About the Cover and Artist

About Rooted and Open: The Common Calling of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities

An institutional framing piece introducing Rooted and Open — NECU’s statement on Lutheran identity in higher education — with a roster of the faculty working group and writing team and an orientation to the essays in this special issue.

Rooted and Open: Background, Purpose, and Challenges

Mark Wilhelm

Wilhelm traces Rooted and Open’s seventy-year backstory — from Conrad Bergendoff’s 1948 call for a Lutheran philosophy of education through the recovery of the vocation tradition — and describes the document’s process, purpose as a teaching and study resource, and the embodiment, contextual, and cultural challenges it implies for NECU institutions.

In a Diverse Society, Why Should Lutheran Colleges/Universities Claim their Theological Roots?

Darrell Jodock

Jodock develops his “third path” account of the Lutheran college — neither sectarian nor non-sectarian but both rooted and open — analogizing the college to a bridge whose deck of daily activities rests on pillars of shared educational priorities, which in turn rest on theological footings; he then answers six common objections to claiming Lutheran roots and explains why those footings still matter.

Roots and Shoots: Tending to Lutheran Higher Education

Jason A. Mahn

Mahn revisits why “education-for-vocation” has become a leitmotif for the 27 NECU schools, distinguishes institutional vocation from individuals’ religious identities and educational priorities from their theological grounding, and offers a friendly critique of Jodock’s bridge metaphor: Lutheran colleges grow in two directions like plants — deep roots and wide branches alike require constant tending.

Marked by Lutheran Higher Education

Martha E. Stortz

Stortz offers an “operating manual” to Rooted and Open by tracing how the writing team moved from descriptive marks of the institutions to aspirational verbs that mark people — “called and empowered, to serve the neighbor, so that all may flourish” — and shows how each mark generates educational priorities theologically grounded in the radical mystery of God, the wild generosity of God, and the God who became one of us.

Deep Roots, Big Questions, Bold Goals

Colleen Windham-Hughes

Adapted from a presentation to the California Lutheran University Board of Regents, Windham-Hughes reads the title Rooted and Open as both reaching back into the Lutheran tradition and opening forward into a shared future, then unpacks the document’s “called and empowered — to serve the neighbor — so that all may flourish” through the lenses of freedom of inquiry as a third path, vocation-centered education, radical hospitality, and civil discourse oriented toward the common good.

Rooted and Open as Resource for Expanding Opportunities on Your Own Campus

Katherine A. Tunheim, Marcia Bunge

Bunge and Tunheim describe how Gustavus Adolphus College has paired Rooted and Open with its own companion volume Rooted in Heritage, Open to the World — in board workshops, new-faculty orientation, and classroom assignments — and survey several Network-wide opportunities (the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, the LECNA Fellows Program, the Association of Lutheran College Faculties, the Tuition Exchange Program, and international partnerships) that give the common calling tangible institutional form.

"Faithful Nones" and the Importance of a Rooted and Open Pedagogy

John Eggen

Drawing on a student survey from his D.Min. thesis at Midland University, Eggen identifies a distinctive subset of religious “nones” — the “faithful nones” — who reject institutional religion yet retain substantive beliefs and practices, and argues that the non-binary, third-path pedagogy commended by Rooted and Open is uniquely positioned to engage a generation that has disambiguated faith, religion, and spirituality.

Finding Flourishing: Teaching Self-Care as Course Content

Emily Kahm

Kahm argues that teaching self-care, self-awareness, and stress-coping as explicit classroom content embodies the “radical hospitality” of Rooted and Open and supports vocational formation against a consumerist culture, then offers concrete classroom techniques — a one-to-five energy check-in, ninety-second silence exercises, and full-day spiritual practices — that can be adapted across disciplines at NECU institutions.

Lutheran Colleges: Past and Prologue

Paul J. Dovre

No. 30 · Fall 2009

Dovre offers a reminiscence rather than a research paper, drawing on Aristotle’s ethos, logos, and pathos to trace fifty years of change at Midwestern Lutheran colleges through the key issues of survival, respectability, faithfulness, and relationship to the church — from the dependence of the 1950s through the independence of the late twentieth century to the partnership of the 2000s — and identifies key variables (the student marketplace, faculty formation, and the identity/diversity paradox) for shaping the identity and mission of Lutheran colleges into the future.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 7 · Summer 1999

Selbyg celebrates the popularity of the previous issue—the first to draw on papers from the annual “Vocation of a Lutheran College” conference—and announces a new Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation grant that will fund the inaugural Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education, a two-week seminar at Harvard led by Ronald Thiemann on “Finding Our Voice: Christian Faith and Critical Vision.”

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 11 · Spring 2001

Selbyg admits that promoting Lutheran colleges and universities can feel Sisyphean—clueless faculty or staff, fundraising treadmills, students and parents treated poorly by admissions, pastors with no sense of the colleges’ mission—but reports that alumni satisfaction surveys, ELCA-college faculty seminars, an engaging bishop, Ernie Simmons’s Lutheran Higher Education: An Introduction, and renewed reader interest in Intersections all show the stone is not at the bottom of the hill.

You Don't Seem Angry: Methodological Confessions Of A Lutheran Lay-Woman

L. DeAne Lagerquist

No. 5 · Summer 1998

Lagerquist, opening from a colleague’s 1981 observation about her M.A. thesis on four female abolitionists, traces her path from feminist historian and battered women’s shelter advocate through the University of Chicago’s obsession with method to a more self-conscious account of her own. The method grows out of four Lutheran themes—original sin (caution and humility), the eighth commandment against bearing false witness (generosity and forgiveness), the neighbor as “little Christ” (cooperative interpretation), and vocation (interpretation as calling, located alongside feeding the hungry and visiting the lonely)—and shapes her ongoing work on a history of Lutherans in the United States with a plot about learning to live with diversity.

“You Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Will Set You Free”: A Scientist’s Response

Ben Huddle

No. 2 · Winter 1997

Huddle of Roanoke College proposes adding a sixth theme to Bouman’s five—the scientific method—as a tool for knowing the Truth not available to Luther but central to twentieth- and twenty-first-century learning. Diagramming the continuous cycle of observations, laws, theories, and predictions, he argues that scientists must be ethical and that scholars in other fields must understand the scientific method (lest environmentalists ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics). A Lutheran college, he concludes, should treasure both the religious and the scientific tradition: stifling either loses meaning or significance, and the Lutheran tradition is therefore biblical, catholic, evangelical, sacramental, scientific, and world-affirming.

Reviews

Matthew J. Marohl

No. 26 · Fall 2007

Marohl reviews two 2006 Lutheran University Press volumes from Grand View College (Des Moines, IA). Mark C. Mattes and Ronald R. Darge’s Imaging the Journey … of Contemplation, Meditation, Reflection, and Adventure pairs Mattes’s Lutheran meditations on seven themes (from a spirituality of communication to Alpha and Omega) with Darge’s photographs and Ronald Taylor’s short prayers, with Mattes’s writing on vocation singled out as the volume’s finest. The Grand View College Reader, edited by Mattes, Evan A. Thomas, Kathryn Pohlman Duffy, and Ronald Taylor, surveys the college’s Foundations, Creativity, and Vocation through chapters by Thorvald Hanson, Kenneth Sundet Jones, Kevin Gannon, Ammertte C. Deibert, Steven Snyder, and President Kent Henning, tracing Grand View’s Grundtvigian and Danish Lutheran roots.