From the Publisher

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

Christenson introduces the issue’s contents—papers from the 1998 Vocation conference by Cheryl Ney and Robert Scholz, a response by Jennifer Sacher Wiley, an interview with four Capital University faculty about Cuba, a meditation by St. Olaf senior Erik Haaland, and the journal’s first letter to the editor—and commends the Mount Mary College volume Wagering on Transcendence as a model of a faculty community sustained by Friday-afternoon conversation over a glass of wine.

Rooting Science in Empathy: Growing Towards a Sustainable Science Practice for the 21st Century

Cheryl L. Ney

Ney, a DNA biochemist turned feminist science educator at Capital University, traces her own search for the “grounding” of teaching from Ernest Boyer’s scholarship of teaching through Cathleen Loving’s Scientific Theory Profile, Evelyn Fox-Keller’s critiques of science as “truly masculine philosophy” and her biography of Barbara McClintock (“A Feeling for the Organism”), and Arnold Pacey’s definition of science as a web of technical, organizational, and cultural practice. Drawing on the Dutch Science Shops, the Loka Institute’s community-based research, and academic service learning, she calls for “sustainable science practice” rooted in empathy and asks whether Lutheran institutions have the courage to claim an institutional freedom of vision rather than reduce themselves to preparation for the job market.

How Can We Keep From Singing?

Robert Scholz

Scholz, professor of music at St. Olaf, responds to Tom Christenson’s “Freedom of a Christian” by walking through his own Nunc dimittis for the St. Olaf Christmas Festival, an Elderhostel choir of singers aged 60 to 95, and the four liberating arts (enablement and change, melioristic, embodying, and critical) as they shape conducting, composition, and music education. He defends the fine arts and folk traditions over “contemporary Christian” soft pop-rock and taped accompaniments, citing Luther’s preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae and the family of God’s need to interact in song against the virtual community of TV evangelism and the Crystal Cathedrals of the air.

Some Personal Reflections on the ELCA Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, 1998

Jennifer Sacher Wiley

Sacher Wiley, a Unitarian Universalist with one Jewish parent and a first-year music faculty member at Susquehanna, reflects on common-ness and other-ness at the 1998 conference—Tom Christenson’s weaver’s warp and Charles Ives’s essay on American music—and proposes four markers of group identity. Against the fear of secularization expressed by some attendees, she suggests that “Christian” might be defined less by belief in Christ as Savior than by living a vocation as Jesus lived, with Cheryl Ney offered as an example of a “working prophet,” or “little Christ,” regardless of specific belief in the Trinity.

The Face of the Neighbor: An Interview with Four Capital University Faculty About Their Recent Visit to Cuba

Brian Forry Wallace, Michael Yosha, Reg Dyck, Susan Narita

Four Capital University faculty—political scientist Brian Wallace (returning to Cuba a third time after the 1994 boat lift), English professor Reg Dyck, ESL teacher Susan Narita, and political scientist Michael Yosha—recount their summer 1998 trip with Pastors for Peace, describing Cuban priorities of education, health care, and military (in that order), the cultural richness of Havana from sixteenth-century cloisters to Miramar, the Cuban Foreign Service’s vision of a Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, the counter-productive U.S. embargo (including its effect on kidney dialysis machines), Castro’s 1991 reconciliation with religious communities, and a recurrent image of a little girl named Marguerite singing at a school for amputee and terminally ill children. The interview was conducted by Capital senior Jessica Brown and Tom Christenson.

Meditation—Band Chapel Service, St. Olaf College

Erik Haaland

Haaland, a St. Olaf senior, offers a brief Band Chapel meditation that defines art as “the expression of what is deeply human through the manipulation of the physical world” and defends worship—architecture, stained glass, music, eloquence—as an art form requiring our best and most sincere efforts. When the God we worship and the salvation we proclaim do not seem near, artful worship offers not propositions but something real and tangible to hold on to.

Letters to the Editor

The journal’s first letter to the editor: Pastor John L. Vaswig of Spokane, a Pacific Lutheran University alumnus and member of the PLU Board of Regents, writes after reading James Tunstead Burtchaell’s The Dying Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches to ask whether church-related institutions, in their effort to be open and tolerant, have abandoned a compelling word of hope and forgiveness in Jesus Christ.

From Alien to Citizen

Arne Selbyg

No. 29 · Spring 2009

Selbyg reflects on three experiences of being educated for citizenship—growing up in Norway under the legacy of Lutheran pastors and public school teachers who resisted the Nazi occupation, arriving in America as a resident alien, and becoming a naturalized American citizen—and proposes the jazz ensemble as a better metaphor for American society than the melting pot, one in which different citizens learn skills, study other instruments, and dialog with one another in service to the common music.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 27 · Spring 2008

Selbyg, retiring this summer as Director for ELCA Colleges and Universities, reflects on his decade serving as spokesperson between the church and its twenty-eight colleges and universities, and argues that the link between the colleges and the church has grown stronger over the last ten years — sustained by supportive church leaders like Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, and a Lutheran theology of higher education whose principles (questioning authority, returning to the sources, including the excluded, serving the neighbor) remain a strong basis for operating colleges and universities in the twenty-first century.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 26 · Fall 2007

