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.
-
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.
-
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.”
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.”
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Article
A Response to Paul Santmire
Don Braxton
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Braxton appreciates the dialectical structure of Santmire’s mandates—“skeletons in our closets and riches in our own vaults”—and reads it as a faithful expression of the Lutheran tradition of Paul, Augustine, and Luther. He argues that Santmire is on target in warning against premature flight to non-Christian traditions for environmental wisdom (theoretical sensitivity does not translate into ecological behavior in practice), and that classical Lutheran social ethics has too often been quietistic. But Lutheran ethics at its best is dialectical, not dualistic—recognizing the interpenetration of church and world, Law and Gospel, eschatological Kingdom and present realities, as in Hegel, Ritschl, Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Larry Rasmussen. Braxton commends environmental responsibility, social criticism of unsustainable practices, and a liturgical practice of resistance to instrumentalism as appropriate next steps for Lutheran liberal arts colleges, especially Capital University.
-
Article
The Dangers of "Vocation" for Students Thinking about Career
Carl Hughes
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Hughes warns that Lutherans too often use “vocation” as a theologically glorified synonym for a fulfilling career — a misuse that constricts God’s call to our jobs and excludes minimum-wage workers, caregivers, and others from the dignity of calling. Recovering Luther’s expansive understanding, he argues that vocation refers first to people, not professions, and must always be bigger than any one aspect of our lives.
-
Article
Martin Luther, Vocation, and Church Colleges: Nurturing Future Leaders for Faith and Community
Richard W. Rouse
No. 14 · Summer 2002
Rouse, citing Arne Selbyg’s statistic that thirteen of sixteen newly elected ELCA bishops graduated from a Lutheran college (and 49 of 65 in the new Conference of Bishops), argues that ELCA colleges are training grounds for future church and community leaders because of Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and his distinction between vocation and station—the basis of PLU’s motto “educating for lives of service, inquiry, leadership, and care.” He describes “Paths Unknown: Where is God Leading Me?” a Western Mission Cluster collaboration of California Lutheran, Luther Seminary, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, PLU, and Trinity Lutheran College that used a dedicated web site (godleading.com), a January-February 2001 online virtual forum reaching over 300 participants in 40 states and Canada and Mexico, and one-day interactive video workshops featuring Trump’s play “Holy Odors,” and reports LECNA’s Reclaiming Lutheran Student Project findings on teaching, community, and faith integration at Lutheran schools.
-
Article
Mission and Hiring in the Christian College
Bruce Reichenbach
No. 3 · Summer 1997
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).
-
Article
No Child Left Behind Meets Philip Melanchthon: A Reflective Conversation
Kathy Book
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Inspired by Tim Lull’s My Conversations with Martin Luther, Book imagines an interview with Philip Melanchthon in the cobblestone courtyard of the University of Wittenberg, in which the Praeceptor Germaniae reflects on his pedagogy (Socratic questioning, brevity and example, declamations, repetition, and interdisciplinary connections), his graded curriculum from primer to university, and his collaboration with Luther on the responsibility of community, parents, and government for the education of all children — and finds his vision strikingly resonant with the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2006.