From the Editor

From the Publisher

W. Robert Sorensen

Sorenson frames Intersections and the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference as vehicles for widening the scope of inquiry that the separation of mind from spirit has curtailed, citing Ernest Boyer on probing “the deep places of the mind and the deep longings of the human spirit.” He previews an announcement at the 1998 conference of the Conrad Bergendoff Series—named for the late scholar and former Augustana College president—whose first volume, by Ernest Simmons of Concordia College, will support an Academy of Scholars in Lutheran Higher Education.

You Don't Seem Angry: Methodological Confessions Of A Lutheran Lay-Woman

L. DeAne Lagerquist

Lagerquist, opening from a colleague’s 1981 observation about her M.A. thesis on four female abolitionists, traces her path from feminist historian and battered women’s shelter advocate through the University of Chicago’s obsession with method to a more self-conscious account of her own. The method grows out of four Lutheran themes—original sin (caution and humility), the eighth commandment against bearing false witness (generosity and forgiveness), the neighbor as “little Christ” (cooperative interpretation), and vocation (interpretation as calling, located alongside feeding the hungry and visiting the lonely)—and shapes her ongoing work on a history of Lutherans in the United States with a plot about learning to live with diversity.

Redemption Through Imperfection

Kyoko Mori

Mori, drawing on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with a friend, contrasts Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés—a peephole work whose mysterious motion sweeps every viewer into a shared, perpetual performance—with the static, glass-encased Liberty Bell as parody of spiritual experience. She extends the contrast into a meditation on rituals (comfort and consolation) versus art (truth, however painful), and on writing as a redemptive process that moves from orderly first drafts toward chaos and deeper, frightening truth—closing with master potters who skewed each finished vessel slightly so that art and decoration could be told apart. Parts are excerpted from Polite Lies (Holt 1997).

A Community That Connects

Conrad Bergendoff

Excerpts from Conrad Bergendoff’s 1990 address at the opening of Augustana’s new library, prepared by David Crowe and published here as a memorial after Bergendoff’s death in December 1997. Bergendoff—Augustana class of 1915, president 1936–1962—recounts eighty years of Augustana memories, insists that “size is pretty much within you, not outside of you,” traces the institution’s bonds to Uppsala from 1860 (and the 1910 visit of the Rector Magnificat), and celebrates Augustana’s graduates “in practically every part of the world” as evidence that a small school can have a universal output.

Walls: Talk At Gustavus Adolphus College

Elizabeth Baer

Baer’s September 11, 1997 Gustavus Adolphus chapel homily on Joshua 6 turns from the trumpets to the walls—Robert Frost’s “Mending Walls,” the walls of the Warsaw ghetto in Vladka Meed’s On Both Sides of the Wall and Margaret Zassenhaus’s Walls, the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989—and then to the autobiographical, intertextual discourse of Gustavus chapel itself as a place where misunderstandings come down. An author’s note added after the March 29 F3 tornado reports the closing line (“LET’S MAKE THOSE WALLS COME TUMBLING DOWN”) as eerily prescient: roofs, windows, and 90% of campus trees were lost, but the Chapel walls and the eternal flame in the red glass lantern stood firm.

The Quest Of The Historical Jesus: Problem & Promise

Robert W. Funk

Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar, frames the quest as the search for reliable data amid twenty-two ancient gospels and as a confrontation among three “parties”—the Jesus Party, the Apostolic Party, and the Bible Party. He surveys the Seminar’s 1985–1998 work (The Five Gospels, The Acts of Jesus, the color-coded reports), defends the synoptics over John, the priority of Mark, the Sayings Gospel Q and the Gospel of Thomas, and argues that a recovered Jesus—a teacher of a trust ethic, celebration, a kingdom without social barriers, a society without brokers, without cult rituals—may serve as catalyst for a sweeping third-millennium reformation that purges the “clogged arteries” of institutional Christianity.

Beyond Data: The Poetry of Faith — A Response to Robert W. Funk

Mark Allan Powell

Powell, professor of New Testament at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, responds to Funk not as a New Testament scholar (Meier, Raymond Brown, and others can rehearse those debates) but as a Christian and a pastor. He challenges Funk’s closing implication that the institutional church’s “only function” is to protect Christian privilege (citing the ELCA’s 28 colleges, 1378 early childhood centers, AIDS hospices, and more), questions the suspicion of “derivative” faith, and proposes that piety is to theology what poetry is to prose—arguing, against Funk and with Marcus Borg, for a wholistic faith that holds history and myth, data and devotion, head and heart together.

The Vocation of Intersections on its Twentieth Birthday

Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak, Tom Christenson

No. 43 · Spring 2016

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.

Point / Counterpoint: What It Means to be a "College of the Church"

Robert Benne, Tom Christenson

No. 28 · Fall 2008

Moderated by Wartburg College pastor Larry Trachte and introduced by Kathryn Kleinhans, this Wartburg campus conversation between Robert Benne (Roanoke College) and Thomas Christenson (Capital University) probes what it means to be a college of the church—Benne emphasizing ethos, vocation, and the Christian intellectual tradition over against secularization and generic education, and Christenson lifting up persistent vocational questions, the gift of difference, and induction into a community of discourse—and finds large common ground around hiring for mission, pedagogy that asks deep questions, and the courage to claim a living religious tradition while inviting everyone to the banquet.

