A well-founded premise is that public policy is initiated by self-interest. A group petitions the city to expand public parks for new pickleball courts. Residents living in a neighborhood request that their county install a stoplight at a nearby intersection. Both of these succeed because specific interests bring the concerns to those making public decisions. Democracy is rarely this simple. Often, we are driven to public advocacy because we recognize that our self-interest is at odds with others on the same issue. The stakes are higher when the conflicting public problem ties into our deeply held beliefs. Given the opportunity, should the tools of power be used to make public life mirror our deeply held beliefs? For example, should Christians invoke a state requirement to display the Ten Commandments in public schools, require Christian prayers in school, or mix Christian theology in public school curriculum?
A central problem of democracy is whether and how individuals and groups can simultaneously advocate for personal values, while also recognizing, tolerating, and respecting the public sphere as a shared space of divergent, competing, incommensurable held values. Some resolve this by an agency of dominant power in the public space, overtaking the system with the values they support at the expense of all others that disagree. In other words, some claim that since their values are the truth and the democratic majority is on their side, then what is stopping them from transferring their values into law?
Is this how faith-based institutions should equip students to engage as citizens of our democracy: teaching that faith is a catalyst to overpower and dominate other interests in society? I suggest it is not. Rather, I see faith-based institutions equipping students to understand and promote a healthy ecosystem of democracy. As Romans 3:23 states, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Human beings are flawed, imperfectly conveying God’s truth.
The tools of faith-based civic engagement should lead students to pursue universal values while acknowledging how imperfectly humanity applies them to social, political, economic, and even religious institutions.
Unlike public universities, faith-based institutions should help students embrace their faith with conviction, encouraging them to connect how their faith can guide them in addressing public problems. Faith-based institutions must promote the recognition of humanity’s incomplete grasp of truth. The tools of faith-based civic engagement should lead students to pursue universal values while acknowledging how imperfectly humanity applies them to social, political, economic, and even religious institutions.
Christian citizens should advocate their beliefs with virtue and tolerance, even when other participants are locked in a zero-sum outcome. Faith-based institutions should promote a public space more akin to an ecosystem of interests, with a healthy promotion of the American republic. Transferring religious values directly into political institutions endangers any open society, especially when those values belong to a single religious tradition. The American founders understood this in the First Amendment, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Christian citizens should advocate for public values that can best promote shared aspirations of justice, liberty, equality, and peace among all citizens and non-citizens. Instead of mounting the Ten Commandments on a wall or prayer in public schools, we should ask whether either promotes a healthy ecosystem of democracy. Teaching self-restraint and limits is a critical part of a faith-based education. An ecosystem of democracy provides a more properly understood, respectful approach to promoting self-interest in a community of competing and often incommensurable values. It should be the responsibility of faith-based institutions to cultivate the civic virtues of tolerance, respect for the law, and using reason for public discourse; some of the virtues the American Founders understood as cooperatively unifying a deeply held faith and an active democratic participation, while optimistically encouraging strong citizens for this world, as well as hope in the one to come.
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Editorial
From the Publisher & Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes, Lamont Anthony Wells
6 min audio
Wells and Windham-Hughes frame vocation as “ground game” — the practical, public living-out of faith through civic engagement — and introduce the issue’s focus on how Lutheran higher education equips students to repair the world.
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Reflection
I am a Treaty Partner
Kyrie Fairbairn
7 min audio
A recent California Lutheran graduate reflects on how a course on Indigenous Rights and Practices, and a conversation with a former Chairman of the Lummi Nation, led her to claim a “treaty partner” identity and to challenge readers to learn the treaties that shape the lands they call home.
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Article
Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives
William O'Brochta
15 min audio
Guest editor William O’Brochta introduces the section by overviewing the ELCA’s call to civic engagement, recapping the Fall 2025 Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives conference at Texas Lutheran University, and previewing the participant essays that follow.
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Article
Leaning-In to the Civic Lessons of Our Namesakes
A. Lanethea Mathews-Schultz
6 min audio
Mathews-Schultz uses the civic legacy of the Muhlenberg family — from General Pete’s Revolutionary call to action to President Muhlenberg’s inaugural address on the “education of conscience” — to invite students at Muhlenberg College into a shared civic inheritance.
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Article
Teaching and Mentoring in Service of Civic Engagement
Haco Hoang
6 min audio
Hoang describes how her teaching, mentoring, and research at California Lutheran University — including a multi-year collaboration with the Lutheran Office of Public Policy on Lutheran Lobby Day — cultivate civic skills grounded in ELCA social statements and the Lutheran tradition of faith and reason.
