I come to you with some final reflections on 30 years in Lutheran higher education. I do this even as I begin a new chapter in my own journey at Carthage College, my own Alma Mater. Leaving the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Division for Higher Education and Schools has not been easy. The Vocation of a Lutheran College project is a good example of what made that a difficult decision. We have been called as colleges and universities of the church to be places where mind, body and spirit are nurtured; to be places of both high quality and of excellence in all that we do. We have been called to be places which help students come to an understanding of their own vocation and then to take ownership of it. The results of our efforts are best told through the stories of our students, where and how they live out their own vocation as global citizens in service to the church and to the larger society. You all know those stories and we all need to keep telling them.
I look back now on my own good fortune. I began to explore my own vocation as a student at Carthage College. I began to live it out as a faculty member in chemistry at Lenoir-Rhyne College. I thought I would spend my life there doing that. I didn’t. I took a turn into academic administration, also at Lenoir-Rhyne. And then, an opportunity came along to be a part of nurturing the church’s mission in higher education, an opportunity which lasted twenty years. I made an apprehensive entry into this role, grew through the support and encouragement of countless people, and, now as I look back, had an almost unbelievable experience. I will not forget the importance of my colleague, Richard Solberg, in the early days of that work. My life became intertwined with the lives of 29 colleges and universities and of thousands of people.
I had the good fortune of watching these institutions thrive and grow in strength and stature. I watched as we made our way through the period of population decline of traditional college-age students. We came through that period, by and large, remarkable well. We grew slowly but steadily in enrollment through that period. We were fortunate to enter the new period of financial challenge in our lives, in the midst of which we now live, in rather good shape. Our endowments, while still not large enough, have grown from $70 million to $1 billion in 25 years. Our students benefit from $500 million a year in financial aid. They also benefit from faculties as strong as they have ever been. It has not all been easy. I was directly involved in the decisions leading to the closing of Upsalsa College in 1995. That was a sad day. While the closing was, perhaps, inevitable, Upsala was serving a very diverse student body. It was living out an important vocation while struggling for its life. I along with my colleague Naomi Linnell, had the wonderful opportunity to live out the Higher Education and Namibia program. You on the campuses made the dream Naomi and I had come true. As a group we played, in fact we continue to play an important role in the development of the new nation of Namibia, now almost eight years old. This program too was a measure of our vocation as institutions in the Lutheran tradition.
And then, I was gifted to travel all over the world. I still pinch myself to be sure it’s true the places I’ve been on behalf of our work together. I never expected this to be a part of my work. Now my challenge is to touch the two remaining continents I have not visited; Australia and Antarctica. The latter, at least, will be hard to justify on behalf of Lutheran higher education or Carthage College. Perhaps an alumni tour. Perhaps the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference. At least air conditioning would not be a problem.
I look back as well on our Vocation of a Lutheran College project. It has thrived and it has meant a great deal to me personally. I continue to thank Paul Dovre, President of Concordia College, for coming to us with the idea. It has benefited now from more than $200,000 in grant support. It must continue. It was put in place to help all of us come to a better understanding of what it means to be an institution of higher education in the Lutheran tradition. We live in a time of challenges to that tradition, from within the church and from the larger society. We hope that this project can help maintain and develop the strength of the partnership between church and college in the Lutheran tradition. I hope I can get to the conferences in the future.
The colleges and universities of the Lutheran church are occasionally referred to as jewels. I agree with that characterization but I have another. I like to think of them as beautiful flowers, let’s say roses. All of the flowers on a bush are the same color; the Lutheran tradition in higher education. At the same time each blossom is a little different from the next; the colleges and universities while all being a part of that tradition have their own histories and cultures. They live out their vocation in their own way. And, the rose bush will only thrive if it is cared for by the gardener. The same with the partnership between church and college. The partnership will only survive and thrive if it is nurtured. Let us never forget to water the flower, to trim them when they need it, to treasure their fragrance, and to share all that they are with each other.
Thanks for the ride!
