I never expected to grow up and become a church and higher education bureaucrat! When I revisited the encouragement received from faculty during my seminary years, resulting in a decision to enter a doctoral program in my mid-thirties, I envisioned joining the faculty at a wonderful Lutheran college or university after defending my dissertation. That did not happen. Nonetheless, I am grateful for the unanticipated opportunities that put me on an unexpected path to becoming the founding executive director for the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities.
Gratitude is rising up in me these days as I anticipate my retirement next winter. As many readers of Intersections will have heard, I announced at NECU’s annual meeting in early January 2022 that I will retire on January 31, 2023. Much time remains before next January, and many tasks are yet to be completed. Even so, I have already begun to reflect on my experience with NECU, and those reflections have sparked gratitude within me. I am deeply and profoundly grateful for the privilege of serving our association and for the opportunity to meet many—but not nearly enough—of the thousands of gifted people at NECU member institutions.
NECU’s growth in its collective understanding of the vocation of Lutheran higher education has been the most gratifying development during my time as executive director. Articulating a vision for Lutheran higher education in twenty-first-century North America was identified as a core purpose for NECU when it was established in 2015. That vision was expressed in our 2018 statement, Rooted and Open: The Common Calling of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities. The journal Intersections has promoted conversation about this vision, and NECU’s summer conferences on the Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education have annually explored various aspects of the Lutheran vision for higher education.
Before I reach retirement, my hope is that we will make additional progress on articulating and claiming how a common vocation to embody a shared vision for Lutheran higher education is expressed in diverse and distinctive ways by NECU’s 27 member colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. The first sentence of a new mission statement for NECU (adopted at last January’s annual meeting) names this issue. The sentence reads, “The Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities articulates a vision for Lutheran higher education in North America that finds expression in the rich and diverse missions of its member institutions.” The first goal of NECU’s 2022-2025 strategic plan directs our association to “deepen the understanding of the rich diversity of Lutheran identity at NECU institutions.”
We will explore this topic at the 2022 Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education Conference, next July 18-20. (Please see information on page 20 of this issue.) Good work toward addressing the issue is also underway at three NECU member institutions through their NetVUE “institutional saga” grants, in the diverse ways vocational reflection is carried out on our campuses, and through other distinctive practices.
With gratitude for the work done and for the work to come, I thank God for my time with NECU even as I thank NECU for giving me the chance to serve our community of higher education.
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Editorial
From the Outgoing Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn closes out a decade of editing Intersections, passes the duties to Colleen Windham-Hughes, gives thanks to Mark Wilhelm and Augustana College, and introduces an issue largely drawn from comments by Lutheran faculty, staff, and administrators at the 2022 NetVUE national gathering.
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Editorial
From the Incoming Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes introduces herself as incoming editor by reclaiming the root of assess — “to sit by” — and committing to the question “What does this mean?” as she sits with readers in the worth of our work and the universality of vocation.
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Institutional Focus
Building a Developmental Framework for Vocational Reflection at Thiel College
Brian Riddle, Greg Q. Butcher, Liza Anne Schaef
Riddle, Schaef, and Butcher describe how a NetVUE Program Development Grant enabled Thiel College to build “the Tomcat Way” — a four-year developmental framework with personal, social, academic, and professional domains and four phases (Explore, Envision, Belong and Lead, Launch) — that now guides every aspect of the student experience.
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Article
Assessing Self-Assessment Instruments at Finlandia University
René Johnson
Johnson surveys three self-assessment instruments presented at the NetVUE conference — PathwayU at Colorado State, the Intercultural Development Inventory at Friends University, and Mark Savickas’s Career Construction Counseling Manual at Union College — and describes Finlandia’s use of the CliftonStrengths© assessment to link students’ personhood to “behaviors that benefit the community.”
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Institutional Focus
Pivoting to Imaginative Programming in the Midst of the Pandemic at Bethany College
Arminta Fox
Fox recounts how Bethany College’s NetVUE Program Development Grant — originally designed around service-learning trips — was reimagined under COVID-19 into a guest-speaker model that tripled student participation and opened new vocational possibilities through the close, personal stories of alumni, alums-turned-volunteers, and community partners.
