What are we to do in the face of the growing injustice in our world? Communities around the world are being ripped apart by natural disasters fueled by climate change as we with more privilege continue to consume and pollute at an unsustainable rate. In our own country, women are being stripped of their bodily autonomy by overzealous lawmakers eager to use their idea of God to continue the subjugation of the female body. Black and brown people are still routinely being murdered by the police, those who claim to keep us all safe, and are enslaved in a cradle-to-prison pipeline designed to keep their bodies oppressed. Queer folx are assaulted by word and deed, whether as gay people told their queerness is “their cross to bear” or trans people assaulted on their walk home from work, simply as they try to exist as their fullest selves.
Mainstream efforts, such as those made in the Suffrage and Civil Rights movements, would guide us to work within the system; women gained the right to vote largely by working through their male counterparts, and black folks, under a media-promoted, deradicalized ideal of Martin Luther King Jr., are said to have persuaded their white counterparts to gain Civil Rights. Each of these examples is memorialized as completed within the system and is celebrated for starting successful movements in large part through their supplication to those who had power within the system, men and white folks. These both were tremendous steps in the path toward justice, and ones that should not be overlooked; however, the horrendous maltreatment of and violence against the black and brown body, as well as the domination over the female body have not entirely faded into the background to leave a world absent of these forms of oppression. The problem remains in the presence of the systems themselves, systems born and bred to perpetuate harm against those marginalized and to keep those with privilege in power.
So we ask ourselves again, “What are we to do?” In order to address this question, I suggest we revisit how Jesus interacted with unjust systems. In Matthew 21:12-13, it is written:
“12Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. 13He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a den of robbers” (NRSVUE).
The moneychangers and the sellers of goods had formed their own system of oppression, one intended to exploit those who came to worship God and exclude those that couldn’t pay the exorbitant price. The priests of the temple, too, by allowing and gaining from the practice, partook in the creation of this system, profiting off of this exploitation. When Jesus sees this, he flips the tables. Jesus does not sit back and allow for this exploitation, he flips the tables. Jesus does not request the Priests, those with the power to stop the abuse but who chose to profit off of it instead, stop the practice, he flips the tables. Jesus does not bargain over the table, asking the moneychangers and the sellers to provide a more equitable service, he flips the tables. Jesus physically overturns the system.
We are called to follow Jesus, for whoever says, “‘I abide in him,’ ought to walk in the same way as he walked” (1 John 2:6, NRSVUE). So, in following Jesus’s example, we also are called to flip tables, to disrupt systems, like those in the temple, that perpetuate injustice, but we are not called to do this work alone.
Often when faced with injustice, we as human beings are drawn into community with others to process, to find comfort, and, hopefully, to heal. It is also within these communities that we find the support and resources to drive the type of change that we are called to make, to be like Jesus and flip tables. To be in community with others, with shared values and ideas, even in the diversity of reasoning, upbringing, and context in the world, gives us the strength to continue on even when it is hard. Further, it gives us the opportunity to take a break when we need to without losing any progress we may have made. Community in this way also makes the vision of a future in which all are seen, heard, and valued, not in spite of, but because of the color of their skin, the queerness of their bodies, the vastness of the image of God we see in the various shapes of human flesh, possible and within reach. Even if these examples are on a local scale, they give us ideas on how to best move forward creating a system that works for all and not just the few. And whether we see it or not, we all are limited by the continuance of systems that oppress any of God’s wonderful creation, even if we are those that are the most privileged by it. We get caught in these rigid binaries and static boxes, unable to express ourselves beyond these and live out our fullest lives. Equity and justice are not problems for those most explicitly marginalized by the lack of them, they are an everyone problem, and to be like Jesus, to flip tables, we need to make them our problem.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher: Introduction and Invitation
Lamont Anthony Wells
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.
-
Editorial
From the Editor: Vocation [in] Disruption
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes introduces the issue’s theme — vocation amidst disruption — previews new features including contributor contact information, a study guide for So That All May Flourish, and invited pieces on reproductive rights, and shares results from the Fall survey of readers.
-
Institutional Focus
So That All May Flourish Study Guide
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.
-
Reflection
“Miracles are no longer required”—Life Writing as a Healing Tool
Barbara Reul
A music historian and cancer survivor chronicles how a uterine cancer diagnosis in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted her vocation as a university professor, and how writing two open-access memoirs became an unexpected tool for healing body, mind, and soul.
-
Article
The Power of Ritual Action and George Floyd Square
Mary Clare Tiede Hottinger
A California Lutheran University senior examines how George Floyd Square in Minneapolis has been transformed into sacred space through ritual action, and considers what this site of remembrance, mourning, and ongoing struggle for justice can teach us about the power of ritual to unify and sustain community.
-
Article
Necessary Disruptions: Centering Vocation in the Common Good
Erin VanLaningham
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.
-
Article
Where Disruption and Vocation Meet: One Path Toward Teaching Reproductive Justice in Challenging Times
Lena R. Hann
Hann recounts how a missed math class in her first college term led her into volunteer work at a feminist abortion clinic and ultimately a career in public health, and describes how she designed and taught a Reproductive Justice immersive term course at Augustana College through the disruptions of COVID-19, George Floyd’s murder, and the Dobbs decision.
