You may have heard, maybe repeatedly, that the Lutheran church has had a strong focus on education since the days of Martin Luther. That is why there are 28 colleges and universities in the United States that are related to the ELCA, eight ELCA seminaries, and thousands of Lutheran early childhood education centers, schools, and campus ministry sites at other colleges and universities. That is also why many Lutherans care deeply about public schools and about other education opportunities and issues.
During 2004 a task force appointed by the ELCA Division for Church in Society was asked to lay the groundwork for a Social Statement on Education, a statement that establishes official ELCA policy on educational issues. The plan is that a draft of such a statement will be debated in congregations and other church and educational forums in 2006 for consideration and adoption at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly in 2007. In order to seek input for that draft, the Task Force has now published a study document. The document sets forth the biblical and theological principles in which the Lutheran views of education should be anchored, reviews the current situation, and challenges the church to take a stand on numerous educational issues, issues which affect everyone from infancy to adulthood.
Now is the time for you to study that document and give your reactions, so that the people who will draft the statement will know what Lutheran educators, and others with ties to the Lutheran educational institutions, think is important, and what they think is right. You can get a copy of the study document from the ELCA Division for Church in Society, Director for Studies, 8765 W. Higgins Road, Chicago, IL 60631, or by sending an e-mail to John.Stumme@elca.org. You may also find it on the ELCA DCS Web site, but since it is more than a hundred pages long, you may prefer to get a printed copy instead of downloading it and printing it yourself.
Living in God’s amazing grace,
Arne Selbyg
Director, ELCA Colleges and Universities
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
Christenson introduces an issue featuring “young and old, angry and encouraging, prophetic and hopeful” voices unified by the assumption that Christians engaged in thinking and educating will ask hard questions: how to raise concerns about militarism and the new American “imperialism,” what a Lutheran law school will say about training a new generation of attorneys, and what Lutheran colleges communicate to undergrads about vocation. Such faithful criticism, he argues, is part of who Lutheran institutions are.
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Article
Mars, Mammon—and Other Options
Carl Skrade
In a wide-ranging public lecture from a Capital University Philosophy and Religion department series on “The Empire, Its Religions, and Some Alternatives,” Skrade distinguishes the military from militarism (using Oxford and Chalmers Johnson definitions), catalogs evidence of contemporary U.S. militarism—budget allocations, arms sales, the military-academic complex, post-1945 interventions, overseas bases, and Bush-era profiteering through Bechtel and Halliburton—and traces its roots in resource greed, racism, right-wing religiosity, and Augustinian incurvatus in se ipsum. After surveying the financial and human costs through testimony from Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam, Samuel Hynes’s The Soldier’s Tale, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, and Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey, he applies Vincent Ferraro’s seven principles of just war to Gulf II, reads Matthew 5:43-48 as a call to indiscriminate care, and proposes a www.religiousleft.org website to host a Christian alternative to Mars and Mammon.
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Article
Leading Students to Distinguish Between Career and Vocation: Reflections from a Lutheran Law School
Steven C. Bahls
Bahls, writing as former dean of the Capital University Law School, argues that most law students and many legal educators confuse vocation with career—asking “what kind of lawyer do you want to be?” rather than “who do I want to be?” Drawing on John O. Mudd’s five attributes of a well-prepared lawyer and Susan Daicoff’s empirical research on lawyer dissatisfaction and the “amoral professional role,” he turns to Ernest L. Simmons’s and Darrel Jodock’s articulations of Luther’s understanding of vocation and proposes five steps—reflection, assessment, vision, integrative thinking, and reassessment—along with explicit leadership from law school deans, engagement of career services offices, and leadership within the profession (illustrated by Capital’s joint venture with the Columbus Bar Association).
