When I meet with my counterparts in other denominations, they are sometimes envious that the colleges and universities that are related to the ELCA have remained very loyal to the church and to Lutheran traditions and principles of higher education, compared to what has happened to many colleges and universities that once were related to Baptist, Congregationalist, Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, or other church bodies. I know of only one college in the USA that has formally severed its ties to the Lutheran church (Hartwick College in New York in 1968). There are other Lutheran colleges that want to avoid too close an embrace by the church as an institution, but they continue to honor the Lutheran ideals for higher education.
One of the main places where these Lutheran ideals are developed is in this journal, Intersections. And since its founding in 1996, the journal has been edited by Dr. Tom Christenson, professor of philosophy at Capital University, and has been supported by that institution. This issue marks the ending of that service. Beginning with the next issue, the editor will be Dr. Bob Haak, professor of religion at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois; and Augustana will help the church with its publication.
For the ELCA this is quite a change. Tom has been an outstanding editor, and we are very grateful to him. He has done all the practical things, so we have not had to worry at all about getting the journal out; this has been outsourcing at its best. But more importantly, he has set an editorial tone that his faculty colleagues at colleges and universities across the country have responded to with enthusiasm, and he has generated articles and other content for the journal so we have had to increase the frequency of publication. Sometimes he has done cover art; sometimes he has added poetry. But in many ways this has been his journal, and through this journal he has strengthened the Lutheran identity of twenty-eight colleges and universities. Tom, we deeply appreciate all you have done for Lutheran higher education through this journal during these nine years, and we thank you for your service.
Living in God’s amazing grace,
Arne Selbyg
Director, ELCA Colleges and Universities
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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.
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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
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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Article
A Lutheran Learning Paradigm
Paul J. Dovre
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Drawing on Hughes and Adrian’s Models of Christian Higher Education and on Ernest Simmons, Darrell Jodock, Tom Christenson, Robert Benne, and Richard Hughes, Dovre sketches a Lutheran learning paradigm shaped by four deep narratives—the biblical, the confessional, the theological, and the vocational—and traces their implications for curriculum (the study of scripture, theology, and vocation), for the religion faculty’s college-wide responsibility, and for pedagogy (moral deliberation, dialectic, paradox, the engagement of faith and the secular disciplines).
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Institutional Focus
LibGuide: Introduction to Womanist Theology
Elli Cucksey
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Cucksey, the head librarian at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, recounts how Beverly Wallace’s Introduction to Womanist Theology class — the first offering of the ELCA Seminaries’ Womanist Theology Initiative — led her to build a publicly available LibGuide that amplifies Black women’s voices and gathers the resources of the course for future students.
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Article
Conciliatory and Queer: The Radical Love of Lutheran Higher Education
Kiki Kosnick, Sharon Varallo
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Kosnick and Varallo reflect in conversation on how Augustana’s Five Faith Commitments and its conciliatory ecumenical roots in the Augsburg Confession have given them — a non-binary queer first-generation faculty member and a twenty-one-year veteran — the “street cred” to act on radical love, build bridges to imprisoned and non-binary communities, and discover that Augustana is welcoming not despite the fact that it is Lutheran, but because of it.
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Article
Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives
William O'Brochta
No. 63 · Spring 2026
15 min audio
Guest editor William O’Brochta introduces the section by overviewing the ELCA’s call to civic engagement, recapping the Fall 2025 Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives conference at Texas Lutheran University, and previewing the participant essays that follow.
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Reflection
Colleges Lead Way: Curiosity, Faith, Discernment, Mission are Key
Mark S. Hanson
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Reprinted from The Lutheran (November 2007), Hanson names four marks of the colleges of this church—nurturing unquenchable curiosity, nourishing faith formation and exploration, modeling public moral deliberation, and preparing students for engagement in the world—and gives thanks for the colleges’ vocation to call us to stand outside ourselves and reach out in mission for the sake of the world.
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Article
Vocation Outside of Career: Discovering Purpose through Comics
María Evelia Emerson
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Emerson recounts building an Augustana Vocational Discernment course around G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel series, using Kamala Khan’s juggling of family, friendship, faith, and superhero identity to help sophomores see vocation as not what they do for a living but how they want to live.