Four papers collected in this issue of Intersections represent the 70th annual meeting of the venerable Association of Lutheran College Faculties (ALCF) held at California Lutheran University in October 2006.
The topic of the meeting at CLU was intentionally and provocatively vague: Identity and Diversity in the Lutheran College. What identity? What diversity? What college? In fact, as the papers came in, Lutheran identity tended to be as much conceptual and pedagogical as historical. Differences among the colleges emerged in both the presentations and in the accompanying discussions.
These essays are observed from markedly distinct disciplinary and personal vantage points as well. Randall Balmer, the distinguished scholar of American evangelicalism and our keynote speaker, recalls his own experience as an undergraduate at a conservative evangelical college and considers that formation in light of his subsequent achievements and study of evangelical culture. His perspective from outside Lutheran higher education balances the insiders’ perspectives and may remind the reader that Lutherans are not the only purveyors of Christian liberal arts, and also that the wide world of evangelical religion is not quite as hostile as we might suppose.
Storm Bailey, our representative philosopher and a professor at Luther College, reflects on specifically Lutheran identity as contributing to notions of academic integrity, with particular attention to our understanding of academic freedom. Reporting on fruitful “Faith and Learning” discussions at Luther, he writes of the usefulness of faculty from different disciplines and diverse religious backgrounds addressing “Lutheran questions.”
In his essay, José Marichal, a CLU political scientist, observes the odd mutual failure of campus diversity initiatives to collaborate or even meaningfully to connect with those promoting service learning or other sorts of educational civic engagement. He maintains that a better understanding of both democracy and the Lutheran call into the world can and should draw these initiatives together, enhancing the education we offer our students.
Pamela Brubaker, who teaches ethics at CLU, projects our understanding of diversity onto a global screen, where the economics of globalization challenge and compromise universal human rights. As we seek to educate students for critical citizenship—a particularly Lutheran project—she maintains we can and must help them to understand and value the social, economic, cultural, civil and political rights of people.
From a California perspective (which the venue encouraged), I find it very interesting that, of the four talks collected here, the two delivered by scholar-teachers living and working “back East” seem most anxious about the academic standing of Christian liberal arts education. Professors Balmer and Bailey, while valiantly and persuasively championing the cause, assume a measure of suspicion and even antagonism toward Lutheran higher education. In contrast, Professors Marichal and Brubaker, our representative Westerners, assume Lutheran identity as a critical advantage, take diversity as a Lutheran given and proceed to define and elaborate some of the challenges. Perhaps the fact that we inhabit a region where white is a minority and monolithic Lutheran identity only a memory explains the difference. Certainly such geographical difference, if it is significant, supports the usefulness of ongoing national conversations made possible by the ALCF and by this journal. Indeed, the long series of conference topics and venues, available on the ALCF website reads like something of a cultural history of Lutheran higher education: http://www.lutherancolleges.org/alcf/history/about.htm.
A number of items that played an important part in this conference are lamentably missing from this collection, a reminder how ephemeral some of our most interesting projects and discussions often are. Four professors from Wartburg College [Cynthia Bane (Psychology), Kit Kleinhans (Religion), Penni Pier (Communication Arts) and Fred Waldstein (Political Science)] reported on a cross-curricular faculty and staff development seminar on the “Lutheran Heritage.” Then there was a dramatic dialogue written, performed and directed by their colleague Kathleen Book. Guy Erwin performed the role of Philip Melanchthon in “‘No Child Left Behind’ Meets Philip Melanchthon.” A concluding discussion encouraged classroom applications of the many ideas that we had entertained.
The 2007 annual meeting of the Association of Lutheran College Faculties will be held October 5-7, 2007 at Newberry College. This year’s theme is “Beyond ‘Whatever’: Values Based Learning in Lutheran Higher Education.”
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
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 Editor
Robert D. Haak
Haak frames the issue around the question of what holds the twenty-eight ELCA colleges together amid their geographic, economic, and theological diversity, introducing Mark Hanson’s address to the assembled college presidents, Randall Balmer’s outsider perspective on the commonalities of Christian liberal arts, José Marichal and Pamela Brubaker on diversity rooted in community and globe, Storm Bailey’s argument that being Lutheran is precisely what makes us embrace diversity, and Jaime Schillinger’s St. Olaf chapel reflection on the formative power of worship and liturgy.
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Article
Reflections on Our Shared Commitments
Mark S. Hanson
Originally delivered to the Lutheran Educational Conference of North America in March 2007, Hanson’s address describes the ELCA as “an ecology of interdependent ecosystems” and locates the church’s relationship to its twenty-eight colleges and universities in a shared mission rather than in older anxieties about church-relatedness. Drawing on Wittenberg’s Lutheran Identity Study, Augustana’s “Five Faith Commitments,” Pamela Jolicoeur’s Concordia address, W. Robert Connor on “big questions,” Joseph Sittler on grace, Walter Brueggemann on fear, Jonathan Strandjord on being “other-wise,” and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s Public Church for the Life of the World, he names four marks of shared mission: communities of free inquiry, encouragement of religious expression in a diverse society, education for the common good, and the formation of leaders for church and religious communities worldwide.
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Reflection
Currents
Jaime Schillinger
Preached in St. Olaf chapel on March 29, 2005, Schillinger reads three “currents” pulling on her hearers—Minnesota spring, the academic year’s final stretch, and Holy Week’s passion and resurrection—against poetic voices from ee cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, before turning to the Song of Songs to suggest that this nexus calls students into the rhythms of love, awakened desire, and an elusive, unresolved promise that animates academic, spiritual, and vocational search alike.
