I am feeling like a proud parent. This publication has been talked about, hoped for, planned for and worked on for what seems like a long time—now here it is! I sincerely hope that all of you who read it will celebrate with those of us who have been in attendance at its birth.
I want to personally recognize the contributions of three people. First, Naomi Linnel, recently retired from the ELCA office for Higher Education and Schools, encouraged the idea of such a publication from the beginning. Second, Jim Unglaube, the real publisher, has made it turn the corner from plan to viable process. Third, Josiah Blackmore, president of Capital University, has given advice, encouragement, and personal and institutional support to the project. Without each of these people INTERSECTIONS would still be just an idea waiting to happen.
This is a publication in process. All of us connected with it invite your reactions and suggestions for improvement. Most of all, of course, we seek your active involvement. We will need, as we go along, editors, reviewers, authors, artists, and critics. We are anxious for people to engage in dialogue over the issues they see raised here and to advance to INTERSECTIONS the form that dialogue takes in the variety of campuses that make up this ELCA college/university family.
Tom Christenson
Professor, Dep’t. Of Philosophy and Religion
Capital University
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Editorial
From the Publisher
James M. Unglaube
Unglaube welcomes readers to the inaugural issue of Intersections, crediting Editor Tom Christenson and Capital University, and announces the new annual Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference whose continuing dialogue the journal exists to enhance. He gives thanks to the Lilly Endowment for a sizable grant supporting the 1996 conference, campus dialogues, and the birth of the publication.
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Article
The Future of Lutheran Higher Education
Mark Schwehn
Schwehn’s keynote, framed against Otto Paul Kretzmann’s October 1940 inaugural at Valparaiso, organizes itself around four topics: the idea of a Christian University (Lutheran schools as a tributary of the Christian intellectual tradition, voices in a conversation in the spirit of H. Richard Niebuhr and Alasdair MacIntyre rather than phases of James Burtchaell’s devolutionary scheme); the pursuit of truth (against Foucauldian reduction of truth to power, with Hilary Putnam, toward a cruciform discipleship that discovers truth ambulando); the critique of knowledge (developing Christian theories of knowing in conversation with Benne, Lotz, Wolterstorff, LeClerc, and Augustine); and Christianity and liberal learning (objectivity refurbished as Thomas Haskell’s ascetic self-discipline, and the recovery of texts that have claims upon us).
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Response
"Whose Future?" or "Social Justice and the Lutheran Academy?"
Marsha Heck
Heck argues that the future of Lutheran higher education lies less in defining Lutheran distinctiveness than in moral action grounded in face-to-face relationships with others. Drawing on David Lotz’s two-kingdoms theology of citizenship, Ernest Simmons’s relational reading of Luther, Arthur Preisinger’s indictment of the German Lutheran misreading of two kingdoms during the Third Reich, Starla Stensaas of Dana College, and Paulo Freire’s dialectic of empowerment, she calls Lutheran colleges to integrate moral reflection with moral action—to move students’ muscles against what is not true as well as to feel truths in their bones.
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Response
Knowing and a Tradition to be Known
Kurt Keljo
Keljo, University Pastor at Capital, embraces Schwehn’s vocational call but challenges his epistemological framing. We are called to bear witness to the Truth more than to pursue it; truth and power need not be dissociated when power is understood cruciform-ly as love and service; alongside objectivity, a case can be made from the tradition for connected knowing (image of God, idolatry, repentance, Incarnation). Christians offer not a particular epistemology but a foundation for epistemology—a tradition to be known. He closes with James Fowler’s four marks of the “public church”: particularly Christian, prepared for pluralism, balancing intimacy with public engagement, and unafraid of ideological pluralism in confident, nondefensive civility.
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Response
Lutheran Colleges: The Context for the Conversation
Thomas Templeton Taylor
Taylor of Wittenberg engages Schwehn’s first argument by sketching the institutional predicament of Lutheran colleges through three converging forces: the collapse of differences among old-line Protestant groups in the wake of ELCA-era ecumenism (with Robert Wuthnow); the secularization of American higher education described by George Marsden; and the post-war decline of liberal arts colleges under pressure to professionalize. The result is an “in-between stage” in which Lutheran colleges retain rhetoric without substance. Following Richard John Neuhaus’s “Eleven Theses,” he argues that, for a time at least, Lutheran colleges’ institutional affiliations must remain actively Lutheran if they are to remain in any sense Christian.
