Mark Wilhelm
PhD, MDiv, Executive Director
Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities
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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. 53 · Spring 2021
Wilhelm reflects on an NPR report of teenagers’ pandemic diaries and the fraught Christian history of struggling to live out Jesus’s ethic of love, framing the issue as a record of NECU institutions working out how to act for the common good through the pandemic of 2020–2021.
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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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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 48 · Fall 2018
Wilhelm frames the issue by reflecting on the Letter of James and the Lutheran tradition of “calling a thing what it is” — arguing that the standards of academic discourse, deeply rooted in Lutheran insistence on frankness and honesty alongside concern for the common good, give NECU institutions a solid platform for sustaining honest but not hateful discourse about divisive issues.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 47 · Spring 2018
Wilhelm celebrates that NECU schools continue to educate for vocation but warns that the culture of Lutheran higher education is at risk — sustained largely by informal cadres of individuals — and introduces NECU’s Rooted and Open statement as a first institutional step toward reclaiming the 500-year-old Lutheran intellectual and educational tradition.
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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.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 45 · Spring 2017
Wilhelm describes how ELCA colleges and universities have shifted the definition of Lutheran higher education away from institutional markers toward alignment with educational values drawn from the Lutheran intellectual tradition — and previews a NECU-convened faculty working group whose recommendations will go to the ELCA college presidents at their June 2017 conference on Lutheran identity.
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Editorial
From the Publisher and Editor
Jason A. Mahn, Mark Wilhelm
No. 44 · Fall 2016
Writing weeks after the 2016 presidential election, Wilhelm and Mahn frame interfaith engagement as the urgent and ongoing work of ELCA colleges and universities, recap NECU’s growing commitments to inter-religious leadership, and introduce essays first delivered at the summer 2016 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference under the theme “Preparing Global Leaders for a Religiously Diverse Society.”
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Article
The Vocation Movement in Lutheran Higher Education
Mark Wilhelm
No. 43 · Spring 2016
Wilhelm offers a brief history of the “vocation movement” in ELCA higher education, arguing that it arose as Lutheran leaders moved beyond institutional markers (percentages of Lutheran students, faculty, and board members) and the collapse of ethnic, separatist Lutheranism to re-ground their schools’ identity in a 500-year-old intellectual tradition that educates the whole person for vocation and the common good — an educational ideal open to persons of any religious or non-religious conviction.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 43 · Spring 2016
Wilhelm announces the new Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities — established in 2015 and convened for its first Board of Directors meeting in February 2016 — as a missional collaboration between the churchwide organization and the twenty-six ELCA colleges and universities, replacing former churchwide units lost to budget reductions and offering a stronger, more viable vision of Lutheran higher education.
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Article
Vocation and the Common Good
Mark Wilhelm
No. 42 · Fall 2015
Wilhelm argues that ELCA colleges and universities are Lutheran not by ethnic culture or institutional checklists but because they stand in a 500-year-old intellectual tradition that educates for vocation. He draws out two insights from that tradition — a common walk of life shared across callings, and a humility about claims to know the good — to ground the schools’ commitment to prepare students for the common good.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Wilhelm celebrates the leadership of ELCA colleges and universities within American higher education — from presidential service in major higher-education agencies to recognized leadership in global education and interfaith understanding — and lifts up the health of the ELCA network of schools as a church-related community that maintains shared identity while living as good citizens of the larger academy.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Wilhelm draws a parallel between the rediscovery of vocation and the rediscovery of interfaith understanding in Lutheran higher education, arguing that previously under-emphasized aspects of the Lutheran tradition point us to interfaith work and that an authentic Lutheran college or university will make interfaith understanding a feature of its mission.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 39 · Spring 2014
Wilhelm interrogates the widely used phrase “the model is broken,” arguing that it blames the victim, masks the demographic and public-funding pressures actually facing ELCA higher education, and distracts from the work of modifying—rather than discarding—a model of educating the whole person that has successfully adjusted across the centuries.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Staying Connected
Mark Wilhelm
No. 38 · Fall 2013
Wilhelm frames Intersections as a tool for maintaining relationships among leaders in ELCA higher education, welcomes the journal’s new editorial advisory board, and points readers toward the 2014 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference at Augsburg and a special interfaith understanding conference at Augustana with Eboo Patel and Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 37 · Spring 2013
