In the spring of 2021, Trinity Lutheran Seminary offered a class called Introduction to Womanist Theology, as the first class of the Womanist Theology Initiative of the Seminaries of the ELCA. The class was taught by Dr. Beverly Wallace, Associate Professor of Congregational and Community Care at Luther Seminary.
The downside of working on a theology degree at the institution where I work full-time is that there is only time for one course at a time. The upside is that with one class at a time, I can focus deeply on that class and look for ways to incorporate the course work directly into my vocational work as Trinity’s only librarian. Dr. Wallace’s class looked like a perfect opportunity for me to explore a perspective to which I have had limited exposure. As with each of the classes I have taken at Trinity, this class would help me broaden my understanding of resources that can be of the most help to seminary students. The experience would prove to be so much more valuable than I had expected.
As it turned out, most of the class had been introduced to Womanist Theology as a field of study. While many of us had read at least a bit on the subject, Dr. Wallace guided us through a full semester of guests who spoke both broadly and deeply about theology, pastoral care, and other topics. Each author, preacher, or professor shared something different of the strengths of black women in the conversations about feminism, liberation, theology. By bringing their lived experiences to the table and allowing the rest of us to examine these ongoing conversations through their unique lenses broadened my perspective.
In due course, we reached the final assignment of the class. Dr. Wallace asked us each to create a “space of freedom.” When pressed for more details about what was expected, she gently demurred and asked us to think about what that meant to us. She reminded us that a womanist is creative. Now, one thing I know for sure is that I cannot be a womanist. Without the lived experience of being a black woman, which I will never have, I can only amplify womanist voices. As I imagined how I might create this “space of freedom” I envisioned a tool by which I might share these voices with audiences that might not have had opportunities to dive deeply into this kind of study. As it turns out, that is exactly what librarians do.
For my final project I created a LibGuide for Introduction to Womanist Theology. If you aren’t familiar with LibGuides then shame on your librarian, but it is a tool for building research guides on the web that allow librarians to assemble many resources into an easily navigable format. These guides can be created for individual classes, subjects, or really anything. I built this LibGuide by gathering as many of the resources referenced by Dr. Wallace and the guest speakers she brought to class, and then adding a space to include the class projects of other students. As of this writing, there are a few student projects waiting to be uploaded, but for various reasons they are not yet available. I hope to continue adding to the guide as future classes from Seminaries of the ELCA’s Womanist Theology Initiative complete.
The LibGuide can be found here: https://libguides.capital.edu/WomanistTheology
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Editorial
From the Editor: Why All This Talk About Vocation?
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes introduces the Fall 2022 issue built around Mark Wilhelm’s keynote “Why all this talk about vocation?” and previews five panel responses, two first-time conference reflections, and companion pieces on Womanist theology — framing vocation as a call not to privilege but to constructive and corrective work that undoes unjust systems.
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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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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
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
Jonah: The Anti-Hero of Vocation
Martha E. Stortz
No. 45 · Spring 2017
In a chapel talk first given at Augsburg College’s Vocation 2.0 series in September 2016, Stortz reads the prophet Jonah as the great anti-hero of vocation — one who tries to outrun God’s call to the great city of Nineveh — and argues that, in a season of urban violence and divisive election-year rhetoric, the story is less about public calling than about being called by the publics in our midst.
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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
Necessary Disruptions: Centering Vocation in the Common Good
Erin VanLaningham
No. 57 · Spring 2023
VanLaningham previews the forthcoming NetVUE volume Called Beyond Our Selves: Vocation and the Common Good, arguing that vocation, common, and good all need to be disrupted and expanded so that students might arrive at a wider sense of individual purpose and collective well-being.
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Article
Vocation at Full Stretch: Reflections on Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling and its Use among College Students
Jason A. Mahn
No. 61 · Spring 2025
43 min audio
Mahn engages Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling as required reading in a sophomore religion course, showing how her categories of missed, blocked, conflicted, fractured, unexpected, and relinquished callings empower young adults to perceive embodied, unplanned, and often painful dimensions of life as essential parts of vocation — and help close the gap between mission-driven and tuition-driven realities.
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Article
Wilhelm Löhe and Higher Education
David Ratke
No. 30 · Fall 2009
Ratke recovers the educational vision of Wilhelm Löhe (1808–1872), spiritual father of Wartburg College and Wartburg Seminary, drawing on Löhe’s “Aphorismen über Schule und Schulunterricht” and other writings to argue that education is about the formation of whole persons by whole teachers in whole institutions, that all education is religious and never neutral, and that education is for eternity as well as the present — a vision in which the values of Christianity sanctify the so-called worldly means of education.