If someone did a word count of the articles that have been published in INTERSECTIONS from the very first issue until this one to see what this journal is all about, I feel confident that the word “vocation” would be among the top three. Vocation is a central concept for Lutherans, and this journal grew out of an effort to make it also a central concept at the colleges and universities that are related to the ELCA. Therefore, many leaders at those universities and colleges became excited when the Lilly Endowment, Inc. decided to start a major new initiative in the area of “Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation.” They invited church related colleges and universities in the United States to submit grant proposals for programs that would help students examine the relationship between their faith and vocational choices, provide more opportunities for young people to explore ministry as their life’s work, and enhance the college’s capacity to prepare a new generation of leaders for church and society. It seemed like an initiative that was tailor-made for our institutions.
And sure enough, in the first round of competition two Lutheran colleges and universities received implementation grants, the next year three more colleges were successful, and last fall four Lutheran colleges and universities were selected as recipients of these grants. We extend warm congratulations to Augsburg College, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois; Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota; Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota; Luther College, Decorah, Iowa; Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington; St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota; Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana; and Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa, for their successful development of plans to encourage vocational discernment among their students. These institutions will now receive grants from the Lilly Endowment of approximately two million dollars each over a five year period to accomplish the goals that they set out in their grant applications. An investment like that should have great benefits for the students from those colleges, and for the church.
These colleges already have an excellent track record of motivating their students to attend seminary and pursue church careers, maybe Lilly used that as a factor in their selection process. But it is important for institutions related to the ELCA to remember that we see just as much potential for callings to careers of vocational service if our students choose to become accountants, nurses, police officers or home makers. Since Lutherans believe in the “priesthood of all believers,” we can use our talents to serve God and his creation to the utmost of our ability in any setting, and be leaders of our church and of society in any career.
Arne Selbyg
Director, ELCA Colleges and Universities
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson previews this issue’s papers from the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference—Curt Thompson on “the Lutheran knot,” Carol Gilbertson on the creative dimensions of language, Bruce Heggen on theological vocabulary in the state university, Susan Poppe on the boundaries of campus freedom, and Sig Royspern’s oracular gems—welcomes Robert Benne’s response to the previous issue as a sign that Intersections is becoming a locus of continuing conversation, and confesses his reluctant consent to appear on the cover.
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Article
Do You Teach in a Different Manner at a Lutheran College? Unraveling the Lutheran Knot and Highlighting the Glory in the Theology of the Cross
Curtis L. Thompson
Thompson argues that being Lutheran means having a “knot in the stomach”—a dialectical “Yes and No” tension between law and gospel, two kingdoms, Word and world—and that this knot is held together by Luther’s theology of the cross supplemented by an under-appreciated theology of glory in which God shines through human beings and creation. He then traces how the Lutheran knot shapes his teaching at Thiel College in the Religion department, the first-year team-taught “History of Western Humanities,” the second-year “Science and Our Global Heritage,” and his work as Co-Director of Thiel’s Global Institute, concluding that only such “dialectical doublespeak” leaves him with the “at-once dreaded and delightful dis-ease of the Lutheran knot.”
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Article
Honoring the Word: Lutherans and Creative Writing
Carol Gilbertson
Gilbertson argues that “honoring the Word” in Lutheran colleges means cherishing the sacred power of human language as God’s gift across three sites—the chapel talk, the classroom of wonder, and the poem—and illustrates her argument by reading aloud her own poems: “The Refiner’s Fire and Leaping Calves,” “Late June,” “Early June,” “Sweet July,” “Good Friday,” “Pondering These Things,” “The Limbs of Words,” and “Night Rising,” drawing on Darrell Jodock, John Updike, Martha Nussbaum, George Steiner, and T. S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages” to claim writing as a Christian vocation that “incarnate[s] the unseen sacred.”
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Article
Writing Toward the Night Complete: Teaching and Working at the Public, Secular Institution
Bruce Allen Heggen
Heggen, Lutheran Campus Ministry pastor and adjunct English professor at the University of Delaware, builds on a freshman’s essay closing line—“All in all our night was complete”—to argue that even in the secular public university one can “teach hope” as a critical principle by drawing on Douglas John Hall’s Heideggerian distinction between calculative and meditative thought, the Frankfurt School’s instrumental versus substantialist reason, Luther’s theology of the cross, Parker Palmer’s “obedience to truth,” bell hooks, Lionel Basney, Shelley Shaver, and Donald Sheehan’s Frost Place “principle of compassion.” The classroom and Lutheran campus ministry together can become “communities of memory and hope” that, like the artist student’s Fourth of July, hold together danger, people getting together, explosions, and lots of fun.