Wilhelm reports that decisions at the February 2013 LECNA and ELCA presidents’ meetings authorized reviews of funding and organizational practices and appointed a working group to draft a presidential statement on what it means to be a college or university of the ELCA, signaling a more substantive future role for the annual presidents’ gathering in shaping the shared identity and common mission of ELCA schools.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 36 · Fall 2012
Wilhelm argues that the rhetoric framing ELCA higher education as a binary between “secular” and “religious” is “hokum”: there is a third way of doing higher education from a Christian perspective that is religious in motivation and practice but on the ground looks secular. After more than half a century of debates, he calls on ELCA presidents to “do something” in 2013 to move forward in shared mission and vocation.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 35 · Spring 2012
Wilhelm describes the “four-legged stool” supporting ELCA higher education—the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, the Lutheran Academy of Scholars, the Thrivent Fellows program, and Intersections—and argues that the conversation about Lutheran mission and identity must now be extended beyond college and university personnel to the larger church and community before the gains of a generation are lost.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Wilhelm bids farewell to Robert D. Haak, who is leaving the editorship of Intersections and the Augustana College Center for Vocational Reflection for a chief-academic-officer post at Hiram College in Ohio, and welcomes Jason A. Mahn as the incoming editor. He celebrates Haak’s tireless work to integrate the Lutheran concept of vocation into the practices and rhetoric of Augustana and ELCA higher education through six years of Intersections, and frames the journal as a vital tool for sustaining the conversation about education in a Lutheran key—even at colleges and universities where most students, faculty, and staff are not Lutheran themselves.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 33 · Spring 2011
Wilhelm notes that while the ELCA’s vocation in higher education remains vibrant, the landscape of churchwide leadership has shifted dramatically with the dissolution of the Vocation and Education unit, and expresses appreciation for the faculty and staff at ELCA colleges and universities who have stepped up to sustain the network during this time of transition.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 32 · Spring 2010
Wilhelm invites readers to enjoy or revisit the presentations from the 2009 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, then reflects on the Higher Learning Commission’s denial of Dana College’s request to transfer accreditation to a for-profit purchaser—an event that effectively ended Dana’s sale and prompted ELCA colleges and universities to welcome Dana students and faculty—and argues that the irreversible entry of for-profit operators into liberal arts education gives the Lutheran community further reason to continue the conversation about the vocation of a Lutheran college.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 31 · Winter 2010
Wilhelm traces his decades-long enthusiasm for the Lutheran doctrine of vocation from his St. Olaf days reading Luther’s Open Letter to the German Nobility, notes Parker Palmer’s lecture-circuit ministry and Mark C. Taylor’s reflections on calling, and argues that ELCA colleges should claim vocation as the defining mark of Lutheran higher education—yet warns that vocation risks becoming “the program du jour” rather than a permanent hallmark.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 30 · Fall 2009
Wilhelm reports on the difficult financial season facing the ELCA churchwide organization — a ten-percent budget reduction announced in November and significant cuts to unrestricted grants for colleges and universities — while affirming that the ELCA’s commitment to the mission of its schools remains strong, including its commitment to engaging the “other,” the theme of this issue.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Wilhelm introduces essays from the 2008 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference held at Luther College under the theme “Educating for Responsible Citizenship,” previewing contributions from Paul Pribbenow on dual citizenship at Augsburg, Wanda Deifelt on Luther College’s engagement with civic vocation, Jose Marichal on the promise and peril of digital citizenship, and Arne Selbyg on his three experiences of being educated for citizenship.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Wilhelm introduces himself as the new Director for Colleges and Universities and publisher of Intersections, thanks his predecessor Arne Selbyg, and previews an issue devoted to the aims and purposes of Lutheran higher education—reflections from Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, two pieces from Wartburg College’s fall 2008 campus conversation about being a college of the church (his own essay and the Benne/Christenson dialogue), and a sermon by Lake Lambert III preached in the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
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Article
Even Lutheranism Can Be Cool Now: Changes in Religion and American Culture
Mark Wilhelm
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Wilhelm names two major changes in the role of religion in American culture—the rise of a rhetoric of religious individualism, exemplified by “Sheilaism” in Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, and a proliferation of religious options driven by the democratization of authority, the end and beginning of ethnicity, the success of ecumenism, and the information revolution—and draws implications for Lutheran-related higher education, including support for Stephen Prothero’s call for core religious literacy and a confident reclaiming of each college’s religious heritage as a platform for engaging the religious diversity of America.
