From the Editor: Vocation [in] Disruption

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.

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.

“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.

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.

Be Like Jesus: Flip Some Tables

Jessica Easter

Easter argues that the example of Jesus overturning the moneychangers’ tables in Matthew 21 calls Christians not to work within unjust systems but to disrupt them — and that this table-flipping must be done in community with others who share the vision of a world where all are seen, heard, and valued.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Our Calling in Education": An Educator's Perspective

Cheryl Budlong

No. 23 · Summer 2006

Budlong, Professor of Education at Wartburg College, asks educators to reexamine their ‘mental models’ of what education itself means in light of the rapidly expanding literature on how young people learn. Drawing on Malcolm Gladwell, Eric Jensen, Ruby Payne, Judith Harris, Robert Slavin, and the AACTE’s Leading a Profession retrospective on the AACTE agenda 1980–2005, she calls on Lutheran educators to articulate vocation intentionally in their classrooms and to ground curricular and pedagogical reform in Wartburg’s focus on Discovering our Calling.

Changes

W. Robert Sorensen

No. 21 · Summer 2005

Writing as former executive director of the Division for Higher Education and Schools, Sorensen places the DHES within the threefold movement of Luther’s Reformation—university, church, and individual piety—and recounts how the Division cohered its work with colleges, universities, campus ministries, and schools around Joseph Sittler’s definition of education as “movement into a larger world.” Drawing on Huston Smith’s “primordial tradition,” the Namibian student program, work in India and Palestine, and the Bergendoff series of publications, he raises a twofold concern about the proposed merger of DHES into a Division for Vocation and Education: whether the new structure will signal the core significance of education in the heritage and life of the church, and whether it can carry forward the effectiveness and scope of DHES’ work.

Learning and Teaching as an Exercise in Christian Freedom

Tom Christenson

No. 6 · Winter 1999

Christenson, the 1998 Wittenberg keynote, argues that what makes our institutions Lutheran is not the percentage of Lutherans served or employed, ethnic celebration, or self-conscious difference, but a theologically informed vision of the educational task framed by the linked ideas of gift, freedom, and vocation. Drawing on Joe Sittler, Wendell Berry, David Orr, Harold Kushner, John Updike, Frederick Buechner, and Luther’s On the Freedom of a Christian, he reframes the liberal arts as four “liberating arts”—critical/deconstructive, embodying/connecting, melioristic/creative, and arts of enablement and change—and closes with his mother’s “end-of-the-month soup” as an image of vocation in a particular place.

Lutheran Heritage Across the Curriculum: Reflections from a Faculty/Staff Development Seminar

Cynthia Bane, Fred Waldstein, Kathryn A. Kleinhans, Penni Pier

No. 26 · Fall 2007

Four Wartburg College colleagues share fruits of the 2006 Lilly-funded “Discovering and Claiming Our Callings” faculty/staff development seminar in Wittenberg, Eisenach, and Neuendettelsau. Kleinhans frames the curriculum and books used; Bane (psychology) finds Lutheran convictions about the value of humans, the affirmation of creation, and the universality of sin congruent with her discipline; Pier (communication arts) reads Luther as a model of dialectical rhetoric that gives educators permission to challenge students with uncomfortable ideas; and Waldstein (political science) reflects on the paradox of humility and self-confidence in Luther and on the Luther-Melanchthon collaboration as a model for the seminar group’s own work.

Called to Flourish: An Ethic of Care

Mindy Makant

No. 52 · Fall 2020

Drawing on Lenoir-Rhyne’s core value of Care, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, Darrel Jodock’s “Gift and Calling,” and Luther’s plague-era practice of opening his home to the sick, Makant argues that flourishing is interdependent — that self-care is a means to extending care, and that an ethic of care is the meaningful, transformative work to which Lutheran liberal arts education is called.

Mission and Hiring in the Christian College

Bruce Reichenbach

No. 3 · Summer 1997

Reichenbach of Augsburg argues that the Christian or Church-related college’s mission to educate the whole person from a perspective of Christian faith and values can only succeed through intentional hiring of a “critical mass” of faculty, administrators, and staff committed to that mission (following George Marsden and the 1960s Danforth Commission), supplemented by on-going faculty development. He defends an inclusive community-with-diversity, a freedom-and-commitment tension grounded in Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of tradition, and the legality of preferential religious hiring under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the relevant case law (Tilton, Hunt, Roemer, Blanton, Grove City, Amos).