From the Editor

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

Selbyg explains that the four essays in this issue grew out of the first Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education—a two-week seminar funded by the Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation and the Lilly Endowment, led for its first three years by Dr. Ronald Thiemann of Harvard Divinity School—whose official theme “Finding Our Voice—Christian Faith and Critical Vision” became informally “What’s Faith Got To Do With It?”

'In, With, and Under:' The Tradition and the Teaching of Christian Ethics

Pamela K. Brubaker

Brubaker describes how she teaches Introduction to Christian Ethics at California Lutheran University—a religiously diverse classroom where about 30% of students are Lutheran, 30% Roman Catholic, and many are “unchurched”—as a community of moral discourse rooted in the Lutheran dialectic of faith and reason. Drawing on Larry Rasmussen and Bruce Birch, Elizabeth Bettenhausen, Roger Crook, and Robert Benne’s typology of “Hot and Cool Connections” between church and politics, she walks through her course’s units on human sexuality, economic life, and war and peace—including the Bomb Shelter simulation, a mock Disney stockholders meeting on sweatshops, and a Congressional hearing on the School of the Americas—to show how ELCA social statements function as case studies in critical inquiry and education for citizenship.

Impelled to Pluralism: Thoughts About Teaching in a Lutheran University

Jim Huffman

Huffman traces his personal journey through three stages of faith—the “comfortable Christ” of his Midwestern Christian childhood, Clark Pinnock’s “faith principle” of accessible salvation, and finally Christ as the “humble teacher”—to a pluralism that rejects religious triumphalism without abandoning Christian commitment. Drawing on Diana Eck, Wesley Ariarajah, John Cobb, the Catholic novelist Endo Shusaku, and the histories of Confucian China and imperial Japan, he then describes how this commitment shapes his teaching of East Asian religion and nationalism at Wittenberg University: insisting on respectful language, working sympathetically through doctrines like Buddhist non-attachment, and helping students see the pernicious effects of triumphalism in both religious and political life.

Making Dry Bones Stand: Lutheran Higher Education at Century's End

Diane Scholl

Scholl reads John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” the banishment of Anne Hutchinson, de Crevecoeur’s American farmer, Olaudah Equiano, Phyllis Wheatley, and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter alongside Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones to ask how a Lutheran college can be a community that holds difference and commonality together. Drawing on Ernest Simmons’s warning against collapsing into either dogmatic absolutism or thoroughgoing relativism and Bruce Reichenbach’s companion essay in this issue, she identifies five features of shared life at a Lutheran college—the liberal arts, political process, the arts, the community of caring, and the recognition of difference and the right to dissent—and argues that the necessary tension between individualism and corporate identity, framed by theological vision, is “our best legacy and our best hope for the future.”

Lutheran Identity and Diversity in Education

Bruce Reichenbach

Reichenbach applies the theological taxonomy of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism to Lutheran colleges and argues that institutions self-consciously committed to inclusivism must hold a non-negotiable theological core in paradoxical tension with intentional diversity. Drawing on Richard Hughes, Darrell Jodock, Gilbert Meilaender, Robert Benne, and Mark Schwehn, he surveys the theological themes Lutheran writers identify as identity-forming—the four solas, law and Gospel, two kingdoms, vocation, simultaneously saint and sinner, the theology of the cross—and proposes that diversity at an inclusivist Lutheran college is to be employed in service of educating “head, hands, and heart,” maintained through a critical mass of faculty and staff who carry the “DNA of the school.”

Emily Dickinson in Columbus, Ohio

Caitlin McHugh

McHugh imagines Emily Dickinson waking up on a COTA bus to find “the world had ended, and her violets were gone forever,” then escaping the crowd to wander High Street, taste “actual brewed liquor,” quit “the act of reclusive-drama queen-ghost,” and finally smash a bouquet of violets when she realizes that “Beauty had not stopped for her death, but crawled bravely onward.”

Response to Robert Benne

Baird Tipson

Tipson responds to Robert Benne’s comments in the previous issue about his review essay of The Future of Religious Colleges, affirming their fundamental agreement that the Enlightenment epistemology dominant in higher education poses the most serious threat to the vitality of Lutheran colleges. Using the example of lecturing on early Mormon history and the Book of Mormon, he concedes that the methodological “solvent” of Enlightenment historiography acts on Christian as well as Mormon faith claims, and concludes that while H. Richard Niebuhr’s “inner” and “outer” history and Walter Brueggemann’s approach in The Theology of the Old Testament are comforting to believers, they do not offer an epistemology that can stand alongside the Enlightenment model in evaluating truth claims in the academy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Skeptical Theologian's Dictionary

Carl Skrade, Spencer Porter

No. 4 · Winter 1998

Porter and Skrade offer selections from a mock-lexicon of theological terms: answer, church, faith, God, grace, hope, justification, love, prayer, sin, soul, and theology, among others. Each entry begins with a standard definition and then unsettles it—answer reminds the reader that in theology and poetry the questions matter more than their answers; church alternates between “the mystical Body of Christ” and ordinary human gatherings whose machinery often obscures the gospel; God is the One whose name we are told not to take in vain and yet whose name we keep using; prayer is communion with God yet often degenerates into a list of demands. The form’s irony exposes the gap between the language of theology and its lived realities—a sober, witty corrective for Lutheran classrooms and chapels alike.

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.

Views on Flourishing After the Age of Roe

Caryn Riswold, Mary J. Streufert

No. 57 · Spring 2023

Riswold and Streufert reflect on the Radcliffe Institute’s January 2023 conference “The Age of Roe” and argue that the ELCA’s 1991 Social Statement on Abortion and its 2019 statement Faith, Sexism, and Justice offer Lutheran higher education a third way to approach reproductive justice grounded in serving the neighbor so that all may flourish.

The Neglected Miracle of Pentecost

Susan M. O'Shaughnessy

No. 32 · Spring 2010

O’Shaughnessy, in a homily delivered at Concordia College in 2008, reads the Pentecost narrative of Acts 2 through Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman’s 1983 critique of white feminism’s cultural imperialism. She argues that the miracle is not the disciples’ speaking but the immigrant Jews’ hearing—and that the writer of Acts withholds the content of what was said precisely to teach disciples that people of privilege know less than the foreigner, the immigrant, the oppressed, the woman, the child, and must learn to listen in new languages before they can speak.

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.

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.