Unpossible

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

Selbyg notes that while the primary source of articles for Intersections is the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, this issue draws on participants in the Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education, whose Lutheran Brotherhood and Lilly Endowment grants have been exhausted but which has been continued through DHES, the colleges, and especially St. Olaf’s release of DeAne Lagerquist to direct it. He draws attention to editor Tom Christenson’s new book The Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education (Augsburg Fortress).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Farming and Eating Locally: An Interview with Garry Griffith about Augustana's Farm2Fork Program

Garry Griffith

No. 36 · Fall 2012

Griffith, Director of Dining at Augustana College (Rock Island), describes the Farm2Fork program’s shift from pre-packaged food to fresh produce sourced from local farms (beginning with Jim Johansen of Wesley Acres in Moline), the Augie Acres campus garden tended by students in learning-community courses, the bio-diesel conversion of used fryer oil for greenhouse heat and farm equipment, and the stewardship calling that grounds these efforts in Augustana’s Lutheran identity.

Valuing Poetry

Allison Wee

No. 37 · Spring 2013

Writing from California Lutheran University as “value” in higher education collapses into “can it get you a job?”, Wee makes a case for poetry as a life-saving discipline. Drawing on William Carlos Williams, Shakespeare, the Psalms, Wordsworth, Pattiann Rogers, Mary Oliver, and her own Environmental Literature assignment that sends students outside for an hour of attentive stillness, she argues that the poet’s skill of translation cultivates the close attention, fresh perspective, and immaterial dimensions of life her students need most.

Journey Conversations

Amy Zalik Larson, Sheila Radford-Hill

No. 40 · Fall 2014

Larson and Radford-Hill describe Luther College’s Journey Conversations Project, a four-phase contemplative practice — quiet, listen, speak, respond — rooted in the Lutheran call to be true to one’s own faith while welcoming all faiths or none, and illustrate its fruit through faith journey stories from Luther students Sukeji Mikaya (South Sudan), Habibullah Rezai (Afghanistan), and Gifty Arthur (Ghana).

Otherwise

David Wee

No. 6 · Winter 1999

Wee’s September 3, 1997 St. Olaf Opening Convocation address takes its title from Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise” and asks why we gather: to celebrate the gifts of life, place, companionship, and the work we love, and to become “otherwise”—wise about the others in our midst. He honors his own St. Olaf teachers (Ditmanson, Shaw, Stiehlow, Jordahl, Paulson, Meyer, Hove, Clausen, Larson, Jorstad) and the gruff Latvian stamp scholar Gus Eglas and Sherlock Holmes expert Randy Cox, draws Huck Finn’s “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” and Flannery O’Connor’s grandmother into a single argument, and closes on Tim Lull’s expectation that a Lutheran college campus should display contentment, courage, and cheerfulness as a family member faces day-six post-bone-marrow-transplant—“the first day of the rest of your life.”

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.

The State of Civil Discourse on Campus and in Society

Terence S. Morrow

No. 33 · Spring 2011

Morrow examines the troubled state of civil discourse in the United States and on college campuses, drawing on three deep traditions — the liberal arts, Lutheranism, and the Anglo-American legal tradition — to argue that Lutheran colleges can serve students and society by acknowledging the tensions inherent in civil discourse and helping students navigate them, and surveys promising campus programs at St. Thomas, Tufts, Loyola, and Harvard.