From the Publisher

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

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.

The Marks of an ELCA College: One Bishop's Reflections

Stanley Olson

Olson, speaking as a bishop and “Harness Boy” whose job is to keep the church’s connections working, replaces his original four-noun outline (fealty, ingenuity, insouciance, focus) with eight marks the ELCA should be able to observe in its colleges: intentional Lutheran identity, significant Lutheran presence, Christian faith at every table, freedom of inquiry, coaching toward vocation, gravity and grace, nurtured community, and excellence by its own standards. Drawing on his survey of all twenty-eight ELCA college mission statements (two tables) and on Darrell Jodock and Mark Edwards, he argues that the Lutheran connection must be made explicit in mission, marketing, and faculty searches, and closes with six reciprocal expectations the colleges should hold of the ELCA—commissioner, mature parent, supporter of adventurous teenagers, advocate, steward of graduates, and a church faithful to its own Lutheran mission.

Welcome Strangers

Gregg Muilenberg

Muilenberg, a non-Lutheran philosopher at Concordia, argues that self-consciously Lutheran colleges cannot make non-Lutheran faculty feel welcome through “institutional fit” rhetoric (he cites Concordia’s own hiring boilerplate) because identity must be sustained and developed, not preserved like a pickle. Drawing on Nikos Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco and the three marks of the “profoundly religious person”—commitment to the truth, to the power of the spirit, and to metousiosis through myth—he proposes that faith and reason are best understood as an unending struggle into which strangers must be invited as valuable and active participants, safeguarded by the strongest possible affirmation of academic freedom (citing Martha Nussbaum on Notre Dame and BYU).

Drunks in a Midnight Choir

Kevin Griffith

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.

The Etiology of Eschatology

Kevin Griffith

A wry meditation on end-times and beginnings in which the last trumpet is only a prelude to the longest dawn, newly handmade animals grow fat waiting for caretakers to name them, dark-robed cryptologists fret over the end of everything, and once everyone has solved the great conundrum the big man simply hits rewind.

The Identity, Mission, Vision, and Goals of a Lutheran College vis a vis Bacon's "Of Studies" and Newman's "The Idea of a University"

Cora Lazor, Mary Theresa Hall

Hall, an Associate Professor of English at Thiel, and Lazor, a Thiel junior and 2002 ELCA Division for Higher Education summer intern, read Thiel College’s Statements of Identity, Mission, Vision, and Goals alongside Sir Francis Bacon’s “Of Studies” (1625) and John Henry Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University (engaging Azade Seyhan’s May 2002 PMLA essay along the way). They argue that Bacon’s “Read…to weigh and consider” and Newman’s defense of liberal over technical training underwrite Thiel’s new Writing-Intensive Course requirement, its ten institutional objectives, and its commitment to “service to society” in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Honesty of Mind: On the Uses and Abuses of Socratic Ignorance in Environmental Studies, Religion, and the Classroom

Don Braxton

Braxton, taking his cue from David James Duncan’s defense of ignorance as a fly-fisher’s most crucial tool and from Socrates’ midwife’s art in the Theaetetus, defends a doctrine of “honesty of mind” resting on four premises—knowledge is constructed, judgments are wagered amid imperfect knowledge, expertise can disable learning, and we are encumbered by other ways of knowing. He field-tests the disposition against three domains: the climate-change and creationism debates in environmental studies, the post-September 11 turn toward religious pluralism (engaging Union Seminary’s Joseph Hough and Hauer and Young’s “three-world” approach to the Bible), and the liberal arts classroom where students “become democrats of the mind” through Reinhold Niebuhr’s balance of conviction and contrition.

Paul Dovre, ed.: The Future of Religious Colleges

Baird Tipson

Tipson, president of Wittenberg University, reviews Paul Dovre’s edited proceedings of the October 2000 Harvard Conference on the Future of Religious Colleges (Eerdmans, 2002), summarizing essays by Douglas Sloan on the failure of the “two-realm theory of truth,” George Marsden on faith-shaped scholarship, DeAne Lagerquist, Father David O’Connell, Mark Noll, Robert Benne, Mark Roche on Notre Dame, Joel Carpenter on neo-Calvinist Kuyperianism, and Mark Schwehn on a Lutheran “college-related church” and the centrality of vocation. Against Benne’s suggestion that only two or three robustly Lutheran colleges can be sustained, Tipson defends a less robust but still authentically Lutheran model embodied at places like Wittenberg, Gettysburg, and Roanoke, arguing for the enlightenment commitment to subjecting all truth claims to rigorous criticism and for hiring Marsden-style faith-shaped scholars rather than counting Lutheran heads.

