What adjective should we use to talk about this issue? It’s thicker than usual, in case you hadn’t noticed, and it has more pieces than usual. But I hesitate to call it “fat” because that suggests that it has unnecessary overages, which it doesn’t. Should we choose “weighty”? That suggests verbiage both long and dense as well as important. I doubt that’s what we want to say either. Perhaps “muscular”? Someone once referred to my physique as “well-developed.” I appreciated their kind efforts at euphemism. People used to use the word “fleshy.” Incarnationists, particularly Lutherans, should have little quarrel with that. So here we go once again, fleshing out our thoughts for sharing.
This issue contains both some of the papers shared at last summer’s Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference as well as two papers commissioned by Intersections from persons who have been at the heart of the ELCA’s efforts at higher education, the two directors of the Division for Higher Education and Schools, Robert Sorenson and Leonard Schulze. We thought it was appropriate to hear from them at this point in time, when the ELCA is considering restructuring and re-prioritizing the offices that oversee higher education in the church.
Arne Selbyg insisted that I use this letter as a kind of valedictory, since I am stepping down as editor of Intersections. This is the last issue that I will edit. The editorship will be passed to Bob Haak at Augustana, Rock Island. I wish him well and I’m extremely happy that Intersections will continue under his leadership and the support of Augustana College. Our thanks are due to Bob and the leadership at Augustana for picking up the ball and moving it on down the field.
When I first took the idea for this publication to Naomi Linnell and then to Jim Unglaube at DHES in 1994, they were both interested in the prospect but somewhat skeptical about its practicality. I think they figured it was a momentary enthusiasm (I’ve been known to have such) that would soon be replaced by something new. I didn’t quit hounding them about it, and they finally agreed to take a proposal to the council of presidents. The presidents showed some enthusiasm for the idea, even if not for paying for it. And so the project was launched on a shoestring, where it’s been hanging ever since. DHES agreed to pay for the printing, and Josiah Blackmore, then president at Capital University, agreed to pay for everything else. Subsequent presidents here have continued that commitment.
We sent out a “Birth Announcement” in the spring of 1996. Here’s part of what it said:
We are pleased to announce the birth of a new publication. It will be called Intersections: Faith+Life+Learning. … Why do we need such a publication?
At some recent conferences I’ve had a chance to talk with faculty colleagues from other ELCA colleges. From them I have heard comments such as these: “Many of the faculty at my institution don’t even know we’re church related, to say nothing of knowing what that means.” “Is being church related anything more than a public relations device?” “Most of the faculty at my college are afraid of our church connectedness. They assume it implies another Inquisition and want nothing to do with it.” “I didn’t realize that we had any ‘sister colleges’ or that I had colleagues beyond my institution who were asking some of the same questions that I do.” “The Lutheran connection at our college is very vague, mostly because no one seems to know exactly what it means.” “Somebody ought to do us the big favor of articulating what it means to be a Lutheran college. The question, at our school, is most often met with a kind of bemused silence.” … It is in response to this lack of awareness, this vagueness, this sense of disconnection, that Intersections hopes to speak.
Of course people at our colleges and universities still have questions about Lutheran identity and its implications, but now they are aware that they are not asking these questions all by themselves and they have some resources for addressing them, resources provided in some part by the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference and by Intersections. Our purpose was to encourage and facilitate such discussion, to create a larger sense of community among the ELCA institutions, and to share the best thinking that we were able to bring to this matter. I think we have succeeded in that enterprise. Just recently I was asked to be of help in completing a bibliography of resources for a university’s Lutheran identity study. It was interesting to see that almost a third of the readings included in the bibliography were pieces that had been published in Intersections. Not infrequently I get an e-mail from colleges requesting copies of particular back issues to be used to facilitate campus discussions about vocation, tenure, academic freedom, service learning, etc. I am happy when such things occur. It means that somebody is reading and that a discussion somewhere is being informed by this publication.
There are some things I wish we had been able to do better. I guess I pass this list along to Bob Haak in the hope that he may be able to improve the publication in ways I was not able to. 1) I wish I had been better able to use the board of editors. That group had potential but was under-utilized. That was my fault, not theirs. 2) I wish I had been able to get more offerings of poetry and art from people at other institutions. Very often I had to call on the considerable talents of colleagues here at Capital for art or poems to fill out an issue. 3) The same can be said for essays and homilies and reflections from colleagues around the league. The journal survives not only on financial support but on the gift economy of shared ideas. That being said I do need to boast that over the 21 issues we’ve done so far, we’ve published pieces from persons at 20 of the 28 ELCA colleges and universities as well as from 10 institutions outside that group. I think that’s mighty fine, and I hope it continues. Send your ideas and proposals to Bob Haak. Let’s keep him and his editorial assistants busy.
There are three people in particular whom I wish to thank for their work on Intersections. They are the students who have worked as copy editors with me over these years. They are: Jessica Brown, Marissa Cull, and Caitlin McHugh. Intersections would have been a mess without their work. Together we learned how to format and edit an issue and get it ready for the printer. My thanks also to the presidents and provosts at Capital University who over the years have supported the publication with money, facilities, and encouragement. And to all others who have been help and support in this process a heartfelt thank you.
