The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s vocation in higher education remains vibrant. The articles in this issue of Intersections from the 2010 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference demonstrate that strength.
Nonetheless, the landscape of leadership in ELCA higher education has shifted significantly since the vocation conference of summer 2010. A redesign of the churchwide organization, which was announced in October 2010, radically revised churchwide ministries with colleges and universities. The Vocation and Education unit ceased to exist as of February 1, 2011. Churchwide work in higher education is now carried by the Congregational and Synodical Mission unit in the redesigned churchwide organization. And, as most readers know, familiar churchwide staff from the Vocation and Education unit either have left the churchwide organization (Marilyn Olson and Kathryn Baker) or have been reassigned to another unit (Arne Quanbeck). I continue to work with colleges and universities, although higher education is only one of four assigned portfolios.
Given this reduction in human resources, staff and faculty from ELCA colleges and universities have stepped up their leadership of our community. For example, our annual administrator conferences have been more directly managed by college and university leaders. I deeply appreciate those who have helped to sustain our network during these days of transition.
Many of you have led much of the work of maintaining our network for years. To name a few examples: Bob Haak at Augustana (IL) has served faithfully as the editor of this publication; George Connell at Concordia has overseen the Lutheran Academy of Scholars until recently and has now passed the baton to Jacquie Bussie (one of the authors of the articles in this issue); and Tom Morgan at Augsburg has provided leadership for gatherings of the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference. In many respects, the health and vibrancy of our network has resulted from the willingness of many of you to take on leadership of the network for many years.
So I welcome the increased participation by all of you in the leadership of our network. And, even though I regret the loss of capacity in the churchwide organization brought about by the changing economy of the ELCA, this apparent change is really nothing new. As I noted above, the ELCA has long been a church in which its higher education network has taken the lead in directing its own common mission. To the extent that we do need new ways of maintaining our network, the Council of Presidents at ELCA colleges and universities has begun exploring the changes that might be required. Thanks to all who continue to contribute toward sustaining the gift of ELCA higher education.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
Haak frames the issue by asking how Lutheran colleges and universities understand the changing landscape of religious identification on their campuses, and argues that Lutheran theological commitments — including the work of the Spirit and the Incarnation — call institutions to create places where the voice of “the other” is heard and valued.
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Article
Vocation of the Lutheran College and Religious Diversity
Darrell Jodock
Jodock describes a “third path” for Lutheran colleges that is both rooted in the Lutheran tradition and inclusive of religious diversity — an alternative to sectarian and non-sectarian default models — and identifies six interlocking features of the Lutheran tradition (giftedness, an engaged God, wisdom, caution about claims to know, community, and an emphasis on service and community leadership) that shape how such a college engages interreligious dialogue and civil discourse.
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Article
The State of Civil Discourse on Campus and in Society
Terence S. Morrow
Morrow examines the troubled state of civil discourse in the United States and on college campuses, drawing on three deep traditions — the liberal arts, Lutheranism, and the Anglo-American legal tradition — to argue that Lutheran colleges can serve students and society by acknowledging the tensions inherent in civil discourse and helping students navigate them, and surveys promising campus programs at St. Thomas, Tufts, Loyola, and Harvard.
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Article
The New (con)Texts of Jewish-Christian Engagement
Karla R. Suomala
Suomala surveys four contemporary contexts of Jewish-Christian engagement on American college campuses — campus populations, Jewish studies curricula, the changing nature of Jewish identity among Millennials, and the shift from formal Jewish-Christian dialogue toward broader religious pluralism — and argues that at Lutheran colleges this success story can serve as a model for engaging the other religious neighbors who increasingly form part of our society.
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Article
The Breadth and the Depth: Dimensions of Christian-Muslim Relations at Educational Institutions of the ELCA
Mark N. Swanson
Swanson reflects on the spatial metaphors of depth and breadth that shape Lutheran higher education and argues that the study of Islam and real conversation between Christians and Muslims can contribute to both the broadening of horizons and the deepening of faith, drawing on his experience at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and pointing to hospitality as a Christian practice in which depth and breadth come together.
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Article
Reconciled Diversity: Reflections on our Calling to Embrace our Religious Neighbors
Jacqueline Bussie
Bussie offers three concrete recommendations for cultivating reconciled religious diversity on Lutheran campuses — Lutheran listening and the telling of stories, engendering encounters with religious neighbors through curriculum and bridge-building events, and choosing empathy and collaboration over evangelism and creed — arguing that what students fear most in encounters with the religious “other” is the loss of their own identity and distinctiveness, and that we can show them how loyalty to one’s own tradition and reverence for different traditions can coexist.
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Article
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Article
Called to Serve
Robert D. Haak
No. 31 · Winter 2010
Haak describes Augustana’s Center for Vocational Reflection (CVR) and its threefold framework of skills/gifts/talents, passions/values, and needs of the community. He surveys the CVR’s Working with Faith group, seminary visits, spiritual companioning, Servant Leader Internships, international travel reflection, and the major Senior Inquiry curriculum revision—then reports the lessons learned at Augustana: that multiple exposures matter more than any single program, that the language of vocation works even for non-religious students, that student-initiated ideas (like Erin Blecha’s Athletes Giving Back) often succeed most, and that the CVR will soon merge into a new Community Engagement Center.
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Article
Freedom of a Christian-College: Looking through the Lens of Vocation
Kathryn L. Johnson
No. 24 · Fall 2006
Johnson, Paul Tudor Jones Professor of Church History at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, re-reads Luther’s 1520 treatise The Freedom of a Christian as a paradigm for the “freedom of a Christian college” amid the pressures of professional preparation. She traces Luther’s paradoxical claim that a Christian is “a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none” and at the same time “a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all,” and argues that the same dialectic frees a Lutheran college to engage the professions without being captured by them.
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Article
Resistance in the Age of Trump: An Interview with Ivonne Wallace Fuentes
Jason A. Mahn, M. Ivonne Wallace Fuentes
No. 45 · Spring 2017
In conversation with Jason Mahn, Roanoke College historian Ivonne Wallace Fuentes describes how she launched a local chapter of Indivisible after the 2016 election, how the skills of teaching and historical research carry over into grassroots advocacy, and how her sense of vocation (vocare) has become intertwined with the work of advocacy (advocare).
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Editorial
From the Editor: Vocation [in] Disruption
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 57 · Spring 2023
Windham-Hughes introduces the issue’s theme — vocation amidst disruption — previews new features including contributor contact information, a study guide for So That All May Flourish, and invited pieces on reproductive rights, and shares results from the Fall survey of readers.
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Institutional Focus
So That All May Flourish Study Guide
No. 57 · Spring 2023
A chapter-by-chapter study guide to So That All May Flourish (Fortress Press 2023), a new volume by NECU authors that develops the central tenet of “Rooted and Open” and offers discussion questions for use in orientation programs, classes, workshops, task forces, and professional development settings.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 37 · Spring 2013
Wilhelm reports that decisions at the February 2013 LECNA and ELCA presidents’ meetings authorized reviews of funding and organizational practices and appointed a working group to draft a presidential statement on what it means to be a college or university of the ELCA, signaling a more substantive future role for the annual presidents’ gathering in shaping the shared identity and common mission of ELCA schools.