With this issue of Intersections we have deviated from the pattern of the first two issues which featured a principle paper with several responses. In this issue we feature three principle papers, one with responses, two without, plus a page of poetry and one of reflective bemusement. Instead of the single focus issues we have had in the past we here feature work on three completely different issues: the environment, the education of desire and hiring and personnel policies. Yet all of these essays have the same sub-focus namely the Lutheran college/university, it’s educational mission and its priorities. I am particularly pleased with this issue because of the provocative issues I see raised here. Paul Santmire focusses our attention on the ambiguities about ethics in our own tradition and provokes us to examine the sources of our anti-urban prejudices. He also provides an inspiring picture of what Lutheran education ought to include. Gregg Muilenburg uses an Aristotelian analysis of education to challenge the common Lutheran assumption that a dialogue of faith and reason is the best we can do. Bruce Reichenbach, Wendy McCredie and Harry Jebsen provoke us to explore the dimensions and difficulties of relationship between mission and hiring/promotion priorities at our institutions. Gary Fincke has provided us with two poems that explore surprising meanings of food and eating. Finally Chuck Huff comes clean through honest but not very contrite public confession. There is plenty here to argue with and about. We hope to hear your responses.
I wish to use the rest of my editorial space to recommend a text to your reading. Though I will summarize the focal argument of the book very briefly, my point is not to review it (I hope someone else will take on that task in these pages) but to provoke your reading of it. The book is George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, (Oxford, 1997) mentioned and quoted in Reichenbach’s essay.
Marsden tackles head on the prejudice against faith - informed scholarship that is very common in American academic circles. He cites and argues with several influential authors who argue that though it may be appropriate to have one’s scholarship informed by one’s political views or by one’s gender or class - influenced outlook, there is no place in the academy for faith - influenced scholarship. Marsden then goes on to point out that this view is widely held even among most Christian scholars who have a very hard time articulating what difference their faith makes to their scholarship. Christians have thus, for the most part, been silently complicit in the view that faith does not and should not inform really good scholarship. The most interesting and challenging parts of Marsden’s book are the two latter sections where he details excellent examples of Christians whose faith explicitly informs their scholarship and suggests some Christian theological principles that he believes could have a positive effect on Christian scholarship in several fields.
Those of us who teach in Lutheran colleges and universities like to think that the “Lutheran-ness” of our institutions makes some substantial difference to the sort of institutions we are. But we are usually quite silent when it comes around to answering the question that Marsden raises: How do the particulars of our faith inform our scholarship and consequently the learning and teaching that takes place in our institutions? Does the difference appear only in what we may study (a requirement in religion, a course in Luther)? Or does it also appear in the assumptions we make when we study (assumptions about the nature of humans, the fallibility of knowledge, our relationship to the culture, our responsibility to our neighbor)? Or does it even appear in the way we construct and weigh theories within our disciplines (is a Christian scholar as likely as anybody to be a positivist, a behaviorist, a chaos theorist)?
Calvinists and Christian evangelicals have done a good deal more explicit work on these questions than Lutherans have and have come up with some extremely interesting things in the process (e.g. Nicholas Wollterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and his subsequent Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic, both published by Eerdmans). I do not want to argue that Lutherans should simply adopt the Calvinist approach to Christian scholarship. What I am suggesting is that Lutheran scholars ought to become sufficiently familiar with the work that Wollterstorff and others have done to be able to state explicitly how our own approach should differ (if it should) from theirs. I believe that this would make a great multi - year project for a team of Lutheran scholars. A project that all of us who teach in Lutheran institutions would benefit from. Run, don’t walk, to your nearest bookstore and add Marsden’s book to the top of your reading stack.
Tom Christenson
Capital University
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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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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.
