To the Editor:
I am a Lutheran pastor out here in the Pacific northwest struggling to articulate the Gospel in meaningful ways while not abandoning the core convictions we live by. I am also on the Board of Regents at Pacific Lutheran University, where I graduated in religion and history some nineteen years ago. I am writing to you out of a sense of perplexity regarding the current assumptions in the church related institutions. I recently read in the Christian Century, a review of a book by James Tunstead Burtchaell titled The Dying Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches. Apparently Burtchaell feels we are merely paying lip service to the gospel in the so-called Christian university. He articulates what he believes has been a whole hearted selling out of Christian core assumptions in deference to a watered down, less than offensive language of character building and lives of service for our fellow human beings. As a regent at PLU, I believe I understand some of the perplexities of appealing to a wider spectrum of people under the guise of openness and tolerance. I wonder, however, if we have lost, amidst the generic language of service and leadership, a compelling word of hope and forgiveness in Jesus Christ? Have we, in an effort to become tolerant, abandoned our core convictions because of the offense? I write to you with these thoughts because I was impressed with the article you wrote for the Intersections journal on some of these very issues. I am neither a Christian without sensitivity to the cultural assumptions, nor do I consider myself among the ranks of those who are seemingly appalled when the Gospel is rightly proclaimed and articulated. I write as one convinced of the need for openness and necessary contemplation of varying perspectives and persuasions. Simultaneously, I am concerned for a differentiation between a liberal arts school unaffiliated with the church and one, that at least in theory, still yearns for the connection. I thank you for your consideration in this vital matter.
Pastor John L. Vaswig
Spokane, Washington
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg celebrates the popularity of the previous issue—the first to draw on papers from the annual “Vocation of a Lutheran College” conference—and announces a new Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation grant that will fund the inaugural Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education, a two-week seminar at Harvard led by Ronald Thiemann on “Finding Our Voice: Christian Faith and Critical Vision.”
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Editorial
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.
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Article
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.
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Article
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.
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Reflection
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.
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Article
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.
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Reflection
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.
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Article
How Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Reminds Us About Work
Than Oo
No. 61 · Spring 2025
Drawing on a Season 15 arc of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in which residents redirect pool funds to fix a plumbing problem, Oo finds in Fred Rogers’ vocation-honoring storytelling a reminder that limited resources are an invitation to creativity, perseverance, and optimism in higher education.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 19 · Summer 2004
Christenson reflects on the scarcity of time in over-committed academic lives and posts a tongue-in-cheek help-wanted advertisement for his own successor as editor. He introduces the issue’s four authors as “three friends and one new acquaintance” whose work addresses Lutheran higher education, the significance of Paul Ricoeur, the implications of being a reformation community, and the perils of teaching ethics.
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Book Review
Learning Across Campus: Hearing Bok's Call to Conversation
David Ratke
No. 39 · Spring 2014
Ratke reads Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges from Lenoir-Rhyne and argues that Bok’s call to think holistically about undergraduate education and to dialogue across disciplinary boundaries names the work already underway at ELCA colleges. He weighs faculty attitudes, the role of skills in the core curriculum and the major, and the importance of the extracurriculum for student formation.
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Article
Women Presidents in Higher Education: How They Experience Their Calling
Aimee Goldschmidt, Gary McLean, Katherine A. Tunheim
No. 42 · Fall 2015
Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifteen women college presidents and a transformative-learning-theory framework, Tunheim, McLean, and Goldschmidt trace a three-stage journey — identifying, interpreting, and pursuing the call — and ask what the language of vocation contributes to the preparation and mentoring of women leaders in higher education.
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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.
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Article
Leading from Within: Peer-Learning Consultations to Explore Our Callings and Campus Capacities for Leadership
Chris Johnson
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Johnson reframes vocational leadership as “soul work” that calls for the deep mind as much as the conscious one, and offers two practices — deep listening and a modified Quaker clearness consultation — as ways for campus colleagues to listen one another into existence. Drawing on Sharon Daloz Parks, Marshall Ganz, Parker Palmer, and Mary Rose O’Reilley, he invites readers to map their stories of self, us, and now.