Through the years, I have donned many roles and titles: son, husband, student, employee, father, pastor, and others. My new role and title as Director for Colleges and Universities for the churchwide organization of the ELCA brings with it a new role and title I never expected to carry: publisher. Nonetheless, I am delighted that the Vocation and Education unit sponsors and publishes this journal of conversation about the “intersection” of faith, learning and teaching in Lutheran higher education. With this issue of Intersections, I am pleased to assume the duties of publisher and to continue Vocation and Education’s sponsorship of the journal.
Let me introduce myself. I became Director for Colleges and Universities as of August 1, 2008, although I have been with the churchwide organization since December 2000. I will continue serving as Associate Executive Director of the Vocation and Education unit, with responsibility for leading the unit’s working group for Educational Partnerships and Institutions. This group is a team of fifteen persons who staff churchwide ministries in theological education and seminaries, lifelong learning/continuing education, schools (primary and secondary) and early childhood education, “first call” theological education, Lutheran Partners, theology and daily life ministry, the Book of Faith Initiative, and of course, colleges and universities, which is the portfolio I directly carry along with my colleague, Marilyn Olson. I serve in these capacities under Call as a pastor of this church. My academic field is American Church History. Before coming to the churchwide offices, I served for ten years at Auburn Theological Seminary, as Associate Director of its Center for the Study of Theological Education.
It is with thanks for the good work of Dr. Arne Selbyg that I begin my relationship to Intersections. This journal prospered during Arne’s tenure as Director for Colleges and Universities. He developed Intersections into the important voice it has become for Lutheran higher education.
This issue looks at a theme dear to Arne: the aims and purposes of Lutheran higher education. The Rev. Mark Hanson, presiding bishop of the ELCA, offers reflections on the core mission of higher education related to the ELCA. Two pieces included in this issue are from Wartburg College’s fall 2008 campus conversation about the college’s mission as a college that takes faith seriously. First, my essay attempts to discuss the implications for being a church-related college of several key shifts in the relationship between religion and culture in America in recent decades. This essay was first presented as a lecture at Wartburg in September 2008. Later that fall, the college convened a dialogue between Dr. Robert Benne of Roanoke College and Dr. Thomas Christenson of Capital University about what it means to be a college of the church (see p. 12). A sermon by Luke Lambert III of Wartburg College, preached in the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, in 2006 on Jesus’ desire to “save our minds,” rounds out our conversation in this issue of Intersections.
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Editorial
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.
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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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Article
Why All This Talk About Understanding the Mission of NECU Member Institutions as a Vocation?
Mark Wilhelm
No. 56 · Fall 2022
In his valedictory keynote, retiring NECU Executive Director Mark Wilhelm argues that Lutheran higher education is, properly understood, vocation-based education — outlining four core practices recovered over the past fifty years and naming the constructive and corrective work still to be done, including a fuller embrace of DEIJ and of the diverse vocations of NECU’s 27 institutions.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Wilhelm announces his planned retirement on January 31, 2023, after serving as the founding executive director of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities, and gives thanks for the privilege of helping NECU articulate a shared vision for Lutheran higher education in twenty-first-century North America.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Wilhelm reflects on an NPR report of teenagers’ pandemic diaries and the fraught Christian history of struggling to live out Jesus’s ethic of love, framing the issue as a record of NECU institutions working out how to act for the common good through the pandemic of 2020–2021.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Wilhelm argues that the “hackneyed” expressions of higher education — “you are not just a number,” “the college experience,” “risen to the challenge” — tell the simple truth about NECU institutions even as the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed budgets, employees, and campus life to the breaking point.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Wilhelm frames the issue by tracing how Lutheran educational ideals — once a primary source of contemporary higher education — were masked in the United States, and introduces a NECU initiative that uses the case of business ethics to explore Lutheran social teaching as an academic resource.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Wilhelm frames the issue by noting that a federal court’s vindication of Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process is a win for higher education’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion — and argues that for Lutheran higher education, the commitment to diversity is an old and foundational claim, rooted in Christianity’s openness to all and reflected in the four diverse gospels of the New Testament.
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Institutional Focus
A List of ELCA Social Teaching and Policy Documents
No. 51 · Spring 2020
A reference list, as of September 2019, of the ELCA’s twelve social statements, fourteen social messages, and over 150 social policy resolutions — with Spanish translations where available.
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Article
Practical Approaches for Lutheran Colleges to Engage Civil Society
Katherine A. Tunheim
No. 35 · Spring 2012
Tunheim distinguishes a college’s mission from its vocation—a calling from the community—and offers four examples of Lutheran colleges “dancing with their neighbors”: Augsburg’s engagement with the Cedar Riverside Neighborhood, her Gustavus students’ work with the St. Peter Soccer Club, St. Olaf football players in the All-Star After-School Program in Northfield, and Concordia students filling sandbags during the 2009 Red River flood. She presses Lutheran educators to ask the troubling questions that prepare students to lead with ethics rather than merely with money.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 22 · Spring 2006
Haak introduces himself as the new editor inheriting the journal from Tom Christenson and frames the issue around the question of what ELCA colleges might contribute to conversations about human sexuality. He summarizes the contributions of Yeager, Benne, Williams, Bussie, and Nack, and shares previously uncollected National Study of Youth and Religion data on the sexual attitudes and behaviors of Lutheran teens—including that 25% of regularly-attending ELCA teens report the church has done nothing to help them with their sexuality.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 7 · Summer 1999
Selbyg celebrates the popularity of the previous issue—the first to draw on papers from the annual “Vocation of a Lutheran College” conference—and announces a new Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation grant that will fund the inaugural Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education, a two-week seminar at Harvard led by Ronald Thiemann on “Finding Our Voice: Christian Faith and Critical Vision.”
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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
A God of Peace and Love? Reflections From a Biblical Scholar
Karla G. Bohmbach
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Bohmbach responds to Gregory Clark’s call to proclaim Jesus on Lutheran campuses with biblical-scholar reservations. Israel’s sacred texts also include the herem ban, the conquest narratives, and a God who fights for Israel; the Christian canon includes the apocalyptic violence of Revelation. To proclaim Jesus is therefore to proclaim a particular and contested figure within a tradition that has its own internal violence—not a generic God of peace and love. Bohmbach asks what it would mean for staff, administrators, and teachers on a college campus to take seriously the Jesus who made himself vulnerable to the violence of his world, even to the point of suffering for it, and whether Lutheran colleges are prepared for such a vocation.