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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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Article
Point / Counterpoint: What It Means to be a "College of the Church"
Robert Benne, Tom Christenson
No. 28 · Fall 2008
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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Article
Education as a Christian (Lutheran) Calling
Tom Christenson
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Christenson opens with an imaginative reconstruction of early Christian communities as radically egalitarian, pacifist, communitarian gatherings within the Roman Empire and argues that such communities are natural homes for the educational vocation. Naming two temptations for contemporary Christian higher education—the parochial Bible school and “Generic U”—he uses his friend Sig Rauspern’s tree metaphor to insist that a university is Christian in its trunk and roots rather than in grafted-on branches. Drawing on Wendell Berry, Jacob Bronowski, Walter Wink, Douglas John Hall, and his own Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education, he names faithful criticism, engaged suspiciousness, simul justus et peccator, and a fallible, love-related Lutheran epistemology as the particular gifts Lutherans bring to the Christian educational calling.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 21 · Summer 2005
In his valedictory letter as outgoing editor, Christenson recounts the 1994 origins of Intersections, when he took the idea to Naomi Linnell and Jim Unglaube at DHES and persuaded the council of presidents to launch the journal on a shoestring with printing paid by DHES and everything else by Capital University. He summarizes the issue’s contents—papers from the 2004 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference plus two commissioned pieces from former DHES directors Bob Sorensen and Leonard Schulze—and thanks the student copy editors and Capital’s presidents and provosts who sustained the publication.
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Book Review
Review of Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Christenson reviews Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans, 2004), edited by C.W. Joldersma and G.G. Stronks. After recounting his own early prejudice against Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and his subsequent conversion through Art in Action, he focuses on two threads: Wolterstorff’s expansive reading of shalom—not merely peace but justice, community, communal responsibility, and delight—as the overall goal of Christian collegiate education, and the influence of Abraham Kuyper’s claim of “privileged cognitive access” for Christian inquirers, which Wolterstorff demonstrates rather than declares.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Christenson introduces an issue featuring “young and old, angry and encouraging, prophetic and hopeful” voices unified by the assumption that Christians engaged in thinking and educating will ask hard questions: how to raise concerns about militarism and the new American “imperialism,” what a Lutheran law school will say about training a new generation of attorneys, and what Lutheran colleges communicate to undergrads about vocation. Such faithful criticism, he argues, is part of who Lutheran institutions are.
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Article
Rooted and Open as Resource for Expanding Opportunities on Your Own Campus
Katherine A. Tunheim, Marcia Bunge
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Bunge and Tunheim describe how Gustavus Adolphus College has paired Rooted and Open with its own companion volume Rooted in Heritage, Open to the World — in board workshops, new-faculty orientation, and classroom assignments — and survey several Network-wide opportunities (the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, the LECNA Fellows Program, the Association of Lutheran College Faculties, the Tuition Exchange Program, and international partnerships) that give the common calling tangible institutional form.
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Article
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.
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Article
Our Place in Church-Related Higher Education in the United States
Richard Hughes
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Adapting his 1997 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference address, Hughes asks how the Lutheran heritage can sustain the life of the mind in church-related higher education. He compares Reformed, Mennonite, and Catholic traditions in turn—the Reformed integration of faith and learning around a Christian worldview, the Mennonite priority of discipleship over cognition, and the Catholic sacramental affirmation of the secular as bridge—before arguing that the Lutheran heritage’s particular gifts (justification by grace, theology of the cross, two kingdoms, paradoxical sensibility, vocation, and openness to ambiguity) uniquely support rigorous inquiry, genuine pluralistic conversation, and critical analysis. Drawing on Arthur Holmes, John Howard Yoder, Mark Schwehn, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Lutheran writers including Bob Benne and Tom Christenson, Hughes contends that Lutheran finitude grounds an unusually open and self-critical academic posture.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 43 · Spring 2016
Mahn introduces the twentieth anniversary issue of Intersections, recalling its 1996 birth at Capital University “in the twinkle of an idea” in the mind of founding editor Tom Christenson, and previewing essays by Wilhelm, Amamoto, Kleinhans, Glass Perez, and Simmons that together look back at twenty years of the journal and forward to its work in the decades to come.
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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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Article
Professional Education/Liberal Arts Education: Not a Case of Either-Or but Both-And
Gail Summer
No. 24 · Fall 2006
Summer, Dean of Academic Programs at Lenoir-Rhyne College, traces the historical interweaving of liberal arts and professional education in American higher education (using the rise of engineering as a case study) and argues that the standard “either-or” framing of liberal arts versus professional preparation misreads both. At Lutheran colleges, the “both-and” relationship is shaped by a Lutheran understanding of vocation in which professional programs are integral to, not in tension with, the liberal arts.