From the Publisher

Living at the Intersection of Fear and Hope

Mark S. Hanson

Hanson draws on his January 2009 ELCA/ELCIC visit to Jordan, Israel, and Palestine—a Hebron Quran that did not burn, fifth graders dancing at the Hope School, a conversation with King Abdullah II—to frame the vocation of Lutheran higher education at the intersection of fear and hope. Engaging Brueggemann, Sittler, Buechner, Auden, Strandjord, Douglas John Hall, W. Robert Connor, Lewis Mudge, and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, he argues that Lutheran colleges are called to critical inquiry that does not collapse into a hermeneutic of suspicion, to a “thinking faith” that resists religious fundamentalism, and to communities of discernment that work for the common good.

Practicing Hope: The Charisms of Lutheran Higher Education

Martha E. Stortz

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.

Hope in the Face of Ecological Decline

Jason Peters

Peters reads our ecological crisis—a campus “Birth Control Tree,” feminized fish, population, climate, water, and soil—through Alexander Pope, William Blake, Søren Kierkegaard, and C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, and argues that the modern project of mastering nature has made despair (the unconscious form Kierkegaard named) our condition. He calls for three reorientations: practical (assigning value to domestic arts and place over disciplinary specialization), philosophical (dismantling the Baconian/Machiavellian/Cartesian project of control), and theological (recovering the Church’s rejection of Gnosticism so that grace comes to us by means of nature, not in contempt of it).

Hope in a Period of Economic Decline

Rebecca Judge

Judge reads the 2008-2009 recession against the panic-free 1982 downturn and argues that this panic comes from the genuine surprise of a generation that had been told—by George Will and others—that business cycles had been tamed by deregulation, globalization, and Greenspan. Drawing on Luther’s “Trade and Usury” and Large Catechism, Paul Tillich, Stephen Marglin, Karl Polanyi, and Larry Summers, she critiques the “crude utilitarianism” of Homo economicus and benefit-cost analysis, finding hope in the possibility that this recession will renew a national conversation about moral obligation to neighbor in a market whose “raging bull” has broken out of its squeeze chute.

An Apostolate of Hope

David L. Tiede

Tiede argues that the vocation of a Lutheran college is to be “an apostolate of hope” oriented by three metrics of our time: 12,000 (the Dow), 350 (parts per million of CO2), and $1.25 (the daily income of 1.4 billion people in extreme poverty). Drawing on Darrell Jodock’s “third path” for church-related colleges, Larry Rasmussen’s Batalden lectures, Mark Tranvik, Douglas John Hall, Bill McKibben, Stephen Privett, Peter Singer, and Augsburg’s Center for Global Education, he proposes that justification by faith, critical pluralism, stewardship of God’s earth, and love and justice for our students together prepare wise leaders to renew the future.

"Annoying the Student With Her Rights:" Human Life Coram Hominibus; Reflections on Vocation, Hope, and Politics

Caryn Riswold

Riswold takes a student’s course-evaluation complaint that she had been “annoyed with her rights” about voting as the entry point for reflection on fear of change, mistrust of difference, and right-wing extremist violence—Poplawski, Von Brunn, Roeder, and the Sotomayor hearings. Drawing on Gerhard Ebeling’s reading of Luther’s fourfold relationality (coram Deo, mundo, meipso, hominibus), Brian Gerrish, Alister McGrath, Gustaf Wingren, Philip Hefner, Mary Rose O’Reilley, and bell hooks, she argues that the vocation of the Lutheran college is precisely to “annoy students with their rights” by forming them for socially responsible voice grounded in faith active in love.

The Neglected Miracle of Pentecost

Susan M. O'Shaughnessy

O’Shaughnessy, in a homily delivered at Concordia College in 2008, reads the Pentecost narrative of Acts 2 through Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman’s 1983 critique of white feminism’s cultural imperialism. She argues that the miracle is not the disciples’ speaking but the immigrant Jews’ hearing—and that the writer of Acts withholds the content of what was said precisely to teach disciples that people of privilege know less than the foreigner, the immigrant, the oppressed, the woman, the child, and must learn to listen in new languages before they can speak.

Why All This Talk About Understanding the Mission of NECU Member Institutions as a Vocation?

