The papers included in this issue were first presented at the annual “Vocation of a Lutheran College” conference held at Midland College in Fremont, Nebraska on August 3-6, 2006. The next conference in this series will be hosted by Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois on August 2-4, 2007. The theme will be “The Vocation of a Lutheran College—Engaging the World.” Those interested in attending can be in contact with their Dean or Provost to inquire about application for the conference. You can be assured of productive and spirited conversation. We look forward to seeing you there.
The question of the relation between the liberal arts and the professions is one that is alive and well on most (all?) campuses that house departments associated with the traditional “liberal arts” alongside those more often associated with “the professions”—business, education, nursing, and the like. (Both Lake Lambert and Gail Summer in their offerings in this issue, in good Lutheran fashion, question whether this definition of the question is really productive!) This conversation is also taking place at the twenty-eight ELCA colleges and universities. Some faculty have been heard to say, “There isn’t much place for professional programs at our liberal arts college!” Deans and financial officers of campuses often populated primarily with students in professional and pre-professional programs would be quick to respond that if all these students left our campuses, there would be some very unpleasant and un-liberal economic consequences.
Is there a “Lutheran” perspective on this issue? The papers included here would answer “Yes.” According to their view, professional programs may be considered “second-class citizens” on other campuses, but not on Lutheran college campuses. Both Lutheran theology (see Kathryn Johnson’s piece) and Lutheran practice tell us that the professions are not just tolerated on our campuses but are integral to who we are as Lutherans engaging the world. In Stan Olsen’s mantra, “Because of Christ, the world; because of the world, vocation; because of vocation, education.” This should be good news to our colleagues in the Business Department who sometimes may feel estranged from others on campus. What they do is fundamental, not incidental, to the work of our colleges. And, if truth be told, it is also good news for the world. Our students, grounded in the liberal arts and the liberating good news, have an impact on the whole community. (Steve Bahls would style them “philosopher-servants.”) That impact is a good thing and a fact that we can be proud of as those who labor in Lutheran higher education.
A parting comment on ‘labor’: I would like to thank Matt Marohl, visiting professor of New Testament at Augustana, for helping with the editing of this issue (and I hope more into the future). His good humor and sound judgment have made my work easier and he is much appreciated.
Again, I invite you to consider submission of materials that speak to the concerns of the Purpose Statement at the front of this issue. Please submit your work (preferably in electronic MLA format) to me at BobHaak@augustana.edu.
The vast majority of copies of Intersections are distributed through an office on your campus (different on each campus). If you find this forum valuable—and want to ensure that you receive your own copy and not be at the mercy of whomever distributes the newsletter at your institution—please send a note indicating your interest to LauraOMelia@augustana.edu. You will be added to our direct mailing list.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
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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Article
Vocation and the Vocation of a Lutheran College (Cows, Colleges and Contentment)
Stanley Olson
Drawing on a childhood image of contented cows on Lutheran-owned farmland in Northfield, Olson—Executive Director of the ELCA Vocation and Education unit—asks whether Lutheran colleges are content because they draw nourishment from the Lutheran tradition, or merely because they happen to be standing on Lutheran soil. He proposes the mantra “Because of Christ, the world; because of the world, vocation; because of vocation, education,” and traces what each clause demands of the colleges and universities of the ELCA.
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Article
Freedom of a Christian-College: Looking through the Lens of Vocation
Kathryn L. Johnson
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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Article
Professional Education/Liberal Arts Education: Not a Case of Either-Or but Both-And
Gail Summer
Summer, Dean of Academic Programs at Lenoir-Rhyne College, traces the historical interweaving of liberal arts and professional education in American higher education (using the rise of engineering as a case study) and argues that the standard “either-or” framing of liberal arts versus professional preparation misreads both. At Lutheran colleges, the “both-and” relationship is shaped by a Lutheran understanding of vocation in which professional programs are integral to, not in tension with, the liberal arts.
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Article
The Divide Within (Not Between) Liberal Arts and Professional Education
Lake Lambert
Lambert, then Board of Regents Chair in Ethics at Wartburg College and Project Director for the “Discovering and Claiming our Callings Initiative,” argues that the real divide in higher education runs not between the liberal arts and the professions but within each — between teaching that forms students for callings and teaching that merely transmits content or credential. He calls Lutheran colleges to recover, across both liberal arts and professional disciplines, a shared commitment to vocational formation grounded in the Lutheran tradition.
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Article
Liberal Arts and Professional Education: A Call for Philosopher-Servants
Steven C. Bahls
Bahls, President of Augustana College (Rock Island), calls for a renewed commitment at Lutheran colleges to form “philosopher-servants” — graduates whose grounding in the liberal arts and the liberating gospel equips them for thoughtful service in business, education, nursing, and the other professions. Their impact, he argues, is “a good thing and a fact that we can be proud of as those who labor in Lutheran higher education.”
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Book Review
Assessing the Value of Liberal Arts: A Review of The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, by Richard A. Detweiler
Robert D. Haak
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Haak reviews Richard A. Detweiler’s The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, in which the former president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association analyzes 240 college mission statements and interviews more than 1,000 graduates to argue that liberal arts educational experiences have a measurable impact on adult lives of consequence, inquiry, and accomplishment — and invites NECU institutions into a further conversation about how Detweiler’s methodology applies to Lutheran higher education.
