To celebrate being fully vaccinated (and my wife’s birthday), my wife and I took a brief road trip to visit fully vaccinated friends outside of Louisville, Kentucky. During the drive, I heard an NPR news report about a podcast composed of diary entries written by teenagers during COVID-19. A few of the teenagers read their own entries for the report. The readings expressed many feelings and described many experiences, but their diary entries seemed to focus on the anxiety they felt over having acted in self-interested or self-protective ways in response to the pandemic, instead of acting for the welfare of others. One teenager wrote in her diary of guilt about simply stepping outside. She knew that even a walk—for which she longed—during the height of the pandemic’s shelter-in-place orders might exacerbate spread of the disease in her community.
I do not know whether any of the diarists were Christians or whether their moral perspective had been shaped by Christian teaching, as absorbed from their families’ culturally Christian history. I do know, however, that their comments reminded me of the fraught history of Christians struggling to live out the ethic of love espoused by Jesus.
The Christian story includes a long history of missteps in the name of loving service to others. Some early Christians falsely understood that self-giving required a form of self-loathing, almost equating Christianity with masochism. Christians have at other times haughtily delivered assistance to others mindlessly or sometimes arrogantly. Think here of the concept of noblesse oblige or the soiled clothing left at Salvation Army donation boxes.
It is not only Christians who have been challenged by the call to love others for the sake of the common good. A fictional example of the struggle all around us is the character of Doug Forcett in the television sitcom The Good Place. In The Good Place, people lived unaware that a point system for doing good for others determined their placement into the “good place” or the “bad place” after death. The exception was Doug. He had figured out the system and was famous among the bad place demons for doing so. But as a result, Doug struggled in life with how to do enough “good.” He lived a life of self-giving to the point that he was terrified to do anything for his own benefit because it might land him in the bad place. The theme is not an uncommon one as folks try to actualize the call to love others.
How does one embrace and actualize a loving, working concern for others with integrity and even with joy? Most persons in Christian and other religious or moral traditions have struggled honestly with the ideal of having a loving, working concern for others and the common good, like the teenagers who recorded their struggles in diaries during the pandemic. This is certainly true of the persons at NECU institutions during 2020 and 2021. The pandemic compels us all to consider how to put into action practices that enable our institutions to function without putting the common good of the wider community at risk. Reflecting on the experience will help build a better future, and this issue of Intersections is a step on the way.
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Article
Teaching as an Expression of a Love Ethic
Abbylynn Helgevold
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.
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Reflection
Keeping Close from a Distance: Pandemic Reflections of a Library Coordinator
Carla Flengeris
Flengeris reflects on a year of running Luther College’s library at the University of Regina from her basement and mourns the loss of the hourly walks through the stacks—the “roving reference” that, she realizes, were never disruptions to her work but were the work itself.
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Article
Preaching in Christ Chapel on Yom HaShoah: Reflections on Interfaith Relations at a Lutheran College
Sarah Ruble
Ruble shares her 2019 Holocaust Remembrance Day homily preached before the cross in Christ Chapel at Gustavus Adolphus, then reflects on whether “professional Christians” on Lutheran campuses might practice a non-mutual, witnessed confession before colleagues of other traditions as a check on Christian self-deceit.
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Article
Down and Out: First Year Students Encounter Lutheran Theology
Lindsey Leonard
Leonard describes how Wartburg’s IS 101 first-year seminar wove the Dalai Lama, Paul Kingsnorth, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Mary Robinson’s Climate Justice into the Fall 2020 reader so the “COVID class” could encounter Lutheran theology’s call to serve the neighbor across the pandemics of disease, racism, and climate change.
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Article
(Re)Defining Vocation: Gladly Challenging a Vocational Giant
Andrew Tucker
Tucker challenges Frederick Buechner’s famous definition of vocation as “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet,” arguing that gladness reflects a privileged perspective and proposing instead that vocation be defined as “any meaningful, life-giving work you do for the world.”
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Article
Vocation Outside of Career: Discovering Purpose through Comics
María Evelia Emerson
Emerson recounts building an Augustana Vocational Discernment course around G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel series, using Kamala Khan’s juggling of family, friendship, faith, and superhero identity to help sophomores see vocation as not what they do for a living but how they want to live.
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Article
Leadership in a Pandemic: Grace-Filled Lessons in Unprecedented Times
Marc Jerry
Reflecting on his first year as president of Luther College at the University of Regina, Jerry argues that the best preparation for leading through a long crisis was not his economics or strategy training but seminary and pastoral formation—and that NECU institutions are called to a post-pandemic ministry of kindness, grace, and community.
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Book Review
Unconventional Wisdom and Talking about God: A Review of Beckstrom’s Leading Lutheran Higher Education in a Secular Age
Ann Rosendale
Rosendale reviews Brian Beckstrom’s Leading Lutheran Higher Education in a Secular Age, recommending its diagnosis of the gap between espoused and perceived Lutheran identity at ELCA schools and its prescription—Trinitarian Missiological Ecclesiology and a campus-wide willingness to talk explicitly about God.
