The churchwide organization of the ELCA is currently in the middle of a strategic planning effort. The ELCA Church Council has approved new statements of mission and vision for the ELCA, and new strategic directions for the churchwide organization. For the colleges and universities that are related to the ELCA, the good news is that among those strategic directions is that the churchwide organization will “Assist this church to bring forth and support faithful, wise, and courageous leaders whose vocations serve God’s mission in a pluralistic world.” The churchwide organization will clearly look to the colleges for help in moving in that direction, and will also look to the colleges and universities for help in reaching some of the other strategic directions. The whole document can be found at www.elca.org/planning/.
In setting the strategic directions, the church at large also included the following statement: “In the course of implementing these strategic directions, the churchwide organization must and will recognize and encourage the vital contributions and deepening relationship with institutions and agencies of this church.” Some of us wish they had stated “with colleges, universities, and other institutions and agencies,” but we are clearly included even though we are not named.
While these are nice goals and conditions for planning, we need to know “What does this mean?” What exactly are we supposed to do, how will the goals be reached, and how will we know that they have been reached? Right now, a series of roundtables and task forces are developing specific goals and time tables. When the results of their work is known, we will sit down and see how our activities can be focused to achieve the goals.
We feel pretty confident that the church will have to rely on the colleges and universities to accomplish many tasks in order for the more general goals to be reached. At this time we do not know what those tasks will be. But I want to assure the readers of INTERSECTIONS that nobody has proposed to do away with this journal, with the conferences on which it is based, or any of the other programs that help illuminate the difference it should make at a college or university when it operates in relationship with the Lutheran church. We suspect that INTERSECTIONS will be one of the tools the larger church will use to reach it’s strategic goals.
Arne Selbyg
Director, ELCA Colleges and Universities
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson draws on a ten-year alumni survey at Capital University showing that students most often credit practica, internships, travel-study, and service-learning—not classroom hours—as the places they best learned the university’s stated outcomes, and introduces this issue’s papers from the Summer 2003 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference on education and global outreach.
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Article
"The Earth is the Lord's And the Fullness Thereof": Six Theses Regarding Global Education at the Colleges of the Church
Christopher M. Thomforde
Thomforde surveys the breadth of global education across ELCA colleges—Susquehanna, Bethany, St. Olaf, Luther’s international students, Concordia’s language villages—and then frames its future around six theses: global education is a theological enterprise that teaches the First Commandment through dialog, wonder, and disillusionment; it necessitates coming to terms with “the stranger” and “hospitality” (drawing on Diana Eck); it is in, for, and against the world; it nurtures vocation and forms L. DeAne Lagerquist’s “cosmopolitan citizens”; it requires sympathetic engagement of faculty, staff, and administration in the spirit of pioneers like Ansgar Sovik; and it calls the ELCA colleges to exercise the gift of administration to bring greater clarity and collective coordination to the portfolio of programs offered across the twenty-eight institutions.
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Article
Service Beyond the Comfort Zone
Kathryn Wolford
Wolford names economic globalization and the growth of civil society as the two issues shaping Lutheran World Relief’s mission, illustrating with the Guatemalan storekeeper undercut by subsidized “gringo” chickens, fair-trade coffee and chocolate campaigns, and Charles Onyango-Obbo’s warning about anti-terrorism laws in fragile African democracies. Drawing on Darrell Jodock, Art Simon, and the Good Samaritan, she frames the global vocation of Lutheran colleges as inviting students past comfort zones of race, class, ethnicity, and ideas through service-learning that links mercy and justice, and closes with a concrete LWR partnership invitation including site visits, internships, fair-trade campus campaigns, and the “A Place for Peace in Colombia” advocacy program.
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Article
Educating for Peace: 21st Century Models for Thinking Globally and Acting Locally
Janet E. Rasmussen
Rasmussen opens with a rabbinic story about the one-step distance between East and West and describes Pacific Lutheran University’s four-phase “Global Education Continuum”—Introductory, Exploratory, Participatory, Integrative—developed with Teagle Foundation support and grounded in Perry, Bennett, and Musil. She illustrates intentional global/local partnership through three case studies: Barbara Temple-Thurston’s Trinidad-and-Salishan initiative; the China Partners Network with the Amity Foundation, Good Samaritan Hospital, and PLU’s Wang Center; and Ann Kelleher’s three-institution “Norway in Namibia” partnership with Hedmark University College, the University of Namibia, NAMAS, and the Ondao mobile schools for the Himba people. She closes with Daloz, Keen, Keen, and Parks’s Common Fire research and Lee Knefelkamp’s call to be “communities of peace.”
