Since the founding of the ELCA in the late 1980s, the colleges and universities related to this church have changed their self-definition of Lutheran higher education. ELCA colleges and universities have shifted the definition of Lutheran higher education away from adherence to institutional markers, such as the percentage of Lutherans on the faculty or in the student body, to an alignment with educational values derived from the Lutheran intellectual tradition. Intersections has recorded the development of this re-definition, as well as the arguments for it and the debates about it, since the journal’s beginning.
The re-definition of Lutheran higher education began before the 1980s, and a full embrace of the new definition does not yet exist. The institutional-marker definition of Lutheran higher education remains dominant in the ELCA and among many non-Lutherans involved in ELCA higher education. Nonetheless, ELCA college and university leaders have widely accepted the new definition. Recent discussions among college and university presidents have focused on deepening their understanding the new definition and the public articulation of it.
The new collegiate association for ELCA higher education, the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities (NECU), is working to assist the presidents with these tasks. NECU convened religion and theology faculty from eight ELCA schools, inviting them to prepare recommendations for summarizing Lutheran higher education defined by values drawn from the Lutheran intellectual tradition. Their suggestions will be presented to the presidents who will gather in Chicago for a conference on Lutheran identity in June 2017.
The breadth of research into the Lutheran roots of higher education has unearthed a wealth of insights. Faculty specialists in religion and theology can navigate the historical, theological, ethical, and pedagogical complexities of the research. (You can find their discussions in back issues of Intersections at http://digitalcommons.augustana.edu/intersections.) They can readily describe the values for higher education rediscovered by this research, how these values do and should continue to drive ELCA higher education, and how an alignment with these educational values strengthens the Lutheran identity and mission of ELCA colleges and universities far more than a focus on numbers of students, faculty, and administrators who are personally Lutheran. Furthermore, they can articulate how alignment with these values has allowed ELCA colleges and universities to embrace diverse constituencies while continuing to enroll and educate leaders for the Lutheran community.
This work, however, is daunting for non-specialists in religion and theology, including most ELCA college and university presidents. The June conference is designed to fill the gap. My hope is that the presidents will find the faculty working group’s recommendations a wise, shared framework for articulating our common Lutheran identity—both within our schools and to all our external constituencies.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn introduces “Education in the Age of Trump” by recounting a difficult academic year on his own campus — the Augustana “chalking” incident, a Latinx Unidos rally, and post-election conversations with marginalized students and quietly conservative Trump supporters alike — and frames the issue’s essays as careful (re)imaginings of the vocation of Lutheran higher education in an anxious political climate.
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Article
Higher Education in the Age of Trump
Daniel B. Braaten
Braaten surveys what the Trump administration has and has not done on higher education — from the selection of Betsy DeVos and a rumored Falwell-led task force to the travel ban and expanded deportation priorities — and argues that Lutheran colleges, guided by the ELCA’s social message on immigration, have a special obligation to consider what they will do to protect their most vulnerable students.
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Article
Resistance in the Age of Trump: An Interview with Ivonne Wallace Fuentes
Jason A. Mahn, M. Ivonne Wallace Fuentes
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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Article
Religion in the Age of Trump
Daniel A. Morris
Morris reads the 81% evangelical vote for Donald Trump through two historical theses: that evangelicals’ once-coherent story about Godly participation in political life has fallen apart, and that their long-running tendency to exclude others — once aimed at Black Americans and Catholics — has now turned decisively against Muslims. He argues that scholars of religion and politics have a responsibility to tell these stories well, and that appeals to classroom objectivity can no longer be a luxury.
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Article
Room at the Table: Reflections on Identity and Inclusion from a Lutheran-Friendly Muslim
Rose Aslan
Aslan reflects on her experience as a Muslim professor of Islamic studies at California Lutheran University — teaching “Introduction to Christianity” from her strengths in the Abrahamic religions, preaching an Eid khutba in a Lutheran chapel, and conversing with the university’s convocators — and proposes “Lutheran-friendly Muslim” as a way of being host and guest at once in a pluralistic Lutheran institution.