Tom Christenson
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Reflection
Finding Words That Matter (Proverbs 1:20-21; 4:10-13)
Harvard Stevens Jr.
In a brief homiletic reflection on Proverbs, Stevens addresses Lutheran educators as “merchants of wisdom” competing with a crowded contemporary marketplace of internet, cable TV, and rap music alongside “Hedonism 101,” “Advanced Voyeurism,” and “Pure Escapism.” Recounting an evening with a Carthage student poetry club, he shares the poem wisdom whispered to him there and offers thanks for the high calling to teach “words that matter.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Article
The Vocation of Intersections on its Twentieth Birthday
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak, Tom Christenson
No. 43 · Spring 2016
The three editors of Intersections — Bob Haak, Jason Mahn, and Tom Christenson (in spirit, following his death in 2013) — trace the twenty-year vocation of the journal itself: its 1996 birth at Capital University; its coming-of-age years of debate over institutional markers, two-kingdoms theology, and Lutheran identity; the ascendancy of “education for vocation” as the central marker of Lutheran higher education; and its ongoing identity in relation to a changing ELCA and to the broader cultural conversation about purpose, wholeness, and the vocation of higher education.
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Article
Point / Counterpoint: What It Means to be a "College of the Church"
Robert Benne, Tom Christenson
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Moderated by Wartburg College pastor Larry Trachte and introduced by Kathryn Kleinhans, this Wartburg campus conversation between Robert Benne (Roanoke College) and Thomas Christenson (Capital University) probes what it means to be a college of the church—Benne emphasizing ethos, vocation, and the Christian intellectual tradition over against secularization and generic education, and Christenson lifting up persistent vocational questions, the gift of difference, and induction into a community of discourse—and finds large common ground around hiring for mission, pedagogy that asks deep questions, and the courage to claim a living religious tradition while inviting everyone to the banquet.
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Book Review
Review of Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
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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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
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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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 19 · Summer 2004
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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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 18 · Fall 2003
Christenson draws on a ten-year alumni survey at Capital University showing that students most often credit practica, internships, travel-study, and service-learning—not classroom hours—as the places they best learned the university’s stated outcomes, and introduces this issue’s papers from the Summer 2003 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference on education and global outreach.
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Article
Women in Leadership: Obstacles, Opportunities, and Entry Points
Susan Hasseler
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Drawing on two focus-group conversations with female faculty and academic administrators at Augustana College (Sioux Falls), Hasseler traces four obstacle/opportunity themes for women in academic leadership — valuing the intellectual work of leadership, religious and cultural interpretations of gender roles, caregiving realities, and embracing a strong voice — and proposes deliberate next steps for cultivating inclusive excellence on ELCA campuses.
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Article
Why Interfaith Work is Not a Luxury: Lutherans as Neighboring Neighbors
Martha E. Stortz
No. 44 · Fall 2016
Stortz argues that interfaith work is not a luxury but a constitutive commitment of Lutheran higher education — institutions she describes as both “faith-based and interfaith-dependent.” Reading the parable of the Good Samaritan as both an intra-faith and inter-faith encounter, she offers a four-fold matrix of theological reflection, spiritual engagement, social action, and everyday experience as portals into the work of being neighbor.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 10 · Fall 2000
Christenson recommends the St. Olaf 125th-anniversary volume Called to Serve—edited by Pamela Schwandt with Gary de Krey and L. DeAne Lagerquist—particularly Walter Sundberg’s “What Does It Mean To be Lutheran?” and Darrell Jodock’s “The Lutheran Tradition and the Liberal Arts College.” He notes that the volume’s biographical sketches of Lars Boe, F. Melius Christiansen, Ole Rolvaag, Emil Ellingson, Agnes Larson, John Berntsen, Arne Flaten, and Howard and Edna Hong show, against an outsourcing age, that the life of an institution like St. Olaf is the committed life of the people who work there.
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Article
The Vocation of a Lutheran College
L. DeAne Lagerquist
No. 12 · Summer 2001
Lagerquist places the twenty-eight ELCA-affiliated colleges in the context of American higher education from Harvard (1636) through the “old time college,” the post-Civil-War research university, and the postwar expansion—drawing on Christopher Lucas, Philip Schaff’s Neo-Lutheran/moderate/Old Lutheran categorization, Sydney Ahlstrom’s scholastic/pietistic/critical currents, Luther’s appeal to the German nobility, Lewis Hyde’s gift economy, and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. She proposes five characteristic practices (the school as learning community, study of Bible and Christian tradition, participation in the arts as makers and audience, application of learning in service, and on-campus Christian worship) grounded in Lutheran teaching about grace, image-and-fall, gratitude, and revelation through created “masks,” and four virtues these practices engender in graduates—loving gratitude, faithful wisdom, bold freedom, and hopeful humility.
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Article
Civic Engagement, "Baylor In Deeds," and Engaged Learning
Rebecca Flavin
No. 63 · Spring 2026
6 min audio
Flavin describes how Baylor’s strategic plan “Baylor in Deeds” and its Office of Engaged Learning are building civic engagement into the Arts & Sciences core curriculum, with early Global Engagement Survey data showing gains in civic efficacy and global civic responsibility.
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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.