Part of the mission of higher education that is rooted in the Christian traditions is to help students awaken to an experience of living that is beyond the sense of “Is this all there is” and, paradoxically, to one of seeing and understanding the simple and ordinary wonder in what is, probably is, maybe is, and in questions of why it isn’t. Considering the topic of vocation in our arena of education, is there a slight turn-of-the-prism that could further help us tap into vocation as the fascinating as well as holy ordinary drama and journey that it is?
According to Iain McGilchrist, humanity, especially in the Western world, but increasingly all around the world, has come to prioritize seeing through micro lenses that offer insulated silos of understanding. While humanity has benefited from micro lenses, such as specializations developed in science, economics, humanities, and the arts, a micro approach limits our understanding of the interconnectedness of life and our life stories, individually and collectively, presently and historically.
Instead, McGilchrist claims we should begin with macro views, wide perspectives that make it possible to grasp how life and life events are connected, then attend to the details at the micro, narrower focus level, where we drill into skill development, subject learning, disciplinary functions, issues, and tasks. More so, after the details are attended to, he directs us to return to a broad, comprehensive, integrated focus, made that much more credible and richer because of the research, work and practice carried out at the micro level. What are beginning macro perspectives on vocation that can help us grasp the holy and holistic significance of each journey, and our collective journey together in these times (McGilchrist)?
We find evidence of pushing against siloed perspectives in higher education, as in inter-discipline studies, department project collaborations, plenary presentations where multiple disciplines are represented, and president advisory councils populated by wide, diverse representation. This is not to slight in any way the necessary work of specialization, but to advocate for the need to bridge specifics with other perspectives so to enrich the dialogue and our understandings, holding singularity under a wide umbrella. We might ask, “How would Homer, Confucius, Plato, Teresa of Ávila, Martin Luther, an Alaska Native leader, Nelson Mandela, Jane Goodall, ‘Captain Kirk,’ or a journalist refugee from any number of oppressive nation states begin to express the drama of a wide perspective vocation story today, mindful of how we got to where we are (or think we are) and where we might be going?
Story is drama because there is tension and conflict wrestling for resolution. Our lives are drama because life is at its core tension, working for resolution, which only leads to another tension, another valley to cross, mountain to climb, meal to cook, problem to solve, river to appreciate, and child to love. Just learning to stand up and walk is a match against gravity, an early phase of a long adventure. However, without tension there is no becoming. Even trees need the wind to gain strength and resiliency. Certainly, the backdrop story of the Passion of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection is a drama-tension against and within which we interpret and re-interpret our lives again-and-again. Familiar with its archetypal plot, we interpret our experience of life through it, drawing forth meaning from the juxtaposition.
Today, meaning communicated through many national epic stories is being challenged. In the United States, these include traditional stories of Christopher Columbus, the founding fathers, and the way U.S. history is told in general. Many stories are being stretched to include more perspectives and questions. Because underlying conflicts were hidden or buried within status-quo-stories and were never resolved, tensions festered untold without the light of day. So, now, we are wrestling with the long shadow of having enslaved human beings who were instrumental in the building of a nation and its wealth, as well as on land grabs, broken treaties, and policies that brought to near extinction native populations. We are working our way back to a wider story so we might go forward. There are oppressive corollaries for how we have told the story of Earth.
The wide perspective includes great accomplishments, heroic deeds, beauty, and marvel, and collective achievements that make us wonder how we did it, like building the James Webb Telescope that is capturing infra-red-light images from the edges of time. Today, we are reaping benefits and tragedies from an Enlightenment mindset that stretches across a few centuries. Advances in technology and science, increased standards of living for many, as well as provided a path toward climate warming and the growing gap between the very wealthy and people caught in poverty (Phan).
How do we hold the drama of our lives within a large plot, even if we interpret that plot as a moving one, one that needs to be tended and re-interpreted afresh by each generation? Now, however, there is a clock that is ticking. Our collective drama, like a Greek tragedy, has us in the amphitheater, where together we empathize and weep for the protagonists, both a suffering planet and its struggling humanity. Weeping is a good sign. Does it stir the heart? Does this put a particular twist to vocation stories today?
Works Cited
McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press, 2009, expanded edition 2018. See his two volume texts, The Matter with Things. Perspective Press, 2021.
Phan, Sam. “Wealth Gap Widening for more than 70% of Global Population, Researchers Find.” The Guardian. 22 January 2020. Web. 2 July 2022.
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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: 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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Article
Lutheran Higher Education and the Public Intellectual
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Simmons argues that college faculty and administrators are, like it or not, public intellectuals, and that Lutheran higher education’s dialectical understanding of Christ and culture is well suited to support four functions of the public intellectual: articulating constructive critique of received social explanation (especially the “collage identity” described by Renate Schacht); presenting a transcendent theological perspective through the theology of the cross that takes seriously God’s hiddeness, the presence of ambiguity, and the reality of suffering; pursuing the common good amid the demise of the “commons” through H. Richard Niebuhr’s “Christ and Culture in Paradox”; and educating for citizenship through Christian vocation by connecting the practical and existential dimensions of the question “Why are you here?”
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Mahn introduces the “Called to Leadership” issue by worrying that training for leadership has become so ubiquitous in higher education as to be nearly meaningless, and recovers Luther’s sense of leadership as service — a calling to be a “slave” whose learning, power, and wisdom belong to the unlearned, the oppressed, and the foolish — as the shared mission of Lutheran colleges to train servant-leaders.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Introduction and Invitation
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 57 · Spring 2023
Wells introduces himself as the new Executive Director of NECU, succeeding Rev. Dr. Mark Wilhelm, and frames this Spring issue as a passionate response to the crises facing higher education amid threats to academic freedom and the well-being of educators.
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Article
A Fifth Teat on a Cow: The Irrelevance of the Lutheran Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms for Academic Life
Richard VonDohlen
No. 9 · Summer 2000
VonDohlen, responding to Richard Hughes, Carol LaHurd, David Ratke, Philip Nordquist, and Robert Benne, argues that the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms as commonly deployed in recent discussions of Lutheran higher education rests on a faulty sociology (taking Luther’s sixteenth-century structure for our highly differentiated society) and an epistemological monism (assuming a single neutral reason against the pluralism described by Alasdair MacIntyre and others), making it anti-intellectual, hostile to interdisciplinary dialogue and Christian social ethics, and ultimately as a defense of theology’s relevance about as useful as “a fifth teat on a cow.” Drawing on his experience on the Catawba Valley Hospice Ethics Committee, his Dutch Reformed and dispensationalist background, and the ELCA social statement “Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All,” he calls for an “intellectually ecumenical” dialogue between Lutherans and non-Lutherans willing to take each other’s paradigms seriously.
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Article
Freedom of a Christian-College: Looking through the Lens of Vocation
Kathryn L. Johnson
No. 24 · Fall 2006
Johnson, Paul Tudor Jones Professor of Church History at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, re-reads Luther’s 1520 treatise The Freedom of a Christian as a paradigm for the “freedom of a Christian college” amid the pressures of professional preparation. She traces Luther’s paradoxical claim that a Christian is “a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none” and at the same time “a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all,” and argues that the same dialectic frees a Lutheran college to engage the professions without being captured by them.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Christenson, feeling like a proud parent, welcomes readers to the inaugural issue and acknowledges three people without whom the publication would still be just an idea: Naomi Linnel of the ELCA office for Higher Education and Schools, publisher Jim Unglaube, and Capital University president Josiah Blackmore. He invites readers’ reactions, suggestions, and active involvement as editors, reviewers, authors, artists, and critics in shaping the dialogue across the ELCA college and university family.