Are we merchants of wisdom? I know well that we want to be mentors, teachers, and advocates, but the word MERCHANTS is helpful because it reminds us of the marketplace of values and ideas. The Book of Proverbs says: “Wisdom cries out in the street…at the busiest corners…at the city gates.” And yes, we have our own booths, well-manned and well-womanned, and from them we cry out Lutheran Higher Education, right here!
We know that the wisdom tradition of Hebrew scripture was always very cross-cultural, reflecting a wide range of authorities, voices, and traditions. This is even truer of some wisdom sources today. Can you say internet? Can you say cable TV? Can you say urban rap music?
Biblical wisdom has always offered us skills for living, but today’s wisdom market almost frightens us, because it offers its own versions of independent studies, seminars, and work study experiences—and some of the topics may as well be: Hedonism 101, Advanced Voyeurism, Neo-Racism, Applied Sexism, and Pure Escapism.
Often our students are the ones who help us face our fears. Last October, I was invited to a meeting of a student poetry club at Carthage. Young poets, rappers, and philosophers with dreadlocks, curls, and shaved heads gathered in a small classroom. They were a diverse multicultural group, from cities, suburbs, and farms. All of them were navigating together through the marketplace of wisdom, and I am proud to say, all of them were doing well in school. They were magnificent representatives of a generation that actively seeks wisdom in profound ways and who hunger and thirst for a way to live a good life.
That night we were given an assignment to take fifteen minutes and write a poem in a style that was different for us. We all wrote, and then shared the results of our creative process. That night, this is what wisdom whispered into my ear.
Being close like this—to you and you—
gives me more than words can say.
Yet it was words that made me pass this way.
Words: invitation—collaboration—inspiration—
new creation—the next generation—
right here before my eyes.
What a surprise.
No need for disguise.
Just realize—this is the prize.
Being close like this,
making words that matter…
A higher cause than chatter, chatter, chatter.
For the high calling to teach the fruits of wisdom, for words that matter, and for the promise that our students bring before us each day, let us give thanks to God Almighty, the source of all wisdom and truth! Amen.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg notes that ELCA colleges and universities have remained more loyal to the church than the institutions of many other denominations and announces that with this issue Tom Christenson’s nine-year service as editor of Intersections comes to an end, with Bob Haak of Augustana College in Rock Island assuming the editorship and institutional support shifting from Capital to Augustana.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
In his valedictory letter as outgoing editor, Christenson recounts the 1994 origins of Intersections, when he took the idea to Naomi Linnell and Jim Unglaube at DHES and persuaded the council of presidents to launch the journal on a shoestring with printing paid by DHES and everything else by Capital University. He summarizes the issue’s contents—papers from the 2004 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference plus two commissioned pieces from former DHES directors Bob Sorensen and Leonard Schulze—and thanks the student copy editors and Capital’s presidents and provosts who sustained the publication.
-
Article
Changes
W. Robert Sorensen
Writing as former executive director of the Division for Higher Education and Schools, Sorensen places the DHES within the threefold movement of Luther’s Reformation—university, church, and individual piety—and recounts how the Division cohered its work with colleges, universities, campus ministries, and schools around Joseph Sittler’s definition of education as “movement into a larger world.” Drawing on Huston Smith’s “primordial tradition,” the Namibian student program, work in India and Palestine, and the Bergendoff series of publications, he raises a twofold concern about the proposed merger of DHES into a Division for Vocation and Education: whether the new structure will signal the core significance of education in the heritage and life of the church, and whether it can carry forward the effectiveness and scope of DHES’ work.
-
Article
The Church in Education? Education in the Church? Ten Theses on Why These Questions Matter
Leonard G. Schulze
Writing in the months before the August 2005 Churchwide Assembly that will decommission DHES, Schulze frames his vision for the division as ten Lutheran-style theses, each followed by Luther’s catechetical question “What does this mean?” He argues that critical thinking and moral deliberation are in the Lutheran gene pool; that Luther’s devotion to learning was an expression of Christian vocation; that the rise of the research university and the binary public meaning of “evangelical” have marginalized church-related colleges; that DHES has been wrongly perceived as marginal; and that the reformed concept of vocation must drive the soon-to-be-created program unit for Vocation and Education. An appendix reproduces the 2005 DHES strategic planning overview.
-
Article
Private University, Public Witness: Life in the "None Zone"
Loren J. Anderson
Drawing on sixteen years at Concordia College in Moorhead and twelve at Pacific Lutheran University, Anderson contrasts the Lutheran heartland with the Pacific Northwest’s “None Zone”—Patricia Killen and Mark Silk’s name for the country’s least churched region—and argues that a faithful Lutheran witness is possible in this changing context. He proposes five callings for the colleges—an academic program shaped by both educational philosophy and Lutheran theology, vibrant campus communities of faith and learning, inclusiveness and ecumenical outreach, global vision, and vocational exploration—and closes by sketching PLU’s shift toward “partnership” congregations and a new Center of Religion, Culture and Society in the Western United States.
-
Poem
Sprigs of Mint
Caitlin McHugh
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.