James M. Unglaube
Associate Vice President for Advancement and Senior Planned Giving Officer
Carthage College
Kenosha, Wisconsin
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson thanks the departing Jim Unglaube, recommends Ronald A. Wells’s Keeping Faith: Embracing the Tensions in Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans) as both an interesting collection of essays and a model worth imitating at ELCA institutions, previews the issue’s pieces by Richard Hughes, Carl Skrade and Spencer Porter, Gregory Clark, and Karla Bohmbach, and introduces three new features of the journal: “What I Have Learned” (an essay by a senior or emeritus faculty member, inaugurated by Richard Ylvisaker), “Reviews” (initiated by Karla Bohmbach), and a “Bulletin Board” for cross-campus announcements.
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Article
Our Place in Church-Related Higher Education in the United States
Richard Hughes
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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Article
The Skeptical Theologian's Dictionary
Carl Skrade, Spencer Porter
Porter and Skrade offer selections from a mock-lexicon of theological terms: answer, church, faith, God, grace, hope, justification, love, prayer, sin, soul, and theology, among others. Each entry begins with a standard definition and then unsettles it—answer reminds the reader that in theology and poetry the questions matter more than their answers; church alternates between “the mystical Body of Christ” and ordinary human gatherings whose machinery often obscures the gospel; God is the One whose name we are told not to take in vain and yet whose name we keep using; prayer is communion with God yet often degenerates into a list of demands. The form’s irony exposes the gap between the language of theology and its lived realities—a sober, witty corrective for Lutheran classrooms and chapels alike.
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Article
The University in the City of God: Beyond Dialectics and Rhetoric
Gregory A. Clark
Clark, drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, distinguishes the preliberal, liberal, and postliberal university and argues that the liberal university’s pretense of dialectical neutrality has masked a particular rhetoric of its own. Following John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, he holds that every philosophy and institution is finally a rhetoric and that the church’s task is not to win on the secular university’s terms but to proclaim and embody an alternative city. The Christian college, then, should give up the apologetic pose of meeting secular reason halfway and instead practice the rhetoric of the gospel: a proclamation of Jesus, an enactment of Christian friendship and peace, and a willingness to be vulnerable to the violence of the world as Jesus was vulnerable to his own. Clark commends this stance to colleges related to the church.
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Article
A God of Peace and Love? Reflections From a Biblical Scholar
Karla G. Bohmbach
Bohmbach responds to Gregory Clark’s call to proclaim Jesus on Lutheran campuses with biblical-scholar reservations. Israel’s sacred texts also include the herem ban, the conquest narratives, and a God who fights for Israel; the Christian canon includes the apocalyptic violence of Revelation. To proclaim Jesus is therefore to proclaim a particular and contested figure within a tradition that has its own internal violence—not a generic God of peace and love. Bohmbach asks what it would mean for staff, administrators, and teachers on a college campus to take seriously the Jesus who made himself vulnerable to the violence of his world, even to the point of suffering for it, and whether Lutheran colleges are prepared for such a vocation.
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Article
What I Have Learned: Maybe Plato Was Right
Richard Ylvisaker
Inaugurating the new “What I Have Learned” column, Ylvisaker reflects on a career of teaching philosophy at Luther College and offers four hard-won “preliminary examples” in which Plato turned out to be more right than fashionable criticism allowed: (1) communities are not necessarily better off by becoming more diverse—diversity needs a unity of purpose if it is to enrich rather than fragment; (2) politics, to be more than a struggle for power by competing interests, must rest on a moral basis that transcends those interests; (3) the much-derided body-soul dualism contains a measure of truth about the cognitive and moral limitations of embodied life; and, deepest of all, (4) reason itself depends on a community of discourse in which doctrinaire pronouncement gives way to disciplined inquiry. Athens and Jerusalem, he concludes, should meet at the college of the church.
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Article
A Response to Paul Santmire: The Lutheran Liberal Arts College and Care for the Earth
Arthur A. Preisinger
Preisinger commends much of Paul Santmire’s earlier essay—the critique of the “back-to-nature” cult, the call for a holistic environmental ethos, the suggestion of a cosmic liturgical praxis—but takes issue with Santmire’s reading of classical Lutheran social ethics. He argues that the two kingdoms doctrine was not a systematic Lutheran treatise (the term itself became common only in the 1930s), that the doctrine’s misuse by some twentieth-century German theologians does not condemn its proper use, and that the South African Council of Churches actually deployed the doctrine (correctly interpreted) against apartheid. Drawing on Karl Hertz, Ulrich Duchrow, Tom Strieter, and F. Edward Cranz, Preisinger defends the doctrine as complementary duality—left hand and right hand of God, governances to be distinguished but never separated—and concludes with Bill Lazareth that the skeletons in the Lutheran closet are not Luther but departures from Luther.
