Leaders in ELCA higher education built in the not-too-distant past a four-legged stool, upon which we have metaphorically sat together in conversation about the mission and identity of post-secondary education in the ELCA. The legs supporting this collaborative conversation are: (1) the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference for faculty and administrators; (2) the Lutheran Academy of Scholars for faculty development on the topic of Lutheran mission and identity in higher education; (3) a similar opportunity for development of senior administrators through the Thrivent Fellows program: and (4) this journal, Intersections, serving a medium for the circulation of essays related to the mission and identity of Lutheran higher education.
A lively conversation has resulted, successfully moving Lutheran higher education away from the fruitless, hackneyed, and wrong-headed discussion of whether “the colleges are leaving the church and the church is leaving its colleges” to reflection on the theme of education for vocation. Having made that shift, we now face the need to extend the conversation deeper into our institutions, among their constituencies, and to the rest of this church. Progress gained will have limited impact and potentially no long-term success unless the conversation is extended beyond its large but very limited audience of college and university personnel. Those outside the conversation still frame their thinking about being a college of the ELCA in the tired, old rhetoric of “is the college leaving the church/is the church leaving its colleges?” The work of a generation could easily be lost if we cannot successfully extend the conversation to the larger community. Ad hoc steps are often taken to make such a move. We must, however, build standing tactics to extend the conversation as leaders once built the tactics for a sustained internal conversation.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn introduces five essays from the 2011 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference at Augsburg, framing how Torvend, Anderson, Svennungsen, Tunheim, and Pribbenow press Lutheran colleges to turn outward—recovering the public character of Luther’s gospel, forming students for moral deliberation, investing in the infrastructure of civic renewal, and pursuing justice and education “off the main road.”
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Article
Critical Engagement in Public Life: Listening to Luther's Troubling Questions
Samuel Torvend
Torvend narrates the medieval “spiritual/temporal” division and the neo-platonic devaluation of the body that shaped the world into which Luther was born, then traces the disruptive questions Paul’s letters provoked in Luther: about indulgences, the two estates, vocation, and the public reach of baptism. He argues that Luther’s reform — expressed in Kirchenordnungen, social welfare reform, public schools, and writings on lobbyists, usury, and monopolies — carries a “genetic encoding” of public engagement that Lutheran colleges should reclaim against the temptations of holy apathy and Christian nationalism.
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Article
Cultivating Transformative Responsible Dialogue: Community of Moral Deliberation and Lutheran Higher Education
Per Anderson
Anderson proposes that ELCA colleges and universities embrace a project of “transformative responsible dialogue” that advances the ELCA’s commitment to be a “community of moral deliberation” and answers the LIFT Report’s call for a culture of faithful discernment. Drawing on Michael Meyer’s “liberal civility,” Martha Nussbaum, Hans Jonas’s responsibility ethic, Patrick Keifert’s ecclesiology of strangers, and Kathryn Tanner on culture, he argues that liberal education at our schools can form students whose dialogue knits together civility, responsibility, and Christian openness to the other.
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Article
Why Lutheran Colleges Need to Engage Civil Society
Ann M. Svennungsen
Svennungsen makes the case that Lutheran colleges must engage the larger civil sphere, drawing on her work with The Presidents’ Pledge Against Global Poverty, Darrell Jodock’s seven fundamental experiences for vocational discernment, David Brooks on civility and modesty, and Michael Sandel’s argument that the affluent are seceding from public life. She urges Lutheran educators to invest in the infrastructure of civic renewal so that service-learning and civic engagement remain central to the Lutheran college curriculum.
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Article
Practical Approaches for Lutheran Colleges to Engage Civil Society
Katherine A. Tunheim
Tunheim distinguishes a college’s mission from its vocation—a calling from the community—and offers four examples of Lutheran colleges “dancing with their neighbors”: Augsburg’s engagement with the Cedar Riverside Neighborhood, her Gustavus students’ work with the St. Peter Soccer Club, St. Olaf football players in the All-Star After-School Program in Northfield, and Concordia students filling sandbags during the 2009 Red River flood. She presses Lutheran educators to ask the troubling questions that prepare students to lead with ethics rather than merely with money.
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Article
Hospitality is Not Enough: Claims of Justice in the Work of Colleges and Universities
Paul C. Pribbenow
Pribbenow argues that Augsburg’s incarnational motto — “And the Word became flesh” — grounds a calling beyond hospitality to justice. Drawing on Stephen Carter on civility, Letty Russell on just hospitality, Henri Nouwen, Parker Palmer, Michael Sandel, Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, and Teresa of Avila, he describes four components of Augsburg’s practice: education “off the main road,” co-created common life, abundance over entitlement, and the anchor-institution model in which colleges become economic and civic partners with their neighborhoods.
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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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Book Review
Alister McGrath: Glimpsing the Divine: The Search for Meaning in the Universe
Don Braxton
No. 14 · Summer 2002
Braxton reviews Alister McGrath’s Glimpsing the Divine (Eerdmans, 2002), commending its twelve articulate, lavishly photographed meditations as a fine introduction to Western spirituality but criticizing its conservative neo-Barthian confessionalism, its Eurocentric treatment of non-Western traditions as “taillights” to Christianity’s “headlights,” its one-sided host-guest engagement with the natural sciences, and its metaphysical dualism. In a section added for ministerial readers, he contrasts McGrath’s self-contained confessionalism with H. Richard Niebuhr’s call to respond to all things as if to God’s actions upon us, and argues that in an era of rival fundamentalisms exclusivity must become a thing of the past.
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Article
Where Disruption and Vocation Meet: One Path Toward Teaching Reproductive Justice in Challenging Times
Lena R. Hann
No. 57 · Spring 2023
Hann recounts how a missed math class in her first college term led her into volunteer work at a feminist abortion clinic and ultimately a career in public health, and describes how she designed and taught a Reproductive Justice immersive term course at Augustana College through the disruptions of COVID-19, George Floyd’s murder, and the Dobbs decision.
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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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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
"Faithful Nones" and the Importance of a Rooted and Open Pedagogy
John Eggen
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Drawing on a student survey from his D.Min. thesis at Midland University, Eggen identifies a distinctive subset of religious “nones” — the “faithful nones” — who reject institutional religion yet retain substantive beliefs and practices, and argues that the non-binary, third-path pedagogy commended by Rooted and Open is uniquely positioned to engage a generation that has disambiguated faith, religion, and spirituality.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 25 · Spring 2007
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.