In the last essay of this issue of Intersections, Ernest Simmons traces the way in which Luther’s refusal to separate the life of faith from life in the world leads to a particular stance on education. Luther’s both/and approach may appear increasingly peculiar as well as particular—especially on this side of the Enlightenment’s quest to clearly distinguish indubitable, sure-footed knowledge from the all the relativities of history, culture, and faith. Our dominant North American culture and our educational institutions thus can pull in opposing directions: One divides fact from value, objective truth from subjective opinion, science from religion. The other believes, first, that no knowledge should be wholly divorced from matters of ultimate concern and, second, that concern for the Ultimate frees rather than constrains one for free and open inquiry into “the world.”
Certainly, Lutheran colleges and universities are particularly (and peculiarly) posed to resist and maybe even mend our culture’s fact-value split. I was stuck by this soon after arriving at my current position. Kai Swanson, Augustana’s Executive Assistant to the President, was leading some of us newcomers on a tour of the campus when we passed the skeletons of an Apatosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex in our Fryxell Geology Museum. Kai mentioned that the museum was named after Dr. Fritiof Fryxell, who graduated from Augustana in 1922 with majors in biology and English before returning to teach here in 1924. “What’s so significant about this period of time?” Kai asked us. The answer, of course, is that this was the time of the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial (1925) that so painfully pitted modern science against biblical religion. Just as that culture war ignited, a graduate in biology and English was quietly starting his second year investigating and teaching about that natural world on its own terms—not despite but because he found himself at a church-related college.
As their parallel titles suggest, the first five essays in this issue think through overlapping matters of value, vocation, faith, meaning, and commitment from the perspective of different disciplines. I hope there is something here for everyone and that together they help move us past the fact-value split. Those who assume that the “hard” and social sciences have no time for “softer” issues of meaning and value might begin with Stephanie Fuhr’s reflections on her “Becoming Biologists” course or with Lynn Hunnicutt’s account of why economists should—but often don’t—talk about vocation. Those who assume that disciplines such as literature or religion may be nice or personally meaningful but don’t much matter in “the real world” might begin with Allison Wee’s account of the value of poetry or with John Barbour’s willingness to model the deep connections between intellectual and religious convictions. Those who assume that religious witness and testimony only take place after hours in the dorms might be surprised—as I was—to read Adam Luebke’s account of the choir as a community of faith.
In light of these essays and our ongoing conversations about the identity of Lutheran colleges, I am convinced that “education for vocation” should characterize not only those who, like Simmons, write elegantly about the namesake of our institutions, or those who find themselves in centers for vocational reflection or institutes for faith and public life. Education for vocation characterizes our daily work with students, spreadsheets, beakers, food preparation, and lesson plans.
Let me end by sharing my excitement about this summer’s Vocation of a Lutheran College conference (see the announcement on the opposing page). In an economic climate where job earnings and what students will “do” with their degree increasingly overshadow questions about who they are and what they (and we) are called to be, what better time to discuss the broader value of Lutheran education, even if it is harder to assess? I look forward to continuing our conversation.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm reports that decisions at the February 2013 LECNA and ELCA presidents’ meetings authorized reviews of funding and organizational practices and appointed a working group to draft a presidential statement on what it means to be a college or university of the ELCA, signaling a more substantive future role for the annual presidents’ gathering in shaping the shared identity and common mission of ELCA schools.
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Article
Valuing Poetry
Allison Wee
Writing from California Lutheran University as “value” in higher education collapses into “can it get you a job?”, Wee makes a case for poetry as a life-saving discipline. Drawing on William Carlos Williams, Shakespeare, the Psalms, Wordsworth, Pattiann Rogers, Mary Oliver, and her own Environmental Literature assignment that sends students outside for an hour of attentive stillness, she argues that the poet’s skill of translation cultivates the close attention, fresh perspective, and immaterial dimensions of life her students need most.
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Article
Calling Economists
Lynn Hunnicutt
Reading Luther’s Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved alongside Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, Hunnicutt asks whether economists, too, can be saved—and whether economics can host a serious conversation about vocation. She traces her own move from Utah State to Pacific Lutheran University and its Wild Hope Center for Vocation, and turns to Deirdre McCloskey and George DeMartino as economists whose work makes room for vocation and the common good within the discipline.
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Article
Singing Faith
Adam Luebke
Luebke describes the Waldorf College Choir as a community of faith whose daily devotions, century-long lineage from F. Melius Christiansen, and disciplined wrestling with sacred repertoire—from Fauré’s Requiem to African-American spirituals to Romans 8 sung backstage—form students spiritually as they form them musically, so that fully grasping what they sing becomes a discovery of why they sing.
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Article
Living Biology
Stephanie Fuhr
Fuhr recounts how a one-credit Becoming Biologists course at Augustana College was rebuilt around the biological worldview after a student flagged John Janovy Jr.’s argument that values are legitimate tools in biology. Drawing also on Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, she argues that visions and values—not skills alone—inspire a life’s work in science and provide the foundation for lifetime engagement in the work of biology.
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Article
Professing Religion
John D. Barbour
Barbour reflects on the vocation of a Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College, asking when and how a teacher should disclose personal faith in the classroom. Drawing on his graduate teachers Anthony C. Yu and Langdon Gilkey, and on Augustine’s Confessions, Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, C. S. Lewis, and Kathleen Norris, he argues that teaching autobiography invites teaching autobiographically—and that professing religion is finally a matter of how one believes, not just what.
