Tom Natalini

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

Wilhelm draws a parallel between the rediscovery of vocation and the rediscovery of interfaith understanding in Lutheran higher education, arguing that previously under-emphasized aspects of the Lutheran tradition point us to interfaith work and that an authentic Lutheran college or university will make interfaith understanding a feature of its mission.

Guest Editorial

Kristen Glass Perez, Richard Priggie

Glass Perez and Priggie introduce the issue by recounting the campus conversations and the June 2014 Interfaith Understanding Conference at Augustana College that gave rise to it, framing the central question, “What does it mean to be Interfaith at a Lutheran College?,” as a living example of the praxis of being a Lutheran college in the twenty-first century.

Vocational Re-Formation for a Multi-Religious World

Elizabeth Eaton

ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton frames vocational formation for a multi-religious world as one of the most significant challenges facing the church and the liberal arts today, calling ELCA colleges and universities to live into Darrell Jodock’s “third path” that is both deeply rooted and dialogical.

Why Interfaith Understanding is Integral to the Lutheran Tradition

Jason A. Mahn

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.

What it Means to Build the Bridge: Identity and Diversity at ELCA Colleges

Eboo Patel

Through the contrasting stories of two college students — Cassie’s identity relativism and April’s soft fundamentalism — Patel diagnoses Peter Berger’s twin pathologies of modernization and argues that ELCA campuses, anchored in Bonhoeffer and the Lutheran capacity to “have faith without laying claim to certainty,” are uniquely equipped to be places where the light falls: bridges of cooperation that nurture both strong religious identity and benevolence toward others.

Danya Tazyeen

Danya Tazyeen

Tazyeen, a Pakistani-American Muslim student at Augustana College, reads Qur’an 49:13 — that God made us into peoples and tribes “that you may know one another” — as a charge to break down fear with open dialogue and to see one another as flawed and relatable fellow human beings.

Building on a Firm Foundation: ELCA Inter-Religious Relations

Kathryn M. Lohre

Lohre traces the ELCA’s twenty-year arc of inter-religious work — from the 1994 Declaration to the Jewish Community and the Lutheran-Jewish Consultative Panel, through the post-9/11 Lutheran-Muslim Panel and the Shoulder to Shoulder Campaign, to fledgling dialogue with Sikhs and the dharmic traditions — and frames Lutheran inter-religious engagement as the strengthening, not the dilution, of Lutheran vocation.

Building an Interfaith Bridge

Belle Michael

Drawing on the holiday of Shavuot, the Book of Ruth, and Martin Buber’s I-Thou, Rabbi Belle Michael picks up Patel’s bridge metaphor and identifies three building blocks for it: experiences with people of different ethnic and religious groups, genuine and long-lasting relationships, and the holy curiosity to ask the questions we are otherwise afraid to ask.

Gifty Arthur

Gifty Arthur

Reading John 10:3 as a Ghanaian Christian student at Luther College, Arthur reflects on how Luther’s Journey Conversations have deepened her own spirituality precisely by giving room for students to share the personal experiences and beliefs at the center of their own traditions.

Journey Toward Pluralism: Reimagining Lutheran Identity in a Changing World

Jacqueline Bussie

Bussie chronicles Concordia College’s Forum on Faith and Life initiative — assessing campus climate, building a President’s Interfaith Advisory Council, and drafting a one-sentence statement that Concordia practices interfaith cooperation “because of” (not “guided by”) its Lutheran identity — to argue that simul justus et peccator thinking equips Lutheran institutions to hold loyalty to tradition and reverence for others together as one piece.

David Kamins

David Kamins

Kamins, a Jewish student at Muhlenberg College, reads Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s The Lonely Man of Faith alongside his own journey at the Interfaith Understanding conference on the eve of Shavuot, finding in the dual figures of Adam I and Adam II a way to remain firmly grounded in his faith community while going out to learn from those around him.

What's in a Name?