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Article
Luther's Theology of Learning: Discovering the Vocation of Today's Small Lutheran Liberal Arts College
Eric Childers
In an excerpt from his Wake Forest University Divinity School senior thesis, Childers profiles six students hand-picked by presidents and chaplains at Concordia College (Moorhead), Lenoir-Rhyne College, and Muhlenberg College—Nathan Gossai, Amy Nelson, Alison Schmidt, Ryan Sigmon, Julie Christianson, and Jeffrey Slotterback—as a living testament to Luther’s theology of learning. He then draws on Solberg, Mark R. Schwehn (in Paul J. Dovre’s The Future of Religious Colleges), Robert Benne, Ernest Simmons, Mark Noll, Richard Hughes, and James Burtchaell to argue that Lutheran colleges have not yet fully articulated their own theology of education and that their vocation is to embrace, engage, and galvanize a Lutheran tradition of learning rooted in the liberal arts, Scripture, the Confessions, and confident ecumenism.
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Book Review
Review of Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education
Tom Christenson
Christenson reviews Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans, 2004), edited by C.W. Joldersma and G.G. Stronks. After recounting his own early prejudice against Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and his subsequent conversion through Art in Action, he focuses on two threads: Wolterstorff’s expansive reading of shalom—not merely peace but justice, community, communal responsibility, and delight—as the overall goal of Christian collegiate education, and the influence of Abraham Kuyper’s claim of “privileged cognitive access” for Christian inquirers, which Wolterstorff demonstrates rather than declares.
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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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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 9 · Summer 2000
Christenson introduces a varied issue: the VonDohlen / Ratke discussion of the two kingdoms doctrine, Rachel Hammond’s “real gem” of a talk on her time in Ecuador (with an invitation to send contributions to the Home for Perpetual Hope orphanage via her home church in Oberlin, Ohio), Chuck Huff’s essay on the effect of liberal learning on the practice of psychology, and John Reumann’s reflection on a scholarly life lived between academy and church—and notes that the cover artist is his eight-year-old daughter Zoé, whose post-circus drawing of a balancing act struck him in light of Reumann’s opening line.
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Article
What is Required of You?: Higher Education Leadership in a Moral Key
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 62 · Fall 2025
15 min audio
Drawing on Micah 6:8 and Stephen Carter’s “etiquette of democracy,” Pribbenow describes the three things Augsburg requires of every incoming student — show up, pay attention, and do the work — as a democratic social ethic that prepares students for engaged citizenship in a fractured public life.
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Article
Freedom of a Christian-College: Looking through the Lens of Vocation
Kathryn L. Johnson
No. 24 · Fall 2006
Johnson, Paul Tudor Jones Professor of Church History at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, re-reads Luther’s 1520 treatise The Freedom of a Christian as a paradigm for the “freedom of a Christian college” amid the pressures of professional preparation. She traces Luther’s paradoxical claim that a Christian is “a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none” and at the same time “a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all,” and argues that the same dialectic frees a Lutheran college to engage the professions without being captured by them.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 9 · Summer 2000
Selbyg reports on the “Reclaiming Lutheran Students” research by the Lutheran Education Conference of North America (partly funded by the Aid Association for Lutherans), which found that alumni of Lutheran colleges report higher satisfaction with the overall quality of their education than alumni of flagship public universities, with more than eighty percent affirming that their college helped them develop moral principles and benefit from spiritual development, while also noting that parents of Lutheran high school students remain largely unaware of both the magnitude of financial aid offered and the quality of the education provided.
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Article
Why Interfaith Understanding is Integral to the Lutheran Tradition
Jason A. Mahn
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Mahn returns to the root of the Lutheran tradition — church, theology, and pedagogy — to argue that interfaith encounter is not the vanishing point of Lutheran identity but central to it, beginning with confession of Luther’s anti-Judaic legacy, working through the typology of exclusivism / inclusivism / pluralism, and showing how the kenotic Christ and the theologian of the cross open Lutherans to authentic encounter with religious others.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Haak frames the issue around “Lutheran conversations,” centered on the exchange between Robert Benne and Tom Christenson at Wartburg College’s ongoing campus conversation about what it means to be a “college of the church,” alongside Mark Wilhelm’s historical and social context, Lake Lambert’s sermon, and Bishop Mark Hanson’s short piece reprinted from The Lutheran—and points readers to the Lutheran Academy of Scholars seminar at Harvard as a place to continue the conversation.