Plague, pestilence, pandemic—these are not new phenomena. As someone who studies the history of theology, I think that one of the blessings of being part of a religious tradition is being able to look back on how people of faith in ages past have grappled with the scourges they faced.
I have been thinking lately of a short treatise that Martin Luther wrote in 1527, titled “Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague.” With all his talk of evil “vapors,” “mists,” and “spirits,” Luther definitely sounds like someone from another era. Then again, he also seems to understand the basics of respiratory transmission. Throughout the treatise, he actually shows a surprising degree of understanding of the nature of contagion and what we would today call public health. In fact, I would say that he has a lot of practical and spiritual guidance for our cities and our country as we struggle with the Covid-19 pandemic.
Luther’s response to pandemic centers around the theme of community. He reminds us that, like it or not, “we are bound to each other.” We live next to each other, we eat each other’s food, and we breathe each other’s air. On the one hand, he says, it is community that makes a pandemic possible, just like it makes a mass fire possible. On the other hand, he insists that the very thing that puts us at risk is also the very thing that can save us. If there’s a fire burning in our house, it is our neighbors who will help us put it out. So in a time of plague, God calls neighbors to take care of neighbors and to work together to restore the health of the community.
What does it mean to be part of a community during a time of plague? It starts, as it always does, with looking out for others rather than just ourselves. Like Jesus before him, Luther says that loving God means loving people. As he puts it, “service to God is service to our neighbor.”
For Luther, serving one’s neighbor in a time of plague requires first and foremost following the advice of medical experts. He insists that God has “created medicines” and “provided us with guidance” from doctors. He says that to put everything in God’s hands and then ignore experts’ advice would be like refusing to fetch water when your neighbor’s house is on fire.
“What does it mean to be part of a community during a time of plague?”
In Luther’s time as in our own, doctor’s orders started with vigilance about sanitation. Sure, pray to God for protection, Luther says, but then “fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it.” Luther practically issues a lock-down order: “Shun persons and places wherever your neighbor does not need your presence.” He goes so far as to say that negligence in these matters is akin to murder. He has especially harsh words for anyone who has symptoms of the disease and doesn’t take precautions not to infect others.
Within the community, Luther says that some people have special responsibilities. For example, doctors and nurses have a calling from God to care for the sick and the dying. In our time as in Luther’s, following this calling puts their own lives at risk. Luther promises that God is with them in what they do and says that they should be honored in the community for their selflessness.
Similarly, Luther argues that civic officials are called to be competent and responsible leaders in a time of crisis, always looking out, not for their own interests, but for the good of the whole. He insists that they have a particular duty to look out for the poor and the weak. When they flee from these responsibilities, he says, they sin against God.
Like it does for most, the pandemic currently sweeping our country and my city makes me fearful. As someone married to a hospital nurse, I am especially worried for my wife’s safety and that of my family. Still, Luther reminds me that we have faced pandemics like this before. We can get through them, with the help of God, if we work together for the good of all.
“Luther argues that civic officials are called to be competent and responsible leaders in a time of crisis, always looking out, not for their own interests, but for the good of the whole.”
So honor medical professionals and trust their advice. Thank grocery store workers, delivery personnel, and all those who risk their safety for the benefit of others. Remember that whenever we wash our hands, or check in on a neighbor in need, or stay home when we would rather go out, we are truly doing God’s work. Finally, as Luther would certainly remind us, have faith that even when we fail, God will never abandon our community or anyone within it.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
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 Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn narrates a year of crisscrossing pandemics — Covid-19, economic collapse, partisan politics, and the long pandemic of white supremacy revealed anew by the murder of George Floyd — and argues that Lutheran liberal arts schools, by educating for vocation, are uniquely poised to help students respond with character and capable callings.
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Article
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Caryn Riswold
Pairing Wartburg’s Lebenskreuz sculpture with the Matthew 25 acts of mercy and the commitments of Rooted and Open, Riswold reads the calls to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and care for the sick as urgent summons for Lutheran higher education in a year of overlapping pandemics — and as a call to dismantle the structures that produced them.
