Health Food in the Inner City: An Interview with Brian Noy about Augsburg's Campus Kitchen

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

Wilhelm argues that the rhetoric framing ELCA higher education as a binary between “secular” and “religious” is “hokum”: there is a third way of doing higher education from a Christian perspective that is religious in motivation and practice but on the ground looks secular. After more than half a century of debates, he calls on ELCA presidents to “do something” in 2013 to move forward in shared mission and vocation.

From the Editor

Jason A. Mahn

Mahn introduces the issue through Norman Wirzba’s The Paradise of God and the Genesis 2 vocation given to Adam to care for adamah—arguing that “vocation” is the Lutheran name for an incarnational, creation-centric theology of kenosis and that Lutherans bring distinctive theological gifts to environmental work even if no absolutely unique perspective on caring for creation.

Vocation for Life: A Report on a New Initiative for Alumni

A report on “Vocation for Life,” a collaborative initiative of ELCA-related colleges and universities to make vocational exploration available to alumni across the country regardless of which school they attended. The first pilot retreat—“Explore Your Life’s Calling,” in Rochester, Minnesota in November 2011, facilitated by Tom Morgan of Augsburg, Chris Johnson of Gustavus, and Tom Scholtterback of Concordia using the Circles of Trust approach—is described.

A Traveler's Manifesto for Navigating the Creation

Ann Pederson

Pederson asks who we are, where we are, and how then we shall live within the Epic of Evolution and the doctrines of creation, incarnation, and imago dei. Drawing on John 3:16 (“For God so loved the cosmos…”), Luther on God’s presence “in the veins of a leaf,” Augustine’s City of God, Phil Hefner’s “created co-creator,” Joseph Sittler’s “Called to Unity,” and Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, she argues for a cosmic reading of incarnation in which all of creation—not only the human—bears the image of God.

Facing Tornados and Climate Change: An Interview with Jim Dontje about Environmental Innovation at Gustavus

Jim Dontje

Dontje, director of the Johnson Center for Environmental Innovation at Gustavus Adolphus College, describes the Center’s work with solar thermal and photovoltaic systems, LEED certification of Beck Hall, recycling and conservation initiatives, the Linnaeus Arboretum, and the difficult work of building consensus around climate response—reflecting on how Gustavus’s 1998 tornado recovery shaped a community capable of collective action, and on how the “Lutheran identity” both restrains and energizes the college’s environmental ethos.

A Lutheran Ethic of Environmental Stewardship

Jim Martin-Schramm

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.

Putting Principles into Practice: An Interview with Kenneth Foster about Concordia's Sustainability Council

Kenneth Foster

Foster, chair of Concordia College’s President’s Sustainability Council, describes the Council’s formation under President William Craft in 2011 as a re-energization of stalled task-force work, its coordination with grass-roots campus initiatives, and its strategy of moving from principles to practice in stewardship of natural resources at a Lutheran liberal arts college.

Climate Justice, Environmental Racism, and a Lutheran Moral Vision

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda

Moe-Lobeda argues that the vocation of a Lutheran college is to prepare students for Thomas Berry’s “great work”: forging a sustainable relationship between the human species and the planet while diminishing the gap between those who have too much and those who have not enough. She develops a three-fold “moral vision” rooted in Luther’s theology of the cross—seeing what is (climate injustice and environmental racism for what they are), seeing more just and sustainable alternatives, and seeing God’s saving presence at work—and offers it as a distinctive Lutheran contribution to the panhuman and interfaith challenge of our day.

Farming and Eating Locally: An Interview with Garry Griffith about Augustana's Farm2Fork Program

Garry Griffith

Griffith, Director of Dining at Augustana College (Rock Island), describes the Farm2Fork program’s shift from pre-packaged food to fresh produce sourced from local farms (beginning with Jim Johansen of Wesley Acres in Moline), the Augie Acres campus garden tended by students in learning-community courses, the bio-diesel conversion of used fryer oil for greenhouse heat and farm equipment, and the stewardship calling that grounds these efforts in Augustana’s Lutheran identity.

Sustaining Sustainability

Baird Tipson

Tipson—former Provost of Gettysburg College, President of Wittenberg University, and President of Washington College—reads Romans 12:2 (“be not conformed to this world…”) against Victor Ferrall’s Liberal Arts at the Brink and the contemporary financial reality of small Lutheran colleges. He tells three case-study stories from Washington College’s Center for the Environment and Society—the Chino Farms partnership, the Chesapeake Semester, and the acquisition of the work boat Callinectes—to show how presidents must engage “the world” to secure resources for sustainability work without being conformed to it.

Fostering Moral Imagination and Inclusivity: The Role of Ethical Leadership in ELCA Colleges and Universities Amid Societal Challenges

Lamont Anthony Wells

No. 62 · Fall 2025

12 min audio

Wells argues that “moral imagination” — the capacity to envision ethical alternatives, empathize across difference, and respond creatively to injustice — is the heart of ethical leadership in NECU institutions, and that anchoring leadership in this principle positions Lutheran higher education to cultivate socially responsible citizens.

Attentional Commons and the Common Good: Technology and Higher Education

Amy Weldon

No. 42 · Fall 2015

Weldon argues that the electronic devices our students (and we) reach for are designed to monetize attention and fragment the very capacities — tolerance for complexity, sustained focus, real conversation — that build lives of meaning and service to the common good. Drawing on Crawford, Lanier, Arendt, and Palmer, she sketches practical tech-mindfulness for the small-college classroom as a defense of the “attentional commons.”

Views on Flourishing After the Age of Roe

Caryn Riswold, Mary J. Streufert

No. 57 · Spring 2023

Riswold and Streufert reflect on the Radcliffe Institute’s January 2023 conference “The Age of Roe” and argue that the ELCA’s 1991 Social Statement on Abortion and its 2019 statement Faith, Sexism, and Justice offer Lutheran higher education a third way to approach reproductive justice grounded in serving the neighbor so that all may flourish.

Unpossible

Tim Knopp

No. 19 · Summer 2004

A new Capital University education graduate reflects on the bargain of trading childhood for “four years closer to some hidden knowledge, four years farther from what I once knew,” as the noon chimes call him out into a campus where professors and students teach one another along worn brick paths that “love is” should be “love can be.”

Hope in the Face of Ecological Decline

Jason Peters

No. 32 · Spring 2010

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).

Both Priest and Beggar: Luther among the Poor

Martha E. Stortz

No. 46 · Fall 2017

Reading Luther’s deathbed remark “We are all beggars” against his “priesthood of all believers,” Stortz argues that priest and beggar are two sides of a human reality — one that locates civic responsibility for the poor at the heart of the Reformation legacy and that pushes beyond paternalistic service toward the systemic question of justice.