From the Publisher

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

Christenson introduces the issue as an illustration of the diversity of interests Intersections aims for, surveys the contents (Lagerquist on method, Mori on art and ritual, Baer on falling walls, Bergendoff as memorial, Funk and Powell in dialogue), urges readers to send in “your good stuff,” asks for distribution feedback, and closes with a sabbatical-year reading list—Kieran Egan, Robert Coles, Daniel Kemmis, David W. Gill, Sallie McFague, Roger Scruton, E.M. Adams, Freeman Dyson, Colamosca and Wolman, Gribbin and Goodwin, van Wyk, Wislawa Szymborska, and Flannery O’Connor.

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.

Changes

W. Robert Sorensen

No. 21 · Summer 2005

Writing as former executive director of the Division for Higher Education and Schools, Sorensen places the DHES within the threefold movement of Luther’s Reformation—university, church, and individual piety—and recounts how the Division cohered its work with colleges, universities, campus ministries, and schools around Joseph Sittler’s definition of education as “movement into a larger world.” Drawing on Huston Smith’s “primordial tradition,” the Namibian student program, work in India and Palestine, and the Bergendoff series of publications, he raises a twofold concern about the proposed merger of DHES into a Division for Vocation and Education: whether the new structure will signal the core significance of education in the heritage and life of the church, and whether it can carry forward the effectiveness and scope of DHES’ work.

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.

Practicing Hope: The Charisms of Lutheran Higher Education

Martha E. Stortz

No. 32 · Spring 2010

Stortz names four charisms—theological gifts of identity rather than commodities—that Lutheran higher education brings to a culture of fear: semper reformanda as flexible, responsive institutions; the freedom of a Christian as simul justus et peccator critical inquiry that holds opposites in creative tension; regard for the other as “neighbor” rather than friend or alien; and the priesthood of all believers as a public, civic calling to know the poor. Drawing on Augustine, George Lindbeck, Patricia Killen, James Clifford, Earl Shorris, Carter Lindberg, and Augsburg’s Center for Global Education, she argues that immersion trips, neighbor-regard, and welfare reform witness that the gift Lutherans bring is hope grounded in Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Caught in a Place Between Caesar and God

Darrel D. Colson

No. 54 · Fall 2021

Colson reflects on his anguish, as Wartburg’s president, over an Iowa law that prevents him from requiring student COVID-19 vaccinations — reading Luther’s “Whether One May Flee From a Deadly Plague” alongside the conflict between obeying the law and serving neighbor.

Celebrating the Reformation: The Lutheran Foundation of a Called Life

Mark D. Tranvik

No. 46 · Fall 2017

Tranvik traces vocation from the monastic impulse through Luther’s rejection of the monk’s vow as the only true calling, and translates the “called life” for twenty-first-century Lutheran colleges — institutions that see students as made in the image of God, enlist the whole community in discernment, and make room for faith and its convictions.

A Lutheran Dialectical Model for Higher Education

Ernest L. Simmons

No. 37 · Spring 2013

Drawing on “The Freedom of a Christian,” simul justus et peccator, Richard Hughes, Joseph Sittler, Martha Nussbaum, and Tom Christenson, Simmons argues that the Lutheran tradition informs an open, dialectical educational model that holds Christian and academic freedom together. He locates vocation at the intersection of the practical (why are you here?) and the existential (why are you here?) and proposes Lutheran higher education as education for self-transcendence and leadership Soli Deo Gloria.

Embodying the Tradition: The Case of Wittenberg University

Baird Tipson

No. 2 · Winter 1997

Tipson, President of Wittenberg University, locates Wittenberg in the “American” strain of Ohio Lutheranism founded in 1845 under Ezra Keller (a Pennsylvania College and Gettysburg Seminary graduate and disciple of Samuel Simon Schmucker), with English-language preaching, financial support from the pan-Protestant New England Society, Presbyterians on the Board, and an Episcopalian teaching Latin. He names two ongoing challenges—remaining authentically Lutheran while welcoming a pluralistic student body (just under a quarter are Lutheran in a primary service area that is 5% Lutheran), and making the tradition clear and compelling to non-Lutheran or lukewarm Lutheran students—and presents the five things every Wittenberg graduate should be able to do (respond to the human condition; recognize, define, and solve problems; develop a sense of vocation; assume servant-leadership; take moral responsibility) as authentic expressions of the Gospel and of the university’s ELCA relationship.