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Institutional Focus
Serving and Building Community at Concordia College
Larry Papenfuss
Papenfuss, director of the Dovre Center for Faith and Learning, frames eight ways Concordia College serves the world by building community — from quality teaching and liberating liberal learning to interfaith cooperation and modeling “diversity with particularity” as a Lutheran “third path” institution.
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Institutional Focus
Sharing the Gift of Vocation at (and beyond) Augsburg University
Paul C. Pribbenow
Pribbenow, drawing on a 2022 NetVUE panel with Dorothy Bass and Jodi Porter, considers how the gift of vocation forged with undergraduates can be extended — beyond undergraduate campuses to graduate students, faculty, and staff; across the vocational lifespan from high schoolers to alumni navigating the “gig economy”; and into accompaniment of faith communities through Augsburg’s Riverside Innovation Hub.
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Book Review
Assessing the Value of Liberal Arts: A Review of The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, by Richard A. Detweiler
Robert D. Haak
Haak reviews Richard A. Detweiler’s The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, in which the former president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association analyzes 240 college mission statements and interviews more than 1,000 graduates to argue that liberal arts educational experiences have a measurable impact on adult lives of consequence, inquiry, and accomplishment — and invites NECU institutions into a further conversation about how Detweiler’s methodology applies to Lutheran higher education.
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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. 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
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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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Haak introduces the issue with the question of whether “our Lutheranism” should have any discernible effect on how we operate as Lutheran colleges, and proposes a working list of “Lutheran” values that characterize our institutions — complexity, real evil, suffering as part of human experience, the centrality of discourse, transcendent values, attention to place, institutional self-criticism, and unity over division — inviting campuses to extend the conversation begun by Simmons, O’Hara, and the Wartburg colleagues.
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Editorial
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.”
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Article
From Pietism to Paradox: The Development of a Lutheran Philosophy of Education
Philip Nordquist
No. 8 · Winter 2000
Nordquist traces a four-decade personal and institutional journey from the “Protestant triumphalism” and aggressive moralism of S. C. Eastvold’s 1950s Pacific Lutheran through the 1960 Ditmanson–Hong–Quanbeck volume The Christian Faith and the Liberal Arts, Gordon Lathrop’s 1972 PLU donor address grounding the university in two-kingdoms theology, the ALC’s 1975 Concordia workshop with Bill Narum, Bob Bertram, Harris Kaasa, and Sydney Ahlstrom’s case for the “critical” tradition over the scholastic and pietistic, the 1976 LCA statement distinguishing “Christian” from “church-related” education, and Richard Hughes’s 1997 Carthage address. He concludes that dialectical (two kingdoms) theology, Christian humanism alongside professional studies (the New American College model), Luther’s commitment to universal compulsory education, environmental and civic responsibility, and academic freedom together constitute the bequest of the Reformation—“Christ and culture in paradox” remains the best approach to education he knows.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Vocation, Mission and Privilege
Marit Trelstad
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Trelstad affirms Wilhelm’s claim that vocation is the foundational shared mission of Lutheran higher education rather than one program among many, and presses the critique that calls to “vocational reflection” can mask privilege — arguing that an intersectional lens shows vocational discernment is in fact a matter of survival and flourishing for students from marginalized communities.
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Article
The University in the City of God: Beyond Dialectics and Rhetoric
Gregory A. Clark
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Clark, drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, distinguishes the preliberal, liberal, and postliberal university and argues that the liberal university’s pretense of dialectical neutrality has masked a particular rhetoric of its own. Following John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, he holds that every philosophy and institution is finally a rhetoric and that the church’s task is not to win on the secular university’s terms but to proclaim and embody an alternative city. The Christian college, then, should give up the apologetic pose of meeting secular reason halfway and instead practice the rhetoric of the gospel: a proclamation of Jesus, an enactment of Christian friendship and peace, and a willingness to be vulnerable to the violence of the world as Jesus was vulnerable to his own. Clark commends this stance to colleges related to the church.
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Article
Gen Z is Made for Lutheran Higher Education
W. Kent Barnds
No. 51 · Spring 2020
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.