Matthew J. Marohl

St. Olaf College Pastor Matt Marohl tells the story of designing The Undercroft’s prayer and meditation room with a campus meditation group whose members began as “Matt” and ended — as their mutual respect grew — calling him “Pastor Matt,” a counterintuitive movement toward a more formal address that signals what intentional Lutheran-Christian hospitality looks like in practice.

Annie Schone

Annie Schone

Schone, raised in a small conservative Central Illinois congregation, recounts how Augustana’s Interfaith Understanding group and Interfaith Youth Core gave her the first chance to befriend Muslim, Unitarian Universalist, and atheist peers, and how she hopes to bring the joy of those friendships back to her home church through the power of storytelling.

Journey Conversations

Amy Zalik Larson, Sheila Radford-Hill

Larson and Radford-Hill describe Luther College’s Journey Conversations Project, a four-phase contemplative practice — quiet, listen, speak, respond — rooted in the Lutheran call to be true to one’s own faith while welcoming all faiths or none, and illustrate its fruit through faith journey stories from Luther students Sukeji Mikaya (South Sudan), Habibullah Rezai (Afghanistan), and Gifty Arthur (Ghana).

Well, Well…Plumbing Our Depths, Telling Our Stories

Ann Boaden

Beginning with a college visit that turned into a grieving mother’s confidence about her daughter’s last moments, Boaden uses John 4’s well of living water to argue that an interfaith education worthy of the name requires Lutherans to plumb the depths of their own tradition’s wells — with rituals, stories, and seasons intact — before they can see, respectfully, into the wells from which others drink.

Activism, Justice, and the Danger of Silence

Dezi Gillon

No. 52 · Fall 2020

In conversation with Jason Mahn, Augustana College alumnux Dezi Gillon traces the call to action they felt as a Black student organizing for Black Lives Matter on a predominately white campus — through seminary, art, spirituality, and restorative justice work — and warns white professors that staying silent “actually speaks volumes.”

Conciliatory and Queer: The Radical Love of Lutheran Higher Education

Kiki Kosnick, Sharon Varallo

No. 50 · Fall 2019

Kosnick and Varallo reflect in conversation on how Augustana’s Five Faith Commitments and its conciliatory ecumenical roots in the Augsburg Confession have given them — a non-binary queer first-generation faculty member and a twenty-one-year veteran — the “street cred” to act on radical love, build bridges to imprisoned and non-binary communities, and discover that Augustana is welcoming not despite the fact that it is Lutheran, but because of it.

Luther's Sutra: An Indian, Subaltern (Dalit) Perspective

Surekha Nelavala

No. 46 · Fall 2017

Nelavala traces how Luther’s “sutra” — grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone, Christ alone — reached the mud hut of her Dalit grandparents in rural India, transforming three generations, and then reads the parable of the vineyard laborers from a subaltern perspective in which grace for all is the heart of God’s alternative kingdom.

The Importance of Connection

Alex Piedras

No. 58 · Fall 2023

Piedras reflects on the 2023 “So that We, Too, May Flourish” Conference at Augsburg as a refreshing space for a weary DEI advocate — surfacing burnout, the Talking Circle on Indigenous Issues, and Dr. Monica Smith’s Racial Healing Circle as opportunities to recharge the soul and build authentic connections for the long journey.

Risky Speech–Gifted Friendships

Sonja Hagander

No. 44 · Fall 2016

Augsburg College Pastor Sonja Hagander reflects on pastoral care across faith traditions — from a campus chapel service after the 2008 murder of Muslim student Achmednur Ali, to her decade-long friendship with Jewish colleague Barbara Lehmann — and reads the Gospel of John as a roadmap for interfaith friendships marked by love, free speech, public space, and a willingness to risk being changed.

Preaching in Christ Chapel on Yom HaShoah: Reflections on Interfaith Relations at a Lutheran College

Sarah Ruble

No. 53 · Spring 2021

Ruble shares her 2019 Holocaust Remembrance Day homily preached before the cross in Christ Chapel at Gustavus Adolphus, then reflects on whether “professional Christians” on Lutheran campuses might practice a non-mutual, witnessed confession before colleagues of other traditions as a check on Christian self-deceit.