This issue of Intersections was fun to put together because of the diversity of pieces that it contains. It includes Darrel Jodock’s inaugural lecture as he assumed the Bernhardson chair at Gustavus Adolphus College. His lecture raises for me the question, “What would a religious tradition be like that had no sense of humor?” I’m sure that such exist, but I’m very happy to say that I do not personally know them. I had a returning student (I think she was in her mid-fifties) in a class a few years ago. One day I discovered that the traditional aged students in the class referred to her among themselves as “the church lady from hell.” She condemned everyone she encountered in that class: the authors of the texts, me, her fellow students. She went on to point out in detail what was wrong with our views, prefacing each sentence with the words, “God and I think….” When I challenged her condemnations she said, “Don’t you believe in the absoluteness of God?” I said I did, and that this was why I did not consider any human version of the truth as absolute. Not hers, not even my own. When I told her that Luther referred to his own theology as “a bag of farts,” she was not amused. Sad.
Ernie Simmons’ article follows. This was a talk he gave at last summer’s Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference which I thought would be of interest to faculty at all our institutions because it researches so thoroughly what our current crop of students are like and what the difficulties and opportunities are that they present to us. This is followed by two short pieces that came out of a travel-study opportunity for faculty and students in South Africa. These pieces by Brian Wallace and Corin Wesner demonstrate what a soul-opening opportunity such cultural relocation can occasion. I thought it made very good sense to publish them together with some of the photographs they brought back. Finally there are two reviews of important books that came out this year. I was very happy to review Richard Hughes’ book. I had heard him deliver some of it’s chapters as public addresses and wanted to see how he fit them together into a larger argument. Joy Schroeder’s review of Robert Benne’s book concludes this issue. It is a book that deserves a discussion on each of our campuses.
If any of you are interested in reviewing books for future issues please let me know.
Tom Christenson
Capital University
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg reports that Executive Director Leonard Schulze has challenged the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools to develop a comprehensive communications plan reaching high school students, college students, parents, pastors, and journalists, and invites Intersections readers to review the redesigned elcacolleges.org website, the “FREE STUFF” brochures, the journal’s advertisements in The Lutheran and related publications, Ernie Simmons’ new Augsburg-Fortress book Lutheran Higher Education: An Introduction, and the ELCA video magazine Mosaic—and to send in their own ideas.
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Article
The Lutheran Theological Tradition and Recruiting Lutheran Students
Ernest L. Simmons
Simmons opens with an Abraham-and-Isaac “Windows 98” joke to illustrate the dialectic of faith and learning, then argues that in a new market era of limited religious background, intentional mission and marketing go together. Drawing on Levine and Cureton’s When Hope and Fear Collide for the Millennial Generation born in 1982 and Tom Beaudoin’s Virtual Faith for their GenX parents, he reads “Reclaiming Lutheran Students” survey results showing 86% strong community at ELCA colleges versus 54% at flagship publics and 61% alumni mentoring versus 39%. He then develops three areas where the Lutheran tradition uniquely equips its colleges—community, mentoring and vocation, and the integration of faith and values—using Luther’s “two kingdoms” image of the “Left Hand” (reason) and “Right Hand” (faith) of God, with academic freedom as a product of Ahlstrom’s “Critical Current” in the tradition, and closes with three challenges: recruiting and retaining mentoring faculty, educating church leaders, and reaching potential students and parents.
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Article
Freedom, Humor, and Community: A Lutheran Vision for Higher Education
Darrell Jodock
Jodock’s inaugural lecture for the Bernhardson chair at Gustavus Adolphus develops three interlocking themes drawn from the Lutheran tradition as a deeper grounding for the liberal arts college than contemporary American assumptions. A sense of humor rests on Luther’s discovery that God takes the initiative—Luther could call himself a beggar, joke about the epistle of James, and credit Wittenberg beer for the Reformation—and underwrites the freedom of inquiry that John Updike traces to Grace Lutheran Sunday School in Shillington. Community, grounded in Augsburg Confession VII and Luther’s 1524 letter to the German city councils, makes the college a community of discourse pursuing wisdom rather than “the same old blockheads.” Freedom is both “freedom from” and “freedom for,” illustrated by Nechama Tec’s Polish Holocaust rescuers and by Jodock’s Holocaust-class corporate role-play in which students voted to build a factory in a death camp rather than risk losing their board seats—a vivid case for educating toward “a passion for justice.”
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Reflection
Truth, Reconciliation, and Redemption in South Africa
Brian Forry Wallace
Wallace, a 24-year veteran political science professor at Capital University, recounts five weeks of post-apartheid peace-building travel-study with students living south of Cape Town—visiting townships, schools, day-care centers, a children’s AIDS hospital, Robben Island, and Nelson Mandela’s cell—and offers vivid sketches of his student companions Amy, Brian, Meghan, Karrie, Patrick, Meredith, Cheryl, Corin, Debbie, April, and Audra. He concludes that these students—atheists and agnostics and Buddhists and Methodists and Baptists, headed for social work, nursing, teaching, ministry, and parenthood—embody vocation by responding to a voice that calls them out of themselves to be present and to heal in this world, and that they are his link to the redemption of a lost and broken soul.
