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.

Community-Building On Campus and Beyond

Krista E. Hughes

No. 54 · Fall 2021

Hughes describes Newberry College’s effort to build a “culture of community” that mirrors South Carolina’s demographics while reckoning with the institution’s founding ties to slavery — and names the challenges and promising city-college collaborations that shape this ongoing work.

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.

In the Beginning of the Reformation Was the Word

George Connell

No. 46 · Fall 2017

Drawing on a Concordia faculty pilgrimage to German Luther sites, Connell appropriates John’s prologue to frame the Reformation as a movement about words — the printed page, the university classroom, the Marburg confession, the Wartburg translation, Bach’s music, and the dining-room conversations of Table Talk — while soberly noting that words can wound as well as heal.

Health Food in the Inner City: An Interview with Brian Noy about Augsburg's Campus Kitchen

Brian Noy

No. 36 · Fall 2012

Noy, Director of Campus Kitchen at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, describes the Kitchen’s four-fold program—Food to Share (2,000 meals per month from surplus dining-services food and Campus Cooking Classes), Food to Grow (an 80-plot community garden), Food to Buy (two farmers markets that accept EBT/food stamps), and Food to Know (educational programming)—and the deep history of Augsburg’s service to the immigrant communities of the Cedar Riverside neighborhood, now Somali and Mexican as well as historically Norwegian.

Mapping Interfaith Encounters

Callista Isabelle

No. 44 · Fall 2016

Muhlenberg College Chaplain Callista Isabelle uses a student-designed subway map of religious and spiritual communities as an image for interfaith engagement — one that invites students to leave their “home” stations, encounter common ground and respectful disagreement, and explore the major intersections where religion meets science, environment, and mental health.

Sprigs of Mint

Caitlin McHugh

No. 21 · Summer 2005

McHugh meditates on three light green mint stalks dying in a plastic cup of water in her window frame’s shadow, drawing a parallel between the neglected mint, the “tainted papers” of her unread journals, and the time that both holds her back and drives her forward.