I grew up in the state of Ohio. This gives me the right to occasionally issue the Ohio disparaging wisecrack, “Everyone has to do time in Ohio sooner or later!”
It is now Bob Haak’s turn to “do time in Ohio,” as he begins his appointment as chief academic officer at Hiram College. He will be missed. No one is more deserving of the opportunity to move into senior academic leadership, but I regret that we will no longer have Bob’s talents and energy in our community. Bob has done yeoman’s work to make “education for vocation” a reality and not just a slogan in ELCA higher education. He has worked tirelessly to integrate the Lutheran concept of vocation into the practices and rhetoric of Augustana College (Illinois) and all of ELCA higher education, especially through his faithful editing of Intersections as a tool for promoting our collective conversation about education for vocation.
Sustaining this conversation is vital to a healthy future of Lutheran higher education. The concept allows for higher education to occur in a Lutheran key, even if many or most of the people at ELCA-related colleges and universities are not Lutheran themselves. The pages of this journal have helped us all grow in our understanding of the effort. The task of editing Intersections now falls to the able gifts of Jason Mahn. I look forward to working with him and moving ahead the conversation about education for vocation. And God bless him as he endures having to work with me!
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Editorial
From the Outgoing and Incoming Editors
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak
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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Article
A Lutheran Learning Paradigm
Paul J. Dovre
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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Poem
Endtimes
Dave Hill
A four-stanza meditation on the “last perfect day” when an unblemished Sun makes the cool Ocean roll—and on the relation of each questing mind to the Deep, of each frail mortal to the pulse of the Sea at the edge of the grave. “Let it die full of Life! Let its murmurs and sighs / Give the drama a meaning. Let it not, Lord, die dead.”
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Article
Gift and Calling: A Lutheran Perspective on Higher Education
Darrell Jodock
Jodock argues that a Lutheran perspective on higher education rests on three underlying ideas—that we are gifted (a giftedness that calls forth wonder, awe, gratitude, a sense of humor, and vocation as response to neighbor); that the Lutheran tradition affirms a particular kind of God who is down-to-earth and at work in the world for justice and human wholeness; and that a Lutheran “third path” can be both rooted in the tradition and inclusive of others. He draws out ten implications for higher education, from wonder as the heart of religion through liberal learning oriented toward the freedom of its members.
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Article
Lutheran Colleges, the Lutheran Tradition, and the Future of Service-Learning
Joseph McDonald
McDonald, who has used service-learning since the early 1990s and now directs the Values Based Learning Program at Newberry College, traces the service-learning movement from its 1960s socio-political pioneers (Nadinne Cruz, Ira Harkavy) through its institutionalization as classroom pedagogy and citizenship education (Stanton, Giles, and Cruz; Edward Zlotkowski; Jane Addams’s Hull House and John Dewey). He argues that three strengths of the Lutheran tradition—robust reflection as a community of discourse, Christian vocation as service infused in all roles, and the capacity to negotiate tension and paradox—uniquely equip Lutheran colleges to hold the pedagogical and socio-political dimensions of service-learning together, recovering the energy of the pioneers without sacrificing classroom rigor.
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Reflection
Dreaming God's Dream: A Sermon on Isaiah 56:1-2, 6-8
Stephan K. Turnbull
Preached at the 2008 “Savvy with Substance” Convocation of the ELCA at Central Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, this sermon by parish pastor Stephan K. Turnbull (First Lutheran Church, White Bear Lake) sets the small dreams of pastors and academics—balanced budgets, peaceful congregations, coherent midterm papers—over against the prophet’s dream in Isaiah 56 of a God who gathers all nations to a house of prayer for all peoples. Turnbull calls educators, preachers, and church leaders to articulate God’s dream of getting the world back through the dying of Jesus the Messiah and the resurrection’s first fruits of new creation.
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Reflection
Fumbling Toward Integrity: A Sermon on Mark 8:34-38, Pastor Kaj Munk, and Father Maximilian Kolbe
Darrell Jodock
Preached at the 2007 ELCA Convocation of Teaching Theologians at Lenoir-Rhyne College, Jodock holds up two World War II martyrs—Polish Franciscan Father Maximilian Kolbe, who took the place of a condemned father in Auschwitz’s starvation bunker, and Danish pastor-playwright Kaj Munk, who was shot by the Nazis after helping save 97 percent of Denmark’s Jews—as mirrors for our own priorities. Drawing on the rescuer characteristics identified by Samuel and Pearl Oliner (agency, moral independence, universalistic caring, a history of care-giving) and on Jesus’s words in Mark 8:34-38, Jodock asks how we who routinely opt out at the first sign of opposition might fumble toward integrity in our own time.