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Why All This Talk About Vocation?
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Why all this talk about vocation? Because, as Mark Wilhelm argues in his Publisher’s keynote, “Lutheran higher education…is vocation-based education” — it is who we are and what we do, even if incompletely, clumsily, and unjustly at times.This Fall 2022 issue gathers Wilhelm’s valedictory address as he retires after decades of service, five responses from across the NECU community (Trelstad, Thasiah, Tucker, Cancienne, Pribbenow), reflections from first-time conference attendees Julius Crump and Madyson Ray, and a pair of companion pieces on Womanist theology from Elli Cucksey and the team of Yolanda M. Norton and Beverly Wallace.
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Called and Empowered; Learning Love of Neighbor (and Assessed)
No. 55 · Spring 2022
A transition issue of Intersections, marking the editorial handoff from Jason Mahn to Colleen Windham-Hughes and looking ahead to Mark Wilhelm’s retirement as the founding executive director of NECU. The essays gathered here, most adapted from comments at the 2022 NetVUE national gathering, ask “What is the worth of our work?” through institutional practices of assessment and imagination: developmental frameworks for vocational reflection, self-assessment instruments, pandemic-era programming, the long arc of serving the neighbor, and a review of Richard A. Detweiler’s The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs.
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Called to Place: Learning to Love of Neighbor
No. 54 · Fall 2021
The theme of the 2021 Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education Conference, hosted by Augsburg University, was “Called to Place: Community-Responsive Education.” Presentations and conversations over four days took stock of the importance of particular settings — including the physical and cultural geographies of campuses and the surrounding communities — for the deep learning of our students, and for us as educators.This issue showcases how NECU institutions are engaging surrounding places and communities and educating students for a sense of rootedness and belonging.
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Learning Love of Neighbor
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Published in the second spring of the COVID-19 pandemic, this issue gathers reflections from across the NECU on what it means to live out the ethic of love of neighbor in a year of shelter-in-place orders, racial reckoning, and remote campuses. Contributors examine teaching as a love ethic, library work without a library, preaching in Christ Chapel on Yom HaShoah, first-year theology in the “COVID class,” vocation beyond gladness and beyond career, pastoral leadership in a long crisis, and what it might mean for Lutheran higher education to start talking about God again.
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The Tradition’s Wisdom in a Time of Pandemics
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Published in fall 2020 amid the intertwined pandemics of Covid-19, systemic racism, and economic upheaval, this issue gathers reflections from NECU educators, presidents, alumni, and theologians who turn to the Lutheran tradition for guidance in a season of crisis. Contributors draw on Luther’s 1527 letter “Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague,” Matthew 25’s acts of mercy, trauma theology, and the everyday vocations of teaching, leading, and caring for neighbor — asking how Lutheran higher education’s ancient commitments to hospitality, neighbor-love, reconciliation, and care speak with renewed urgency today.
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Lutheran Social Teaching and Economic Life
No. 51 · Spring 2020
The Spring 2020 issue gathers writings from a NECU initiative to reclaim the Lutheran intellectual tradition as a resource for academic mission. A July 2019 Augsburg consultation asked whether ELCA social teaching — especially the 1999 statement Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All — could serve as a classroom resource for business ethics. Essays explore moral deliberation, responsibility ethics, the challenge of inclusion, the theology of marketing and branding, student food insecurity, and how Generation Z’s defining traits align with Lutheran higher education.
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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
No. 50 · Fall 2019
This Fall 2019 issue gathers essays from the 2019 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference at Augsburg, themed “Beyond Privilege: Engaging Diversity, Inclusion and Equity.” Essays explore the work of the Chief Diversity Officer; the perils and promise of privilege; the vocation of white people in a racist society; inclusive pedagogy as a foreign language; vocation across a religiously diverse classroom; the American myth of white supremacy; a meditation on seeing in a new way; and the radical love — conciliatory and queer — of Lutheran higher education.
