Number 6
The Winter 1999 issue of Intersections gathers papers from the 1998 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference at Wittenberg. Tom Christenson’s keynote frames the Lutheran educational task by gift, freedom, and vocation, proposing four “liberating arts.” Ryan La Hurd reads Luther’s two kingdoms onto the institution, distinguishing the “imagined” from the “real” college of budgets. Pamela M. Jolicoeur searches for “the words” in California’s religious marketplace; David Wee meditates on being “wise about others”; Kevin Griffith closes with two poems.
Editors
Articles in this Issue
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg reports on the work of the Division of Higher Education and Schools to focus what makes Lutheran colleges and universities distinctive, recaps the 1998 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference at Wittenberg, previews the 1999 Susquehanna conference on “Identity and Fragmentation: Can the Lutheran Center hold?” (inspired by Yeats’s vision of the Second Coming), commends Ernest Simmons’s Lutheran Higher Education: An Introduction for Faculty (Augsburg Fortress, 1998), and announces a new NEH/NSF-style initiative called “The Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education.”
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson explains that three of the five papers from the 1998 Wittenberg Vocation of a Lutheran College conference appear here (with Robert Scholz and Cheryl Ney to follow in the next issue), passes on Andy Sheppard’s “Books for Belarus” appeal from Southwestern College, and reflects on Douglas John Hall’s The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity—its claim that disengagement from cultural dominance is the prerequisite for faithful re-engagement, and its retrieval of Christ’s metaphors of “a little salt, a little yeast, a little light” as a possible session topic for a future VLC Conference.
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Article
Learning and Teaching as an Exercise in Christian Freedom
Tom Christenson
Christenson, the 1998 Wittenberg keynote, argues that what makes our institutions Lutheran is not the percentage of Lutherans served or employed, ethnic celebration, or self-conscious difference, but a theologically informed vision of the educational task framed by the linked ideas of gift, freedom, and vocation. Drawing on Joe Sittler, Wendell Berry, David Orr, Harold Kushner, John Updike, Frederick Buechner, and Luther’s On the Freedom of a Christian, he reframes the liberal arts as four “liberating arts”—critical/deconstructive, embodying/connecting, melioristic/creative, and arts of enablement and change—and closes with his mother’s “end-of-the-month soup” as an image of vocation in a particular place.
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Response
Of Imaginary Cows and a White Toy Sheep: The Freedom of a Christian College
Ryan La Hurd
La Hurd, president of Lenoir-Rhyne and a former Thiel English professor and Augsburg academic dean, responds to Christenson by insisting (with Robert Kegan’s story of Tommy’s imaginary cattle farm) that a college is composed of people but is not itself a person, and so cannot share in Luther’s freedom of the Christian. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, George Marsden, Mark Schwehn, Jacques Barzun, and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable, he distinguishes the “imagined college” (the gift-economy realm of teaching and the alma mater) from the “real college” (the commodity-economy realm of fund-raising, deferred maintenance, and federal aid reconciliation that does not have such freedom)—and ends with Pablo Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry” and the marvelous white toy sheep offered through a hole in a fence.
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Response
Finding the Words: The Trouble of Being California Lutheran University
Pamela M. Jolicouer
Jolicoeur, provost and vice president for academic affairs at California Lutheran, recounts the marketing problem of a university whose middle name is Lutheran in a Southern California religious landscape where the operative modifier is “Christian” (Pepperdine, Azusa Pacific) and tests Christenson’s three themes against her own “alumni magazine test”—the Jesuit standard set by Santa Clara. She concludes that freedom, gift, and vocation, though not uniquely Lutheran, are the words she can actually use: with prospective faculty, with the constituent church bodies who pressed for “Christian” in the new CLU mission statement (compromise: “rooted in the Lutheran tradition of Christian faith…”), and with the “C student” alumna headed for a Ph.D. in psychology whose consciousness of her own gifts had evaporated.
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Reflection
Otherwise
David Wee
Wee’s September 3, 1997 St. Olaf Opening Convocation address takes its title from Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise” and asks why we gather: to celebrate the gifts of life, place, companionship, and the work we love, and to become “otherwise”—wise about the others in our midst. He honors his own St. Olaf teachers (Ditmanson, Shaw, Stiehlow, Jordahl, Paulson, Meyer, Hove, Clausen, Larson, Jorstad) and the gruff Latvian stamp scholar Gus Eglas and Sherlock Holmes expert Randy Cox, draws Huck Finn’s “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” and Flannery O’Connor’s grandmother into a single argument, and closes on Tim Lull’s expectation that a Lutheran college campus should display contentment, courage, and cheerfulness as a family member faces day-six post-bone-marrow-transplant—“the first day of the rest of your life.”
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Poem
Poetry: Rituals for an Uninvented Religion / On the Recently Discovered Mass Grave of Mice
Kevin Griffith
Two poems by Kevin Griffith of Capital University: “Rituals for an Uninvented Religion,” a seven-part liturgical bestiary of made-up customs (lead-filling cups in June, masks for the dying, two bottom-feeding August fish, wax grave markers with wicks, the leap-day child, and the carnival-free day of judgment), and “On the Recently Discovered Mass Grave of Mice,” prompted by New Zealand shepherds’ uncovering of 300,000 mouse skeletons, on the bones “each light as a child’s first question” and the “graveyard rush” we share with the good flock.