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Article
Jonah: The Anti-Hero of Vocation
Martha E. Stortz
In a chapel talk first given at Augsburg College’s Vocation 2.0 series in September 2016, Stortz reads the prophet Jonah as the great anti-hero of vocation — one who tries to outrun God’s call to the great city of Nineveh — and argues that, in a season of urban violence and divisive election-year rhetoric, the story is less about public calling than about being called by the publics in our midst.
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Article
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? A Homily on Liminality and Vocation
Lori Brandt Hale
Drawing on Wes Moore’s The Other Wes Moore, Warren St. John’s Outcasts United, Victor Turner’s anthropology of liminality, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poem “Who Am I?”, Hale considers how Hmong, Muslim, Latinx, LGBTQ+, non-traditional, and other students live in “double liminal” spaces — and asks whether liminality might itself be a place of transformation in conversations about vocation.
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Poem
Poetry: After Months of Clouds, the Sun; First Bird
Farah Marklevits
Two poems by Augustana writing instructor Farah Marklevits: “After Months of Clouds, the Sun” calls the reader up from a desk of doom-scrolling addiction and into breeze and light, while “First Bird,” epigraphed by Emily Dickinson, watches a robin flit through mid-January Midwestern loam as a phenological fairy tale of dread and the urge to live.
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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
What is Required of You?: Higher Education Leadership in a Moral Key
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 62 · Fall 2025
Drawing on Micah 6:8 and Stephen Carter’s “etiquette of democracy,” Pribbenow describes the three things Augsburg requires of every incoming student — show up, pay attention, and do the work — as a democratic social ethic that prepares students for engaged citizenship in a fractured public life.
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Article
Down and Out: First Year Students Encounter Lutheran Theology
Lindsey Leonard
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Leonard describes how Wartburg’s IS 101 first-year seminar wove the Dalai Lama, Paul Kingsnorth, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Mary Robinson’s Climate Justice into the Fall 2020 reader so the “COVID class” could encounter Lutheran theology’s call to serve the neighbor across the pandemics of disease, racism, and climate change.
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Article
In the Beginning of the Reformation Was the Word
George Connell
No. 46 · Fall 2017
Drawing on a Concordia faculty pilgrimage to German Luther sites, Connell appropriates John’s prologue to frame the Reformation as a movement about words — the printed page, the university classroom, the Marburg confession, the Wartburg translation, Bach’s music, and the dining-room conversations of Table Talk — while soberly noting that words can wound as well as heal.
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Article
Building on a Firm Foundation: ELCA Inter-Religious Relations
Kathryn M. Lohre
No. 40 · Fall 2014
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.
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Article
Even Lutheranism Can Be Cool Now: Changes in Religion and American Culture
Mark Wilhelm
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Wilhelm names two major changes in the role of religion in American culture—the rise of a rhetoric of religious individualism, exemplified by “Sheilaism” in Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, and a proliferation of religious options driven by the democratization of authority, the end and beginning of ethnicity, the success of ecumenism, and the information revolution—and draws implications for Lutheran-related higher education, including support for Stephen Prothero’s call for core religious literacy and a confident reclaiming of each college’s religious heritage as a platform for engaging the religious diversity of America.
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Article
Engaging the Local Community: Why Bother?
Mary S. Carlsen
No. 27 · Spring 2008
Carlsen traces the often adversarial history of town-gown relations from the medieval universities through the Battle of St. Scholastica Day to the “ivory tower” pattern of American higher education, then argues that Lutheran colleges should engage their local communities for practical, educational, ecological, moral, and theological reasons. Drawing on her work in social work education at St. Olaf and on Ira Harkavy, Ernest Boyer, and the ELCA’s “Our Calling in Education,” she offers a recipe for engagement that is Passionate, Ethical (Needed, Welcomed, Mutual, Long-term, Attentive to diversity, Strengths-based, Respectful), and Reflective.