm points out the tension that exists between the rampant individualism of today’s society and the fact that we live in communities, not the least of which is the common life formed by our colleges and universities. He also raises the question of how our colleges will move beyond the sometimes insular places they were in the past into a world of religious options. For some this world may be a fearful place. As Lake Lambert reminds us in his sermon Saving Minds, Lutherans know that this need not be the case. We can be confident of this world and our place in it.
A great place to engage in these ongoing Lutheran conversations is at the annual Lutheran Academy of Scholars seminar that is held at Harvard University in the summer. This is unique time to engage deeply in conversations about what it means to be Lutheran in this world, along side others who are asking the same questions. I urge you to take a look at the notice of this year’s gathering on p 23, and to consider your own participation. This seminar is supported by your college and by the ELCA. There is a stipend and the promise of a fruitful and engaging time.
It should be also noted that Mark Wilhelm has taken over the role of Associate Executive Director for Educational Partnerships and Institutions and Director for Colleges and Universities Vocation and Education, ELCA. Part of this position is to support such things as the Lutheran Academy of Scholars, and also to act as publisher of this journal. You can read his “inaugural” comments on page two of this issue. Mark Wilhelm’s “boss,” bishop Mark Hanson, also contributes his thoughts on the nature of Lutheran colleges in a short piece reprinted from THE LUTHERAN.
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Editorial
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.
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Reflection
Colleges Lead Way: Curiosity, Faith, Discernment, Mission are Key
Mark S. Hanson
Reprinted from The Lutheran (November 2007), Hanson names four marks of the colleges of this church—nurturing unquenchable curiosity, nourishing faith formation and exploration, modeling public moral deliberation, and preparing students for engagement in the world—and gives thanks for the colleges’ vocation to call us to stand outside ourselves and reach out in mission for the sake of the world.
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Article
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.
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Article
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.
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Reflection
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.
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Book Review
Assessing the Value of Liberal Arts: A Review of The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, by Richard A. Detweiler
Robert D. Haak
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Haak reviews Richard A. Detweiler’s The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, in which the former president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association analyzes 240 college mission statements and interviews more than 1,000 graduates to argue that liberal arts educational experiences have a measurable impact on adult lives of consequence, inquiry, and accomplishment — and invites NECU institutions into a further conversation about how Detweiler’s methodology applies to Lutheran higher education.
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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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Editorial
From the Outgoing and Incoming Editors
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Outgoing editor Robert D. Haak reflects on a six-year run inheriting Intersections from founder Tom Christenson, the “powerful voices” that have driven the conversation (Dovre, Jodock, Christenson, Simmons, Morgan, Olsen, Wilhelm) and the newer ones now entering (Mahn, Bussie); incoming editor Jason A. Mahn, picked up from the airport in Bob’s pickup truck five years ago, names central issues that “Lutherans on Faith and Learning” engages and previews essays by Dovre, Jodock, McDonald, Hill, Turnbull, and Jodock again.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 33 · Spring 2011
Haak frames the issue by asking how Lutheran colleges and universities understand the changing landscape of religious identification on their campuses, and argues that Lutheran theological commitments — including the work of the Spirit and the Incarnation — call institutions to create places where the voice of “the other” is heard and valued.
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Article
Called to Serve
Robert D. Haak
No. 31 · Winter 2010
Haak describes Augustana’s Center for Vocational Reflection (CVR) and its threefold framework of skills/gifts/talents, passions/values, and needs of the community. He surveys the CVR’s Working with Faith group, seminary visits, spiritual companioning, Servant Leader Internships, international travel reflection, and the major Senior Inquiry curriculum revision—then reports the lessons learned at Augustana: that multiple exposures matter more than any single program, that the language of vocation works even for non-religious students, that student-initiated ideas (like Erin Blecha’s Athletes Giving Back) often succeed most, and that the CVR will soon merge into a new Community Engagement Center.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 30 · Fall 2009
Haak frames the issue around the question of Lutheran college identity as formed in distinction from some “other,” introducing essays by Witherup on the Joint Declaration, Reuther on Holden Village, Afzaal on Christian-Muslim dialogue, Dovre on the history of Midwestern Lutheran colleges, Radecke on service-learning, and Ratke on Wilhelm Löhe — each making the claim that the “other” is an essential partner in conversation who helps us know who we are and shape who we will become.