Education as a Christian (Lutheran) Calling

Tom Christenson

No. 21 · Summer 2005

Christenson opens with an imaginative reconstruction of early Christian communities as radically egalitarian, pacifist, communitarian gatherings within the Roman Empire and argues that such communities are natural homes for the educational vocation. Naming two temptations for contemporary Christian higher education—the parochial Bible school and “Generic U”—he uses his friend Sig Rauspern’s tree metaphor to insist that a university is Christian in its trunk and roots rather than in grafted-on branches. Drawing on Wendell Berry, Jacob Bronowski, Walter Wink, Douglas John Hall, and his own Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education, he names faithful criticism, engaged suspiciousness, simul justus et peccator, and a fallible, love-related Lutheran epistemology as the particular gifts Lutherans bring to the Christian educational calling.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

No. 21 · Summer 2005

In his valedictory letter as outgoing editor, Christenson recounts the 1994 origins of Intersections, when he took the idea to Naomi Linnell and Jim Unglaube at DHES and persuaded the council of presidents to launch the journal on a shoestring with printing paid by DHES and everything else by Capital University. He summarizes the issue’s contents—papers from the 2004 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference plus two commissioned pieces from former DHES directors Bob Sorensen and Leonard Schulze—and thanks the student copy editors and Capital’s presidents and provosts who sustained the publication.

Review of Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education

Tom Christenson

No. 20 · Fall 2004

Christenson reviews Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans, 2004), edited by C.W. Joldersma and G.G. Stronks. After recounting his own early prejudice against Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and his subsequent conversion through Art in Action, he focuses on two threads: Wolterstorff’s expansive reading of shalom—not merely peace but justice, community, communal responsibility, and delight—as the overall goal of Christian collegiate education, and the influence of Abraham Kuyper’s claim of “privileged cognitive access” for Christian inquirers, which Wolterstorff demonstrates rather than declares.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

No. 20 · Fall 2004

Christenson introduces an issue featuring “young and old, angry and encouraging, prophetic and hopeful” voices unified by the assumption that Christians engaged in thinking and educating will ask hard questions: how to raise concerns about militarism and the new American “imperialism,” what a Lutheran law school will say about training a new generation of attorneys, and what Lutheran colleges communicate to undergrads about vocation. Such faithful criticism, he argues, is part of who Lutheran institutions are.

Ivory Tower or Holy Mountain? Faith and Academic Freedom

Nicholas Wolterstorff

No. 11 · Spring 2001

Wolterstorff defines infringement of academic freedom as impairing a faculty member’s standing on account of the ideological content of her position, argues that academic freedom (like free speech) is “duly qualified” rather than absolute, and offers eight considerations bearing on religiously based institutions: Weber’s differentiation of Wissenschaft, religious pluralism within a liberal polity, the vitality of American civil society, a decentralized educational system, the “holistic” character of much American religion, the post-Kuhnian collapse of classical foundationalism and of the “generically human” academy, the fact that ideas matter, and the personhood violated by infringement (the desecration of an image of God). He concludes that the private sector offers wider academic freedom than the public, that religious qualifications are not inherently inappropriate (any more than St. John’s Great Books commitment), but that religiously based colleges too often apply them unjustly—arbitrarily, secretly, without recourse—and that the AAUP’s best service is model codes of procedure.

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.

Dual Citizenship: Reflections on Educating Citizens at Augsburg College

Paul C. Pribbenow

No. 29 · Spring 2009

Pribbenow argues that the vocation of Augsburg College is to educate “dual citizens”—those able to live within the messiness of common work rather than resolve every tension once and for all. Drawing on John Courtney Murray on democracy as “the intersection of conspiracies,” Bill Moyers, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Stephen Carter, and the Augsburg vision statement “We believe we are called to serve our neighbor,” he names four common commitments and five principles of civic education that ground Augsburg’s incarnational mission in its city neighborhood.

Teaching as an Expression of a Love Ethic

Abbylynn Helgevold

No. 53 · Spring 2021

Drawing on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love and Kevin Gannon’s teaching manifesto, Helgevold describes how an ethic of upbuilding love—love that presupposes goodness in students—reshapes inclusive pedagogy at Wartburg College, from syllabus language to how she addresses plagiarism and attendance.

Why Lutheran Colleges Need to Engage Civil Society

Ann M. Svennungsen

No. 35 · Spring 2012

Svennungsen makes the case that Lutheran colleges must engage the larger civil sphere, drawing on her work with The Presidents’ Pledge Against Global Poverty, Darrell Jodock’s seven fundamental experiences for vocational discernment, David Brooks on civility and modesty, and Michael Sandel’s argument that the affluent are seceding from public life. She urges Lutheran educators to invest in the infrastructure of civic renewal so that service-learning and civic engagement remain central to the Lutheran college curriculum.

Lutheran Tradition: Five Continuing Themes

Walter R. Bouman

No. 2 · Winter 1997

Bouman of Trinity Lutheran Seminary identifies five themes central to the Lutheran theological tradition (understood through Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of tradition as “an historically extended, socially embodied argument”): biblical (a non-oppressive authority for the Bible rooted in the gospel rather than in scholastic inerrancy, against the backdrop of Luther’s 1517 challenge to Tetzel and the post-Enlightenment marginalization of theology); catholic (continuity with the Book of Concord and the three ancient creeds, with Luther’s “Christology from below” recovering a Jewish rather than Hellenistic understanding of God, revived by Tillich, Pannenberg, Forde, and Jenson); evangelical (justification by faith as the answer to mortality’s radical question); sacramental (Word, Eucharist, and Baptism as Christ’s presence from the future of God’s consummated Reign); and world-affirming (creation as gift, vocation as God’s work in every calling, and stewardship of the ecological crisis).