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Article
The Search for a Just Peace in a Globalized World
Munib A. Younan
Younan, Lutheran Bishop in Jerusalem, grounds Palestinian Christian identity in Incarnation theology and a Lutheran theology of grace and the cross, then surveys the Evangelical movement’s nineteenth-century legacy in the Middle East—the 1864 Arabic Bible, ELCJ schools, women’s ordination, and the Middle East Council of Churches. Engaging Edward Said’s critique of Samuel Huntington, he calls for international and local mutual-recognition agreements (including the Jerusalem Lutheran-Anglican agreement and a Lutheran-Reformed agreement in the Middle East), four marks of interfaith dialogue, and a sharp distinction between Lutheran “Evangelical” identity and the Dispensationalist evangelistic Right whose Israel-Palestine scenarios he names a heresy. He closes by proposing concrete scholarship, faculty exchange, and sabbatical partnerships between U.S. Lutheran colleges and the ELCJ’s churches, schools, and Dar al-Kalima Lutheran Academy.
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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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Reflection
Truth, Reconciliation, and Redemption in South Africa
Brian Forry Wallace
No. 13 · Winter 2002
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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Article
The University in the City of God: Beyond Dialectics and Rhetoric
Gregory A. Clark
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Clark, drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, distinguishes the preliberal, liberal, and postliberal university and argues that the liberal university’s pretense of dialectical neutrality has masked a particular rhetoric of its own. Following John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, he holds that every philosophy and institution is finally a rhetoric and that the church’s task is not to win on the secular university’s terms but to proclaim and embody an alternative city. The Christian college, then, should give up the apologetic pose of meeting secular reason halfway and instead practice the rhetoric of the gospel: a proclamation of Jesus, an enactment of Christian friendship and peace, and a willingness to be vulnerable to the violence of the world as Jesus was vulnerable to his own. Clark commends this stance to colleges related to the church.
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Article
Finding Flourishing: Teaching Self-Care as Course Content
Emily Kahm
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Kahm argues that teaching self-care, self-awareness, and stress-coping as explicit classroom content embodies the “radical hospitality” of Rooted and Open and supports vocational formation against a consumerist culture, then offers concrete classroom techniques — a one-to-five energy check-in, ninety-second silence exercises, and full-day spiritual practices — that can be adapted across disciplines at NECU institutions.
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Article
Why All This Talk About Understanding the Mission of NECU Member Institutions as a Vocation?
Mark Wilhelm
No. 56 · Fall 2022
In his valedictory keynote, retiring NECU Executive Director Mark Wilhelm argues that Lutheran higher education is, properly understood, vocation-based education — outlining four core practices recovered over the past fifty years and naming the constructive and corrective work still to be done, including a fuller embrace of DEIJ and of the diverse vocations of NECU’s 27 institutions.
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Institutional Focus
Scriptures That Inspire Work for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice
Altheia Richardson, Angie Hambrick, Caryn Riswold, Colleen Windham-Hughes, Deanna Thompson, Marcia Bunge, Robert Clay
No. 61 · Spring 2025
A companion list of biblical verses — from Genesis 1:27 and Galatians 3:28 to Micah 6:8 and Luke 4:18-19 — that grounded NECU’s drafting of So That All May Belong, organized by the four DEIJ commitments and offered as an invitation to share other texts that ground and sustain the work.
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Reflection
Finding Words That Matter (Proverbs 1:20-21; 4:10-13)
Harvard Stevens Jr.
No. 21 · Summer 2005
In a brief homiletic reflection on Proverbs, Stevens addresses Lutheran educators as “merchants of wisdom” competing with a crowded contemporary marketplace of internet, cable TV, and rap music alongside “Hedonism 101,” “Advanced Voyeurism,” and “Pure Escapism.” Recounting an evening with a Carthage student poetry club, he shares the poem wisdom whispered to him there and offers thanks for the high calling to teach “words that matter.”