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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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Editorial
From the Outgoing and Incoming Editors
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Outgoing editor Robert D. Haak reflects on a six-year run inheriting Intersections from founder Tom Christenson, the “powerful voices” that have driven the conversation (Dovre, Jodock, Christenson, Simmons, Morgan, Olsen, Wilhelm) and the newer ones now entering (Mahn, Bussie); incoming editor Jason A. Mahn, picked up from the airport in Bob’s pickup truck five years ago, names central issues that “Lutherans on Faith and Learning” engages and previews essays by Dovre, Jodock, McDonald, Hill, Turnbull, and Jodock again.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 33 · Spring 2011
Haak frames the issue by asking how Lutheran colleges and universities understand the changing landscape of religious identification on their campuses, and argues that Lutheran theological commitments — including the work of the Spirit and the Incarnation — call institutions to create places where the voice of “the other” is heard and valued.
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Article
Called to Serve
Robert D. Haak
No. 31 · Winter 2010
Haak describes Augustana’s Center for Vocational Reflection (CVR) and its threefold framework of skills/gifts/talents, passions/values, and needs of the community. He surveys the CVR’s Working with Faith group, seminary visits, spiritual companioning, Servant Leader Internships, international travel reflection, and the major Senior Inquiry curriculum revision—then reports the lessons learned at Augustana: that multiple exposures matter more than any single program, that the language of vocation works even for non-religious students, that student-initiated ideas (like Erin Blecha’s Athletes Giving Back) often succeed most, and that the CVR will soon merge into a new Community Engagement Center.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 30 · Fall 2009
Haak frames the issue around the question of Lutheran college identity as formed in distinction from some “other,” introducing essays by Witherup on the Joint Declaration, Reuther on Holden Village, Afzaal on Christian-Muslim dialogue, Dovre on the history of Midwestern Lutheran colleges, Radecke on service-learning, and Ratke on Wilhelm Löhe — each making the claim that the “other” is an essential partner in conversation who helps us know who we are and shape who we will become.
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Book Review
The Information Deluge: Navigating the Digital Age with Recent Scholars
Virginia Connell
No. 39 · Spring 2014
From the reference desk at Concordia’s Carl B. Ylvisaker Library, Connell navigates Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete, and Howard Gardner and Katie Davis’ The App Generation, then describes information-literacy work at Concordia—primary-source assignments, Omeka and TimelineJS exhibits—that helps students move from app-dependent to app-enabled in the Lutheran tradition of reform.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: DEI, Great; DWS (Dismantling White Supremacy), Even Better
Vic Thasiah
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Thasiah argues that if Lutheran colleges and universities want to live out their commitment to the flourishing of all, DEI is good but DWS — dismantling white supremacy — is even better, and offers three Lutheran sensibilities (suspicion of self-righteousness, the decolonial shockwave of the cross, and critical thinking that can still register awe) that can make DWS a core practice of higher education.
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Response
“You Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Will Set You Free”: A Scientist’s Response
Ben Huddle
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Huddle of Roanoke College proposes adding a sixth theme to Bouman’s five—the scientific method—as a tool for knowing the Truth not available to Luther but central to twentieth- and twenty-first-century learning. Diagramming the continuous cycle of observations, laws, theories, and predictions, he argues that scientists must be ethical and that scholars in other fields must understand the scientific method (lest environmentalists ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics). A Lutheran college, he concludes, should treasure both the religious and the scientific tradition: stifling either loses meaning or significance, and the Lutheran tradition is therefore biblical, catholic, evangelical, sacramental, scientific, and world-affirming.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Mahn introduces the “Called to Leadership” issue by worrying that training for leadership has become so ubiquitous in higher education as to be nearly meaningless, and recovers Luther’s sense of leadership as service — a calling to be a “slave” whose learning, power, and wisdom belong to the unlearned, the oppressed, and the foolish — as the shared mission of Lutheran colleges to train servant-leaders.
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Article
"Annoying the Student With Her Rights:" Human Life Coram Hominibus; Reflections on Vocation, Hope, and Politics
Caryn Riswold
No. 32 · Spring 2010
Riswold takes a student’s course-evaluation complaint that she had been “annoyed with her rights” about voting as the entry point for reflection on fear of change, mistrust of difference, and right-wing extremist violence—Poplawski, Von Brunn, Roeder, and the Sotomayor hearings. Drawing on Gerhard Ebeling’s reading of Luther’s fourfold relationality (coram Deo, mundo, meipso, hominibus), Brian Gerrish, Alister McGrath, Gustaf Wingren, Philip Hefner, Mary Rose O’Reilley, and bell hooks, she argues that the vocation of the Lutheran college is precisely to “annoy students with their rights” by forming them for socially responsible voice grounded in faith active in love.
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Article
Moving Forward by Looking Back: Lutheran Vocation as Foundation for Interfaith Ministry
Kristen Glass Perez
No. 43 · Spring 2016
Recounting how Augustana students mentored her into the role of presider at a campus vigil following the 2012 Sikh Temple of Wisconsin shooting, Glass Perez proposes that interfaith understanding become a mode of praxis for the twenty-first century Lutheran college. Drawing on Engaging Others, Knowing Ourselves and Interfaith Youth Core’s leadership practices, she urges ELCA schools to develop a common language linking interfaith engagement to vocational exploration and to the wider mission of the church.