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Rooted and Open
No. 49 · Spring 2019
A special issue of Intersections dedicated to Rooted and Open: The Common Calling of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities, the statement on Lutheran identity in higher education unanimously adopted by NECU presidents in January 2018. Writing-team members Mark Wilhelm, Darrell Jodock, Jason A. Mahn, and Martha E. Stortz offer the “third path” rationale and account for how the “marks” inscribe both institutions and people. Further essays by Colleen Windham-Hughes, Marcia J. Bunge, Kathi Tunheim, John Eggen, and Emily S. Kahm bring Rooted and Open to life on campus.
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Civil Discourse in a Fragmented World
No. 48 · Fall 2018
Most of the essays in this issue were first presented at the 2018 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference. Some emphasize the need to emphatically listen and find common ground in a polarized culture, complete with partisan politics, social media echo-chambers, and the propaganda of “alternative facts.” Others remind us that calls for civility can also become “the sleep-aid of a majority inclined to ignore the violence done in its name”; these authors urge educators to speak truthfully, even when those words sound angry. Together, the essays help us tune up for frank and honest conversations while resisting hateful discourse about divisive issues.
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Vocation for Life
No. 47 · Spring 2018
The Spring 2018 “Vocation for Life” issue, drawn from the 2017 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, gathers essays on vocational reflection as a lifelong journey — how Lutheran colleges can educate students for the many callings they will hear and heed. Essays explore vocation across the lifespan, the experience of emerging adulthood, vocation from Buddhist and Hindu perspectives, a reading of Tranvik’s Martin Luther and the Called Life, Luther’s catechisms as a resource for a theology of intellectual disability, and Lutheran higher education in a campus culture of pervasive anxiety.
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Reforming Church and Academy: 500 Years and Counting
No. 46 · Fall 2017
An issue of Intersections marking the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. Essays gathered here move beyond celebration to careful assessment and creative re-appropriation of the Reformation tradition — engaging vocation, education, social service, the “Book of Nature,” Luther among the poor, the centrality of the Word, a Dalit reading of Luther’s sutra, and the call for ecclesiological reflection in Lutheran higher education.
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Education in the Age of Trump
No. 45 · Spring 2017
Published in the wake of the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Spring 2017 “Education in the Age of Trump” issue gathers reflections on educating, teaching religion, organizing, preaching, and writing poetry in the early months of the Trump presidency. Contributors examine federal higher education policy, sanctuary campus debates, the religious story behind evangelical politics, the place of a Muslim professor at an ELCA institution, the prophet Jonah as anti-hero of public vocation, and the liminal experience of students caught between worlds—inviting readers to search for truth amid “alternative facts” and remain hopeful.
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Preparing Global Leaders for a Religiously Diverse Society
No. 44 · Fall 2016
The Fall 2016 issue, drawn from the 2016 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, explores why interfaith engagement is integral to the mission of ELCA colleges. From Bishop Elizabeth Eaton’s call for Lutheran colleges to be “laboratories for living in a diverse world” to a conversation between Mark Hanson, Eboo Patel, and Katie Baxter on negotiating conflicting values, contributors examine theological foundations for inter-religious work, the promise and peril of the interfaith classroom, pastoral care across faith traditions, and the everyday tensions where legitimate religious values come into conflict.
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Twentieth Anniversary Issue: Looking Back and Looking Forward
No. 43 · Spring 2016
This Spring 2016 anniversary issue marks twenty years since Intersections was first printed at Capital University in 1996. The publisher introduces the newly-established Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities, and the editors trace the vocation of Intersections across its twenty-year life. Essays consider the vocation movement in Lutheran higher education, the long dance between Lutheran identity and racial and religious diversity at Gustavus, Lutheran contributions to scholarship on vocation, Lutheran vocation as a foundation for interfaith ministry, and educating students as “sustainability leaders” in the Anthropocene.
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Vocation and the Common Good
No. 42 · Fall 2015
The Fall 2015 “Vocation and the Common Good” issue draws on the 2015 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference at Augsburg, asking what is left of “the commons” in an age of privatization. Essays move from the Lutheran sense of a common walk of life and “little bits of good,” through Luther’s “greed is an unbelieving scoundrel” and interfaith cooperation, to a critique of the attentional commons in a wired classroom, a presidential call to “say something theological,” and a study of how women college presidents experience their calling.