Mark Wilhelm

No. 56 · Fall 2022

In his valedictory keynote, retiring NECU Executive Director Mark Wilhelm argues that Lutheran higher education is, properly understood, vocation-based education — outlining four core practices recovered over the past fifty years and naming the constructive and corrective work still to be done, including a fuller embrace of DEIJ and of the diverse vocations of NECU’s 27 institutions.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 55 · Spring 2022

Wilhelm announces his planned retirement on January 31, 2023, after serving as the founding executive director of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities, and gives thanks for the privilege of helping NECU articulate a shared vision for Lutheran higher education in twenty-first-century North America.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 53 · Spring 2021

Wilhelm reflects on an NPR report of teenagers’ pandemic diaries and the fraught Christian history of struggling to live out Jesus’s ethic of love, framing the issue as a record of NECU institutions working out how to act for the common good through the pandemic of 2020–2021.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 52 · Fall 2020

Wilhelm argues that the “hackneyed” expressions of higher education — “you are not just a number,” “the college experience,” “risen to the challenge” — tell the simple truth about NECU institutions even as the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed budgets, employees, and campus life to the breaking point.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 51 · Spring 2020

Wilhelm frames the issue by tracing how Lutheran educational ideals — once a primary source of contemporary higher education — were masked in the United States, and introduces a NECU initiative that uses the case of business ethics to explore Lutheran social teaching as an academic resource.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 50 · Fall 2019

Wilhelm frames the issue by noting that a federal court’s vindication of Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process is a win for higher education’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion — and argues that for Lutheran higher education, the commitment to diversity is an old and foundational claim, rooted in Christianity’s openness to all and reflected in the four diverse gospels of the New Testament.

Why Interfaith Understanding is Integral to the Lutheran Tradition

Jason A. Mahn

No. 40 · Fall 2014

Mahn returns to the root of the Lutheran tradition — church, theology, and pedagogy — to argue that interfaith encounter is not the vanishing point of Lutheran identity but central to it, beginning with confession of Luther’s anti-Judaic legacy, working through the typology of exclusivism / inclusivism / pluralism, and showing how the kenotic Christ and the theologian of the cross open Lutherans to authentic encounter with religious others.

Ethical Deliberation and the Biblical Text—A Lutheran Contribution to Reading the Bible

Ritva Williams

No. 22 · Spring 2006

Williams articulates a Lutheran “critical traditionalist hermeneutic”—a phrase borrowed from her Hebrew Bible professor Robert Polzin—that honors Scripture as queen while keeping Christ as its king, and tests it by critiquing Robert Gagnon’s use of Romans 1:18-32 in The Bible and Homosexual Practice. Drawing on Lazareth, Lotz, Philip Esler’s Conflict and Identity in Romans, Stanley Stowers’ Rereading Romans, and Ben Witherington III, she proposes an alternative reading in which Paul recites a Hellenistic-Jewish ethnic caricature in 1:18-32 only to overturn it in 2:1-16, making the passage a critique of self-righteous stereotyping rather than the foundation of a moral doctrine on same-sex intercourse.

Assessing Self-Assessment Instruments at Finlandia University

René Johnson

No. 55 · Spring 2022

Johnson surveys three self-assessment instruments presented at the NetVUE conference — PathwayU at Colorado State, the Intercultural Development Inventory at Friends University, and Mark Savickas’s Career Construction Counseling Manual at Union College — and describes Finlandia’s use of the CliftonStrengths© assessment to link students’ personhood to “behaviors that benefit the community.”

Cultivating Transformative Responsible Dialogue: Community of Moral Deliberation and Lutheran Higher Education

Per Anderson

No. 35 · Spring 2012

Anderson proposes that ELCA colleges and universities embrace a project of “transformative responsible dialogue” that advances the ELCA’s commitment to be a “community of moral deliberation” and answers the LIFT Report’s call for a culture of faithful discernment. Drawing on Michael Meyer’s “liberal civility,” Martha Nussbaum, Hans Jonas’s responsibility ethic, Patrick Keifert’s ecclesiology of strangers, and Kathryn Tanner on culture, he argues that liberal education at our schools can form students whose dialogue knits together civility, responsibility, and Christian openness to the other.

Why Martin Luther and the Reformation Matter 500 Years Later

Kathryn A. Kleinhans

No. 46 · Fall 2017

Adapted from a 2017 address to Wartburg College’s entering class, Kleinhans surveys Luther’s lasting impact in vocation, education, social service, and the necessary work of repentance — closing with the Lutheran World Federation’s Windhoek assembly and the Reformation World Exhibition’s call to live reform forward into the next 500 years.

Ivory Tower or Holy Mountain? Faith and Academic Freedom

Nicholas Wolterstorff

No. 11 · Spring 2001

Wolterstorff defines infringement of academic freedom as impairing a faculty member’s standing on account of the ideological content of her position, argues that academic freedom (like free speech) is “duly qualified” rather than absolute, and offers eight considerations bearing on religiously based institutions: Weber’s differentiation of Wissenschaft, religious pluralism within a liberal polity, the vitality of American civil society, a decentralized educational system, the “holistic” character of much American religion, the post-Kuhnian collapse of classical foundationalism and of the “generically human” academy, the fact that ideas matter, and the personhood violated by infringement (the desecration of an image of God). He concludes that the private sector offers wider academic freedom than the public, that religious qualifications are not inherently inappropriate (any more than St. John’s Great Books commitment), but that religiously based colleges too often apply them unjustly—arbitrarily, secretly, without recourse—and that the AAUP’s best service is model codes of procedure.