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

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.

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.

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

Brian Noy

Noy, Director of Campus Kitchen at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, describes the Kitchen’s four-fold program—Food to Share (2,000 meals per month from surplus dining-services food and Campus Cooking Classes), Food to Grow (an 80-plot community garden), Food to Buy (two farmers markets that accept EBT/food stamps), and Food to Know (educational programming)—and the deep history of Augsburg’s service to the immigrant communities of the Cedar Riverside neighborhood, now Somali and Mexican as well as historically Norwegian.

Response to Mark Wilhelm: Vocation, Mission and Privilege

Marit Trelstad

No. 56 · Fall 2022

Trelstad affirms Wilhelm’s claim that vocation is the foundational shared mission of Lutheran higher education rather than one program among many, and presses the critique that calls to “vocational reflection” can mask privilege — arguing that an intersectional lens shows vocational discernment is in fact a matter of survival and flourishing for students from marginalized communities.

Affirming, Entrusting, and Acting: A Baptismal Grounding of Affirmative Action in Lutheran Higher Education

Peter Carlson Schattauer

No. 60 · Fall 2024

Schattauer draws on the Lutheran baptism liturgy — where the gathered assembly publicly affirms what it is for and is entrusted with responsibilities for justice and peace — to argue that NECU institutions create truly inclusive communities by affirming commitments, naming responsibilities, and acting in ways that embody both.

"We're Looking for a College—Not a Vocation": Articulating Lutheran Higher Education to Prospective Students and Parents Seeking Relevance

Karl Stumo, Tom Crady

No. 38 · Fall 2013

Drawing on Sallie Mae and UCLA enrollment data, the websites of competitor institutions, and candid voices from the field, Crady and Stumo describe a recruitment landscape in which yield rates have collapsed, discount rates have soared, and the word “Lutheran” often presents an obstacle until it is patiently unpacked. They survey mission language at Augsburg, PLU, Gustavus, and Wartburg and argue that strategic message development is the only way for ELCA schools to make vocation and Lutheran identity “credible, relevant, differentiating, and compelling” to prospective families.

Why Lutheran Colleges Need to Engage Civil Society

Ann M. Svennungsen

No. 35 · Spring 2012

Svennungsen makes the case that Lutheran colleges must engage the larger civil sphere, drawing on her work with The Presidents’ Pledge Against Global Poverty, Darrell Jodock’s seven fundamental experiences for vocational discernment, David Brooks on civility and modesty, and Michael Sandel’s argument that the affluent are seceding from public life. She urges Lutheran educators to invest in the infrastructure of civic renewal so that service-learning and civic engagement remain central to the Lutheran college curriculum.

A College Degree or a College Experience? Reflecting on Selingo's College (Un)Bound

Laurie Brill

No. 39 · Spring 2014

Brill reads Jeff Selingo’s College (Un)Bound from inside the Lutheran Educational Conference of North America, drawing on LECNA’s alumni research with Hardwick-Day and on Brandon Busteed’s Gallup data to argue that, in an age of competency-based degrees and college-as-commodity, Lutheran colleges must speak more clearly about the transformational, vocational impact of a college experience that develops the whole person.

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

Philip Nordquist

No. 8 · Winter 2000

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.