A year from now, Lutherans around the world will commemorate the 500 year anniversary of the birth of the Reformation, marked by Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in 1517. But today, faculty, staff, and administrators within Lutheran higher education commemorate a lesser-known milestone.
The summer of 2016 marks 20 years since Intersections was first printed at Capital University and distributed among the (then) 28 ELCA colleges and universities. As the journal’s second editor, Bob Haak, would later say, it was “born in the twinkle of an idea” in the mind of the founding editor, Tom Christenson. Tom would edit the journal for almost a decade; Bob would take over for another half decade before inviting me to carry the work forward.
Intersections, along with the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, was conceived as a way to sustain an open-ended conversation about the nature and mission of Lutheran colleges or universities after they ceased to be a places that (mostly) Lutherans went to be educated by (mostly) Lutherans. Thousands have attended the summer conference, learning about the Lutheran intellectual tradition that undergirds our residential colleges and education for vocation therein. Hundreds have contributed articles, essays, book reviews, reports, poems, and homilies to Intersections—sometimes celebrating our work or arguing with one another, often asking deep and important questions about how best to educate students for lives of responsible service, purpose, and meaning.
The first essay of this special anniversary edition comes to terms with the 20 year-old conversation called Intersections. It is co-authored by the three editors, past and present, although Tom’s name is listed “in spirit.” Tom passed away in 2013, but his spirit certainly lives on in this journal. The essay quotes from his editorials frequently and could not have been written without him.
I am delighted that the other authors of this issue agreed to write for this special anniversary issue. Mark Wilhelm has given a version of his essay as the opening address of the Vocation conference in recent years. In it, he explains why and how education for vocation has emerged as the sine qua non of Lutheran higher education. Florence Amamoto contributed to the first issue of Intersections in 1996; here she looks back to that essay and the dance between Lutheran identity and racial and religious diversity that she has witnessed (and helped choreograph) at Gustavus and beyond. Kit Kleinhans positions Lutheran conceptions among other recent scholarship on vocation. Her essay suggests that, while teacher-scholars contributing to Intersections often debate with one another, their work also helps direct broader conversations about holistic education and service to the common good. Kristen Glass Perez then “moves forward by looking back” as she suggests that the attention given to vocation over the past decades should also be given to interfaith understanding in the decades to come. Finally, Ernie Simmons takes into account a number of initiatives in Lutheran higher education before making one more irreplaceable proposal: We ought to help students become “sustainability leaders” in a world whose climate and environment has been drastically altered by human consumption and waste.
I close by thanking Augustana junior Eileen Ruppel for designing the wonderful cover of this special edition, and Augustana graduate Kaity Lindgren (‘16) for her diligence, insightfulness, and care while serving as the editorial assistant. Eileen and Kaity are extremely professional and wise, even though they are hardly older than this journal.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm announces the new Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities — established in 2015 and convened for its first Board of Directors meeting in February 2016 — as a missional collaboration between the churchwide organization and the twenty-six ELCA colleges and universities, replacing former churchwide units lost to budget reductions and offering a stronger, more viable vision of Lutheran higher education.
-
Article
The Vocation of Intersections on its Twentieth Birthday
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak, Tom Christenson
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.
-
Article
The Vocation Movement in Lutheran Higher Education
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm offers a brief history of the “vocation movement” in ELCA higher education, arguing that it arose as Lutheran leaders moved beyond institutional markers (percentages of Lutheran students, faculty, and board members) and the collapse of ethnic, separatist Lutheranism to re-ground their schools’ identity in a 500-year-old intellectual tradition that educates the whole person for vocation and the common good — an educational ideal open to persons of any religious or non-religious conviction.
-
Article
Diversity and Dialogue: Twenty Years and Counting
Florence D. Amamoto
Twenty years after her essay “Diversity and Dialogue” in the first issue of Intersections, Amamoto returns to Gustavus Adolphus College to reflect on what has changed and what has not: rising numbers of students of color and international students, faculty turnover and increased publication pressures, the disappearance of the Center for Vocational Reflection, and the renewed importance of articulating Gustavus’s Swedish Lutheran heritage and inclusive sense of community in a tuition-dependent, cost-cutting environment.
-
Article
Distinctive Lutheran Contributions to the Conversation about Vocation
Kathryn A. Kleinhans
Kleinhans surveys the recent resurgence of vocation talk in American higher education — from Frederick Buechner’s widely quoted definition to Lilly Endowment’s PTEV grants and the CIC’s NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project — and uses her chapter in At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education to highlight distinctively Lutheran emphases: vocation grounded in creation rather than redemption, the given-ness of multiple simultaneous callings, and a frank acknowledgment of the constraints and “dark side” of vocation.
-
Article
Moving Forward by Looking Back: Lutheran Vocation as Foundation for Interfaith Ministry
Kristen Glass Perez
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.
-
Article
Semper Reformanda: Lutheran Higher Education in the Anthropocene
Ernest L. Simmons
Simmons enumerates the ELCA initiatives over the past twenty years that have helped Lutheran higher education retrieve a Christian understanding of vocation, then argues that the looming reality of human-caused climate change — the geological epoch of the Anthropocene — now requires Lutheran liberal arts education to prepare students for “planetary citizenship” as sustainability leaders, drawing on the classical Trivium, Luther’s panentheism, and a quantum-physics-inflected theology of divine entanglement and hope.
-
Article
Vocation at Full Stretch: Reflections on Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling and its Use among College Students
Jason A. Mahn
No. 61 · Spring 2025
Mahn engages Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling as required reading in a sophomore religion course, showing how her categories of missed, blocked, conflicted, fractured, unexpected, and relinquished callings empower young adults to perceive embodied, unplanned, and often painful dimensions of life as essential parts of vocation — and help close the gap between mission-driven and tuition-driven realities.