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Called to Leadership
No. 41 · Spring 2015
The Spring 2015 “Called to Leadership” issue of Intersections draws from the 2014 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference at Augsburg, framing leadership not as command-and-control or charisma but as service to the neighbor rooted in vocation. Essays move from Jodock’s “vocational leadership” through Neilson on shared leadership, Ngunjiri on mentoring as gurus, coaches, and sponsors, Hughes on conflating vocation with career, Hasseler on women in leadership, Warren on superhero origin stories, and Johnson on peer-learning consultations—closing with Crowe and Hanson’s review of Claiming Our Callings.
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Interfaith Understanding at Lutheran Colleges and Universities
No. 40 · Fall 2014
The Fall 2014 issue gathers presentations from the first Interfaith Understanding Conference for ELCA Colleges and Universities at Augustana College in June 2014, asking “What does it mean to be Interfaith at a Lutheran College?” Keynotes by Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton, Jason A. Mahn, and Interfaith Youth Core founder Eboo Patel anchor the issue, with essays by Kathryn M. Lohre, Rabbi Belle Michael, Jacqueline Bussie, Matthew J. Marohl, Amy Zalik Larson and Sheila Radford-Hill, and Ann Boaden, interwoven with student reflections from Augustana, Luther, Muhlenberg, and Susquehanna.
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The State of College
No. 39 · Spring 2014
The Spring 2014 “State of College” book-review issue gathers eight reflective reviews by ELCA faculty and staff. Reviewers engage Delbanco’s College, Selingo’s College (Un)Bound, Childers’s College Identity Sagas, Jacobsen and Jacobsen’s No Longer Invisible, Farrell’s The Nature of College, Palmer and Zajonc’s The Heart of Higher Education, Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges, and a cluster on the digital information deluge—asking what Lutheran liberal arts might mean against the pull toward careerism.
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Challenging the Commodification of Education
No. 38 · Fall 2013
The Fall 2013 “Challenging the Commodification of Education” issue draws on the 2013 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, asking what a Lutheran sense of vocation adds when colleges are priced and sold as commodities. DeAne Lagerquist recovers Luther’s “gift economy” as a counter to market logic; Mark Schwehn defends the “value added” of Lutheran liberal arts through the “local genius”; Tom Crady and Karl Stumo report from Gustavus and Pacific Lutheran recruitment; Patricia J. Lull preaches on Matthew 10; Duin and Childers introduce Project DAVID as a reinvention framework.
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Faith and Meaning in the Disciplines
No. 37 · Spring 2013
The Spring 2013 “Faith and Meaning in the Disciplines” issue gathers six essays from ELCA faculty thinking through value, vocation, faith, and meaning from their own disciplines. The first five—on poetry, economics, choral music, biology, and religious studies—share parallel titles (Valuing Poetry, Calling Economists, Singing Faith, Living Biology, Professing Religion) and invite readers past the fact-value split between “hard” knowledge and “softer” meaning. Ernest Simmons closes with a Lutheran dialectical model in which faith and learning are kept in dynamic relationship at the intersection where vocation takes root.
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Lutherans, Creation, and Sustainability
No. 36 · Fall 2012
The Fall 2012 “Lutherans, Creation, and Sustainability” issue pairs four feature essays on environmental theology with four interviews on ELCA campus sustainability. Ann Pederson argues for a cosmic, ecological reading of imago Dei; Jim Martin-Schramm sketches a Lutheran ethic of environmental stewardship; Cynthia Moe-Lobeda develops a three-fold moral vision on climate justice; Baird Tipson tells three stories from Washington College on funding a sustainability agenda. Interviews with Jim Dontje, Kenneth Foster, Garry Griffith, and Brian Noy profile programs at Gustavus, Concordia, Augustana, and Augsburg.
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Civility and Civic Engagement
No. 35 · Spring 2012
The Spring 2012 “Civility and Civic Engagement” issue draws on the 2011 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference at Augsburg. Samuel Torvend reads Luther’s reforms as a turn from privatized spirituality to public engagement among the hungry poor; Per Anderson proposes ELCA colleges become incubators of moral deliberation; Ann M. Svennungsen argues colleges must invest in civic renewal; Kathi Tunheim offers four examples of Lutheran colleges “dancing with their neighbors”; Paul Pribbenow argues hospitality is not enough—justice calls colleges to take students “off the main road.”
