Last July, I was included in a working group of administrators, chairs, chaplains, and faculty members from our 26 ELCA colleges and universities called, “People of Wondrous Ability: Introducing Faculty and Staff to Lutheran Higher Education.” Under the direction of Samuel Torvend of Pacific Lutheran University, we shared creative ways of introducing colleagues to what Marty Stortz calls the distinctive charisms of our tradition. Here are some ideas tried out on our campuses:
- Host off-campus faculty retreats where participants discuss the theological roots of Lutheran higher education, the specific history of the school, and the vocation of a teacher-scholar. Some schools have traveled as far as Italy and Germany.
- Invite alumni working in diverse fields to reflect on the intersection of faith, work, family, and service in their daily lives at a faculty seminar.
- Survey faculty, administration, and staff about their religious affiliations (or not) as well as their impressions and understandings of the church-relatedness of the college.
- Identify experienced faculty “allies” who can lead conversations and share personal stories about their calling to and within a Lutheran college.
- Offer faculty seminars about Lutheran institutional identity, with readings spanning from history and theology to contemporary analyses of higher education.
- Publish a “Lutheran Reader,” with essays about the college’s church-relatedness written by administrators and faculty from ecumenical, interfaith, and no-faith perspectives.
I returned to Augustana excited about so many of these ideas that I essentially rolled the last three into one. With funding from the President’s office and the Center for Vocational Reflection, we initiated “Augustana as Lutheran Education” (ALE). Throughout the year the group of ten discussed Andrew Delbanco’s College, Ernie Simmons’s Lutheran Higher Education, and a handful of essays over good food and German beer. We plan to repeat ALE for the next few years before publically presenting written reflections in conjunction with the 500 year commemoration of the Reformation in 2017. The initiative brings together “allies” of Lutheran education (many of whom may tend to “cheerlead” for it, in Torvend’s terms) beside those who too easily ignore or discard it, asking each—and the many in between—to think critically about the nature of Lutheran education.
The present issue of Intersections tries to do the same. It is comprised of reflective reviews of eight well-known books on higher education, written from the perspectives of faculty teaching at our Lutheran colleges and universities. Like ALE, these essays move from national trends—many alarmist and foreboding—to homegrown conversations, negotiations, and initiatives. Readers will learn about the religious roots of liberal arts education together with what Lutheran liberal arts might mean; about integrative and transformational education together with initiatives that ask faculty to practice what we teach; about the opportunity to make college into a prophetic counterculture beside the ongoing proclivities to conform to careerism and the marketplace.
The authors here report on the state of the college without either cheerleading or disparaging. Certainly, the state of Lutheran higher education is strong. But you will find here more weighted reflections about a raging national debate about college from an institutional tradition called “Lutheran.” May it inspire you to discuss books such as these with others rooted in that tradition.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm interrogates the widely used phrase “the model is broken,” arguing that it blames the victim, masks the demographic and public-funding pressures actually facing ELCA higher education, and distracts from the work of modifying—rather than discarding—a model of educating the whole person that has successfully adjusted across the centuries.
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Book Review
The Religious Genealogy of College: Interrogating the Ambivalence of Delbanco's College
George Connell
Connell reads Andrew Delbanco’s College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be alongside Concordia’s Vision Statement for the Humanities and Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit, tracing Delbanco’s ambivalent engagement with the religious origins of American college. He asks whether Delbanco’s “college idea” can survive cut off from the religious rootstock that nourished it, and proposes that church-related colleges may serve best not as a “usable past” but as a “usable present.”
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Book Review
A College Degree or a College Experience? Reflecting on Selingo's College (Un)Bound
Laurie Brill
Brill reads Jeff Selingo’s College (Un)Bound from inside the Lutheran Educational Conference of North America, drawing on LECNA’s alumni research with Hardwick-Day and on Brandon Busteed’s Gallup data to argue that, in an age of competency-based degrees and college-as-commodity, Lutheran colleges must speak more clearly about the transformational, vocational impact of a college experience that develops the whole person.
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Book Review
Types, Methods, and Sagas in Lutheran Higher Education: Learning from Childers
Lake Lambert
Lambert situates Eric Childers’ College Identity Sagas within the older tradition of the 1977 Association of Lutheran College Faculties volume The Church-Related College in an Age of Pluralism, working through Burton Clark’s “saga” and Robert Benne’s typology of church-related colleges. He commends Childers’ socio-scientific approach while questioning whether a typology can do justice to institutions that resist easy classification.
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Book Review
Post-Secular Religion on Campus: Conversing with Jacobsen and Jacobsen
L. DeAne Lagerquist
Lagerquist guides readers through Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen’s No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education and its companion volumes, unpacking the authors’ three-act story of campus religion (Protestant, Privatized, Pluriform), their three-by-two framework of historic/public/personal religion in belief and behavior, and the six questions they pose for campus conversations. She lifts up interfaith etiquette and vocation as especially fruitful zones for Lutheran campuses.
