Creating and sustaining meaningful relationships in our personal and public lives challenges each of us. This challenge extends to higher education and the community of ELCA colleges and universities. Intersections was established as a tool for maintaining relationships among leaders in ELCA higher education. Under our now not-so-new editor, Jason Mahn, Intersections remains a vibrant vehicle for sharing ideas, research, and reflections on the vocation of our institutions. Jason has recently brought new voices to serve as an editorial advisory board for the journal. We welcome Laurie Brill (LECNA), Jacqueline Bussie (Concordia), Darrell Jodock (St. Olaf), Lynn Hunnicutt (PLU), Tom Morgan (Augsburg), Kathi Tunheim (Gustavus), and Ernie Worman (Newberry). Your suggestions for Intersections are welcomed by Jason and the advisory editorial board. It is my hope that over the next few years, the journal will become a more widely utilized tool for a conversation about our shared ELCA identity and our congruent mission as colleges and universities.
Coming together for face-to-face conversations has and will continue to be—even in this digital age of virtual meetings—important for maintaining relationships among the people who work at our institutions. The annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference remains an important in-person gathering. We will next meet July 21-23 at Augsburg College to discuss Leadership as informed by vocation, service, and mentoring. In the summer of 2014, teams from our colleges and universities are also invited to attend a special conference on the expanding work of interfaith dialogue and understanding on our campuses. With support from the churchwide organization, Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois is hosting this conference June 1-3, 2014, on its campus. ELCA colleges and universities are invited to send presidents, faculty, students, and chaplains to discuss best practices and experiences in interfaith dialogue and understanding. Eboo Patel, president of the Interfaith Youth Core, and the new presiding bishop of the ELCA, Elizabeth Eaton, will speak at the conference. The conference promises to help us all better claim that the vocation of an ELCA college or university includes the promotion of interfaith understanding among students and all within our communities of learning.
Maintaining our community of shared identity and mission is an ongoing task, but the task is made all the easier with this fine journal, our annual Vocation conference at Augsburg College, and special events like the 2014 interfaith understanding conference at Augustana or the conference in summer of 2013 at Pacific Lutheran University on introducing faculty and staff to Lutheran higher education. Join the conversation!
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn reads Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy alongside Larry Rasmussen and Martha Nussbaum to ask how Lutheran schools can articulate the “value added” of vocation without commodifying it, and previews the 2013 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference papers, Patricia Lull’s sermon, and Ann Hill Duin and Eric Childers’ Project DAVID essay that make up the issue.
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Article
Welfare of the City and Why Lutherans Care about Education
L. DeAne Lagerquist
Lagerquist takes readers on a historical tour from sixteenth-century Saxony through the founding decades of Lutheran higher education in the United States to the present day, recovering Luther’s “gift economy” alongside Lewis Hyde and Oswald Bayer as a counter to the market logic that increasingly governs American higher education. She offers four propositions on vocation and commodification and proposes that Lutheran institutional vocation is to accept and pass along the gifts that come to our schools for the well-being of students, neighbors, and the world.
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Article
The Value of Evoking Vocation and the Vocation of Evoking Value
Mark Schwehn
Schwehn answers Michael Staton’s call to “disaggregate” the components of a college degree by insisting that Lutheran education is integral and whole. Working through Bruce Kimball’s history of liberal education, Cardinal Newman, and Leon Kass on Athens and Jerusalem, he argues that Lutherans should defend liberal learning on instrumental grounds and offers the figure of the “local genius”—exemplified by his Valparaiso colleague John Strietelmeier—as the form of human excellence that Lutheran colleges uniquely cultivate.
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Article
"We're Looking for a College—Not a Vocation": Articulating Lutheran Higher Education to Prospective Students and Parents Seeking Relevance
Karl Stumo, Tom Crady
Drawing on Sallie Mae and UCLA enrollment data, the websites of competitor institutions, and candid voices from the field, Crady and Stumo describe a recruitment landscape in which yield rates have collapsed, discount rates have soared, and the word “Lutheran” often presents an obstacle until it is patiently unpacked. They survey mission language at Augsburg, PLU, Gustavus, and Wartburg and argue that strategic message development is the only way for ELCA schools to make vocation and Lutheran identity “credible, relevant, differentiating, and compelling” to prospective families.