-
Article
On Recruiting Diverse Students, Rooted in Mission
Eric Rowell, Jason A. Mahn
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Jason Mahn interviews Eric Rowell, Assistant Director of Admissions and Diversity Outreach at Augustana College, about how recruiting students from a wide variety of backgrounds — rooted in Augustana’s Lutheran commitment to vocation and educating across difference — remains essentially unchanged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions on affirmative action.
-
Editorial
From the Outgoing Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Mahn closes out a decade of editing Intersections, passes the duties to Colleen Windham-Hughes, gives thanks to Mark Wilhelm and Augustana College, and introduces an issue largely drawn from comments by Lutheran faculty, staff, and administrators at the 2022 NetVUE national gathering.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Mahn introduces the “Called to Place” theme of the 2021 VLHE Conference, arguing that Lutheran higher education’s emphasis on vocation must be grounded in particular geographies and embodied communities — for, as Wallace Stegner put it, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
-
Reflection
Shelter in Place: Reflections from March 22, 2020
Jason A. Mahn
No. 53 · Spring 2021
On the fourth Sunday of Lent in 2020, Mahn meditates on the etymology of “shelter” (from shield) and on an email from a former student in Boston whose mutual-aid organizing models a Lutheran understanding of vocation: the upending of ego by divine love that frees us, finally, to see and serve the neighbor.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Mahn narrates a year of crisscrossing pandemics — Covid-19, economic collapse, partisan politics, and the long pandemic of white supremacy revealed anew by the murder of George Floyd — and argues that Lutheran liberal arts schools, by educating for vocation, are uniquely poised to help students respond with character and capable callings.
-
Article
Uneasy Partners? Religion and Academics
Storm Bailey
No. 11 · Spring 2001
Bailey, a philosopher at Luther College, takes up the reflex of describing church-related colleges as “pretty good in spite of the religion” and argues instead that religious commitment serves academic goals on three fronts: service as central academic purpose (Richard Hughes on Mennonite colleges in Models of Christian Higher Education), educational community (Plato’s dialogues, Parker Palmer, and Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden), and integration of knowledge across disciplines against Nelson and Watt’s “entrepreneurial disciplinarity.” He then defends academic freedom on Christian grounds by drawing on Mill’s On Liberty argument from fallibilism, the centrality of epistemic weakness in the Christian tradition, and Wolterstorff’s claim that to infringe academic freedom is to desecrate an image of God—making personal and institutional religious commitment a foundation, not a foe, of the liberal academic ideal.
-
Article
Professional Education/Liberal Arts Education: Not a Case of Either-Or but Both-And
Gail Summer
No. 24 · Fall 2006
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.
-
Article
Honoring the Word: Lutherans and Creative Writing
Carol Gilbertson
No. 16 · Winter 2003
Gilbertson argues that “honoring the Word” in Lutheran colleges means cherishing the sacred power of human language as God’s gift across three sites—the chapel talk, the classroom of wonder, and the poem—and illustrates her argument by reading aloud her own poems: “The Refiner’s Fire and Leaping Calves,” “Late June,” “Early June,” “Sweet July,” “Good Friday,” “Pondering These Things,” “The Limbs of Words,” and “Night Rising,” drawing on Darrell Jodock, John Updike, Martha Nussbaum, George Steiner, and T. S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages” to claim writing as a Christian vocation that “incarnate[s] the unseen sacred.”
-
Article
You Don't Seem Angry: Methodological Confessions Of A Lutheran Lay-Woman
L. DeAne Lagerquist
No. 5 · Summer 1998
Lagerquist, opening from a colleague’s 1981 observation about her M.A. thesis on four female abolitionists, traces her path from feminist historian and battered women’s shelter advocate through the University of Chicago’s obsession with method to a more self-conscious account of her own. The method grows out of four Lutheran themes—original sin (caution and humility), the eighth commandment against bearing false witness (generosity and forgiveness), the neighbor as “little Christ” (cooperative interpretation), and vocation (interpretation as calling, located alongside feeding the hungry and visiting the lonely)—and shapes her ongoing work on a history of Lutherans in the United States with a plot about learning to live with diversity.
-
Article
Bringing an Ecumenical Milestone Out of the Shadows
Ronald D. Witherup, S.S.
No. 30 · Fall 2009
Witherup draws attention to the tenth anniversary of the Lutheran-Catholic “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification” signed on Reformation Day 1999, summarizes the document’s claim that justification is the work of the triune God received by grace alone through faith, surveys the remaining questions raised by Pope John Paul II and the 2006 endorsement by the World Methodist Conference, and proposes a pastoral strategy for bringing this ecumenical milestone out of the shadows in Catholic parishes.
-
Article
A Lutheran Ethic of Environmental Stewardship
Jim Martin-Schramm
No. 36 · Fall 2012
Martin-Schramm sketches a Lutheran ethic of environmental stewardship organized around four moral norms inherited from World Council of Churches discussions and developed by Presbyterian and ELCA social statements: sustainability, sufficiency, participation, and solidarity. He grounds each norm in scripture and the Lutheran tradition—the theocentric doctrine of creation against rampant anthropocentrism, the incarnation against destructive dualisms, Christ in community against modern individualism, and accountability to God for future generations—arguing that this “ethic of ecological justice” offers a common moral vocabulary for engaging environmental policy debates that would otherwise collapse into cost-benefit analysis.