I recently read Andrew Greeley’s Religion as Poetry. In that book he describes religion as 1) hope renewing experiences, and 2) the ways we have of preserving such experiences in stories, symbols, rituals, images, etc. Reading that triggered in me the following reflection on the question: “Where do I experience hope?” I decided to start a list. What I generated, I discovered, can be read as a list or as a poem. Someone once complained about Walt Whitman, “His poems are just lists.” The companion aptly replied, “Yes, but what lists!”
Lovers kissing in the street.
The first snowfall of each year.
Compost, spring sprouts, Jewish humor.
Kids summer mischief.
A mother nursing her baby on the bus.
Small jazz ensembles.
Two old men. One says to the other, “I never liked you, but now I can’t remember why.”
An unscheduled gift.
People who sing with their whole breath.
Times we can’t help but laugh at ourselves.
A teen alienated from her peers.
The blues; “three chords and the truth.”
A child taking me by the hand.
Courage—the discovery that there’s a death more fearful than the one everybody fears.
Wonder, awe, mystery, parsnips.
The gray-haired man in a dark blue suit I saw crossing a downtown bridge at mid-day who threw his cellular phone in the river.
Bread, wine, goat cheese, a bowl of beans; all life given and shared life received.
Folks who know they have a lot to learn.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg reflects on the origins of Intersections—begun out of concern that the philosophy and theology behind Lutheran higher education could be lost to retirements and other preoccupations—and credits Paul Dovre of Concordia and Robert Sorensen of the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools as key figures behind the resumption of the debate. He points to three recent books (Ernest Simmons’s Lutheran Higher Education, Paul Contino and David Morgan’s The Lutheran Reader, and Pamela Schwandt’s Called to Serve) and to the new Lutheran Academy for Scholars in Higher Education, and previews the next “Vocation of a Lutheran College” conference at Dana College in August on what differentiates Lutheran colleges within American higher education.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson marks the eighth edition of Intersections, expresses gratitude to the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools and especially to the soon-retiring Bob Sorenson for backing the journal, the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conferences, and the Lutheran Academy of Scholars, and introduces an issue that gathers analyses and arguments from both insiders to Lutheran theology and outsiders, from veterans of the institutions and recent arrivals—voices that together remind us that what is and what ought to be need to inform each other.
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Article
Integrity and Fragmentation: Can the Lutheran Center Hold?
Robert Benne
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
From Pietism to Paradox: The Development of a Lutheran Philosophy of Education
Philip Nordquist
Nordquist traces a four-decade personal and institutional journey from the “Protestant triumphalism” and aggressive moralism of S. C. Eastvold’s 1950s Pacific Lutheran through the 1960 Ditmanson–Hong–Quanbeck volume The Christian Faith and the Liberal Arts, Gordon Lathrop’s 1972 PLU donor address grounding the university in two-kingdoms theology, the ALC’s 1975 Concordia workshop with Bill Narum, Bob Bertram, Harris Kaasa, and Sydney Ahlstrom’s case for the “critical” tradition over the scholastic and pietistic, the 1976 LCA statement distinguishing “Christian” from “church-related” education, and Richard Hughes’s 1997 Carthage address. He concludes that dialectical (two kingdoms) theology, Christian humanism alongside professional studies (the New American College model), Luther’s commitment to universal compulsory education, environmental and civic responsibility, and academic freedom together constitute the bequest of the Reformation—“Christ and culture in paradox” remains the best approach to education he knows.
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Article
Diversity, Integrity, and Lutheran Colleges
Florence D. Amamoto
Amamoto—a sansei Jodo Shin Shu Buddhist who is “an inside outsider” at Gustavus Adolphus—argues that diversity and integrity belong together in Lutheran higher education, perhaps in a way unmatched by other church-related traditions. She affirms the importance of Gustavus’s 60% Lutheran student body and vibrant Christ Chapel under Richard Elvee and Brian Johnson while warning that numbers and chapel are not enough, draws on Tom Christenson, Patricia Gurin, Sylvia Hurtado, Anthony Carnevale, Martha Nussbaum, W. E. B. DuBois (the deaths of Matthew Shepard and Isaiah Shoels), Richard Hughes’s reading of finitum capax infiniti, Richard Solberg, and Mark Schwehn’s mutual hospitality model, and concludes that the real enemy is not diversity but indifference—and that Lutheran finitude grounds a theological commitment to keeping diversity and identity in creative conversation.
