From the Publisher

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

Christenson marks the eighth edition of Intersections, expresses gratitude to the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools and especially to the soon-retiring Bob Sorenson for backing the journal, the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conferences, and the Lutheran Academy of Scholars, and introduces an issue that gathers analyses and arguments from both insiders to Lutheran theology and outsiders, from veterans of the institutions and recent arrivals—voices that together remind us that what is and what ought to be need to inform each other.

Integrity and Fragmentation: Can the Lutheran Center Hold?

Robert Benne

Benne answers the conference’s question pessimistically—“the Lutheran center cannot hold in many, if not most of our colleges, because it was never there in an articulated form in the first place”—and distinguishes “Christ of culture” colleges like the Midland Lutheran of his youth (Lutheran by ethno-religious ethos rather than by articulated theology) from James Burtchaell’s “confessional colleges” that operated from a theologically distilled Lutheran humanism. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre and Mark Schwehn’s First Things essay on Christian universities, he sketches what a Lutheran center looks like (unity, universality, integrity, a tradition of thought) and how its distortion—reducing the Gospel to justification and ceding everything else to autonomous reason—splits Christ and culture as dangerously as the German church separated Gospel and politics. For colleges that have lost their center, he proposes an “intentional, robust pluralism” that guarantees a Lutheran voice in every department and an “affirmative action for Christians” in hiring.

From Pietism to Paradox: The Development of a Lutheran Philosophy of Education

Philip Nordquist

Nordquist traces a four-decade personal and institutional journey from the “Protestant triumphalism” and aggressive moralism of S. C. Eastvold’s 1950s Pacific Lutheran through the 1960 Ditmanson–Hong–Quanbeck volume The Christian Faith and the Liberal Arts, Gordon Lathrop’s 1972 PLU donor address grounding the university in two-kingdoms theology, the ALC’s 1975 Concordia workshop with Bill Narum, Bob Bertram, Harris Kaasa, and Sydney Ahlstrom’s case for the “critical” tradition over the scholastic and pietistic, the 1976 LCA statement distinguishing “Christian” from “church-related” education, and Richard Hughes’s 1997 Carthage address. He concludes that dialectical (two kingdoms) theology, Christian humanism alongside professional studies (the New American College model), Luther’s commitment to universal compulsory education, environmental and civic responsibility, and academic freedom together constitute the bequest of the Reformation—“Christ and culture in paradox” remains the best approach to education he knows.

Diversity, Integrity, and Lutheran Colleges

Florence D. Amamoto

Amamoto—a sansei Jodo Shin Shu Buddhist who is “an inside outsider” at Gustavus Adolphus—argues that diversity and integrity belong together in Lutheran higher education, perhaps in a way unmatched by other church-related traditions. She affirms the importance of Gustavus’s 60% Lutheran student body and vibrant Christ Chapel under Richard Elvee and Brian Johnson while warning that numbers and chapel are not enough, draws on Tom Christenson, Patricia Gurin, Sylvia Hurtado, Anthony Carnevale, Martha Nussbaum, W. E. B. DuBois (the deaths of Matthew Shepard and Isaiah Shoels), Richard Hughes’s reading of finitum capax infiniti, Richard Solberg, and Mark Schwehn’s mutual hospitality model, and concludes that the real enemy is not diversity but indifference—and that Lutheran finitude grounds a theological commitment to keeping diversity and identity in creative conversation.

Things That Renew Hope

Sig Royspern

Inspired by Andrew Greeley’s Religion as Poetry, which defines religion as hope-renewing experiences and the stories, symbols, rituals, and images that preserve them, Rauspern offers a list-poem of small renewals of hope: lovers kissing in the street, the first snowfall of each year, compost and spring sprouts and Jewish humor, kids’ summer mischief, a mother nursing her baby on the bus, small jazz ensembles, two old men reconciling without remembering why, an unscheduled gift, the blues, a child taking him by the hand, and a gray-haired man who threw his cellular phone in the river.

The Diversity Dilemma: Dealing With Difference

Kathy Fritz

Fritz reports from Newberry College—83% Caucasian, 16% African-American, 22% Lutheran, the smallest college in NCAA football—on a 1998–1999 year of crisis in which the Board of Trustees Executive Committee asked the president to resign over financial issues, the president fired three vice presidents, four trustees including the chair and treasurer resigned, and the controversial “veterinary technology” major became a flashpoint between the president’s recruitment-driven vision and the faculty’s commitment to “preparation for LIFE.” Turning to ethnic diversity, she frames three sociological approaches—“feed them all” to reduce conflict, the “3 A’s” (academics, athletics, arts) to create common identity, and Aguirre and Turner’s case for “weak ethnic identification” against the post-Yugoslavia failures of strong pluralism—and grounds the search for institutional unity in St. Paul’s body-of-Christ imagery from 1 Corinthians 12 and Ernest Simmons’s claim that diversity yields “creative adaptations that assist mutual survival.”