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Article
Radical Hospitality on Haunted Grounds: Anti-Racism in Lutheran Higher Education
Krista E. Hughes
Writing from Newberry College’s campus on land once home to the Cherokee and within a day’s drive of Mother Emanuel A.M.E., Hughes argues that NECU’s call to “practice radical hospitality” demands that predominately white institutions open themselves to the hauntings of racism — pursuing belonging rather than mere welcome, and risking kenotic transformation of institutional identity itself.
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Article
Activism, Justice, and the Danger of Silence
Dezi Gillon
In conversation with Jason Mahn, Augustana College alumnux Dezi Gillon traces the call to action they felt as a Black student organizing for Black Lives Matter on a predominately white campus — through seminary, art, spirituality, and restorative justice work — and warns white professors that staying silent “actually speaks volumes.”
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Article
Leadership in Lutheran Key at a Time of Pandemics
Deanna Thompson
Thompson draws on Luther’s theology of the cross and Shelly Rambo’s theology of trauma to sketch a Lutheran model of leadership for a season of pandemics — one that is attentive to pain, responsive to need, and intentionally nourished by food, friends, and deep conversation.
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Article
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Paul C. Pribbenow
Reflecting on Augsburg’s 150th-anniversary motto “Through truth to freedom,” Pribbenow argues that in a season of three pandemics — pandemic illness, economic collapse, and the racial sin laid bare by the murder of George Floyd — higher education’s most authentic work is to educate for truth and freedom by way of confession and reconciliation.
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Article
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Lena R. Hann
When the pandemic hit her new public health professionalism course, Hann recalibrated her teaching from the “how” of professional preparation to the “why” of vocational reflection — and recounts how Augustana public health students and alumni found purpose in the chaos through food banks, disaster response, palliative care, and research on health inequities.
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Reflection
The Long Pilgrimage of 2020-21
Kara Baylor
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.
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Article
Called to Flourish: An Ethic of Care
Mindy Makant
Drawing on Lenoir-Rhyne’s core value of Care, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, Darrel Jodock’s “Gift and Calling,” and Luther’s plague-era practice of opening his home to the sick, Makant argues that flourishing is interdependent — that self-care is a means to extending care, and that an ethic of care is the meaningful, transformative work to which Lutheran liberal arts education is called.
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Article
Called to the Moment: A New Vocation for Lutheran Colleges
W. Kent Barnds
After a derecho ravaged Iowa in August 2020 and Pastor Katy Warren preached on 1 Peter 4, Barnds watched line workers, neighbors, and Augustana colleagues simply show up where they were needed — and proposes that the true vocation of a Lutheran college may be making the case for “meeting immediate need with a deep willingness” alongside the longer work of vocational discernment.
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Article
Finding the Miracle in the Intersection of Mission and Limitations: Lessons from Latin America
Kat Peters
No. 61 · Spring 2025
Peters draws on her time interning with Lutheran World Relief and leading a study abroad program in Central America — including a Costa Rican women’s farm cooperative whose ecotourism project was “unprofitable” but life-giving — to argue that the intersection of God’s preference for struggle and God’s desire for abundant life is itself the miracle higher education can claim amid scarcity.
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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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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Selbyg explains that the four essays in this issue grew out of the first Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education—a two-week seminar funded by the Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation and the Lilly Endowment, led for its first three years by Dr. Ronald Thiemann of Harvard Divinity School—whose official theme “Finding Our Voice—Christian Faith and Critical Vision” became informally “What’s Faith Got To Do With It?”
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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
Dual Citizenship in Athens and Jerusalem: Ricoeur's Hermeneutics and the Promise of Lutheran Higher Education
Mark C. Mattes
No. 19 · Summer 2004
Mattes proposes a Lutheran model of Christian higher education that develops conversation between faith and learning while preserving the integrity of each, in contrast to Reformed, Roman Catholic, and Mennonite/free-church alternatives. Drawing extensively on Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval, his account of myth and symbol, and his understanding of truth as manifestation rather than mere correspondence, Mattes argues that issues of faith can be genuinely public; that the four phenomenological contours of dialogue—risk, listening, mutuality, and open-endedness—mark authentic Lutheran pedagogy; and that Lutheran education is best served when it charts a path between accommodationist and sectarian responses to the liberal-rationalist tradition.
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Article
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.