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Article
Community-Based Research as Engaged Citizenship
James Paul Old
6 min audio
Old argues that genuine citizenship requires more than charitable gestures — it demands long-term, reciprocal community partnerships — and describes how Valparaiso’s Community Research and Service Center embodies that vision even amid the financial pressures threatening such programs.
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Article
Bringing Core Values to Life through Civic Engagement
Austin Trantham
5 min audio
Trantham shows how Saint Leo University’s Benedictine Core Values shape his civic engagement work — from advising a “Why Vote?” campaign and Constitution Day panels to engaging students in the Unify Challenge for respectful cross-institutional discourse.
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Article
Civic Engagement, "Baylor In Deeds," and Engaged Learning
Rebecca Flavin
6 min audio
Flavin describes how Baylor’s strategic plan “Baylor in Deeds” and its Office of Engaged Learning are building civic engagement into the Arts & Sciences core curriculum, with early Global Engagement Survey data showing gains in civic efficacy and global civic responsibility.
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Article
Fragmented in Faith: The Concerns and Hopes Found in Student Spirituality and Civic Engagement
Emma Bohmann, Monica Sitachitta
11 min audio
Two Texas Lutheran University students reflect on the cyclical pattern of low spiritual and civic engagement on their campus and argue that distinguishing Lutheran values from Lutheran practice could open space for civic engagement to become a non-optional expression of neighbor-justice for all students.
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Institutional Focus
Continuing the Dialogue: Augustana College
Sandra C. Looney
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Looney describes Augustana College, Sioux Falls, debating and renaming its values—Christian, Liberal Arts, Community, Excellence, Service—under the leadership of religion professor Dr. Arthur Olsen and the T’N’T (“Through Thick and Thin”) committee, in the wake of ELCA Region III’s “What Does It Mean to be a College of the Church?” conversations. She describes Augustana’s 56% Lutheran student body, daily 10 a.m. chapel, dual Christmas Vespers in Our Savior’s Lutheran Church and St. Joseph’s Cathedral, the Capstone classes on moral and aesthetic issues, and the ongoing work of enlarging Augustana’s conversation to include Native American, Jewish, and Islamic voices.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 16 · Winter 2003
Christenson previews this issue’s papers from the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference—Curt Thompson on “the Lutheran knot,” Carol Gilbertson on the creative dimensions of language, Bruce Heggen on theological vocabulary in the state university, Susan Poppe on the boundaries of campus freedom, and Sig Royspern’s oracular gems—welcomes Robert Benne’s response to the previous issue as a sign that Intersections is becoming a locus of continuing conversation, and confesses his reluctant consent to appear on the cover.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 33 · Spring 2011
Wilhelm notes that while the ELCA’s vocation in higher education remains vibrant, the landscape of churchwide leadership has shifted dramatically with the dissolution of the Vocation and Education unit, and expresses appreciation for the faculty and staff at ELCA colleges and universities who have stepped up to sustain the network during this time of transition.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 24 · Fall 2006
Haak introduces the issue’s essays by Stanley N. Olson, Kathryn L. Johnson, Gail Summer, Lake Lambert, and Steven C. Bahls; argues that on Lutheran campuses, professional programs in business, education, and nursing are not “second-class citizens” but integral to the institution’s vocation; cites Olson’s mantra (“Because of Christ, the world; because of the world, vocation; because of vocation, education”); and thanks Matt Marohl for assisting with the editing.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 23 · Summer 2006
Haak previews the issue’s four essays by Marcia Bunge, Paul Dovre, Samuel Torvend, and Cheryl Budlong — each engaging the ELCA Task Force on Education’s study document and first draft of the social statement on Lutheran education — and invites readers to bring their distinctive voices as professional educators at Lutheran institutions into the conversation before the October 15 deadline. He also invites submissions to Intersections and directs readers to LauraOMelia@augustana.edu to be added to the direct mailing list.
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Article
Lutheran Heritage Across the Curriculum: Reflections from a Faculty/Staff Development Seminar
Cynthia Bane, Fred Waldstein, Kathryn A. Kleinhans, Penni Pier
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Four Wartburg College colleagues share fruits of the 2006 Lilly-funded “Discovering and Claiming Our Callings” faculty/staff development seminar in Wittenberg, Eisenach, and Neuendettelsau. Kleinhans frames the curriculum and books used; Bane (psychology) finds Lutheran convictions about the value of humans, the affirmation of creation, and the universality of sin congruent with her discipline; Pier (communication arts) reads Luther as a model of dialectical rhetoric that gives educators permission to challenge students with uncomfortable ideas; and Waldstein (political science) reflects on the paradox of humility and self-confidence in Luther and on the Luther-Melanchthon collaboration as a model for the seminar group’s own work.