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Response
Renewing Our Journey: Some Thoughts on Pursuing the Truth
John Rehl
Rehl, a Capital University graduate pursuing doctorates in theology at Chicago and in economics at Wisconsin, takes up Schwehn’s invitation to think again on the nature of truth. He sets aside truth as information, as object, and as mere words; recasts the church-related college’s task as a renewed emphasis on classroom teaching (Kierkegaard’s teacher as midwife) and on brave, articulate professors. He calls for moral education in courage, discipline, patience, and love, illustrates the costs of the fact-value split with examples from economics, and argues that we honor Lutheran heritage not by preserving it as a museum piece but by testing it—Luther’s theology of the cross over a theology of glory—and by preparing students for a world of Untruth, strengthened (with Julian of Norwich) by the promise that they will not be overwhelmed.
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Institutional Focus
Diversity and Dialogue: Gustavus Adolphus College
Florence D. Amamoto
Amamoto, a third-generation Japanese-American Buddhist who teaches American literature at Gustavus Adolphus and regularly attends daily chapel, writes as an “inside outsider.” Engaging Schwehn’s closing call to refurbish the Lutheran college, she argues that church-related colleges are vitally important to society, that “refurbishing” must take up diversity, and describes how Lutheranism is manifest at Gustavus: Christ Chapel as the highest point on campus, the ecumenical chapel program led for thirty years by Chaplain Richard Elvee, the Nobel Conferences that pair scientists with philosophers and theologians, the First-term Seminar and Tuesday Conversations, the India study-abroad program organized by Deane Curtin, and the Sponberg Chair in Ethics. She names the pressures of money, secularization, and the publications-driven push for “excellence” that threaten this creative tension.
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Institutional Focus
Continuing the Dialogue: Augustana College
Sandra C. Looney
Looney describes Augustana College, Sioux Falls, debating and renaming its values—Christian, Liberal Arts, Community, Excellence, Service—under the leadership of religion professor Dr. Arthur Olsen and the T’N’T (“Through Thick and Thin”) committee, in the wake of ELCA Region III’s “What Does It Mean to be a College of the Church?” conversations. She describes Augustana’s 56% Lutheran student body, daily 10 a.m. chapel, dual Christmas Vespers in Our Savior’s Lutheran Church and St. Joseph’s Cathedral, the Capstone classes on moral and aesthetic issues, and the ongoing work of enlarging Augustana’s conversation to include Native American, Jewish, and Islamic voices.
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Article
The Vocation of Intersections on its Twentieth Birthday
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak, Tom Christenson
No. 43 · Spring 2016
The three editors of Intersections — Bob Haak, Jason Mahn, and Tom Christenson (in spirit, following his death in 2013) — trace the twenty-year vocation of the journal itself: its 1996 birth at Capital University; its coming-of-age years of debate over institutional markers, two-kingdoms theology, and Lutheran identity; the ascendancy of “education for vocation” as the central marker of Lutheran higher education; and its ongoing identity in relation to a changing ELCA and to the broader cultural conversation about purpose, wholeness, and the vocation of higher education.
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Article
Point / Counterpoint: What It Means to be a "College of the Church"
Robert Benne, Tom Christenson
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Moderated by Wartburg College pastor Larry Trachte and introduced by Kathryn Kleinhans, this Wartburg campus conversation between Robert Benne (Roanoke College) and Thomas Christenson (Capital University) probes what it means to be a college of the church—Benne emphasizing ethos, vocation, and the Christian intellectual tradition over against secularization and generic education, and Christenson lifting up persistent vocational questions, the gift of difference, and induction into a community of discourse—and finds large common ground around hiring for mission, pedagogy that asks deep questions, and the courage to claim a living religious tradition while inviting everyone to the banquet.