Selbyg notes that, while a stated purpose of Intersections over its twelve years and twenty-six issues has been the intersection of faith, learning, and teaching, surprisingly few articles have addressed how Lutheran faculty teach and why — and credits the editor for assembling essays from authors whose teaching has benefited from the ELCA Wittenberg Center, on the eve of the City of Wittenberg’s “Luther Decade” leading up to the 2017 Reformation anniversary.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 25 · Spring 2007

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.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 24 · Fall 2006

Selbyg situates this issue in the ongoing ELCA conversation about education that began with the 2005 conference and is feeding into the second draft of the ELCA Social Statement on Education, previews the 2007 conference (“The Vocation of a Lutheran College — Engaging the World”) at Augustana College, Rock Island, and lifts up Luther’s insistence that the church and its members contribute to their wider communities rather than retreat into self-centered enclaves.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 23 · Summer 2006

Selbyg features articles based on presentations at the 2005 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference focused on the upcoming ELCA Social Statement on Education, and urges members of the ELCA higher-education community to download the first draft (“Our Calling in Education”) from the ELCA website and submit feedback to the Task Force on Education before the October 15 deadline. He worries that the sexuality social statement on a 2009 timeline will draw more attention than the education statement, but reminds readers that, for Martin Luther and for those who work in Lutheran higher education, education is as important as sex.

Response to Bishop Olson and President Tipson

Robert Benne

No. 16 · Winter 2003

Benne responds to two articles in the Winter 2002 Intersections: former Bishop Stanley Olson’s “The Marks of an ELCA College,” whose narrow reading of the two kingdoms cedes all epistemological claims to secular knowledge, and President Tipson’s engagement with The Future of Religious Colleges, whose “rather unchastened Enlightenment spirit” underestimates how loaded the social sciences and humanities are with their own philosophical and religious assumptions. Drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr, John Milbank, and William Buckley, Benne defends a “critical mass” of pervasively Lutheran colleges and calls on bishops and pastors to take the schools seriously lest they drift from their religious heritage.

Mission and Hiring in the Christian College

Bruce Reichenbach

No. 3 · Summer 1997

Reichenbach of Augsburg argues that the Christian or Church-related college’s mission to educate the whole person from a perspective of Christian faith and values can only succeed through intentional hiring of a “critical mass” of faculty, administrators, and staff committed to that mission (following George Marsden and the 1960s Danforth Commission), supplemented by on-going faculty development. He defends an inclusive community-with-diversity, a freedom-and-commitment tension grounded in Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of tradition, and the legality of preferential religious hiring under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the relevant case law (Tilton, Hunt, Roemer, Blanton, Grove City, Amos).

Response to Mark Wilhelm: Adopting the Framework of ‘Because’ and ‘Therefore’

Paul C. Pribbenow

No. 56 · Fall 2022

Pribbenow describes how Augsburg University responded to its dramatic demographic transformation (from 18% to nearly 70% BIPOC entering students over sixteen years) by adopting an institutional vocational statement and a simple “because/therefore” framework for translating particular Lutheran theological convictions into institutional programs, policies, and practices.

Diversity and Dialogue: Gustavus Adolphus College

Florence D. Amamoto

No. 1 · Summer 1996

Amamoto, a third-generation Japanese-American Buddhist who teaches American literature at Gustavus Adolphus and regularly attends daily chapel, writes as an “inside outsider.” Engaging Schwehn’s closing call to refurbish the Lutheran college, she argues that church-related colleges are vitally important to society, that “refurbishing” must take up diversity, and describes how Lutheranism is manifest at Gustavus: Christ Chapel as the highest point on campus, the ecumenical chapel program led for thirty years by Chaplain Richard Elvee, the Nobel Conferences that pair scientists with philosophers and theologians, the First-term Seminar and Tuesday Conversations, the India study-abroad program organized by Deane Curtin, and the Sponberg Chair in Ethics. She names the pressures of money, secularization, and the publications-driven push for “excellence” that threaten this creative tension.

The Marks of an ELCA College: One Bishop's Reflections

Stanley Olson

No. 15 · Winter 2002

Olson, speaking as a bishop and “Harness Boy” whose job is to keep the church’s connections working, replaces his original four-noun outline (fealty, ingenuity, insouciance, focus) with eight marks the ELCA should be able to observe in its colleges: intentional Lutheran identity, significant Lutheran presence, Christian faith at every table, freedom of inquiry, coaching toward vocation, gravity and grace, nurtured community, and excellence by its own standards. Drawing on his survey of all twenty-eight ELCA college mission statements (two tables) and on Darrell Jodock and Mark Edwards, he argues that the Lutheran connection must be made explicit in mission, marketing, and faculty searches, and closes with six reciprocal expectations the colleges should hold of the ELCA—commissioner, mature parent, supporter of adventurous teenagers, advocate, steward of graduates, and a church faithful to its own Lutheran mission.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

No. 9 · Summer 2000

Christenson introduces a varied issue: the VonDohlen / Ratke discussion of the two kingdoms doctrine, Rachel Hammond’s “real gem” of a talk on her time in Ecuador (with an invitation to send contributions to the Home for Perpetual Hope orphanage via her home church in Oberlin, Ohio), Chuck Huff’s essay on the effect of liberal learning on the practice of psychology, and John Reumann’s reflection on a scholarly life lived between academy and church—and notes that the cover artist is his eight-year-old daughter Zoé, whose post-circus drawing of a balancing act struck him in light of Reumann’s opening line.