“Why all this talk about vocation?” This question, the theme of last summer’s conference for Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education, was the first in-person gathering for the group since 2019, which increased the joy in seeing one another while also raising the stakes of why we gather. Why, amidst all of the disruptions to higher education and continuing concerns about community spread of COVID, would we gather for presentations, workshops, and conversations about vocation? Mark Wilhelm offered a deceptively simple answer to the question in his keynote address, printed in this issue: “Lutheran higher education…is vocation-based education.”
We talk about vocation because we must: it is who we are and what we do, even if incompletely, clumsily, and unjustly at times. Wilhelm, who has served Lutheran higher education in various capacities for multiple decades and will retire in late January of 2023, calls us to “constructive work” and “corrective work” in the next decade of our work in vocation, a call that resonates with many authors in this issue.
In this issue you will read several responses to Wilhelm’s keynote address, offered in panel format at the conference and printed here for continued conversations among us on our college/university campuses. Each in their own way, Marit Trelstad, Vic Thasiah, Drew Tucker, Mary-Paula Cancienne, and Paul Pribbenow are already pushing, via vocation, toward constructive work and corrective work, outlining a living-together in higher education that widens and deepens the work as well as the narrative of what we do when we gather to learn and to teach for the sake of the world. Vocation must not be a mark of privilege, but must instead lead us boldly into reforms that call into question and even undo unjust systems of which we are part.
Julius Crump and Madyson Ray, both of whom attended the Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education conference for the first time last summer, write in compelling ways about why the work of vocation is essential to joy and purpose in learning as well as authentic relationships between professors and students.
The final two pieces are companions, since Elli Cucksey shares the constructive work she did in her role as librarian as a response to her experience as a student of Womanist theology with Beverly Wallace. In Wallace’s co-authored piece with Yolanda Norton, they root the work of vocation in the soul (“Doing the Work One’s Soul Must Have”). Engaging Womanist theology through coursework and the Black Girl Magic Academy, and cultivating spaces of freedom and empowerment through the Beyoncé Mass and Womanist Experiential Learning Initiative, Norton and Wallace invite ELCA colleges and universities to host existing events and expand the work to undergraduate campuses.
Take action based on what you read here
1) Reach out to one of the authors printed here and continue conversation about, or schedule an event that lives out, our shared calling to “vocation-based education.”
2) Complete the short survey we have designed to understand Intersections’ past and chart its future.
3) Contribute to the Spring 2023 issue: “Vocation (in) Disruption.” We invite pieces on finding vocation amidst disruption as well as being called to disruption as a vocation. Perspectives from all areas of Higher Education at Lutheran colleges and universities are welcome, including students. Submissions are due 15 January 2023.
There are several mic-drop moments in this issue; do not miss them!
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Article
Why All This Talk About Understanding the Mission of NECU Member Institutions as a Vocation?
Mark Wilhelm
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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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Vocation, Mission and Privilege
Marit Trelstad
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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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: DEI, Great; DWS (Dismantling White Supremacy), Even Better
Vic Thasiah
Thasiah argues that if Lutheran colleges and universities want to live out their commitment to the flourishing of all, DEI is good but DWS — dismantling white supremacy — is even better, and offers three Lutheran sensibilities (suspicion of self-righteousness, the decolonial shockwave of the cross, and critical thinking that can still register awe) that can make DWS a core practice of higher education.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Distinguishing Between Identity and Vocation
Andrew Tucker
Tucker proposes that NECU’s next most faithful step is to faithfully and effectively differentiate vocations and identities — arguing that identity is who you are, vocation is what you do, and that recognizing the plurality of both helps Lutheran institutions name which work is theirs to take up and which is good work that belongs to someone else.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Vocation—Wide Perspective Questions
Mary-Paula Cancienne
Cancienne, drawing on Iain McGilchrist, asks whether higher education has prioritized micro lenses at the expense of the macro view, and invites educators to hold the drama of individual vocation stories within a wider plot that includes James Webb Telescope wonder, climate grief, the long shadow of enslavement, and the resilience of native populations.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Adopting the Framework of ‘Because’ and ‘Therefore’
Paul C. Pribbenow
Pribbenow describes how Augsburg University responded to its dramatic demographic transformation (from 18% to nearly 70% BIPOC entering students over sixteen years) by adopting an institutional vocational statement and a simple “because/therefore” framework for translating particular Lutheran theological convictions into institutional programs, policies, and practices.
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Article
Work Works
Julius Crump
Crump argues that in an era of class-stratified careerism and the “ruins of neoliberalism,” commencement-speech rhetoric about heroic vocation will not resuscitate vocation — instead, professors embodying vulnerability, extemporaneity, and contemporaneity in the classroom can show students that consistent work, embodied as service to others, is itself worthy.
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Reflection
Why All This Talk About Vocation?
Madyson Ray
Ray, a junior at Midland University and the only student attendee at the 2022 conference, reflects on four workshops — on teaching womanist thought, on supporting student-athletes, on resistance to the word “vocation,” and on vocational reflection — and brings home concrete ideas including a women’s-history scavenger hunt and semester-long vocational reflections.
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Institutional Focus
LibGuide: Introduction to Womanist Theology
Elli Cucksey
Cucksey, the head librarian at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, recounts how Beverly Wallace’s Introduction to Womanist Theology class — the first offering of the ELCA Seminaries’ Womanist Theology Initiative — led her to build a publicly available LibGuide that amplifies Black women’s voices and gathers the resources of the course for future students.
