I am writing this publisher’s note the day after a federal district court ruled in favor of Harvard University in its defense of the university’s practice of using race as one factor in its admissions process.
I agree with Barbara Mistick, the new president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, that “Harvard University’s successful defense of its admissions process in federal court is a win for the entire higher education community’s efforts to diversify enrollment and create opportunities for students from all sectors of our nation to achieve their dream of a college degree.” Harvard’s vindication also supports Lutheran higher education’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, which was the focus of the 2019 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference. (Two notes for readers: First, know that NAICU is the Washington lobbying office for NECU institutions and most other church-related and private higher education. They do terrific work on your behalf every day. Second, beginning with the 2020 conference, NECU’s annual summer conference will be labeled the “Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education Conference.”)
A commitment to diversity sounds contemporary, but for Lutheran higher education, it is an old and foundational commitment. Its root is the claim that Christianity is open and available to all. Christianity’s commitment to universalism has all-too-often sadly translated into cultural and even political imperialism. Nonetheless, the commitment remains that the gospel is to be spoken to and meant for all. The earliest Christians affirmed that all people were welcomed because, in Christ, God shows no partiality.
The Christian commitment to diversity is also reflected in our basic confessional document, the Bible. The early Church rejected attempts by some Christians to harmonize the four diverse gospel books of the New Testament into a single, biographical narrative about Jesus. The early Christians insisted that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John truly are “gospels,” not biographies of Jesus, conveying four different takes on the good news (the meaning of “gospel”) from God revealed by Jesus. Diversity in the four testimonies to the gospel, despite the resulting complexity and even contradictions contained within them, was to be honored.
This core Christian commitment to diversity means that Lutheran higher education also is committed to diversity. In our day, that commitment requires a concomitant commitment to equity and inclusion, as was demonstrated well at the Vocation Conference in 2019 and in the essays of this issue of Intersections.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn opens with Lenny Duncan’s observation that the ELCA is 96 percent white — the whitest denomination in the U.S. — and asks how teachers and administrators at historically, predominantly, and persistently white institutions can turn from white privilege and white supremacy toward spaces where people of color thrive and white people are re-formed into antiracist allies.
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Article
Making Diversity Matter: Inclusion is the Key
Monica Smith
Smith, Augustana’s inaugural Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, frames the work of a Chief Diversity Officer as that of a disrupter and argues that while diversity in higher education is already happening, inclusion is a choice — one requiring a fundamental institutional transformation that diversifies faculty and staff, infuses diversity into the curriculum, invests in professional development, and draws on senior leadership to dismantle barriers.
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Article
The Perils and Promise of Privilege
Guy Nave
Nave argues that privilege is always used in one of two ways — to preserve privilege by promoting inequity, or to challenge privilege by promoting diversity, inclusion, and equity — and uses examples from Indianapolis Catholic schools, Martin Luther, and equity-mindedness research to call Lutheran institutions to address the racist practices and policies that reproduce whiteness on their campuses.
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Article
The Vocation of White People in a Racist Society
Caryn Riswold
Riswold proposes that whiteness is a weakness borne of apathy, atrophy, and ignorance — an atrophied muscle of race-consciousness — and offers concrete practices (reading, adjusting one’s gaze, consuming media differently, drawing on ELCA social statements like the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery) for exercising that muscle and naming the vocation of white people in a racist and white supremacist culture.
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Article
Learning the Language of Inclusive Pedagogy
David Thompson
Thompson frames inclusive pedagogy as a foreign language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and cultural values, and reflects on a year of immersing himself in readings, conversations, and workshops — arguing that proficiency grows when instructors study and practice these languages repeatedly and atrophies when ignored.
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Article
The "V" Word: Different Dimensions of Vocation in a Religiously Diverse Classroom
Martha E. Stortz
Stortz responds to a sea of blank stares when she used the word “vocation” in a religiously diverse required course by offering five metaphors — place, path, relationships, lens, and story — that point to different dimensions of vocation across the world’s religions and help students articulate their callings on their own terms.
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Book Review
The American Myth of White Supremacy: A Review of Myths America Lives By
Susan VanZanten
VanZanten reviews Richard T. Hughes’s Myths America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories that Give Us Meaning, which argues that the United States grounds its identity in five myths — Chosen Nation, Nature’s Nation, Christian Nation, Millennial Nation, and Innocent Nation — all informed by the primal myth of white supremacy, and considers what Lutheran theological values can offer for resisting that myth.
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Reflection
Seeing in a New Way: A Meditation
Kara Baylor
Baylor, the only Black campus pastor in the NECU, weaves Psalm 25, the parable of the Good Samaritan as re-read through Lenny Duncan, and the “crimson thread of divine justice” from Allen Dwight Callahan into a meditation that closes with the invitation she offered at the 2019 conference — to tie a crimson thread around the wrist as a symbol of collective commitment to moving beyond privilege toward inclusion and equity.
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Article
Conciliatory and Queer: The Radical Love of Lutheran Higher Education
Kiki Kosnick, Sharon Varallo
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.
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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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Article
Rooted and Open: Background, Purpose, and Challenges
Mark Wilhelm
No. 49 · Spring 2019
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.
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Response
“My Wife, We Have Not Come to the End of All Our Trials, but a Measureless Labor Yet”: The Lutheran Argument in Colleges
Steven Paulson
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Paulson of Concordia College responds to Bouman by invoking Penelope’s unreasonable patience for Odysseus and asking whether Bouman’s five “principles” deliver the “continuities of conflict” that MacIntyre’s account of a living tradition demands. He argues that the proper Lutheran “continuity of conflict” is the praxis of proclamation—Christ crucified as “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles”—which is given outside the institution’s walls and which colleges and universities, as socially embodied arguments, “can’t like” because it places truth beyond their control. The Lutheran problem, he concludes, is not the Enlightenment or Post-Modernism but the “old Adam,” the Odysseus still unsure of his identity.
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Institutional Focus
A List of ELCA Social Teaching and Policy Documents
No. 51 · Spring 2020
A reference list, as of September 2019, of the ELCA’s twelve social statements, fourteen social messages, and over 150 social policy resolutions — with Spanish translations where available.
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Article
"Greed is an Unbelieving Scoundrel": The Common Good as Commitment to Social Justice
Samuel Torvend
No. 42 · Fall 2015
Torvend uses his Lutheran Heritage course at Pacific Lutheran University to ask what “the common good” might mean concretely — fresh air, clean water, food, shelter, healthcare — and traces the early Lutheran reform of literacy and social welfare to argue that the first gift of Lutheran education is the capacity to question the status quo and to push beyond charity into the pursuit of social justice.
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Institutional Focus
Continuing the Dialogue: Augustana College
Sandra C. Looney
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Looney describes Augustana College, Sioux Falls, debating and renaming its values—Christian, Liberal Arts, Community, Excellence, Service—under the leadership of religion professor Dr. Arthur Olsen and the T’N’T (“Through Thick and Thin”) committee, in the wake of ELCA Region III’s “What Does It Mean to be a College of the Church?” conversations. She describes Augustana’s 56% Lutheran student body, daily 10 a.m. chapel, dual Christmas Vespers in Our Savior’s Lutheran Church and St. Joseph’s Cathedral, the Capstone classes on moral and aesthetic issues, and the ongoing work of enlarging Augustana’s conversation to include Native American, Jewish, and Islamic voices.
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Article
"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.
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Article
Deep Roots, Big Questions, Bold Goals
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 49 · Spring 2019
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.