-
Article
The Duty to Teach and Restore Bodily Autonomy: Reflections from the Classroom
Cynthia Richards
Richards reflects on a Narrative Medicine course she taught at Wittenberg University in the wake of the Dobbs decision, in which students examined cultural “first recognitions” of the reproductive body and discovered that almost none had ever had a way of talking openly about their reproductive selves — an alienation she calls educators to address.
-
Article
Turning to a Reproductive Justice Framework for Inclusive Dialogue across Differences
Jenny M. James
James makes the case that a reproductive justice framework, rooted in the work of black feminist scholars and activists, gives educators tools to overhaul polarized pro-choice/pro-life conversations and to host inclusive dialogues across differences of race, sexuality, gender identity, and faith.
-
Article
A Reconsideration of the Political Approach to Abortion
Sophia Cruz Ponce
Cruz Ponce argues that the pro-life versus pro-choice binary distracts from the underlying social factors that lead to unwanted pregnancies, and proposes a reframed political approach focused on mandated sex education, free contraception, and crisis pregnancy centers that address the social, political, and economic barriers women face.
-
Article
Take Heart: Is Neutrality Really What We Need Right Now?
Abbylynn Helgevold
Helgevold, an ethicist at Wartburg College, argues that calls for faculty neutrality on abortion in the post-Roe classroom stifle the courageous conversations Lutheran higher education is uniquely positioned to host — conversations grounded in “Rooted and Open” and the ELCA’s 1991 Social Statement on Abortion.
-
Article
Views on Flourishing After the Age of Roe
Caryn Riswold, Mary J. Streufert
Riswold and Streufert reflect on the Radcliffe Institute’s January 2023 conference “The Age of Roe” and argue that the ELCA’s 1991 Social Statement on Abortion and its 2019 statement Faith, Sexism, and Justice offer Lutheran higher education a third way to approach reproductive justice grounded in serving the neighbor so that all may flourish.
-
Article
Leading Students to Distinguish Between Career and Vocation: Reflections from a Lutheran Law School
Steven C. Bahls
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Bahls, writing as former dean of the Capital University Law School, argues that most law students and many legal educators confuse vocation with career—asking “what kind of lawyer do you want to be?” rather than “who do I want to be?” Drawing on John O. Mudd’s five attributes of a well-prepared lawyer and Susan Daicoff’s empirical research on lawyer dissatisfaction and the “amoral professional role,” he turns to Ernest L. Simmons’s and Darrel Jodock’s articulations of Luther’s understanding of vocation and proposes five steps—reflection, assessment, vision, integrative thinking, and reassessment—along with explicit leadership from law school deans, engagement of career services offices, and leadership within the profession (illustrated by Capital’s joint venture with the Columbus Bar Association).
-
Article
Vocation for Emerging Adulthood: Within and Beyond College
Adam Copeland
No. 47 · Spring 2018
Copeland uses scenes from Master of None, David Brooks’ columns, Meg Jay’s The Defining Decade, and the stories of two ELCA college graduates to argue that emerging adulthood has fundamentally changed — and that Lutheran colleges should call out cultural lies about work, reframe vocation as meaning-making, and help graduates take small, wise steps into their twenties.
-
Article
The Face of the Neighbor: An Interview with Four Capital University Faculty About Their Recent Visit to Cuba
Brian Forry Wallace, Michael Yosha, Reg Dyck, Susan Narita
No. 7 · Summer 1999
Four Capital University faculty—political scientist Brian Wallace (returning to Cuba a third time after the 1994 boat lift), English professor Reg Dyck, ESL teacher Susan Narita, and political scientist Michael Yosha—recount their summer 1998 trip with Pastors for Peace, describing Cuban priorities of education, health care, and military (in that order), the cultural richness of Havana from sixteenth-century cloisters to Miramar, the Cuban Foreign Service’s vision of a Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, the counter-productive U.S. embargo (including its effect on kidney dialysis machines), Castro’s 1991 reconciliation with religious communities, and a recurrent image of a little girl named Marguerite singing at a school for amputee and terminally ill children. The interview was conducted by Capital senior Jessica Brown and Tom Christenson.
-
Article
How Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Reminds Us About Work
Than Oo
No. 61 · Spring 2025
5 min audio
Drawing on a Season 15 arc of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in which residents redirect pool funds to fix a plumbing problem, Oo finds in Fred Rogers’ vocation-honoring storytelling a reminder that limited resources are an invitation to creativity, perseverance, and optimism in higher education.
-
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.
-
Article
The Lutheran Calling in Education: Context and Prospect
Paul J. Dovre
No. 23 · Summer 2006
Dovre, President Emeritus of Concordia College and co-chair of the ELCA Task Force on Education, undertakes three tasks: focusing on the current social context (young people’s spiritual lives, the state of mainline denominations, the family map, schools, communities, and higher education); reflecting on why Lutherans care about education (creation in God’s image, vocation, Luther’s legacy, the priesthood of all believers, civic righteousness, and hope); and considering the prospects and possibilities for addressing the calling (biblical, confessional, theological, and pedagogical legacies; the renewal of apostolic ministry, the Christian-college renaissance, K–12 reform, and the congregational education explosion).