The Lutheran Reformation of Christianity in the sixteenth century also included the reform of education. Prior to the Reformation, education in Europe had been a private matter, reserved for those who could afford tutors or who could enter a medieval monastery. Lutheran reformers insisted that education should be a function of the community and available to all because education was necessary to fulfill God’s desire that human communities flourish and that society function wisely.
Although it is no longer widely known, this Lutheran educational ideal is one of the primary sources of contemporary higher education. The ideal first informed higher education’s attention to character development, which remains with us today, particularly in undergraduate education. The Lutheran tradition of educational reform also shaped the university model by helping to establish the University of Berlin, the first modern research university. Concomitantly, the Lutheran movement played a significant role in creating the academy. Drawing on the commitment to embrace God’s call to freedom, the value of all people, and care for creation, Lutheranism helped develop key practices of the academy: academic freedom, humble acknowledgment of one’s limits, contributions to the common good, and the importance of questioning received knowledge, values, and practices.
The truth that a living Lutheran intellectual movement centrally helped develop Western and then global higher education has been masked in the United States. Immigrant Lutherans founded colleges in America to serve their communities without reference to broader Lutheran ideals. They focused instead on creating schools for educating their own leaders, a necessary task in America, with its disestablishment of religion. The decision of twentieth-century American Lutheran leaders not to establish a Lutheran research university reflected their focus on residential colleges as vehicles for internal Lutheran leadership development.
This focus on internal leadership development and this forgetting of Lutheran educational ideals left an intellectual void that was filled by a widely accepted secular understanding of academic mission. The Lutheran tradition as a resource for higher education was relegated to campus ministry and, in most cases, to certain religion department courses. At some colleges, the Lutheran tradition continued to provide a pious gloss to the college’s academic mission, but it had no substantive place in informing academic work.
The Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities (NECU) was organized in part to awaken Lutheran higher education from our collective amnesia about the ideals of Lutheran higher education and their implications for the mission of our institutions. The statement Rooted and Open summarizes the work done to articulate a vision for higher education shaped by Lutheran ideals. We have also made great strides toward drawing on Lutheran educational ideals for co-curricular learning, particularly by emphasizing education-for-vocation. However, we have only begun to reclaim the Lutheran intellectual tradition as an ongoing resource for the full missions of our institutions, including their academic missions.
This issue of Intersections includes writings from an initiative by NECU to change this situation. NECU convened a consultation in July 2019 to explore possible uses of the Lutheran intellectual tradition as a resource for the academic mission of our institutions. The case study was whether and how to use Lutheran social teaching as a resource for teaching business ethics. The consultation involved professors from business, leadership, and management departments at Augsburg University, Concordia College, and Augustana College.
Much detritus to discard and much work remains toward reclaiming a vibrant Lutheran identity at NECU institutions. All the articles in this issue on Lutheran social teaching and economic life reflect an important step along the way.
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Editorial
Guest Editorial: Moral Deliberation in NECU Classrooms
Ernest L. Simmons
Simmons introduces the guiding question of the NECU working group: could the ELCA’s twelve social statements and thirteen social messages — expressions of Lutheran social teaching originally formulated for congregational use — turn campuses into “academic communities of moral deliberation”?
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Article
The Responsible Professional: Vocation and Economic Life
Martha E. Stortz, Tom Morgan
Stortz and Morgan argue that the “value-added” of Lutheran higher education is a responsibility ethic — one that frames the professional as a first responder “called and empowered to serve the neighbor so that all may flourish” — and unpack the four criteria of the 1999 ELCA social statement Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All as a framework for economic deliberation.
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Institutional Focus
A List of ELCA Social Teaching and Policy Documents
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
ELCA Social Teaching for the Classroom?
Roger A. Willer
Willer argues that the body of ELCA social teaching, taken as a whole, constitutes an actual social ethic — relatively comprehensive, responsibly consistent, and remarkably cogent — whose mode of responsibility ethics commends it as a classroom resource for any discipline that wrestles with moral questions.