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Article
Education as a Christian (Lutheran) Calling
Tom Christenson
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Christenson opens with an imaginative reconstruction of early Christian communities as radically egalitarian, pacifist, communitarian gatherings within the Roman Empire and argues that such communities are natural homes for the educational vocation. Naming two temptations for contemporary Christian higher education—the parochial Bible school and “Generic U”—he uses his friend Sig Rauspern’s tree metaphor to insist that a university is Christian in its trunk and roots rather than in grafted-on branches. Drawing on Wendell Berry, Jacob Bronowski, Walter Wink, Douglas John Hall, and his own Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education, he names faithful criticism, engaged suspiciousness, simul justus et peccator, and a fallible, love-related Lutheran epistemology as the particular gifts Lutherans bring to the Christian educational calling.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 21 · Summer 2005
In his valedictory letter as outgoing editor, Christenson recounts the 1994 origins of Intersections, when he took the idea to Naomi Linnell and Jim Unglaube at DHES and persuaded the council of presidents to launch the journal on a shoestring with printing paid by DHES and everything else by Capital University. He summarizes the issue’s contents—papers from the 2004 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference plus two commissioned pieces from former DHES directors Bob Sorensen and Leonard Schulze—and thanks the student copy editors and Capital’s presidents and provosts who sustained the publication.
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Book Review
Review of Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Christenson reviews Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans, 2004), edited by C.W. Joldersma and G.G. Stronks. After recounting his own early prejudice against Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and his subsequent conversion through Art in Action, he focuses on two threads: Wolterstorff’s expansive reading of shalom—not merely peace but justice, community, communal responsibility, and delight—as the overall goal of Christian collegiate education, and the influence of Abraham Kuyper’s claim of “privileged cognitive access” for Christian inquirers, which Wolterstorff demonstrates rather than declares.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Christenson introduces an issue featuring “young and old, angry and encouraging, prophetic and hopeful” voices unified by the assumption that Christians engaged in thinking and educating will ask hard questions: how to raise concerns about militarism and the new American “imperialism,” what a Lutheran law school will say about training a new generation of attorneys, and what Lutheran colleges communicate to undergrads about vocation. Such faithful criticism, he argues, is part of who Lutheran institutions are.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 22 · Spring 2006
Selbyg notes that both the ELCA and Intersections have undergone major changes this year—the Division for Higher Education and Schools is gone, replaced by the Educational Partnerships and Institutions group within the Vocation and Education unit, and the journal has a new editor (Robert Haak), a new home at Augustana College, a new printer, and a new design. He commends the issue’s focus on human sexuality and points readers to the first draft of Our Calling in Education.
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Article
From Pietism to Paradox: The Development of a Lutheran Philosophy of Education
Philip Nordquist
No. 8 · Winter 2000
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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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Selbyg reports that during 2004 a task force appointed by the ELCA Division for Church in Society has been laying the groundwork for a Social Statement on Education, with a draft to be debated in congregations and educational forums in 2006 and considered for adoption at the 2007 Churchwide Assembly. He urges Lutheran educators to obtain and study the new Task Force study document from the Division for Church in Society and submit their reactions so that the drafters know what those with ties to Lutheran educational institutions think is important.
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Institutional Focus
Interfaith Campus Organizing at California Lutheran University
Allison Bermann, Mehak Sachdev
No. 44 · Fall 2016
California Lutheran University students Allison Bermann and Mehak Sachdev describe how interfaith participation at CLU grew from a grassroots movement into a sustained, integrated part of campus identity — with an intern program, Interfaith Allies, co-curricular events from Diwali dinners to Hunger Banquets, and a classroom practice of storytelling that opens the required Introduction to Christianity course to students of every faith and none.
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Article
More Value than Many Sparrows: A Sermon on Matthew 10:26-31
Patricia Lull
No. 38 · Fall 2013
Preaching at the 2013 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, Lull recalls her own arrival at the College of Wooster the summer after Kent State and contrasts that era’s sense of students as participants in a college’s mission with today’s talk of “butts in seats.” Reading Matthew 10:26-31, she promises that the way of the cross—and its hard opportunities for slow-paced learning, genuine debate, and access for students who cannot pay the full cost—is the easy yoke, the lightest burden of all.
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Article
A River Runs Through It: CLU as a Church-Related University
A. Joseph Everson
No. 12 · Summer 2001
Everson borrows Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and the small creek that flows through California Lutheran University’s Kingsman Park as images for the quiet stream of Christian tradition on campus, describes the dialectic of faith and reason (with a “Lord of Life” student congregation, two required religion courses, and a voluntary Wednesday chapel) as the “theology of paradox” that runs from Luther’s simul justus et peccator through Richard Solberg and Richard Hughes, and names six commitments that constitute the CLU ethos—academic freedom (Jeremiah 29:7 and John 8:32), vocation, service (Amos and Habitat for Humanity), grace and graciousness (Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice), diversity, and reverence (Proverbs 9 as awe and wonder).