A year from now, Lutherans around the world will commemorate the 500 year anniversary of the birth of the Reformation, marked by Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in 1517. But today, faculty, staff, and administrators within Lutheran higher education commemorate a lesser-known milestone.
The summer of 2016 marks 20 years since Intersections was first printed at Capital University and distributed among the (then) 28 ELCA colleges and universities. As the journal’s second editor, Bob Haak, would later say, it was “born in the twinkle of an idea” in the mind of the founding editor, Tom Christenson. Tom would edit the journal for almost a decade; Bob would take over for another half decade before inviting me to carry the work forward.
Intersections, along with the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, was conceived as a way to sustain an open-ended conversation about the nature and mission of Lutheran colleges or universities after they ceased to be a places that (mostly) Lutherans went to be educated by (mostly) Lutherans. Thousands have attended the summer conference, learning about the Lutheran intellectual tradition that undergirds our residential colleges and education for vocation therein. Hundreds have contributed articles, essays, book reviews, reports, poems, and homilies to Intersections—sometimes celebrating our work or arguing with one another, often asking deep and important questions about how best to educate students for lives of responsible service, purpose, and meaning.
The first essay of this special anniversary edition comes to terms with the 20 year-old conversation called Intersections. It is co-authored by the three editors, past and present, although Tom’s name is listed “in spirit.” Tom passed away in 2013, but his spirit certainly lives on in this journal. The essay quotes from his editorials frequently and could not have been written without him.
I am delighted that the other authors of this issue agreed to write for this special anniversary issue. Mark Wilhelm has given a version of his essay as the opening address of the Vocation conference in recent years. In it, he explains why and how education for vocation has emerged as the sine qua non of Lutheran higher education. Florence Amamoto contributed to the first issue of Intersections in 1996; here she looks back to that essay and the dance between Lutheran identity and racial and religious diversity that she has witnessed (and helped choreograph) at Gustavus and beyond. Kit Kleinhans positions Lutheran conceptions among other recent scholarship on vocation. Her essay suggests that, while teacher-scholars contributing to Intersections often debate with one another, their work also helps direct broader conversations about holistic education and service to the common good. Kristen Glass Perez then “moves forward by looking back” as she suggests that the attention given to vocation over the past decades should also be given to interfaith understanding in the decades to come. Finally, Ernie Simmons takes into account a number of initiatives in Lutheran higher education before making one more irreplaceable proposal: We ought to help students become “sustainability leaders” in a world whose climate and environment has been drastically altered by human consumption and waste.
I close by thanking Augustana junior Eileen Ruppel for designing the wonderful cover of this special edition, and Augustana graduate Kaity Lindgren (‘16) for her diligence, insightfulness, and care while serving as the editorial assistant. Eileen and Kaity are extremely professional and wise, even though they are hardly older than this journal.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm announces the new Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities — established in 2015 and convened for its first Board of Directors meeting in February 2016 — as a missional collaboration between the churchwide organization and the twenty-six ELCA colleges and universities, replacing former churchwide units lost to budget reductions and offering a stronger, more viable vision of Lutheran higher education.
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Article
The Vocation of Intersections on its Twentieth Birthday
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak, Tom Christenson
The three editors of Intersections — Bob Haak, Jason Mahn, and Tom Christenson (in spirit, following his death in 2013) — trace the twenty-year vocation of the journal itself: its 1996 birth at Capital University; its coming-of-age years of debate over institutional markers, two-kingdoms theology, and Lutheran identity; the ascendancy of “education for vocation” as the central marker of Lutheran higher education; and its ongoing identity in relation to a changing ELCA and to the broader cultural conversation about purpose, wholeness, and the vocation of higher education.
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Article
The Vocation Movement in Lutheran Higher Education
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm offers a brief history of the “vocation movement” in ELCA higher education, arguing that it arose as Lutheran leaders moved beyond institutional markers (percentages of Lutheran students, faculty, and board members) and the collapse of ethnic, separatist Lutheranism to re-ground their schools’ identity in a 500-year-old intellectual tradition that educates the whole person for vocation and the common good — an educational ideal open to persons of any religious or non-religious conviction.