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Article
More Value than Many Sparrows: A Sermon on Matthew 10:26-31
Patricia Lull
Preaching at the 2013 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, Lull recalls her own arrival at the College of Wooster the summer after Kent State and contrasts that era’s sense of students as participants in a college’s mission with today’s talk of “butts in seats.” Reading Matthew 10:26-31, she promises that the way of the cross—and its hard opportunities for slow-paced learning, genuine debate, and access for students who cannot pay the full cost—is the easy yoke, the lightest burden of all.
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Article
Reinventing Lutheran Liberal Arts: A Preliminary Report on Project DAVID
Ann Hill Duin, Eric Childers
Duin and Childers introduce Project DAVID—Distinction, Analytics, Value, Innovation, Digital opportunity—as a framework for showcasing strategic reinvention across ELCA liberal arts institutions. Building on Childers’ College Identity Sagas and reading Selingo, Norris, and Popenici alongside the AAC&U, Adrian College, NITLE, and the Delta Cost Project, they pose framing questions about distinction, vocation, affordability, value propositions, two-track innovation, and BYOE technology that ELCA campuses can use to face their own “Goliath” moments.
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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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Response
Response to Bishop Olson and President Tipson
Robert Benne
No. 16 · Winter 2003
Benne responds to two articles in the Winter 2002 Intersections: former Bishop Stanley Olson’s “The Marks of an ELCA College,” whose narrow reading of the two kingdoms cedes all epistemological claims to secular knowledge, and President Tipson’s engagement with The Future of Religious Colleges, whose “rather unchastened Enlightenment spirit” underestimates how loaded the social sciences and humanities are with their own philosophical and religious assumptions. Drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr, John Milbank, and William Buckley, Benne defends a “critical mass” of pervasively Lutheran colleges and calls on bishops and pastors to take the schools seriously lest they drift from their religious heritage.
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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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Article
Finding the Miracle in the Intersection of Mission and Limitations: Lessons from Latin America
Kat Peters
No. 61 · Spring 2025
Peters draws on her time interning with Lutheran World Relief and leading a study abroad program in Central America — including a Costa Rican women’s farm cooperative whose ecotourism project was “unprofitable” but life-giving — to argue that the intersection of God’s preference for struggle and God’s desire for abundant life is itself the miracle higher education can claim amid scarcity.
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Article
The Responsible Professional: Vocation and Economic Life
Martha E. Stortz, Tom Morgan
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Stortz and Morgan argue that the “value-added” of Lutheran higher education is a responsibility ethic — one that frames the professional as a first responder “called and empowered to serve the neighbor so that all may flourish” — and unpack the four criteria of the 1999 ELCA social statement Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All as a framework for economic deliberation.
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Article
Practicing Hope: The Charisms of Lutheran Higher Education
Martha E. Stortz
No. 32 · Spring 2010
Stortz names four charisms—theological gifts of identity rather than commodities—that Lutheran higher education brings to a culture of fear: semper reformanda as flexible, responsive institutions; the freedom of a Christian as simul justus et peccator critical inquiry that holds opposites in creative tension; regard for the other as “neighbor” rather than friend or alien; and the priesthood of all believers as a public, civic calling to know the poor. Drawing on Augustine, George Lindbeck, Patricia Killen, James Clifford, Earl Shorris, Carter Lindberg, and Augsburg’s Center for Global Education, she argues that immersion trips, neighbor-regard, and welfare reform witness that the gift Lutherans bring is hope grounded in Christ in you, the hope of glory.
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Article
Seeking the Common Good: Lutheran Contributions to Global Citizenship
Wanda Deifelt
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Deifelt draws on Luther’s account of neighborly love in “The Freedom of a Christian” and on his Two Kingdoms theology to argue that a Lutheran ethics of care fosters a sense of responsibility, accountability, and compassion that broadens citizenship beyond rights and virtues. Engaging William Galston’s typology of civic virtues, Sylvia Walby on women’s citizenship, Serene Jones on communitarianism, and Manuel Castells on globalization, she proposes that Lutheran theology equips the church to educate for transformative participation in world affairs.