While the primary source of articles for this journal is the papers presented at the annual conference on “The Vocation of a Lutheran College,” we now receive other submissions for it as well. We also ask for permission to publish papers based on other presentations we hear that deal with “our” topics. In Issue 17 last year we published four papers that were developed by participants in the Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education, and this issue includes some other papers by participants in that academy.
The Lutheran academy was started with generous grant support from Lutheran Brotherhood and the Lilly Endowment, but those grants have now been exhausted. Fortunately, the colleges and universities that are related to the ELCA recognized that the academy could be a very valuable faculty development opportunity, so the academy has been continued with support from the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools and from the colleges themselves. Especially important is support from St. Olaf College, which made it possible for Dr. DeAne Lagerquist, professor of religion at St. Olaf, to take on the task of being the director for the academy.
In 2004 the academy has returned to Harvard University, and the leader is again Dr. Ronald Thiemann, the John Lord O’Brian professor of Divinity at Harvard. At the academy, each of the participants work on scholarly papers in their discipline, and they also participate in scholarly exchanges about the relationships between their faith and their profession, and between religion and society, and they work on interdisciplinary papers, learning from each other both in topical discussions led by the leader and in critiques of the work each faculty member presented.
In addition to the papers presented in INTERSECTIONS, numerous other scholarly articles and books have been published by the participants based on the work they did as participants in the academy. We want to especially draw your attention to a book written by the editor of INTERSECTIONS, Dr. Tom Christenson, The Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education, published this year by Augsburg Fortress. That volume should be of special interest to the many people who are fascinated by the topics of this journal.
Arne Selbyg
Director, ELCA Colleges and Universities
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson reflects on the scarcity of time in over-committed academic lives and posts a tongue-in-cheek help-wanted advertisement for his own successor as editor. He introduces the issue’s four authors as “three friends and one new acquaintance” whose work addresses Lutheran higher education, the significance of Paul Ricoeur, the implications of being a reformation community, and the perils of teaching ethics.
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Article
Academic Vocation: What the Lutheran University has to Offer
Wendy McCredie
Writing as a practicing Lutheran, a trained literary scholar, and the associate director for interpretation at the ELCA churchwide office, McCredie articulates a vocation for ELCA colleges and universities grounded in the dialogical tension Gilbert Meilaender names between “bonds of particular love” and “a love which is open to every neighbor.” Drawing on Berube and Nelson, Marsden, Pelikan, Schwehn, Toulmin, Simmons, Hughes, MacIntyre, and Wolterstorff, she argues that Lutheran tradition resists both the easy separation and the collapse of sacred and secular, that human reason errs while God’s grace makes action possible, and that listening to the marginalized and to those outside the tradition is itself a theology of the cross enacted in classroom and collegial life.
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Article
Dual Citizenship in Athens and Jerusalem: Ricoeur's Hermeneutics and the Promise of Lutheran Higher Education
Mark C. Mattes
Mattes proposes a Lutheran model of Christian higher education that develops conversation between faith and learning while preserving the integrity of each, in contrast to Reformed, Roman Catholic, and Mennonite/free-church alternatives. Drawing extensively on Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval, his account of myth and symbol, and his understanding of truth as manifestation rather than mere correspondence, Mattes argues that issues of faith can be genuinely public; that the four phenomenological contours of dialogue—risk, listening, mutuality, and open-endedness—mark authentic Lutheran pedagogy; and that Lutheran education is best served when it charts a path between accommodationist and sectarian responses to the liberal-rationalist tradition.
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Reflection
Reflections on Lutheran Identity on Reformation Sunday
Thomas W. Martin
Beginning with an “intellectual vertigo” experienced when his celebrant announced that “today the Church gathers to celebrate the Reformation,” Martin—a biblical scholar who has belonged to four Protestant denominations—asks how Lutherans should tell their own foundational myth. He argues that the Reformation was a mixed bag whose dark side includes a century of religious warfare and the killing of Anabaptists; that Luther himself is too mythic a figure to monopolize; and that distinguishing “constitutive” from “prophetic” reading (after James Sanders) opens the way to a Reformation Sunday told “together with” rather than “over and against” the rest of the Church—one that mixes repentance for the dark with celebration of the glory.
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Article
The Ought
Ned Wisnefske
Wisnefske observes that students and faculty raise contradictory objections to moral education—that students are already morally formed, and that teachers must not form them—and argues that both share the same fear of “the Ought.” He proposes that the Ought is best encountered not in front of us but behind us, nudging us, as we exercise impartiality, sympathy, and free will and discover that the persons participating in moral inquiry deserve respect; the Ought can then reform our past formations and transform our wants, so that it is never too late, or a mistake, to be shaped by it.
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Poem
Unpossible
Tim Knopp
A new Capital University education graduate reflects on the bargain of trading childhood for “four years closer to some hidden knowledge, four years farther from what I once knew,” as the noon chimes call him out into a campus where professors and students teach one another along worn brick paths that “love is” should be “love can be.”
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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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Article
Higher Education in the Age of Trump
Daniel B. Braaten
No. 45 · Spring 2017
Braaten surveys what the Trump administration has and has not done on higher education — from the selection of Betsy DeVos and a rumored Falwell-led task force to the travel ban and expanded deportation priorities — and argues that Lutheran colleges, guided by the ELCA’s social message on immigration, have a special obligation to consider what they will do to protect their most vulnerable students.
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Editorial
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.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Mahn opens with Lenny Duncan’s observation that the ELCA is 96 percent white — the whitest denomination in the U.S. — and asks how teachers and administrators at historically, predominantly, and persistently white institutions can turn from white privilege and white supremacy toward spaces where people of color thrive and white people are re-formed into antiracist allies.
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Article
Living at the Intersection of Fear and Hope
Mark S. Hanson
No. 32 · Spring 2010
Hanson draws on his January 2009 ELCA/ELCIC visit to Jordan, Israel, and Palestine—a Hebron Quran that did not burn, fifth graders dancing at the Hope School, a conversation with King Abdullah II—to frame the vocation of Lutheran higher education at the intersection of fear and hope. Engaging Brueggemann, Sittler, Buechner, Auden, Strandjord, Douglas John Hall, W. Robert Connor, Lewis Mudge, and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, he argues that Lutheran colleges are called to critical inquiry that does not collapse into a hermeneutic of suspicion, to a “thinking faith” that resists religious fundamentalism, and to communities of discernment that work for the common good.
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Article
The Critical Role of Lutheran Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Jose Marichal, Maya Goehner, Tyler Haug
No. 59 · Spring 2024
A Cal Lutheran political science professor and two of his students draw on Rooted and Open to argue that Lutheran higher education is uniquely positioned to stake out a middle path between AI utopianism and AI doom — cultivating a “healthy sense of human limit,” resisting data colonialism, and forming students to see the neighbor rather than the enemy as the world becomes increasingly synthetic.
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Article
Professional Education/Liberal Arts Education: Not a Case of Either-Or but Both-And
Gail Summer
No. 24 · Fall 2006
Summer, Dean of Academic Programs at Lenoir-Rhyne College, traces the historical interweaving of liberal arts and professional education in American higher education (using the rise of engineering as a case study) and argues that the standard “either-or” framing of liberal arts versus professional preparation misreads both. At Lutheran colleges, the “both-and” relationship is shaped by a Lutheran understanding of vocation in which professional programs are integral to, not in tension with, the liberal arts.