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Article
Why All This Talk About Understanding the Mission of NECU Member Institutions as a Vocation?
Mark Wilhelm
No. 56 · Fall 2022
In his valedictory keynote, retiring NECU Executive Director Mark Wilhelm argues that Lutheran higher education is, properly understood, vocation-based education — outlining four core practices recovered over the past fifty years and naming the constructive and corrective work still to be done, including a fuller embrace of DEIJ and of the diverse vocations of NECU’s 27 institutions.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Wilhelm announces his planned retirement on January 31, 2023, after serving as the founding executive director of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities, and gives thanks for the privilege of helping NECU articulate a shared vision for Lutheran higher education in twenty-first-century North America.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Wilhelm reflects on an NPR report of teenagers’ pandemic diaries and the fraught Christian history of struggling to live out Jesus’s ethic of love, framing the issue as a record of NECU institutions working out how to act for the common good through the pandemic of 2020–2021.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Wilhelm argues that the “hackneyed” expressions of higher education — “you are not just a number,” “the college experience,” “risen to the challenge” — tell the simple truth about NECU institutions even as the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed budgets, employees, and campus life to the breaking point.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Wilhelm frames the issue by tracing how Lutheran educational ideals — once a primary source of contemporary higher education — were masked in the United States, and introduces a NECU initiative that uses the case of business ethics to explore Lutheran social teaching as an academic resource.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Wilhelm frames the issue by noting that a federal court’s vindication of Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process is a win for higher education’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion — and argues that for Lutheran higher education, the commitment to diversity is an old and foundational claim, rooted in Christianity’s openness to all and reflected in the four diverse gospels of the New Testament.
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Article
Seeking the Common Good: Lutheran Contributions to Global Citizenship
Wanda Deifelt
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Deifelt draws on Luther’s account of neighborly love in “The Freedom of a Christian” and on his Two Kingdoms theology to argue that a Lutheran ethics of care fosters a sense of responsibility, accountability, and compassion that broadens citizenship beyond rights and virtues. Engaging William Galston’s typology of civic virtues, Sylvia Walby on women’s citizenship, Serene Jones on communitarianism, and Manuel Castells on globalization, she proposes that Lutheran theology equips the church to educate for transformative participation in world affairs.
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Article
Where Your Feet are Standing: Institutional Engagement and Place
Melissa Maxwell-Doherty
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Maxwell-Doherty draws on Cal Lutheran’s Hispanic-Serving Institution designation and its location on Chumash, Fernandino Tataviam, and Ohlone lands to ask how the university’s mission might shift if it depended on where its students are standing — not just where the institution sits.
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Reflection
Be Like Jesus: Flip Some Tables
Jessica Easter
No. 57 · Spring 2023
Easter argues that the example of Jesus overturning the moneychangers’ tables in Matthew 21 calls Christians not to work within unjust systems but to disrupt them — and that this table-flipping must be done in community with others who share the vision of a world where all are seen, heard, and valued.
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Response
Hitting a Moving Target
Harry Jebsen
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Jebsen, former Provost of Capital University, responds to Reichenbach by arguing that the institutions, the ELCA, congregations and pastors, students, and curriculum are all moving targets. Drawing on Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and his own fifteen years of hiring as Dean and Provost (a candidate who hoped the cross out front didn’t mean anything), he traces the drift from the “Mr. Chips” faculty who personified Dana and Midland Lutheran to a campus culture where “everybody is nice to each other” has replaced theological substance, and where MBA programs, conservatories, law schools, and adult-education programs further dilute the focus of the residential Lutheran college.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 15 · Winter 2002
Christenson introduces an issue of varied voices—bishops and university presidents, philosophers and poets, students and their teachers—and defends the T. S. Eliot cover selection (“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?”) against the charge of being too depressing, arguing with cover artist Ida that Lutherans are realists about human accomplishments and that there is a huge difference between optimism and hope.
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Article
Down and Out: First Year Students Encounter Lutheran Theology
Lindsey Leonard
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Leonard describes how Wartburg’s IS 101 first-year seminar wove the Dalai Lama, Paul Kingsnorth, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Mary Robinson’s Climate Justice into the Fall 2020 reader so the “COVID class” could encounter Lutheran theology’s call to serve the neighbor across the pandemics of disease, racism, and climate change.