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Article
The Challenge of Inclusion in the Ethics Classroom
Faith Wambura Ngunjiri
Ngunjiri, the only Black woman tenured faculty member at Concordia College, reflects on her students’ resistant and resonant responses to MLK Day programming on “Not Racist: A White Moderate Myth” — and on what it takes to make the ethics classroom a place where students can “BREW”: Becoming Responsibly Engaged in the World.
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Article
Business as Usual? Marketing, God, and the Limits of Christian Callings
Emily Beth Hill
Hill, a former corporate marketing consultant turned theologian, returns to Luther’s claim that no vocation is more holy than another — and uses Luther’s Large Catechism definition of God to argue that the modern practice of branding intentionally redirects the love and worship of human beings toward capital, raising the question of whether Christian neighbor-love places limits on what professions Christians should pursue.
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Article
Responding to Student Hunger at NECU Institutions
Kristen Glass Perez
Glass Perez recounts how her work as college chaplain at Augustana and Muhlenberg evolved after a student offhandedly declared, “I am always so hungry at this school,” and shares five lessons learned from launching campus pantries, emergency grant programs, and the HOPE Survey to address food insecurity as a defining calling of NECU institutions.
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Article
Gen Z is Made for Lutheran Higher Education
W. Kent Barnds
Barnds argues that Generation Z’s defining traits — socially responsible, purpose-driven, cost-conscious, culturally open, and tech-expectant — align almost perfectly with the missions of NECU institutions, and offers concrete suggestions (from replacing “vocation” with “purpose” to embracing Gen X parents as co-pilots) for Lutheran colleges seeking to attract and serve this generation.
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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. 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
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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Article
“A Decolonizing Conversation”: Indigenous Engagement at Luther College at the University of Regina
Marc Jerry, Sarah Dymund
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Jerry and Dymund describe Luther College at the University of Regina’s response to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission — Land Acknowledgments, a Starblanket ceremony, the Project of Heart, an Elder in Residence, and the unedited video conversation with Elder Lorna Standingready that anchored their 2023 VLHE keynote.
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Article
Civic Engagement, "Baylor In Deeds," and Engaged Learning
Rebecca Flavin
No. 63 · Spring 2026
6 min audio
Flavin describes how Baylor’s strategic plan “Baylor in Deeds” and its Office of Engaged Learning are building civic engagement into the Arts & Sciences core curriculum, with early Global Engagement Survey data showing gains in civic efficacy and global civic responsibility.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
James M. Unglaube
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Unglaube welcomes readers to the inaugural issue of Intersections, crediting Editor Tom Christenson and Capital University, and announces the new annual Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference whose continuing dialogue the journal exists to enhance. He gives thanks to the Lilly Endowment for a sizable grant supporting the 1996 conference, campus dialogues, and the birth of the publication.
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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.
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Article
A Church, the Human Condition, and the Fissured Face of Peace
D. M. Yeager
No. 22 · Spring 2006
Yeager, a member of the ELCA Task Force for Studies on Sexuality, reflects on lessons for the church’s educational mission in the wake of the 2005 Churchwide Assembly. Drawing on Macquarrie’s The Concept of Peace, Polanyi on the personal coefficient of knowledge, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and responses to the task force report from Roy Harrisville III and Larry Rasmussen, she proposes “the fissured face of peace”—peace as the absence of hostility rather than disagreement—and maps how Arendt’s five conditions of human existence (life, earth, natality, mortality, worldliness, plurality) might shape Lutheran colleges’ curricula in history, epistemology, and the sociology of knowledge so that graduates can disagree without hostility and embrace the slow work of reformation.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Christenson introduces an issue featuring “young and old, angry and encouraging, prophetic and hopeful” voices unified by the assumption that Christians engaged in thinking and educating will ask hard questions: how to raise concerns about militarism and the new American “imperialism,” what a Lutheran law school will say about training a new generation of attorneys, and what Lutheran colleges communicate to undergrads about vocation. Such faithful criticism, he argues, is part of who Lutheran institutions are.