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Reflection
Shelter in Place: Reflections from March 22, 2020
Jason A. Mahn
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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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. 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
Rooted and Open: Background, Purpose, and Challenges
Mark Wilhelm
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Wilhelm traces Rooted and Open’s seventy-year backstory — from Conrad Bergendoff’s 1948 call for a Lutheran philosophy of education through the recovery of the vocation tradition — and describes the document’s process, purpose as a teaching and study resource, and the embodiment, contextual, and cultural challenges it implies for NECU institutions.
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Article
Lutheran Colleges, the Lutheran Tradition, and the Future of Service-Learning
Joseph McDonald
No. 34 · Fall 2011
McDonald, who has used service-learning since the early 1990s and now directs the Values Based Learning Program at Newberry College, traces the service-learning movement from its 1960s socio-political pioneers (Nadinne Cruz, Ira Harkavy) through its institutionalization as classroom pedagogy and citizenship education (Stanton, Giles, and Cruz; Edward Zlotkowski; Jane Addams’s Hull House and John Dewey). He argues that three strengths of the Lutheran tradition—robust reflection as a community of discourse, Christian vocation as service infused in all roles, and the capacity to negotiate tension and paradox—uniquely equip Lutheran colleges to hold the pedagogical and socio-political dimensions of service-learning together, recovering the energy of the pioneers without sacrificing classroom rigor.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 16 · Winter 2003
Christenson previews this issue’s papers from the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference—Curt Thompson on “the Lutheran knot,” Carol Gilbertson on the creative dimensions of language, Bruce Heggen on theological vocabulary in the state university, Susan Poppe on the boundaries of campus freedom, and Sig Royspern’s oracular gems—welcomes Robert Benne’s response to the previous issue as a sign that Intersections is becoming a locus of continuing conversation, and confesses his reluctant consent to appear on the cover.
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Article
Professional Education/Liberal Arts Education: Not a Case of Either-Or but Both-And
Gail Summer
No. 24 · Fall 2006
Summer, Dean of Academic Programs at Lenoir-Rhyne College, traces the historical interweaving of liberal arts and professional education in American higher education (using the rise of engineering as a case study) and argues that the standard “either-or” framing of liberal arts versus professional preparation misreads both. At Lutheran colleges, the “both-and” relationship is shaped by a Lutheran understanding of vocation in which professional programs are integral to, not in tension with, the liberal arts.
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Article
Finding Purpose in Chaos: Reflection In and Beyond the Public Health Classroom
Lena R. Hann
No. 52 · Fall 2020
When the pandemic hit her new public health professionalism course, Hann recalibrated her teaching from the “how” of professional preparation to the “why” of vocational reflection — and recounts how Augustana public health students and alumni found purpose in the chaos through food banks, disaster response, palliative care, and research on health inequities.
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Article
Business as Usual? Marketing, God, and the Limits of Christian Callings
Emily Beth Hill
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Hill, a former corporate marketing consultant turned theologian, returns to Luther’s claim that no vocation is more holy than another — and uses Luther’s Large Catechism definition of God to argue that the modern practice of branding intentionally redirects the love and worship of human beings toward capital, raising the question of whether Christian neighbor-love places limits on what professions Christians should pursue.
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Article
Can a Christian Be a Journalist?
Catherine McMullen
No. 11 · Spring 2001
McMullen recounts how Ernie Mancini’s alumni-program invitation forced her to articulate what a print-journalism major at Concordia might be, then surveys the annus horribilus of 1998—Chiquita and the Cincinnati Enquirer, CNN/Time’s retracted Tailwind story, Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle fired at the Boston Globe, Stephen Glass at The New Republic, and Matt Drudge and the White House scandal—before contrasting Concordia’s liberal-arts approach with Pat Robertson’s Regent University, whose “Christian journalism” produces one-sided vampire-cult stories and graduates who conclude journalism is no place for a Christian. Drawing on Richard Baker’s The Christian as a Journalist, Tom Christenson on the “law of niceness,” Ernie Simmons, Harmon Smith and Louis Hodges on Christian ethics, Robert Benne’s Lutheran four orders and his “Christian cobbler makes good shoes, not poor shoes with little crosses on them,” Mel Mencher, Robert Bugeja, Walter Cronkite, Pete Hamill, Jeremy Iggers, David Remnick, the Northwestern Death Row exoneration of Dennis Williams, Verneal Jimerson, and William Rainge, and Pulitzer citations for Katherine Boo, Eric Newhouse, George Dohrman, and Mark Schoofs, she argues that journalism is a Lutheran vocation and that Christian cobblers—and Christian journalists—make good shoes.