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Article
Diversity and Dialogue: Twenty Years and Counting
Florence D. Amamoto
Twenty years after her essay “Diversity and Dialogue” in the first issue of Intersections, Amamoto returns to Gustavus Adolphus College to reflect on what has changed and what has not: rising numbers of students of color and international students, faculty turnover and increased publication pressures, the disappearance of the Center for Vocational Reflection, and the renewed importance of articulating Gustavus’s Swedish Lutheran heritage and inclusive sense of community in a tuition-dependent, cost-cutting environment.
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Article
Distinctive Lutheran Contributions to the Conversation about Vocation
Kathryn A. Kleinhans
Kleinhans surveys the recent resurgence of vocation talk in American higher education — from Frederick Buechner’s widely quoted definition to Lilly Endowment’s PTEV grants and the CIC’s NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project — and uses her chapter in At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education to highlight distinctively Lutheran emphases: vocation grounded in creation rather than redemption, the given-ness of multiple simultaneous callings, and a frank acknowledgment of the constraints and “dark side” of vocation.
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Article
Moving Forward by Looking Back: Lutheran Vocation as Foundation for Interfaith Ministry
Kristen Glass Perez
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
Semper Reformanda: Lutheran Higher Education in the Anthropocene
Ernest L. Simmons
Simmons enumerates the ELCA initiatives over the past twenty years that have helped Lutheran higher education retrieve a Christian understanding of vocation, then argues that the looming reality of human-caused climate change — the geological epoch of the Anthropocene — now requires Lutheran liberal arts education to prepare students for “planetary citizenship” as sustainability leaders, drawing on the classical Trivium, Luther’s panentheism, and a quantum-physics-inflected theology of divine entanglement and hope.
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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
2024 VHLE Conference: "Rooting Access" Panel Talking Points
Guy Nave
No. 60 · Fall 2024
Nave reads “access” across Deuteronomy 23, Ruth, Isaiah 56, Acts 10, and Matthew 15:21-28 as an ongoing biblical conversation that evolves from exclusion to ever-widening welcome — and presses ELCA institutions to shift their focus from “student readiness” to “institutional readiness.”
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Article
Work Works
Julius Crump
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Crump argues that in an era of class-stratified careerism and the “ruins of neoliberalism,” commencement-speech rhetoric about heroic vocation will not resuscitate vocation — instead, professors embodying vulnerability, extemporaneity, and contemporaneity in the classroom can show students that consistent work, embodied as service to others, is itself worthy.
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Article
Return to Purpose: Learning in an Age of Collapse
Ahmed Afzaal
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Afzaal argues that the cascading crises facing higher education are not temporary glitches but symptoms of planetary and civilizational collapse — and that colleges must embrace “double-loop” learning and return to a shared sense of purpose if they are to help humanity descend gradually rather than catastrophically.
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Reflection
Meditation—Band Chapel Service, St. Olaf College
Erik Haaland
No. 7 · Summer 1999
Haaland, a St. Olaf senior, offers a brief Band Chapel meditation that defines art as “the expression of what is deeply human through the manipulation of the physical world” and defends worship—architecture, stained glass, music, eloquence—as an art form requiring our best and most sincere efforts. When the God we worship and the salvation we proclaim do not seem near, artful worship offers not propositions but something real and tangible to hold on to.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Adopting the Framework of ‘Because’ and ‘Therefore’
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Pribbenow describes how Augsburg University responded to its dramatic demographic transformation (from 18% to nearly 70% BIPOC entering students over sixteen years) by adopting an institutional vocational statement and a simple “because/therefore” framework for translating particular Lutheran theological convictions into institutional programs, policies, and practices.
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Reflection
I am a Treaty Partner
Kyrie Fairbairn
No. 63 · Spring 2026
7 min audio
A recent California Lutheran graduate reflects on how a course on Indigenous Rights and Practices, and a conversation with a former Chairman of the Lummi Nation, led her to claim a “treaty partner” identity and to challenge readers to learn the treaties that shape the lands they call home.