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Lutherans on Faith and Learning
No. 34 · Fall 2011
The Fall 2011 “Lutherans on Faith and Learning” issue marks the editorial transition from Robert D. Haak to Jason A. Mahn. Paul J. Dovre sketches a Lutheran learning paradigm organized around four narratives—biblical, confessional, theological, and vocational. Darrell Jodock’s “Gift and Calling” grounds Lutheran higher education in human giftedness, calling forth a “third path” both rooted and inclusive. Joseph McDonald argues the Lutheran capacity for paradox equips colleges to recover service-learning’s socio-political vision. Sermons by Turnbull and Jodock and Dave Hill’s “Endtimes” round out the issue.
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Lutherans and Religious Diversity
No. 33 · Spring 2011
The Spring 2011 issue of Intersections, drawn from the 2010 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, asks how Lutheran campuses respond to religious diversity. Essays by Darrell Jodock, Terence S. Morrow, Karla R. Suomala, Mark N. Swanson, and Jacqueline Aileen Bussie chart a “third path” between sectarian and non-sectarian models, examine civil discourse on campus, trace new contexts for Jewish-Christian engagement, explore Christian-Muslim relations at ELCA institutions, and offer practical recommendations for embracing reconciled religious diversity.
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Lutherans in an Age of Anxiety
No. 32 · Spring 2010
The Spring 2010 “Lutherans in an Age of Anxiety” issue draws on the 2009 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference. Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson reflects on living at the intersection of fear and hope; Martha E. Stortz names four charisms Lutheran higher education brings to a culture of fear; Jason Peters reads ecological decline through Pope, Blake, Lewis, and Kierkegaard; Rebecca Judge finds hope in the bursting of market fundamentalism; David L. Tiede frames Lutheran higher education as “an apostolate of hope”; Susan M. O’Shaughnessy rereads Pentecost as a corrective to cultural imperialism.
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Lutherans and Vocational Reflection
No. 31 · Winter 2010
The Winter 2010 issue gathers reports from the “Called for Life” study, in which Luther, Augsburg, and Augustana assessed their Lilly Endowment-funded vocational programs. Richard L. Torgerson introduces the project; Wilder Research’s Greg Owen, Ellen Shelton, and Brian Pittman compare “Lilly” to “pre-Lilly” graduates; Mark D. Tranvik narrates Augsburg’s journey from Exploring Our Gifts to its new Center for Faith and Learning; Ruth R. Kath describes Luther’s Sense of Vocation program; Robert D. Haak chronicles Augustana’s Center for Vocational Reflection.
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Lutheran Colleges and the "Other"
No. 30 · Fall 2009
The Fall 2009 “Lutheran Colleges and the ‘Other’” issue explores how identity is formed in distinction from some “other” as partner rather than foil. Ronald D. Witherup marks ten years of the Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration; Rosemary Radford Ruether’s 1968 essay from Holden Village offers a Catholic’s view of Lutheranism from inside the sauna; Ahmed Afzaal charts a path from Christian-Muslim suspicion to trust; Paul Dovre traces fifty years of change in Midwestern Lutheran colleges; Mark Wm. Radecke offers a Screwtape-style satire on short-term mission trips; David C. Ratke recovers Löhe’s educational vision.
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Educating for Responsible Citizenship
No. 29 · Spring 2009
The Spring 2009 “Educating for Responsible Citizenship” issue gathers essays from the 2008 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference at Luther College. Paul C. Pribbenow argues Augsburg’s mission to educate “dual citizens” calls students to live in the tensions of common life; Jose Marichal proposes Aristotelian phronesis as the goal of digital citizenship; retiring ELCA director Arne Selbyg offers the jazz ensemble as a better metaphor than the melting pot; Wanda Deifelt returns to Luther on neighborly love and the two kingdoms.
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Lutheran Conversations
No. 28 · Fall 2008
The Fall 2008 “Lutheran Conversations” issue gathers reflections on what it means to be a “college of the church.” Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson names curiosity, faith, moral discernment, and engagement in mission as the marks. Mark Wilhelm traces individualism and religious pluralism and their implications. Robert Benne and Thomas Christenson weigh in via a Wartburg Point/Counterpoint. Lake Lambert III’s sermon “Saving Minds,” preached in the Castle Church in Wittenberg, calls Lutheran educators to name the sins of the mind.