In this issue of Intersections we feature articles based on presentations made at the 2005 conference on “The Vocation of a Lutheran College.” Those presentations were focused on the upcoming ELCA Social Statement on Education. At that time we had before us a study document from the Task Force that is working on that social statement. Now we have a first draft of the statement itself: “Our Calling in Education”. If you have not seen that draft, I urge you to download it from the ELCA website at www.elca.org/socialstatements/education.
The task force would like you to respond to the draft. Please send them your response before October 15, 2006. There is a response form at the end of the draft document. The task force will study the responses, and then produce a second draft, which will be submitted to the 2007 ELCA Churchwide Assembly for approval. This is the way the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America establishes its policies: a study, hearings and feedback, a first draft, more hearings and feedback, a second draft, final consideration by a representative body. It is a very democratic process, but like all democratic processes, it only works well if a large and representative set of citizens/members is engaged, gets informed, and participates in the process.
I worry about how many people will participate in this process because at the same time another ELCA Task Force is working on a social statement on sexuality, with a timeline culminating in the 2009 Churchwide Assembly. My impression is that many more people care about what the official position of the ELCA will be on sexual issues than about our stand on educational issues. But for Martin Luther, and for us as who work at or with Lutheran educational institutions, education is as important as sex. It is likely that the social statement on education will establish the priorities of the ELCA unit for Vocation and Education, and that it will urge the colleges that are related to the church to do certain things and not do other things. So please, take the time to become an informed citizen, think about the issues raised in the first draft, and tell us what you think before the October 15 deadline. After an election, it does not help to say “Oh, I should have voted, but I just never got around to it.”
Living in God’s Amazing Grace,
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
Haak previews the issue’s four essays by Marcia Bunge, Paul Dovre, Samuel Torvend, and Cheryl Budlong — each engaging the ELCA Task Force on Education’s study document and first draft of the social statement on Lutheran education — and invites readers to bring their distinctive voices as professional educators at Lutheran institutions into the conversation before the October 15 deadline. He also invites submissions to Intersections and directs readers to LauraOMelia@augustana.edu to be added to the direct mailing list.
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Article
"Our Calling in Education": Working Together to Generate a Strong Social Statement on Public Schools, Lutheran Schools and Colleges, and the Faith Formation of Children and Young People
Marcia Bunge
Bunge, Professor of Theology and Humanities at Christ College, Valparaiso University, makes two claims about the ELCA’s forthcoming social statement on education: first, that it should be built on a robust Lutheran understanding of vocation, addressing four common misconceptions (vocation as occupation, as self-fulfillment, as ordained ministry, and as “vo-tech”) and recovering the breadth of Luther’s teaching; and second, that the statement should narrow its focus to three urgent areas affecting children and young people — public schools, Lutheran schools and colleges, and faith formation — rather than addressing the full lifespan of education in equal depth.
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Article
The Lutheran Calling in Education: Context and Prospect
Paul J. Dovre
Dovre, President Emeritus of Concordia College and co-chair of the ELCA Task Force on Education, undertakes three tasks: focusing on the current social context (young people’s spiritual lives, the state of mainline denominations, the family map, schools, communities, and higher education); reflecting on why Lutherans care about education (creation in God’s image, vocation, Luther’s legacy, the priesthood of all believers, civic righteousness, and hope); and considering the prospects and possibilities for addressing the calling (biblical, confessional, theological, and pedagogical legacies; the renewal of apostolic ministry, the Christian-college renaissance, K–12 reform, and the congregational education explosion).
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Article
Lutheran Education in the None Zone
Samuel Torvend
Torvend, Associate Professor of Religion at Pacific Lutheran University, argues that any ELCA social statement on education must speak not only to those raised within the cultural and theological traditions of ELCA Lutheranism but also to the diverse communities of the “none zone” — the Pacific Northwest and other regions where religious affiliation is increasingly unaffiliated. The statement must therefore equip Lutheran colleges, congregations, and schools for engagement with religious pluralism and cultural diversity rather than presuming a Lutheran cultural baseline.
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Article
"Our Calling in Education": An Educator's Perspective
Cheryl Budlong
Budlong, Professor of Education at Wartburg College, asks educators to reexamine their ‘mental models’ of what education itself means in light of the rapidly expanding literature on how young people learn. Drawing on Malcolm Gladwell, Eric Jensen, Ruby Payne, Judith Harris, Robert Slavin, and the AACTE’s Leading a Profession retrospective on the AACTE agenda 1980–2005, she calls on Lutheran educators to articulate vocation intentionally in their classrooms and to ground curricular and pedagogical reform in Wartburg’s focus on Discovering our 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. 22 · Spring 2006
Selbyg notes that both the ELCA and Intersections have undergone major changes this year—the Division for Higher Education and Schools is gone, replaced by the Educational Partnerships and Institutions group within the Vocation and Education unit, and the journal has a new editor (Robert Haak), a new home at Augustana College, a new printer, and a new design. He commends the issue’s focus on human sexuality and points readers to the first draft of Our Calling in Education.
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Institutional Focus
Pivoting to Imaginative Programming in the Midst of the Pandemic at Bethany College
Arminta Fox
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Fox recounts how Bethany College’s NetVUE Program Development Grant — originally designed around service-learning trips — was reimagined under COVID-19 into a guest-speaker model that tripled student participation and opened new vocational possibilities through the close, personal stories of alumni, alums-turned-volunteers, and community partners.
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Article
Leading from Within: Peer-Learning Consultations to Explore Our Callings and Campus Capacities for Leadership
Chris Johnson
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Johnson reframes vocational leadership as “soul work” that calls for the deep mind as much as the conscious one, and offers two practices — deep listening and a modified Quaker clearness consultation — as ways for campus colleagues to listen one another into existence. Drawing on Sharon Daloz Parks, Marshall Ganz, Parker Palmer, and Mary Rose O’Reilley, he invites readers to map their stories of self, us, and now.
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Article
Rooted and Open as Resource for Expanding Opportunities on Your Own Campus
Katherine A. Tunheim, Marcia Bunge
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Bunge and Tunheim describe how Gustavus Adolphus College has paired Rooted and Open with its own companion volume Rooted in Heritage, Open to the World — in board workshops, new-faculty orientation, and classroom assignments — and survey several Network-wide opportunities (the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, the LECNA Fellows Program, the Association of Lutheran College Faculties, the Tuition Exchange Program, and international partnerships) that give the common calling tangible institutional form.
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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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Editorial
From the Publisher and Editor
Jason A. Mahn, Mark Wilhelm
No. 44 · Fall 2016
Writing weeks after the 2016 presidential election, Wilhelm and Mahn frame interfaith engagement as the urgent and ongoing work of ELCA colleges and universities, recap NECU’s growing commitments to inter-religious leadership, and introduce essays first delivered at the summer 2016 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference under the theme “Preparing Global Leaders for a Religiously Diverse Society.”
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 12 · Summer 2001
Selbyg reports that the Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation and the Lilly Endowment have funded the Lutheran Academy of Scholars, which since 1999 has gathered ten to twelve Lutheran scholars at Harvard for two-week summer seminars under Ronald Thiemann (themes: “Finding Our Voice—Christian Faith and Critical Vision” in 1999–2000 and “The Lutheran Public Intellectual: Faith, Reason and the Arts” in 2001), and announces that the academy will move to Berkeley in 2002 under Ted Peters to take up the intersection of faith and science.