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Book Review
The Prophetic Vocation and the Nature(s) of College: Reimagining College with Jim Farrell
Peder Jothen
Jothen reads the late Jim Farrell’s The Nature of College as a prophetic critique of the dual nature(s) of college—its socio-cultural “normal” and its ecological habitat—and argues that Farrell’s call to model an “Anthropocene Responsibility” resonates with the prophetic dimension of Lutheran higher education. He proposes a re-imagined “About St. Olaf” that names vocation, ecological dependence, and personal involvement as the operative goods of college.
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Book Review
The Courage to Change: Creating New Hearts with Palmer and Zajonc
Martha E. Stortz
Stortz reads Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc’s The Heart of Higher Education from the landscape of Lent and notes that the book’s strategies all target students, not their professors. Drawing on her own Faculty Formation Group at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Ignatian Colleagues Program at Jesuit institutions, she asks what a Lutheran analogue might look like that would form the educators who teach for transformation.
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Book Review
Learning Across Campus: Hearing Bok's Call to Conversation
David Ratke
Ratke reads Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges from Lenoir-Rhyne and argues that Bok’s call to think holistically about undergraduate education and to dialogue across disciplinary boundaries names the work already underway at ELCA colleges. He weighs faculty attitudes, the role of skills in the core curriculum and the major, and the importance of the extracurriculum for student formation.
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Book Review
The Information Deluge: Navigating the Digital Age with Recent Scholars
Virginia Connell
From the reference desk at Concordia’s Carl B. Ylvisaker Library, Connell navigates Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete, and Howard Gardner and Katie Davis’ The App Generation, then describes information-literacy work at Concordia—primary-source assignments, Omeka and TimelineJS exhibits—that helps students move from app-dependent to app-enabled in the Lutheran tradition of reform.
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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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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 48 · Fall 2018
Wilhelm frames the issue by reflecting on the Letter of James and the Lutheran tradition of “calling a thing what it is” — arguing that the standards of academic discourse, deeply rooted in Lutheran insistence on frankness and honesty alongside concern for the common good, give NECU institutions a solid platform for sustaining honest but not hateful discourse about divisive issues.
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Article
Moving Forward by Looking Back: Lutheran Vocation as Foundation for Interfaith Ministry
Kristen Glass Perez
No. 43 · Spring 2016
Recounting how Augustana students mentored her into the role of presider at a campus vigil following the 2012 Sikh Temple of Wisconsin shooting, Glass Perez proposes that interfaith understanding become a mode of praxis for the twenty-first century Lutheran college. Drawing on Engaging Others, Knowing Ourselves and Interfaith Youth Core’s leadership practices, she urges ELCA schools to develop a common language linking interfaith engagement to vocational exploration and to the wider mission of the church.
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Article
Low-Hanging Fruit, Moonshots, and Coffee: Dreaming Big Within and Beyond Our Limitations
Jeremy Myers
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Myers shares the process used by Augsburg’s Christensen Center for Vocation to help teams move from a shared experience to next steps — an Ignatian-rooted Awareness Examen followed by naming low-hanging fruit, moonshots, and the coffee conversations that build the coalition to make it all happen.
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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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Response
Renewing Our Journey: Some Thoughts on Pursuing the Truth
John Rehl
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Rehl, a Capital University graduate pursuing doctorates in theology at Chicago and in economics at Wisconsin, takes up Schwehn’s invitation to think again on the nature of truth. He sets aside truth as information, as object, and as mere words; recasts the church-related college’s task as a renewed emphasis on classroom teaching (Kierkegaard’s teacher as midwife) and on brave, articulate professors. He calls for moral education in courage, discipline, patience, and love, illustrates the costs of the fact-value split with examples from economics, and argues that we honor Lutheran heritage not by preserving it as a museum piece but by testing it—Luther’s theology of the cross over a theology of glory—and by preparing students for a world of Untruth, strengthened (with Julian of Norwich) by the promise that they will not be overwhelmed.
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Article
A Church, the Human Condition, and the Fissured Face of Peace
D. M. Yeager
No. 22 · Spring 2006
Yeager, a member of the ELCA Task Force for Studies on Sexuality, reflects on lessons for the church’s educational mission in the wake of the 2005 Churchwide Assembly. Drawing on Macquarrie’s The Concept of Peace, Polanyi on the personal coefficient of knowledge, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and responses to the task force report from Roy Harrisville III and Larry Rasmussen, she proposes “the fissured face of peace”—peace as the absence of hostility rather than disagreement—and maps how Arendt’s five conditions of human existence (life, earth, natality, mortality, worldliness, plurality) might shape Lutheran colleges’ curricula in history, epistemology, and the sociology of knowledge so that graduates can disagree without hostility and embrace the slow work of reformation.