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Reflection
Sweet on My Lips
Corin Wesner
A passage from Wesner’s travel journal during the same South Africa workshop. Walking into a wood-and-tin shack church where raindrops fall on already-soaked carpet and the service is in Xhosa, she remembers her painted, carpeted home church and her adolescent argument with her mother about wearing a dress to worship, and finds herself engulfed in warmth as the few women sing—welcomed by a stranger’s smile and opened up.
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Book Review
Richard T. Hughes: How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind
Tom Christenson
Christenson reviews Richard Hughes’s How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind (Eerdmans, 2001), which argues, drawing on Tillich’s notion of “religion breaking through its own particularity,” that faith is a means to the open pursuit of truth rather than its enemy. Christenson reads the argument as a natural fit for a Lutheran tradition of semper reformanda but notes Luther’s own dogmatism toward fellow reformers, and wishes Hughes had drawn a sharper line between an absolute truth that relativizes all human truths and a postmodern abandonment of truth altogether. The book was the most-cited title at the November meeting of North American Lutheran academic officers.
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Book Review
Robert Benne: Quality With Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith With Their Religious Traditions
Joy Schroeder
Schroeder reviews Robert Benne’s Quality With Soul (Eerdmans, 2001), which assesses the secularization documented by James T. Burtchaell’s The Dying of the Light and names six “bright lights” that resist it: Calvin, Wheaton, Baylor, Notre Dame, Valparaiso, and St. Olaf. Benne argues that piety alone or “generic Christianity” is insufficient—a school’s specific denominational intellectual tradition must permeate mission statements, classroom, and chapel, sustained by a critical mass of identifying faculty (he proposes a 2:1 ratio and at least one-third communicant membership), a first-rate theology department as “trustworthy guardian,” and visionary presidential and board leadership. Schroeder flags the under-representation of student and faculty voices but commends the book as required reading for presidents, board members, and faculty seminars at church-related institutions.
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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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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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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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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Vocation, Mission and Privilege
Marit Trelstad
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Trelstad affirms Wilhelm’s claim that vocation is the foundational shared mission of Lutheran higher education rather than one program among many, and presses the critique that calls to “vocational reflection” can mask privilege — arguing that an intersectional lens shows vocational discernment is in fact a matter of survival and flourishing for students from marginalized communities.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 15 · Winter 2002
Christenson introduces an issue of varied voices—bishops and university presidents, philosophers and poets, students and their teachers—and defends the T. S. Eliot cover selection (“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?”) against the charge of being too depressing, arguing with cover artist Ida that Lutherans are realists about human accomplishments and that there is a huge difference between optimism and hope.
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Article
"Annoying the Student With Her Rights:" Human Life Coram Hominibus; Reflections on Vocation, Hope, and Politics
Caryn Riswold
No. 32 · Spring 2010
Riswold takes a student’s course-evaluation complaint that she had been “annoyed with her rights” about voting as the entry point for reflection on fear of change, mistrust of difference, and right-wing extremist violence—Poplawski, Von Brunn, Roeder, and the Sotomayor hearings. Drawing on Gerhard Ebeling’s reading of Luther’s fourfold relationality (coram Deo, mundo, meipso, hominibus), Brian Gerrish, Alister McGrath, Gustaf Wingren, Philip Hefner, Mary Rose O’Reilley, and bell hooks, she argues that the vocation of the Lutheran college is precisely to “annoy students with their rights” by forming them for socially responsible voice grounded in faith active in love.
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Article
Faith, Understanding, and Action
Paul J. Dovre
No. 10 · Fall 2000
Dovre frames the St. Olaf 125th anniversary—originally read as part of a presentation with the St. Olaf Cantorei and organist Paul Manz—around T.F. Gullixson’s story of an immigrant woman who “turned her face to the west wind” and the 1874 gathering at the Holden parsonage of B.J. Muus, Harold Thorson, O.K. Finseth, K.P. Haugen, and O.O. Osmondson. He weaves Anselm’s “faith seeks understanding,” Harold H. Ditmanson on the universal relevance of Christian faith, and the music of Venatius Honorius Fortunatas, John Rutter, Herbert Brokering, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and John Tavener into a meditation on faith as motive, understanding as modus, and action as consequence, against the “ill winds” of poverty, child homicide, AIDS, and consumer gluttony.
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Article
Semper Reformanda: Lutheran Higher Education in the Anthropocene
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 43 · Spring 2016
Simmons enumerates the ELCA initiatives over the past twenty years that have helped Lutheran higher education retrieve a Christian understanding of vocation, then argues that the looming reality of human-caused climate change — the geological epoch of the Anthropocene — now requires Lutheran liberal arts education to prepare students for “planetary citizenship” as sustainability leaders, drawing on the classical Trivium, Luther’s panentheism, and a quantum-physics-inflected theology of divine entanglement and hope.
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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.