-
Article
Money, Sex and Power: An Exploration of Some Controversial Issues in the Public Witness of the Church
Pamela K. Brubaker
Brubaker explores two controversial issues in the church’s public witness—homosexuality and economic life—and the challenges they present for both church and college. Drawing on Beverly Harrison, Elizabeth Bounds, Ron Thiemann, Linell Cady, Marcia Bunge, Richard Hughes, Darrell Jodock, Ernest Simmons, Karen Bloomquist, Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher, and Larry Rasmussen, and on episodes at California Lutheran University around “Harmony Week” and Bishop Paul Egertson’s participation in Anita Hill’s ordination, she argues that colleges related to the ELCA are called to educate for “critical citizenship” by hosting rigorous, bold, and unfettered debate—including debate over the neo-liberal globalism that she names a form of economic fundamentalism.
-
Article
Education as a Christian (Lutheran) Calling
Tom Christenson
Christenson opens with an imaginative reconstruction of early Christian communities as radically egalitarian, pacifist, communitarian gatherings within the Roman Empire and argues that such communities are natural homes for the educational vocation. Naming two temptations for contemporary Christian higher education—the parochial Bible school and “Generic U”—he uses his friend Sig Rauspern’s tree metaphor to insist that a university is Christian in its trunk and roots rather than in grafted-on branches. Drawing on Wendell Berry, Jacob Bronowski, Walter Wink, Douglas John Hall, and his own Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education, he names faithful criticism, engaged suspiciousness, simul justus et peccator, and a fallible, love-related Lutheran epistemology as the particular gifts Lutherans bring to the Christian educational calling.
-
Article
Gen Z is Made for Lutheran Higher Education
W. Kent Barnds
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Barnds argues that Generation Z’s defining traits — socially responsible, purpose-driven, cost-conscious, culturally open, and tech-expectant — align almost perfectly with the missions of NECU institutions, and offers concrete suggestions (from replacing “vocation” with “purpose” to embracing Gen X parents as co-pilots) for Lutheran colleges seeking to attract and serve this generation.
-
Article
From Pietism to Paradox: The Development of a Lutheran Philosophy of Education
Philip Nordquist
No. 8 · Winter 2000
Nordquist traces a four-decade personal and institutional journey from the “Protestant triumphalism” and aggressive moralism of S. C. Eastvold’s 1950s Pacific Lutheran through the 1960 Ditmanson–Hong–Quanbeck volume The Christian Faith and the Liberal Arts, Gordon Lathrop’s 1972 PLU donor address grounding the university in two-kingdoms theology, the ALC’s 1975 Concordia workshop with Bill Narum, Bob Bertram, Harris Kaasa, and Sydney Ahlstrom’s case for the “critical” tradition over the scholastic and pietistic, the 1976 LCA statement distinguishing “Christian” from “church-related” education, and Richard Hughes’s 1997 Carthage address. He concludes that dialectical (two kingdoms) theology, Christian humanism alongside professional studies (the New American College model), Luther’s commitment to universal compulsory education, environmental and civic responsibility, and academic freedom together constitute the bequest of the Reformation—“Christ and culture in paradox” remains the best approach to education he knows.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 37 · Spring 2013
Mahn introduces the issue’s six essays as parallel attempts—from poetry, economics, choral music, biology, religion, and Lutheran higher education—to resist our culture’s fact-value split, and uses Augustana’s Fritiof Fryxell, a 1922 biology and English graduate who began teaching just as the Scopes Trial ignited, to illustrate how church-related colleges have long held faith and disciplinary inquiry together.
-
Article
Redemption Through Imperfection
Kyoko Mori
No. 5 · Summer 1998
Mori, drawing on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with a friend, contrasts Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés—a peephole work whose mysterious motion sweeps every viewer into a shared, perpetual performance—with the static, glass-encased Liberty Bell as parody of spiritual experience. She extends the contrast into a meditation on rituals (comfort and consolation) versus art (truth, however painful), and on writing as a redemptive process that moves from orderly first drafts toward chaos and deeper, frightening truth—closing with master potters who skewed each finished vessel slightly so that art and decoration could be told apart. Parts are excerpted from Polite Lies (Holt 1997).
-
Article
A Lutheran Dialectical Model for Higher Education
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 37 · Spring 2013
Drawing on “The Freedom of a Christian,” simul justus et peccator, Richard Hughes, Joseph Sittler, Martha Nussbaum, and Tom Christenson, Simmons argues that the Lutheran tradition informs an open, dialectical educational model that holds Christian and academic freedom together. He locates vocation at the intersection of the practical (why are you here?) and the existential (why are you here?) and proposes Lutheran higher education as education for self-transcendence and leadership Soli Deo Gloria.
-
Article
Welfare of the City and Why Lutherans Care about Education
L. DeAne Lagerquist
No. 38 · Fall 2013
Lagerquist takes readers on a historical tour from sixteenth-century Saxony through the founding decades of Lutheran higher education in the United States to the present day, recovering Luther’s “gift economy” alongside Lewis Hyde and Oswald Bayer as a counter to the market logic that increasingly governs American higher education. She offers four propositions on vocation and commodification and proposes that Lutheran institutional vocation is to accept and pass along the gifts that come to our schools for the well-being of students, neighbors, and the world.