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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Article
Return to Purpose: Learning in an Age of Collapse
Ahmed Afzaal
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Afzaal argues that the cascading crises facing higher education are not temporary glitches but symptoms of planetary and civilizational collapse — and that colleges must embrace “double-loop” learning and return to a shared sense of purpose if they are to help humanity descend gradually rather than catastrophically.
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Article
The Lutheran Liberal Arts College and Care for the Earth
H. Paul Santmire
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Santmire, author of The Travail of Nature, proposes three mandates for the Lutheran liberal arts college: take responsibility for spiritual particularity by confronting the ambiguities of the classical Christian tradition (Lynn White’s charge against anthropocentric Christianity vs. the Franciscan ecological tradition from Irenaeus through Luther) and of classical Lutheran social ethics (the Two Kingdoms, Romans 13, the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer); promote responsible cultural criticism (against Thoreau’s sociopathic anti-urban suburbanism); and promote a holistic environmental ethos through an interdisciplinary core curriculum with ecology as the queen of the sciences, a community that liberates the social imagination (Mumford, Marcuse), a cosmic Liturgical praxis rooted in the Colossians 1:15–20 hymn to the cosmic Christ, and an academy that models ecological responsibility.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 45 · Spring 2017
Wilhelm describes how ELCA colleges and universities have shifted the definition of Lutheran higher education away from institutional markers toward alignment with educational values drawn from the Lutheran intellectual tradition — and previews a NECU-convened faculty working group whose recommendations will go to the ELCA college presidents at their June 2017 conference on Lutheran identity.
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Article
A River Runs Through It: CLU as a Church-Related University
A. Joseph Everson
No. 12 · Summer 2001
Everson borrows Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and the small creek that flows through California Lutheran University’s Kingsman Park as images for the quiet stream of Christian tradition on campus, describes the dialectic of faith and reason (with a “Lord of Life” student congregation, two required religion courses, and a voluntary Wednesday chapel) as the “theology of paradox” that runs from Luther’s simul justus et peccator through Richard Solberg and Richard Hughes, and names six commitments that constitute the CLU ethos—academic freedom (Jeremiah 29:7 and John 8:32), vocation, service (Amos and Habitat for Humanity), grace and graciousness (Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice), diversity, and reverence (Proverbs 9 as awe and wonder).
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Article
The Diversity Dilemma: Dealing With Difference
Kathy Fritz
No. 8 · Winter 2000
Fritz reports from Newberry College—83% Caucasian, 16% African-American, 22% Lutheran, the smallest college in NCAA football—on a 1998–1999 year of crisis in which the Board of Trustees Executive Committee asked the president to resign over financial issues, the president fired three vice presidents, four trustees including the chair and treasurer resigned, and the controversial “veterinary technology” major became a flashpoint between the president’s recruitment-driven vision and the faculty’s commitment to “preparation for LIFE.” Turning to ethnic diversity, she frames three sociological approaches—“feed them all” to reduce conflict, the “3 A’s” (academics, athletics, arts) to create common identity, and Aguirre and Turner’s case for “weak ethnic identification” against the post-Yugoslavia failures of strong pluralism—and grounds the search for institutional unity in St. Paul’s body-of-Christ imagery from 1 Corinthians 12 and Ernest Simmons’s claim that diversity yields “creative adaptations that assist mutual survival.”
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 23 · Summer 2006
Selbyg features articles based on presentations at the 2005 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference focused on the upcoming ELCA Social Statement on Education, and urges members of the ELCA higher-education community to download the first draft (“Our Calling in Education”) from the ELCA website and submit feedback to the Task Force on Education before the October 15 deadline. He worries that the sexuality social statement on a 2009 timeline will draw more attention than the education statement, but reminds readers that, for Martin Luther and for those who work in Lutheran higher education, education is as important as sex.