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Article
The Impropriety of Jesus' Teaching: The Woman at the Well and The Vagina Monologues
Susan M. O'Shaughnessy
O’Shaughnessy Poppe dedicates her message to those who worked to put on Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues against administrative resistance and reads the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well alongside the testimony of a Bosnian rape survivor whose story Ensler asked to tell, arguing that the “impropriety” of Jesus—his scandalous recognition of those silenced by sexism, racism, war, custom, and the church—is the model for the mission of a college of the church to defend academic freedom and to break the chains of oppression by inflicting discomfort on the proper and pure.
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Poem
A Rainfall of Questions Collected in the Form of a Poem
Sig Royspern
Royspern offers fourteen oracular questions on aging, addiction to possessions, water striders, magnolias, slippery fish, moths and the moon, priests and leaf-rakers, weeds and flowers, the price of education, abandoned groceries, spiritual pilgrimage, melons and oats, similes, and the impossibility of finding a store that sells a spring wind.
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Response
Response to Bishop Olson and President Tipson
Robert Benne
Benne responds to two articles in the Winter 2002 Intersections: former Bishop Stanley Olson’s “The Marks of an ELCA College,” whose narrow reading of the two kingdoms cedes all epistemological claims to secular knowledge, and President Tipson’s engagement with The Future of Religious Colleges, whose “rather unchastened Enlightenment spirit” underestimates how loaded the social sciences and humanities are with their own philosophical and religious assumptions. Drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr, John Milbank, and William Buckley, Benne defends a “critical mass” of pervasively Lutheran colleges and calls on bishops and pastors to take the schools seriously lest they drift from their religious heritage.
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Article
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Institutional Focus
So That All May Flourish Study Guide
No. 57 · Spring 2023
A chapter-by-chapter study guide to So That All May Flourish (Fortress Press 2023), a new volume by NECU authors that develops the central tenet of “Rooted and Open” and offers discussion questions for use in orientation programs, classes, workshops, task forces, and professional development settings.
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Article
Civic Engagement, "Baylor In Deeds," and Engaged Learning
Rebecca Flavin
No. 63 · Spring 2026
6 min audio
Flavin describes how Baylor’s strategic plan “Baylor in Deeds” and its Office of Engaged Learning are building civic engagement into the Arts & Sciences core curriculum, with early Global Engagement Survey data showing gains in civic efficacy and global civic responsibility.
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Reflection
Currents
Jaime Schillinger
No. 25 · Spring 2007
Preached in St. Olaf chapel on March 29, 2005, Schillinger reads three “currents” pulling on her hearers—Minnesota spring, the academic year’s final stretch, and Holy Week’s passion and resurrection—against poetic voices from ee cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, before turning to the Song of Songs to suggest that this nexus calls students into the rhythms of love, awakened desire, and an elusive, unresolved promise that animates academic, spiritual, and vocational search alike.
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Article
A Lutheran Call for Educator Flourishing
Krista E. Hughes
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Hughes argues that without educator flourishing there is no student flourishing, traces how an exploitative “passion tax” can distort vocation, and offers seven Lutheran “third-way” value pairings — including Metrics/Grace, Efficiency/Kairos, and DEI/Priesthood of All Believers — to reframe institutional success at NECU campuses.
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Article
Gen Z is Made for Lutheran Higher Education
W. Kent Barnds
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Barnds argues that Generation Z’s defining traits — socially responsible, purpose-driven, cost-conscious, culturally open, and tech-expectant — align almost perfectly with the missions of NECU institutions, and offers concrete suggestions (from replacing “vocation” with “purpose” to embracing Gen X parents as co-pilots) for Lutheran colleges seeking to attract and serve this generation.
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Article
Called to Compassion over the Course of a Life: A Buddhist Perspective
Florence D. Amamoto
No. 47 · Spring 2018
Amamoto, an associate professor at Gustavus Adolphus shaped by Jodo Shin Shu Buddhism, argues that although Buddhism has no “caller” God, it has a strong sense of calling — we are called by the world to respond to the suffering around us with mindfulness, egolessness, and compassion — and that this lifelong journey is enriched by encounter with the Lutheran vocational tradition.