From Alien to Citizen

Arne Selbyg

No. 29 · Spring 2009

Selbyg reflects on three experiences of being educated for citizenship—growing up in Norway under the legacy of Lutheran pastors and public school teachers who resisted the Nazi occupation, arriving in America as a resident alien, and becoming a naturalized American citizen—and proposes the jazz ensemble as a better metaphor for American society than the melting pot, one in which different citizens learn skills, study other instruments, and dialog with one another in service to the common music.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 27 · Spring 2008

Selbyg, retiring this summer as Director for ELCA Colleges and Universities, reflects on his decade serving as spokesperson between the church and its twenty-eight colleges and universities, and argues that the link between the colleges and the church has grown stronger over the last ten years — sustained by supportive church leaders like Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, and a Lutheran theology of higher education whose principles (questioning authority, returning to the sources, including the excluded, serving the neighbor) remain a strong basis for operating colleges and universities in the twenty-first century.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 26 · Fall 2007

Selbyg notes that, while a stated purpose of Intersections over its twelve years and twenty-six issues has been the intersection of faith, learning, and teaching, surprisingly few articles have addressed how Lutheran faculty teach and why — and credits the editor for assembling essays from authors whose teaching has benefited from the ELCA Wittenberg Center, on the eve of the City of Wittenberg’s “Luther Decade” leading up to the 2017 Reformation anniversary.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 25 · Spring 2007

Selbyg notes that most papers in this issue grew out of a pan-Lutheran conference organized by the Association of Lutheran College Faculties in fall 2006 rather than the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, and argues that the ELCA’s ecumenical posture—truthful but open to learning from others—is a good foundation for institutions of higher education whose faculty likewise profess while remaining subject to change based on new research and insights.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 24 · Fall 2006

Selbyg situates this issue in the ongoing ELCA conversation about education that began with the 2005 conference and is feeding into the second draft of the ELCA Social Statement on Education, previews the 2007 conference (“The Vocation of a Lutheran College — Engaging the World”) at Augustana College, Rock Island, and lifts up Luther’s insistence that the church and its members contribute to their wider communities rather than retreat into self-centered enclaves.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 23 · Summer 2006

Selbyg features articles based on presentations at the 2005 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference focused on the upcoming ELCA Social Statement on Education, and urges members of the ELCA higher-education community to download the first draft (“Our Calling in Education”) from the ELCA website and submit feedback to the Task Force on Education before the October 15 deadline. He worries that the sexuality social statement on a 2009 timeline will draw more attention than the education statement, but reminds readers that, for Martin Luther and for those who work in Lutheran higher education, education is as important as sex.

Learning from Luther on Covid-19

Carl Hughes

No. 52 · Fall 2020

Reading Martin Luther’s 1527 treatise “Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague,” Hughes finds practical and spiritual guidance for a pandemic age: serve the neighbor, follow medical experts, honor those whose vocations put them at risk, and trust that even when we fail, God will not abandon the community.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 24 · Fall 2006

Selbyg situates this issue in the ongoing ELCA conversation about education that began with the 2005 conference and is feeding into the second draft of the ELCA Social Statement on Education, previews the 2007 conference (“The Vocation of a Lutheran College — Engaging the World”) at Augustana College, Rock Island, and lifts up Luther’s insistence that the church and its members contribute to their wider communities rather than retreat into self-centered enclaves.

From the Publisher

James M. Unglaube

No. 1 · Summer 1996

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.

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.

Assessing Self-Assessment Instruments at Finlandia University

René Johnson

No. 55 · Spring 2022

Johnson surveys three self-assessment instruments presented at the NetVUE conference — PathwayU at Colorado State, the Intercultural Development Inventory at Friends University, and Mark Savickas’s Career Construction Counseling Manual at Union College — and describes Finlandia’s use of the CliftonStrengths© assessment to link students’ personhood to “behaviors that benefit the community.”

Ethical Leadership: Rooted, Open, Generative, and Mindful

John Arthur Nunes

No. 62 · Fall 2025

As he prepares to teach an Ethical Leadership First Year Seminar at California Lutheran, Nunes organizes his pedagogy around three mutually-reinforcing “turns” — inward, outward, and intellectual — grounded in Luther’s mandatum dei and larvae dei, Bonhoeffer’s estates, and Howard Thurman’s call to hear “the sound of the genuine” in oneself.