From the Publisher

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

Christenson introduces the four essays by participants in the first Lutheran Academy of Scholars as fruit of the “genuine conversation” that emerges when specialists set aside their lecturers’ podiums to speak as human beings, and welcomes the issue’s additional “Intersections first”—a response to a response to a review—continuing the conversation between Baird Tipson and Robert Benne about the paradigm of Lutheran higher education.

'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.

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.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 29 · Spring 2009

Wilhelm introduces essays from the 2008 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference held at Luther College under the theme “Educating for Responsible Citizenship,” previewing contributions from Paul Pribbenow on dual citizenship at Augsburg, Wanda Deifelt on Luther College’s engagement with civic vocation, Jose Marichal on the promise and peril of digital citizenship, and Arne Selbyg on his three experiences of being educated for citizenship.

Guest Editor

Madeleine Forell Marshall

No. 25 · Spring 2007

Marshall introduces the four papers in this issue from the 70th annual meeting of the Association of Lutheran College Faculties, held at California Lutheran University in October 2006 on the theme “Identity and Diversity in the Lutheran College.” She notes a geographic pattern—the two East Coast contributors (Balmer and Bailey) defend Christian liberal arts against perceived suspicion, while the two Westerners (Marichal and Brubaker) treat Lutheran identity as advantage and diversity as a Lutheran given—and announces the 2007 ALCF meeting at Newberry College on “Beyond ‘Whatever’: Values Based Learning in Lutheran Higher Education.”

The Perils and Promise of Privilege

Guy Nave

No. 50 · Fall 2019

Nave argues that privilege is always used in one of two ways — to preserve privilege by promoting inequity, or to challenge privilege by promoting diversity, inclusion, and equity — and uses examples from Indianapolis Catholic schools, Martin Luther, and equity-mindedness research to call Lutheran institutions to address the racist practices and policies that reproduce whiteness on their campuses.

Down and Out: First Year Students Encounter Lutheran Theology

Lindsey Leonard

No. 53 · Spring 2021

Leonard describes how Wartburg’s IS 101 first-year seminar wove the Dalai Lama, Paul Kingsnorth, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Mary Robinson’s Climate Justice into the Fall 2020 reader so the “COVID class” could encounter Lutheran theology’s call to serve the neighbor across the pandemics of disease, racism, and climate change.

Reconciled Diversity: Reflections on our Calling to Embrace our Religious Neighbors

Jacqueline Bussie

No. 33 · Spring 2011

Bussie offers three concrete recommendations for cultivating reconciled religious diversity on Lutheran campuses — Lutheran listening and the telling of stories, engendering encounters with religious neighbors through curriculum and bridge-building events, and choosing empathy and collaboration over evangelism and creed — arguing that what students fear most in encounters with the religious “other” is the loss of their own identity and distinctiveness, and that we can show them how loyalty to one’s own tradition and reverence for different traditions can coexist.

LibGuide: Introduction to Womanist Theology

Elli Cucksey

No. 56 · Fall 2022

Cucksey, the head librarian at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, recounts how Beverly Wallace’s Introduction to Womanist Theology class — the first offering of the ELCA Seminaries’ Womanist Theology Initiative — led her to build a publicly available LibGuide that amplifies Black women’s voices and gathers the resources of the course for future students.