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Article
A Lutheran Dialectical Model for Higher Education
Ernest L. Simmons
Drawing on “The Freedom of a Christian,” simul justus et peccator, Richard Hughes, Joseph Sittler, Martha Nussbaum, and Tom Christenson, Simmons argues that the Lutheran tradition informs an open, dialectical educational model that holds Christian and academic freedom together. He locates vocation at the intersection of the practical (why are you here?) and the existential (why are you here?) and proposes Lutheran higher education as education for self-transcendence and leadership Soli Deo Gloria.
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Article
Vocation at Full Stretch: Reflections on Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling and its Use among College Students
Jason A. Mahn
No. 61 · Spring 2025
43 min audio
Mahn engages Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling as required reading in a sophomore religion course, showing how her categories of missed, blocked, conflicted, fractured, unexpected, and relinquished callings empower young adults to perceive embodied, unplanned, and often painful dimensions of life as essential parts of vocation — and help close the gap between mission-driven and tuition-driven realities.
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Article
On Recruiting Diverse Students, Rooted in Mission
Eric Rowell, Jason A. Mahn
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Jason Mahn interviews Eric Rowell, Assistant Director of Admissions and Diversity Outreach at Augustana College, about how recruiting students from a wide variety of backgrounds — rooted in Augustana’s Lutheran commitment to vocation and educating across difference — remains essentially unchanged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions on affirmative action.
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Editorial
From the Outgoing Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Mahn closes out a decade of editing Intersections, passes the duties to Colleen Windham-Hughes, gives thanks to Mark Wilhelm and Augustana College, and introduces an issue largely drawn from comments by Lutheran faculty, staff, and administrators at the 2022 NetVUE national gathering.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Mahn introduces the “Called to Place” theme of the 2021 VLHE Conference, arguing that Lutheran higher education’s emphasis on vocation must be grounded in particular geographies and embodied communities — for, as Wallace Stegner put it, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
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Reflection
Shelter in Place: Reflections from March 22, 2020
Jason A. Mahn
No. 53 · Spring 2021
On the fourth Sunday of Lent in 2020, Mahn meditates on the etymology of “shelter” (from shield) and on an email from a former student in Boston whose mutual-aid organizing models a Lutheran understanding of vocation: the upending of ego by divine love that frees us, finally, to see and serve the neighbor.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Mahn narrates a year of crisscrossing pandemics — Covid-19, economic collapse, partisan politics, and the long pandemic of white supremacy revealed anew by the murder of George Floyd — and argues that Lutheran liberal arts schools, by educating for vocation, are uniquely poised to help students respond with character and capable callings.
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Article
Uneasy Partners? Religion and Academics
Storm Bailey
No. 11 · Spring 2001
Bailey, a philosopher at Luther College, takes up the reflex of describing church-related colleges as “pretty good in spite of the religion” and argues instead that religious commitment serves academic goals on three fronts: service as central academic purpose (Richard Hughes on Mennonite colleges in Models of Christian Higher Education), educational community (Plato’s dialogues, Parker Palmer, and Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden), and integration of knowledge across disciplines against Nelson and Watt’s “entrepreneurial disciplinarity.” He then defends academic freedom on Christian grounds by drawing on Mill’s On Liberty argument from fallibilism, the centrality of epistemic weakness in the Christian tradition, and Wolterstorff’s claim that to infringe academic freedom is to desecrate an image of God—making personal and institutional religious commitment a foundation, not a foe, of the liberal academic ideal.
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Article
Vocation and Civil Discourse: Discerning and Defining
Lynn Hunnicutt
No. 48 · Fall 2018
Hunnicutt draws on Rabbi Amy Eilberg’s reading of Moses’ calling to identify four features of vocational discernment — attention, wonder, communal consciousness, and humility — and argues that these same qualities are also key aspects of civil discourse, so that forming students for vocational discernment is simultaneously forming them for civility.
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Article
Rich and Poor in an Era of Globalized Religion and Economies: Challenges to Lutheran Colleges
Pamela K. Brubaker
No. 25 · Spring 2007
Brubaker opens with two World Council of Churches communion stories—a generous Aymara potato meal in Bolivia and a gated invitation-only lunch at a prosperous immigrant German Lutheran church in Brazil—to frame the question of which stance Lutheran colleges will adopt toward diversity. Drawing on Richard Hughes and Ernest Simmons on Lutheran “ecumenical confessionalism,” Linell Cady, Ulrich Beck, Held and McGrew, the World Bank’s 2006 Equity and Development report, Mark Juergensmeyer’s Global Religions, Harvey Cox on the Market as God, the WCC’s “economy of life” / AGAPE document, and Larry Rasmussen on universal human rights, she argues that part of the academic work of Lutheran colleges is to educate for critical citizenship by questioning neo-liberal assumptions and equipping students to claim social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights for the whole human family.
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Reflection
Colleges Lead Way: Curiosity, Faith, Discernment, Mission are Key
Mark S. Hanson
No. 28 · Fall 2008
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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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 6 · Winter 1999
Selbyg reports on the work of the Division of Higher Education and Schools to focus what makes Lutheran colleges and universities distinctive, recaps the 1998 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference at Wittenberg, previews the 1999 Susquehanna conference on “Identity and Fragmentation: Can the Lutheran Center hold?” (inspired by Yeats’s vision of the Second Coming), commends Ernest Simmons’s Lutheran Higher Education: An Introduction for Faculty (Augsburg Fortress, 1998), and announces a new NEH/NSF-style initiative called “The Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education.”
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Editorial
From the Editor: Vocation as Action in the Affirmative
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Windham-Hughes frames vocation as practicing “at the borders of our incompetence” — every small yes to the callings we experience, every effort made in the direction of life, is action in the affirmative — and previews the issue’s essays on diversity, transformation, AI, championship team culture, and dreaming big within and beyond our limitations.