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Article
Doing the Work One’s Soul Must Have
Beverly Wallace, Yolanda M. Norton
Norton and Wallace describe the Womanist Experiential Learning Initiative — including the Beyoncé Mass, study-abroad partnerships in Portugal, Brazil, and Ghana, and the Black Girl Magic Academy for teenage girls — as a way of centering Black women’s voices in theological education and doing, as Katie Geneva Cannon put it, “the work…that one’s soul must have.”
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Editorial
From the Publisher & Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes, Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 63 · Spring 2026
6 min audio
Wells and Windham-Hughes frame vocation as “ground game” — the practical, public living-out of faith through civic engagement — and introduce the issue’s focus on how Lutheran higher education equips students to repair the world.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 62 · Fall 2025
5 min audio
Windham-Hughes plays on the shared Latin root of “education” and “seduction” (ducere, to lead) to warn against the No-saying seductions of giving up or condemnation, and to call educators to the riskier Yes of showing up to build third-space communities of truth-telling and hope.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 61 · Spring 2025
5 min audio
Windham-Hughes uses Fred Rogers’ neighborhood as a living embodiment of a Lutheran understanding of vocation — seeing dignity in each person, offering one’s gifts generously, and trusting that the well-being of the neighborhood is intrinsically connected to the well-being of every neighbor.
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Institutional Focus
So That All May Belong: Lutheran Roots for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice
Altheia Richardson, Angie Hambrick, Caryn Riswold, Colleen Windham-Hughes, Deanna Thompson, Marcia Bunge, Robert Clay
No. 61 · Spring 2025
22 min audio
The full NECU statement grounds DEIJ work in Luther’s 16th-century reforms and Lutheran theological claims about the image of God, equal dignity, and the limits of human knowing — offering definitions, Lutheran roots, and calls to action for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, with belonging as the outcome of DEIJ at work.
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Institutional Focus
Scriptures That Inspire Work for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice
Altheia Richardson, Angie Hambrick, Caryn Riswold, Colleen Windham-Hughes, Deanna Thompson, Marcia Bunge, Robert Clay
No. 61 · Spring 2025
9 min audio
A companion list of biblical verses — from Genesis 1:27 and Galatians 3:28 to Micah 6:8 and Luke 4:18-19 — that grounded NECU’s drafting of So That All May Belong, organized by the four DEIJ commitments and offered as an invitation to share other texts that ground and sustain the work.
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Institutional Focus
So That All May Belong: Lutheran Roots for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice [abridged]
Altheia Richardson, Angie Hambrick, Caryn Riswold, Colleen Windham-Hughes, Deanna Thompson, Marcia Bunge, Robert Clay
No. 61 · Spring 2025
8 min audio
A condensed version of the NECU statement that consolidates Lutheran theological grounding for DEIJ and a single combined call to action for Lutheran colleges and universities — offered as a shareable summary alongside the complete document.
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Response
Of Imaginary Cows and a White Toy Sheep: The Freedom of a Christian College
Ryan La Hurd
No. 6 · Winter 1999
La Hurd, president of Lenoir-Rhyne and a former Thiel English professor and Augsburg academic dean, responds to Christenson by insisting (with Robert Kegan’s story of Tommy’s imaginary cattle farm) that a college is composed of people but is not itself a person, and so cannot share in Luther’s freedom of the Christian. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, George Marsden, Mark Schwehn, Jacques Barzun, and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable, he distinguishes the “imagined college” (the gift-economy realm of teaching and the alma mater) from the “real college” (the commodity-economy realm of fund-raising, deferred maintenance, and federal aid reconciliation that does not have such freedom)—and ends with Pablo Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry” and the marvelous white toy sheep offered through a hole in a fence.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 62 · Fall 2025
5 min audio
Wells frames the issue as a record of the 2025 VLHE Conference at Augsburg under the theme “Ethical Leadership in a Changing World,” arguing that vocation is never solitary but a collective, public witness of ethical formation, theology and care, flourishing and belonging, and leadership rooted in God’s grace.
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Article
Dual Citizenship: Reflections on Educating Citizens at Augsburg College
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Pribbenow argues that the vocation of Augsburg College is to educate “dual citizens”—those able to live within the messiness of common work rather than resolve every tension once and for all. Drawing on John Courtney Murray on democracy as “the intersection of conspiracies,” Bill Moyers, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Stephen Carter, and the Augsburg vision statement “We believe we are called to serve our neighbor,” he names four common commitments and five principles of civic education that ground Augsburg’s incarnational mission in its city neighborhood.
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Institutional Focus
So That All May Flourish Study Guide
No. 57 · Spring 2023
A chapter-by-chapter study guide to So That All May Flourish (Fortress Press 2023), a new volume by NECU authors that develops the central tenet of “Rooted and Open” and offers discussion questions for use in orientation programs, classes, workshops, task forces, and professional development settings.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 37 · Spring 2013
Wilhelm reports that decisions at the February 2013 LECNA and ELCA presidents’ meetings authorized reviews of funding and organizational practices and appointed a working group to draft a presidential statement on what it means to be a college or university of the ELCA, signaling a more substantive future role for the annual presidents’ gathering in shaping the shared identity and common mission of ELCA schools.
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Article
Professional Education/Liberal Arts Education: Not a Case of Either-Or but Both-And
Gail Summer
No. 24 · Fall 2006
Summer, Dean of Academic Programs at Lenoir-Rhyne College, traces the historical interweaving of liberal arts and professional education in American higher education (using the rise of engineering as a case study) and argues that the standard “either-or” framing of liberal arts versus professional preparation misreads both. At Lutheran colleges, the “both-and” relationship is shaped by a Lutheran understanding of vocation in which professional programs are integral to, not in tension with, the liberal arts.