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Article
The Diversity Dilemma: Dealing With Difference
Kathy Fritz
Fritz reports from Newberry College—83% Caucasian, 16% African-American, 22% Lutheran, the smallest college in NCAA football—on a 1998–1999 year of crisis in which the Board of Trustees Executive Committee asked the president to resign over financial issues, the president fired three vice presidents, four trustees including the chair and treasurer resigned, and the controversial “veterinary technology” major became a flashpoint between the president’s recruitment-driven vision and the faculty’s commitment to “preparation for LIFE.” Turning to ethnic diversity, she frames three sociological approaches—“feed them all” to reduce conflict, the “3 A’s” (academics, athletics, arts) to create common identity, and Aguirre and Turner’s case for “weak ethnic identification” against the post-Yugoslavia failures of strong pluralism—and grounds the search for institutional unity in St. Paul’s body-of-Christ imagery from 1 Corinthians 12 and Ernest Simmons’s claim that diversity yields “creative adaptations that assist mutual survival.”
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Reflection
A View From the Other Side
Daisybelle Thomas-Quinney
Thomas-Quinney—an ordained Church of God minister and adjunct in Religion at Thiel College—offers “a view from the other side” as a non-Lutheran African American “outsider and novice”: her bittersweet 1995 arrival at Thiel, her swift discovery (alongside one African American secretary, one Hispanic professor, and thirty-eight African American students recruited largely as athletes) of a “chilly” campus unprepared to nurture the very minority students it had recruited, her examination of Thiel’s 1875 founding and the Augsburg Confession Article IV right-hand/left-hand kingdoms, the parables of mustard seed and yeast from Matthew 13, and Bishop James Crumbly’s 1985 LCA manual Inclusiveness and Diversity: Gifts of God. Drawing on Bruce Reichenbach, Samuel Hazo, and Josephine D. Davis’s Coloring the Halls of Ivy, she concludes that the Lutheran center cannot hold “as is” but has “great possibility” when the mission statement is actually followed.
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Poem
Two Poems: The Advent Carol / The Madonna of Dohany Street
Brian Forry Wallace
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Two poems by Brian Forry Wallace of Capital University: “The Advent Carol,” a litany of the babies who were not adored—the Jewish baby shot with a Luger, the Black child hanged from a tree, the female messiah tossed into a river, the Tutsi infant cut by machetes, the Japanese newborn incinerated by atom bombs, the Chinese baby crushed by Japanese bombs, the aborted Mary’s child—ending with the baby “whom we do not understand, cannot feed, whom we kill”; and “The Madonna of Dohany Street,” on a Holocaust photograph in a Budapest museum of a dead mother and her dead Christ-child daughter in the former ghetto, in which annunciation, nativity, adoration, and crucifixion are seen together in a single instant.
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Institutional Focus
About the Cover and Artist
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Kristen Gilje, a Bellingham, Washington artist who spent nine years as Artist in Residence at Holden Village, recounts the “Tree of Life” she painted for the Holden Village 1999 summer theme and the unexpected interpretation Lapidary Fred offered of Yggdrasol, Prometheus, the Druid Tree Spirit, and the crucifix all at once.
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Poem
Poetry: Rituals for an Uninvented Religion / On the Recently Discovered Mass Grave of Mice
Kevin Griffith
No. 6 · Winter 1999
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.
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Article
The Musician's Vocation
Jeffrey Bell-Hanson
No. 48 · Fall 2018
Bell-Hanson argues that musicians, who exercise profound influence over the emotional flavor of a moment, are called not merely to technical proficiency but to a sense of vocation: understanding their art well enough to use it responsibly, to intend truthfulness rather than manipulation, and to articulate its significance in dialog with other disciplines.
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Poem
Drunks in a Midnight Choir
Kevin Griffith
No. 15 · Winter 2002
A pantoum-like Christmas-season poem in which red-robed choristers, flasks clinking and hands trembling, mangle the words of carols beneath “the midnight sky, your endless dark coat,” trusting that “it’s the season to forgive what’s vile” and that even wise men praise the humble and make glad.
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Poem
Two Poems: The Dark Angels / Decorative Cooking
Gary Fincke
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Two poems by Gary Fincke of Susquehanna University: “The Dark Angels,” a return to the sidewalk in front of the father’s razed bakery in Etna, the soot-pocked windows, the Saturday trash fire, the last eclair on the work room’s folding chair; and “Decorative Cooking,” the mother’s story of St. Julitta, Betty Crocker’s “New Design for Happiness,” the Sunday dinners of shaped Jellos and anise Magi cookies, the visit of the former pastor returned to Pittsburgh to declaim the death of God, and the father who lays evergreen crosses by the mother’s headstone in the Garden of Dreams.