Associations of colleges and universities are commonplace in American higher education. Many of these associations are found in the community of church-related colleges and universities. Before 2016, however, the colleges and universities of the ELCA had never been organized into an association. They shared in many others, including an association composed of schools from pan-Lutheran church-bodies in the United States and Canada (including those outside the ELCA), known as the Lutheran Educational Conference of North America (LECNA). But until 2016, ELCA colleges and universities never had their own association.
Now they do. The new association, called the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities, was established through a yearlong process in 2015, culminating in the first meeting of the Network’s Board of Directors in February 2016. The Network was established as a missional collaboration of the churchwide organization and the twenty-six colleges and universities that are part of the ELCA. This new association will help ELCA schools and the churchwide organization sustain a common identity and shared mission in higher education. (The mission will include maintaining relationships with LECNA, in which ELCA colleges and universities continue to hold membership.)
The Network was created by the churchwide organization and the colleges and universities in response to lost capacity in the churchwide organization to maintain connections and programming among the ELCA’s twenty-six colleges and universities. The Network is not an additional administrative structure that will burden ELCA’s mission of higher education with bureaucratic bloat. The new Network replaces former churchwide units devoted to higher education that had to be eliminated as the churchwide organization’s annual budget shrank from approximately $100 million in the 1990s (soon after the creation of the ELCA) to approximately $50 million today. The Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities is a collaborative solution to address a problem of diminished capacity within the churchwide organization to provide leadership for ELCA higher education.
The Network came into being through the work of the college and university presidents and churchwide leaders over a period of five years. A special word of thanks goes to Elizabeth Eaton, Presiding Bishop of the ELCA; Stephen Bouman, executive director of the Domestic Mission unit; and Michael Maxey, President of Roanoke College and Chairperson of the President’s Council, whose agreements in March 2015 about the mechanism of this new collaboration made it possible for the presidents to take the final steps toward creation of the new Network.
As I write this note, I am preparing for the first meeting of the Executive Committee of the Network. The committee’s meeting will set in motion, in the words of President Mike Maxey, the pledge of this groundbreaking Network to “develop and sustain a stronger, more viable vision of Lutheran higher education in the ELCA. The links between and among our colleges and universities and the ELCA will make all of us stronger, separately and collectively.”
I think Tom Christensen and the other Lutheran higher education leaders who invented Intersections twenty years ago would be proud.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn introduces the twentieth anniversary issue of Intersections, recalling its 1996 birth at Capital University “in the twinkle of an idea” in the mind of founding editor Tom Christenson, and previewing essays by Wilhelm, Amamoto, Kleinhans, Glass Perez, and Simmons that together look back at twenty years of the journal and forward to its work in the decades to come.
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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
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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Article
A Lutheran Learning Paradigm
Paul J. Dovre
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Drawing on Hughes and Adrian’s Models of Christian Higher Education and on Ernest Simmons, Darrell Jodock, Tom Christenson, Robert Benne, and Richard Hughes, Dovre sketches a Lutheran learning paradigm shaped by four deep narratives—the biblical, the confessional, the theological, and the vocational—and traces their implications for curriculum (the study of scripture, theology, and vocation), for the religion faculty’s college-wide responsibility, and for pedagogy (moral deliberation, dialectic, paradox, the engagement of faith and the secular disciplines).
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 60 · Fall 2024
Windham-Hughes welcomes newcomers and seasoned colleagues to the conversation, lifts up Mary Elise Lowe’s three Lutheran “whys” for educational access, and commends Rev. Jen Rude’s “Sacred Pause” practice as a way to humanize one another and make opening access both easier and more joyful.
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Editorial
From the Editor: So That We, Too, May Flourish
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Windham-Hughes introduces the 2023 VLHE conference theme of educator flourishing, drawing on Dr. Monica Smith’s plenary challenge — “How can we flourish if only some are centered and others are at the margins?” — and invites readers to ground themselves in Us/We, the cover art by Augustana graduate William Hatchet, and join the conversation.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Selbyg reports that during 2004 a task force appointed by the ELCA Division for Church in Society has been laying the groundwork for a Social Statement on Education, with a draft to be debated in congregations and educational forums in 2006 and considered for adoption at the 2007 Churchwide Assembly. He urges Lutheran educators to obtain and study the new Task Force study document from the Division for Church in Society and submit their reactions so that the drafters know what those with ties to Lutheran educational institutions think is important.
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Article
Money, Sex and Power: An Exploration of Some Controversial Issues in the Public Witness of the Church
Pamela K. Brubaker
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Brubaker explores two controversial issues in the church’s public witness—homosexuality and economic life—and the challenges they present for both church and college. Drawing on Beverly Harrison, Elizabeth Bounds, Ron Thiemann, Linell Cady, Marcia Bunge, Richard Hughes, Darrell Jodock, Ernest Simmons, Karen Bloomquist, Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher, and Larry Rasmussen, and on episodes at California Lutheran University around “Harmony Week” and Bishop Paul Egertson’s participation in Anita Hill’s ordination, she argues that colleges related to the ELCA are called to educate for “critical citizenship” by hosting rigorous, bold, and unfettered debate—including debate over the neo-liberal globalism that she names a form of economic fundamentalism.
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Article
Students in the Cloud: Creating Digital Citizens
Jose Marichal
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Marichal weighs the utopian and dystopian views of the “networked information economy,” drawing on Yochai Benkler, Manuel Castells, Henry Jenkins, Cass Sunstein, Robert Putnam, Nicholas Carr, and Andrew Keen to chart the promise and peril of life “in the cloud,” and proposes Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of phronesis—developed through Hubert Dreyfus’s five stages of skill acquisition—as the goal of digital citizenship for college faculty and their students.