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Article
A Response to Paul Santmire
Don Braxton
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.
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Book Review
In Search of a Calling: The College's Role in Shaping Identity
Karla G. Bohmbach
Bohmbach reviews Thomas O. Buford’s In Search of a Calling: The College’s Role in Shaping Identity (Mercer University Press, 1995), which diagnoses a meaning-crisis among college students and traces two historical aspects of “calling”: the biblical, communitarian aspect rooted in the Hebrew Bible and the practical, individualistic aspect rooted in the Renaissance. She praises Buford’s reconstruction of imago dei as imagination rather than copy of God’s rationality, his broad disciplinary range (biblical studies, theology, educational psychology, business management), and his identification of the tension between freedom and limitation as the field of calling. She is sharply critical, however, of his final chapter’s wariness of canon-revisionists and multiculturalists, his caricature of “special-interest groups,” and his presumption of a homogeneous student body—a presumption that, she argues, never matched American college reality and matches it less today.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
James M. Unglaube
No. 3 · Summer 1997
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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Editorial
From the Publisher
James M. Unglaube
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Unglaube reports on the second annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference of August 1996, where Walter Bouman of Trinity Lutheran Seminary addressed “What is Lutheran; What is the Lutheran Tradition” (biblical, catholic, evangelical, sacramental, world-affirming—the world “received, enjoyed, served as God’s Gift”). He previews presentations by Wendy McCredie of Texas Lutheran and Baird Tipson of Wittenberg on how the Lutheran tradition is embodied in its colleges, and Bob Vogel’s challenge in “Coherence—And Now what?” that the tradition comes to life in how faculty give expression to their beliefs and values in the classroom and with colleagues.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
James M. Unglaube
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Unglaube welcomes readers to the inaugural issue of Intersections, crediting Editor Tom Christenson and Capital University, and announces the new annual Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference whose continuing dialogue the journal exists to enhance. He gives thanks to the Lilly Endowment for a sizable grant supporting the 1996 conference, campus dialogues, and the birth of the publication.
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Book Review
Post-Secular Religion on Campus: Conversing with Jacobsen and Jacobsen
L. DeAne Lagerquist
No. 39 · Spring 2014
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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Editorial
From the Editor: Why All This Talk About Vocation?
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Windham-Hughes introduces the Fall 2022 issue built around Mark Wilhelm’s keynote “Why all this talk about vocation?” and previews five panel responses, two first-time conference reflections, and companion pieces on Womanist theology — framing vocation as a call not to privilege but to constructive and corrective work that undoes unjust systems.
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Article
Leadership in Lutheran Key at a Time of Pandemics
Deanna Thompson
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Thompson draws on Luther’s theology of the cross and Shelly Rambo’s theology of trauma to sketch a Lutheran model of leadership for a season of pandemics — one that is attentive to pain, responsive to need, and intentionally nourished by food, friends, and deep conversation.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Selbyg notes that ELCA colleges and universities have remained more loyal to the church than the institutions of many other denominations and announces that with this issue Tom Christenson’s nine-year service as editor of Intersections comes to an end, with Bob Haak of Augustana College in Rock Island assuming the editorship and institutional support shifting from Capital to Augustana.
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Article
Journey Toward Pluralism: Reimagining Lutheran Identity in a Changing World
Jacqueline Bussie
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Bussie chronicles Concordia College’s Forum on Faith and Life initiative — assessing campus climate, building a President’s Interfaith Advisory Council, and drafting a one-sentence statement that Concordia practices interfaith cooperation “because of” (not “guided by”) its Lutheran identity — to argue that simul justus et peccator thinking equips Lutheran institutions to hold loyalty to tradition and reverence for others together as one piece.
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Editorial
Guest Editorial
Lynn Hunnicutt
No. 47 · Spring 2018
Hunnicutt traces the etymology of vocation through its cognates — evoke, provoke, convocation — to argue that vocation presumes a relationship between caller and called, that callings are often grounded in ordinary words and humble lives, and that recognizing vocation as plural and lifelong relieves colleges of the pressure to help students find a single calling while on campus.