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Article
ELCA Social Teaching for the Classroom?
Roger A. Willer
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Willer argues that the body of ELCA social teaching, taken as a whole, constitutes an actual social ethic — relatively comprehensive, responsibly consistent, and remarkably cogent — whose mode of responsibility ethics commends it as a classroom resource for any discipline that wrestles with moral questions.
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Book Review
Unconventional Wisdom and Talking about God: A Review of Beckstrom’s Leading Lutheran Higher Education in a Secular Age
Ann Rosendale
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Rosendale reviews Brian Beckstrom’s Leading Lutheran Higher Education in a Secular Age, recommending its diagnosis of the gap between espoused and perceived Lutheran identity at ELCA schools and its prescription—Trinitarian Missiological Ecclesiology and a campus-wide willingness to talk explicitly about God.
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Article
Where Your Feet are Standing: Institutional Engagement and Place
Melissa Maxwell-Doherty
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Maxwell-Doherty draws on Cal Lutheran’s Hispanic-Serving Institution designation and its location on Chumash, Fernandino Tataviam, and Ohlone lands to ask how the university’s mission might shift if it depended on where its students are standing — not just where the institution sits.
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Article
Conciliatory and Queer: The Radical Love of Lutheran Higher Education
Kiki Kosnick, Sharon Varallo
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Kosnick and Varallo reflect in conversation on how Augustana’s Five Faith Commitments and its conciliatory ecumenical roots in the Augsburg Confession have given them — a non-binary queer first-generation faculty member and a twenty-one-year veteran — the “street cred” to act on radical love, build bridges to imprisoned and non-binary communities, and discover that Augustana is welcoming not despite the fact that it is Lutheran, but because of it.
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Book Review
Reviews
Matthew J. Marohl
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Marohl reviews two 2006 Lutheran University Press volumes from Grand View College (Des Moines, IA). Mark C. Mattes and Ronald R. Darge’s Imaging the Journey … of Contemplation, Meditation, Reflection, and Adventure pairs Mattes’s Lutheran meditations on seven themes (from a spirituality of communication to Alpha and Omega) with Darge’s photographs and Ronald Taylor’s short prayers, with Mattes’s writing on vocation singled out as the volume’s finest. The Grand View College Reader, edited by Mattes, Evan A. Thomas, Kathryn Pohlman Duffy, and Ronald Taylor, surveys the college’s Foundations, Creativity, and Vocation through chapters by Thorvald Hanson, Kenneth Sundet Jones, Kevin Gannon, Ammertte C. Deibert, Steven Snyder, and President Kent Henning, tracing Grand View’s Grundtvigian and Danish Lutheran roots.
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Article
A Fifth Teat on a Cow: The Irrelevance of the Lutheran Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms for Academic Life
Richard VonDohlen
No. 9 · Summer 2000
VonDohlen, responding to Richard Hughes, Carol LaHurd, David Ratke, Philip Nordquist, and Robert Benne, argues that the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms as commonly deployed in recent discussions of Lutheran higher education rests on a faulty sociology (taking Luther’s sixteenth-century structure for our highly differentiated society) and an epistemological monism (assuming a single neutral reason against the pluralism described by Alasdair MacIntyre and others), making it anti-intellectual, hostile to interdisciplinary dialogue and Christian social ethics, and ultimately as a defense of theology’s relevance about as useful as “a fifth teat on a cow.” Drawing on his experience on the Catawba Valley Hospice Ethics Committee, his Dutch Reformed and dispensationalist background, and the ELCA social statement “Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All,” he calls for an “intellectually ecumenical” dialogue between Lutherans and non-Lutherans willing to take each other’s paradigms seriously.