A View From the Other Side

Daisybelle Thomas-Quinney

Thomas-Quinney—an ordained Church of God minister and adjunct in Religion at Thiel College—offers “a view from the other side” as a non-Lutheran African American “outsider and novice”: her bittersweet 1995 arrival at Thiel, her swift discovery (alongside one African American secretary, one Hispanic professor, and thirty-eight African American students recruited largely as athletes) of a “chilly” campus unprepared to nurture the very minority students it had recruited, her examination of Thiel’s 1875 founding and the Augsburg Confession Article IV right-hand/left-hand kingdoms, the parables of mustard seed and yeast from Matthew 13, and Bishop James Crumbly’s 1985 LCA manual Inclusiveness and Diversity: Gifts of God. Drawing on Bruce Reichenbach, Samuel Hazo, and Josephine D. Davis’s Coloring the Halls of Ivy, she concludes that the Lutheran center cannot hold “as is” but has “great possibility” when the mission statement is actually followed.

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.

Practicing Hope: The Charisms of Lutheran Higher Education

Martha E. Stortz

No. 32 · Spring 2010

Stortz names four charisms—theological gifts of identity rather than commodities—that Lutheran higher education brings to a culture of fear: semper reformanda as flexible, responsive institutions; the freedom of a Christian as simul justus et peccator critical inquiry that holds opposites in creative tension; regard for the other as “neighbor” rather than friend or alien; and the priesthood of all believers as a public, civic calling to know the poor. Drawing on Augustine, George Lindbeck, Patricia Killen, James Clifford, Earl Shorris, Carter Lindberg, and Augsburg’s Center for Global Education, she argues that immersion trips, neighbor-regard, and welfare reform witness that the gift Lutherans bring is hope grounded in Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Lutheran Colleges, the Lutheran Tradition, and the Future of Service-Learning

Joseph McDonald

No. 34 · Fall 2011

McDonald, who has used service-learning since the early 1990s and now directs the Values Based Learning Program at Newberry College, traces the service-learning movement from its 1960s socio-political pioneers (Nadinne Cruz, Ira Harkavy) through its institutionalization as classroom pedagogy and citizenship education (Stanton, Giles, and Cruz; Edward Zlotkowski; Jane Addams’s Hull House and John Dewey). He argues that three strengths of the Lutheran tradition—robust reflection as a community of discourse, Christian vocation as service infused in all roles, and the capacity to negotiate tension and paradox—uniquely equip Lutheran colleges to hold the pedagogical and socio-political dimensions of service-learning together, recovering the energy of the pioneers without sacrificing classroom rigor.

Making the Common Good Common

René Johnson

No. 42 · Fall 2015

Johnson reflects on the Servant Leadership House for women at Finlandia University — from a sweaty trip to the local landfill to weekly habits of campus presence — to argue that the common good becomes truly common when it is embedded in the ordinary details of vocational living, and that Luther’s sense of neighbor calls servant leaders to “little bits of good” as well as to more radical pursuits of justice.

Reviews

Matthew J. Marohl

No. 26 · Fall 2007

Marohl reviews two 2006 Lutheran University Press volumes from Grand View College (Des Moines, IA). Mark C. Mattes and Ronald R. Darge’s Imaging the Journey … of Contemplation, Meditation, Reflection, and Adventure pairs Mattes’s Lutheran meditations on seven themes (from a spirituality of communication to Alpha and Omega) with Darge’s photographs and Ronald Taylor’s short prayers, with Mattes’s writing on vocation singled out as the volume’s finest. The Grand View College Reader, edited by Mattes, Evan A. Thomas, Kathryn Pohlman Duffy, and Ronald Taylor, surveys the college’s Foundations, Creativity, and Vocation through chapters by Thorvald Hanson, Kenneth Sundet Jones, Kevin Gannon, Ammertte C. Deibert, Steven Snyder, and President Kent Henning, tracing Grand View’s Grundtvigian and Danish Lutheran roots.

Scarred Epistemologies: What a Theology of the Cross Has to Say about the Gay Marriage Ban

Jacqueline Bussie

No. 22 · Spring 2006

Responding to Robert Benne’s claim (citing Gilbert Meilander and Wolfhart Pannenberg) that one cannot defend gay marriage on biblical or confessional grounds, Bussie reads three theses of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation alongside Moltmann’s Crucified God and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail to argue that the theologia crucis—with its insistence on calling the thing what it is, its acknowledgment of scarred epistemologies and simul justus et peccator, and its refusal to domesticate God—exposes the Ohio Defense of Marriage Act as scapegoating, selective literalism, and an unjust law that the Christian conscience must reject.

Through Truth to Freedom—by Way of Reconciliation

Paul C. Pribbenow

No. 52 · Fall 2020

Reflecting on Augsburg’s 150th-anniversary motto “Through truth to freedom,” Pribbenow argues that in a season of three pandemics — pandemic illness, economic collapse, and the racial sin laid bare by the murder of George Floyd — higher education’s most authentic work is to educate for truth and freedom by way of confession and reconciliation.