Vocational Re-Formation for a Multi-Religious World

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.

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).

Tom Natalini

Tom Natalini

Natalini, a Susquehanna University senior raised Lutheran, schooled Mennonite, and seasoned by a meditative encounter in India, reflects on his journey through churchgoing, philosophy, near-Jewish conversion, and Buddhist practice to a stance he calls patience — neither Christian, Jew, Buddhist, seeker, nor “none.”

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.

Laboratories for Living in a Diverse World

Elizabeth Eaton

No. 44 · Fall 2016

Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton argues that ELCA colleges and universities are called to be laboratories for living in a religiously diverse world. Reflecting on the decline of Christian privilege, the ELCA’s ecumenical and inter-religious work, and her own experience addressing the Islamic Society of North America, she offers three questions about partnerships, formation, and institutions as platforms for new collaborations.

Do You Teach in a Different Manner at a Lutheran College? Unraveling the Lutheran Knot and Highlighting the Glory in the Theology of the Cross

Curtis L. Thompson

No. 16 · Winter 2003

Thompson argues that being Lutheran means having a “knot in the stomach”—a dialectical “Yes and No” tension between law and gospel, two kingdoms, Word and world—and that this knot is held together by Luther’s theology of the cross supplemented by an under-appreciated theology of glory in which God shines through human beings and creation. He then traces how the Lutheran knot shapes his teaching at Thiel College in the Religion department, the first-year team-taught “History of Western Humanities,” the second-year “Science and Our Global Heritage,” and his work as Co-Director of Thiel’s Global Institute, concluding that only such “dialectical doublespeak” leaves him with the “at-once dreaded and delightful dis-ease of the Lutheran knot.”

A Lutheran Learning Paradigm

Paul J. Dovre

No. 34 · Fall 2011

Drawing on Hughes and Adrian’s Models of Christian Higher Education and on Ernest Simmons, Darrell Jodock, Tom Christenson, Robert Benne, and Richard Hughes, Dovre sketches a Lutheran learning paradigm shaped by four deep narratives—the biblical, the confessional, the theological, and the vocational—and traces their implications for curriculum (the study of scripture, theology, and vocation), for the religion faculty’s college-wide responsibility, and for pedagogy (moral deliberation, dialectic, paradox, the engagement of faith and the secular disciplines).

The Long Pilgrimage of 2020-21

Kara Baylor

No. 52 · Fall 2020

Drawing on Martha Stortz’s definition of pilgrimage as “intentional dislocation, for the sake of transformation, where the body teaches the soul,” Baylor invites students and educators worn out by the 2020-21 academic year to ask what is essential, to listen to what their bodies are telling their souls, and to be more open to the transformations the dislocation might still yield.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 36 · Fall 2012

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: 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.

Toward an Adequate Theology of Christian Higher Education

Robert Benne

No. 10 · Fall 2000

Drawing on his forthcoming Eerdmans volume Quality With Soul—Thriving Ventures in Christian Higher Education, which studies St. Olaf, Valparaiso, Notre Dame, Baylor, Wheaton, and Calvin, Benne argues that these schools have kept their souls because a critical mass of boards, administrators, faculty, and students treat the Christian account as comprehensive, unsurpassable, and central. He critiques four inadequate theologies of Christian higher education—pietism, liberal theology (Whitehead, Henry Nelson Weiman, the “values” turn, and accommodation to diversity and multiculturalism), “First Article” approaches (including Merrill Cunninggim’s Methodist version and a Lutheran two-kingdoms quietism), and reactionary/triumphalist theology—and contrasts the Catholic (Notre Dame), Reformed (Calvin, Wheaton, Baylor), and Lutheran (St. Olaf, Valpo) ways of relating faith and learning, calling Lutherans to recover “Christ and culture in paradox” as serious extended conversation rather than as a lazy excuse.