Number 3
The Summer 1997 issue of Intersections gathers essays on the environment, the education of desire, and hiring policies. H. Paul Santmire offers three mandates for the Lutheran college’s care for the earth; Gregg Muilenburg argues the core of Christian education is the education of Christian desire. A discussion on mission and hiring pairs Bruce Reichenbach for “critical mass” hiring, Wendy J. McCredie for “creative education,” and Harry Jebsen on the “moving target” of church and curriculum. Gary Fincke offers two poems; Chuck Huff closes with “Confessions of a Collaborator.”
Editors
Articles in this Issue
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Editorial
From the Publisher
James M. Unglaube
Unglaube opens the journal’s second year by previewing the 1997 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference at Carthage, which will examine the Lutheran tradition from outside (Richard Hughes of Pepperdine on the Lilly Endowment’s Models for Christian Higher Education; David Johnson, President of the University of Minnesota at Morris and Luther College graduate, on the tradition from the public sector) and inside (Ann Pederson of Augustana in Sioux Falls; Timothy Lull of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary), and previews Eric Eliason’s emerging proposal for an Academy of Scholars in Lutheran Higher Education modeled on NEH/NSF-style summer seminars.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson explains that this issue breaks from the first two issues’ single-focus pattern to feature three principal papers on the environment, the education of desire, and hiring and personnel policies, plus two poems and a piece of reflective bemusement. He then commends George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford, 1997) and challenges Lutheran scholars to articulate how the particulars of their faith inform their scholarship—in conversation with Calvinist work like Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and Art in Action—rather than remaining silently complicit in the view that faith has no place in the academy.
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Article
The Lutheran Liberal Arts College and Care for the Earth
H. Paul Santmire
Santmire, author of The Travail of Nature, proposes three mandates for the Lutheran liberal arts college: take responsibility for spiritual particularity by confronting the ambiguities of the classical Christian tradition (Lynn White’s charge against anthropocentric Christianity vs. the Franciscan ecological tradition from Irenaeus through Luther) and of classical Lutheran social ethics (the Two Kingdoms, Romans 13, the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer); promote responsible cultural criticism (against Thoreau’s sociopathic anti-urban suburbanism); and promote a holistic environmental ethos through an interdisciplinary core curriculum with ecology as the queen of the sciences, a community that liberates the social imagination (Mumford, Marcuse), a cosmic Liturgical praxis rooted in the Colossians 1:15–20 hymn to the cosmic Christ, and an academy that models ecological responsibility.
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Article
An Aristotelian Twist to Faith and Learning
Gregg Muilenberg
Muilenburg, chair of Philosophy at Concordia, surveys the four traditional models for faith and reason—conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration—and argues that the Lutheran dialogical model is insufficient for wholeness. Drawing on the post-foundationalist epistemology of perspective and Aristotle’s account of knowing as desire-driven action, he proposes that faith is an ultimate value (an assessment belief of the form ‘x is better than y’), that learning is desire-directed action, and that the core of Christian education is the education of Christian desire—requiring both reflection and commitment, both integration and diversity.
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Poem
Two Poems: The Dark Angels / Decorative Cooking
Gary Fincke
Two poems by Gary Fincke of Susquehanna University: “The Dark Angels,” a return to the sidewalk in front of the father’s razed bakery in Etna, the soot-pocked windows, the Saturday trash fire, the last eclair on the work room’s folding chair; and “Decorative Cooking,” the mother’s story of St. Julitta, Betty Crocker’s “New Design for Happiness,” the Sunday dinners of shaped Jellos and anise Magi cookies, the visit of the former pastor returned to Pittsburgh to declaim the death of God, and the father who lays evergreen crosses by the mother’s headstone in the Garden of Dreams.
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Article
Mission and Hiring in the Christian College
Bruce Reichenbach
Reichenbach of Augsburg argues that the Christian or Church-related college’s mission to educate the whole person from a perspective of Christian faith and values can only succeed through intentional hiring of a “critical mass” of faculty, administrators, and staff committed to that mission (following George Marsden and the 1960s Danforth Commission), supplemented by on-going faculty development. He defends an inclusive community-with-diversity, a freedom-and-commitment tension grounded in Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of tradition, and the legality of preferential religious hiring under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the relevant case law (Tilton, Hunt, Roemer, Blanton, Grove City, Amos).
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Response
A Call for Creative Education
Wendy McCredie
McCredie of Texas Lutheran responds to Reichenbach by reframing the four ideas embedded in his claim that “the entire college community should be knowledgeably committed to the college’s mission”—community, knowledge, commitment, mission—and argues that the Lutheran tradition’s unwillingness to be separate from the world should lead us to educate the public about the Lutheran tradition rather than interrogate prospective employees about their faith. She questions whether agreement on “Christian values” is possible (or even Lutheran), and reads Reichenbach’s “creative education” as the dialectical tension between gospel and law, God’s love and our human limits, that members of communities related to the Lutheran church are uniquely positioned to inhabit.
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Response
Hitting a Moving Target
Harry Jebsen
Jebsen, former Provost of Capital University, responds to Reichenbach by arguing that the institutions, the ELCA, congregations and pastors, students, and curriculum are all moving targets. Drawing on Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and his own fifteen years of hiring as Dean and Provost (a candidate who hoped the cross out front didn’t mean anything), he traces the drift from the “Mr. Chips” faculty who personified Dana and Midland Lutheran to a campus culture where “everybody is nice to each other” has replaced theological substance, and where MBA programs, conservatories, law schools, and adult-education programs further dilute the focus of the residential Lutheran college.
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Reflection
Confessions of a Collaborator
Chuck Huff
Huff of St. Olaf offers a tongue-in-cheek public confession of his lifelong sin of collaboration—from elementary-school reports on dinosaurs and Cliff notes on Faulkner, through high-school algebra and college group projects, to borrowed syllabi, group work imposed on resentful students, tutorials, independent studies on every form of self-reliance, and circulated drafts. Even this confession was collaborated on, and (he confesses) he enjoyed it.