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Article
Sojourners in a Pluralistic Land: The Promise and Peril of Christian Higher Education
Randall Balmer
Balmer, a Barnard scholar of American evangelicalism reared in evangelical parsonages and formed at Trinity College in the Chicago suburbs, defends public education even as he champions Christian higher education as a “halfway house” for students moving from religious subculture into a pluralistic world. Drawing on his own undergraduate experience, his books Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory and Thy Kingdom Come, and a chastening visit to Patrick Henry College, he names three perils of Christian higher education—the Scylla of secularism (intellectual arrogance allergic to piety), the Charybdis of sectarianism (intellectual dishonesty as exemplified by intelligent design’s special pleading), and insularity—and prescribes mentors, primary sources, internships outside the subculture, and a broader, intergenerational pluralism on campus.
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Article
Lutheran Identity, Academic Integrity, and Religious Diversity
Storm Bailey
Bailey argues that one might rightly say of a college “that’s a pretty good school because it’s religious,” defending the proposition under three headings: academic and curricular virtues, free inquiry, and religious diversity. Drawing on Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden, Richard Hughes on the Lutheran tradition’s “most potent theological resources” for the life of the mind, Parker Palmer, Lendol Calder, Mill’s On Liberty, Newman’s Idea of a University, and the AAUP’s 1940 Statement, he proposes a “critical mass” alternative in which the Lutheran commitment to truth-seeking and self-critique itself requires—rather than tolerates—a religiously diverse faculty whose opposing voices are needed for the mission to flourish.
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Article
Why Diversity and Civic Engagement Don't Talk to Each Other on College Campuses: The Need for Public Work
Jose Marichal
Marichal opens with Thurgood Marshall’s line from Milliken v. Bradley and traces the “decoupling” of campus diversity and civic engagement initiatives back to their shared grounding in Benjamin Barber’s “thin” or pluralist democracy. Reviewing CIRCLE data on youth political disengagement, the limits of mandatory volunteerism, and persistent residential segregation, and drawing on Mary Ann Glendon, Lani Guinier, Caryn McTighe Musil, and Richard Rorty, he argues that only Harry Boyte’s notion of “public work” can bind diversity and civic engagement together—and contends that Lutheran colleges, with their understanding of vocation as call into the world, are uniquely positioned to build that infrastructure.
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Article
Rich and Poor in an Era of Globalized Religion and Economies: Challenges to Lutheran Colleges
Pamela K. Brubaker
Brubaker opens with two World Council of Churches communion stories—a generous Aymara potato meal in Bolivia and a gated invitation-only lunch at a prosperous immigrant German Lutheran church in Brazil—to frame the question of which stance Lutheran colleges will adopt toward diversity. Drawing on Richard Hughes and Ernest Simmons on Lutheran “ecumenical confessionalism,” Linell Cady, Ulrich Beck, Held and McGrew, the World Bank’s 2006 Equity and Development report, Mark Juergensmeyer’s Global Religions, Harvey Cox on the Market as God, the WCC’s “economy of life” / AGAPE document, and Larry Rasmussen on universal human rights, she argues that part of the academic work of Lutheran colleges is to educate for critical citizenship by questioning neo-liberal assumptions and equipping students to claim social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights for the whole human family.
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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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Article
Ivory Tower or Holy Mountain? Faith and Academic Freedom
Nicholas Wolterstorff
No. 11 · Spring 2001
Wolterstorff defines infringement of academic freedom as impairing a faculty member’s standing on account of the ideological content of her position, argues that academic freedom (like free speech) is “duly qualified” rather than absolute, and offers eight considerations bearing on religiously based institutions: Weber’s differentiation of Wissenschaft, religious pluralism within a liberal polity, the vitality of American civil society, a decentralized educational system, the “holistic” character of much American religion, the post-Kuhnian collapse of classical foundationalism and of the “generically human” academy, the fact that ideas matter, and the personhood violated by infringement (the desecration of an image of God). He concludes that the private sector offers wider academic freedom than the public, that religious qualifications are not inherently inappropriate (any more than St. John’s Great Books commitment), but that religiously based colleges too often apply them unjustly—arbitrarily, secretly, without recourse—and that the AAUP’s best service is model codes of procedure.
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Article
Why Interfaith Understanding is Integral to the Lutheran Tradition
Jason A. Mahn
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Mahn returns to the root of the Lutheran tradition — church, theology, and pedagogy — to argue that interfaith encounter is not the vanishing point of Lutheran identity but central to it, beginning with confession of Luther’s anti-Judaic legacy, working through the typology of exclusivism / inclusivism / pluralism, and showing how the kenotic Christ and the theologian of the cross open Lutherans to authentic encounter with religious others.
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Article
Fostering Moral Imagination and Inclusivity: The Role of Ethical Leadership in ELCA Colleges and Universities Amid Societal Challenges
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 62 · Fall 2025
12 min audio
Wells argues that “moral imagination” — the capacity to envision ethical alternatives, empathize across difference, and respond creatively to injustice — is the heart of ethical leadership in NECU institutions, and that anchoring leadership in this principle positions Lutheran higher education to cultivate socially responsible citizens.
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Article
A New Image for an Ancient Call: Lutheran Higher Education Amidst Pandemics Today
Caryn Riswold
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Pairing Wartburg’s Lebenskreuz sculpture with the Matthew 25 acts of mercy and the commitments of Rooted and Open, Riswold reads the calls to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and care for the sick as urgent summons for Lutheran higher education in a year of overlapping pandemics — and as a call to dismantle the structures that produced them.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Staying Connected
Mark Wilhelm
No. 38 · Fall 2013
Wilhelm frames Intersections as a tool for maintaining relationships among leaders in ELCA higher education, welcomes the journal’s new editorial advisory board, and points readers toward the 2014 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference at Augsburg and a special interfaith understanding conference at Augustana with Eboo Patel and Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton.