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
Integrity and Fragmentation: Can the Lutheran Center Hold?
Robert Benne
No. 8 · Winter 2000
Benne answers the conference’s question pessimistically—“the Lutheran center cannot hold in many, if not most of our colleges, because it was never there in an articulated form in the first place”—and distinguishes “Christ of culture” colleges like the Midland Lutheran of his youth (Lutheran by ethno-religious ethos rather than by articulated theology) from James Burtchaell’s “confessional colleges” that operated from a theologically distilled Lutheran humanism. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre and Mark Schwehn’s First Things essay on Christian universities, he sketches what a Lutheran center looks like (unity, universality, integrity, a tradition of thought) and how its distortion—reducing the Gospel to justification and ceding everything else to autonomous reason—splits Christ and culture as dangerously as the German church separated Gospel and politics. For colleges that have lost their center, he proposes an “intentional, robust pluralism” that guarantees a Lutheran voice in every department and an “affirmative action for Christians” in hiring.
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Article
The Face of the Neighbor: An Interview with Four Capital University Faculty About Their Recent Visit to Cuba
Brian Forry Wallace, Michael Yosha, Reg Dyck, Susan Narita
No. 7 · Summer 1999
Four Capital University faculty—political scientist Brian Wallace (returning to Cuba a third time after the 1994 boat lift), English professor Reg Dyck, ESL teacher Susan Narita, and political scientist Michael Yosha—recount their summer 1998 trip with Pastors for Peace, describing Cuban priorities of education, health care, and military (in that order), the cultural richness of Havana from sixteenth-century cloisters to Miramar, the Cuban Foreign Service’s vision of a Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, the counter-productive U.S. embargo (including its effect on kidney dialysis machines), Castro’s 1991 reconciliation with religious communities, and a recurrent image of a little girl named Marguerite singing at a school for amputee and terminally ill children. The interview was conducted by Capital senior Jessica Brown and Tom Christenson.
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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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Article
Valuing Poetry
Allison Wee
No. 37 · Spring 2013
Writing from California Lutheran University as “value” in higher education collapses into “can it get you a job?”, Wee makes a case for poetry as a life-saving discipline. Drawing on William Carlos Williams, Shakespeare, the Psalms, Wordsworth, Pattiann Rogers, Mary Oliver, and her own Environmental Literature assignment that sends students outside for an hour of attentive stillness, she argues that the poet’s skill of translation cultivates the close attention, fresh perspective, and immaterial dimensions of life her students need most.
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Article
Negotiating Legitimate and Conflicting Values
Eboo Patel, Katie Bringman Baxter, Mark S. Hanson
No. 44 · Fall 2016
In a closing-day conversation at the 2016 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, Mark Hanson and Eboo Patel — moderated by Katie Bringman Baxter of Interfaith Youth Core — share case studies in which legitimate religious values come into tension with one another, and make the case that Lutheran colleges should teach interfaith leadership through the hard cases rather than the easy ones.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 46 · Fall 2017
Wilhelm reflects on how NECU’s focused work on Lutheran identity in higher education — including the forthcoming document Rooted and Open: Our Common Institutional Calling — turns out to be a fitting commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, even though it did not arise from anniversary planning.