I consider myself bad at change, yet I believe in the power of transformation.
I have undergone many transformations in my life. I moved from a Japanese-speaking preschool to an English kindergarten at age 5. My parents divorced when I was 11. I moved from Japan to the US, alone, at 18. I came out as non-binary and gay at 19. Each time, there was a period of intense discomfort before a dramatic transformation in how I understood myself and more importantly, in how I saw others.
There is a natural human instinct to live in the moment. I often forget that I have had a storied past, and will likely have a storied future. We tend to see ourselves as monolithic, as though the current version of ourselves was always who we were and who we will always be.
“We tend to see ourselves as monolithic, as though the current version of ourselves was always who we were and who we will always be. This is false.”
This is false. All of us have undergone dramatic (and not-so-dramatic) changes throughout our lives. Literature abounds with stories of transformation: the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, personal accounts of Born-again Christians; the archetypal hero’s journey ends with the hero transformed.
Of course, transformation doesn’t mean throwing everything out; it just means removing what is unnecessary, much like smelting metal from ore. Many of us have been hurt, and we have built trauma responses as armor against that pain. When we become free from the hurt, that armor can begin to get in the way of our lives and our relationships. It can be difficult and scary, but shedding that armor is an important part of the healing process.
Cultural and institutional reform is much the same. In any institution, there is something about it that holds good, or it would not survive. The work of reformation is discarding what has become no longer useful, while keeping that which still holds value.
Change is uncomfortable. Biologically, a change in our environment requires us to expend resources to adapt, and so we have evolved to shy away from anything that might cause change. That armor of personal inertia is the first obstacle to transformation. Here is where I am drawn to an idea I have encountered at Cal Lutheran about living with—and engaging—that discomfort; many people simply turn away from that discomfort, suppressing it in order to remain in the comfort of familiarity. But without engaging that discomfort, it becomes much harder to change for the better.
“The work of reformation is discarding what has become no longer useful, while keeping that which still holds value.”
And here I must add: not all change is a life-changing, revelatory experience. Most change is slow and unnoticed. It can be for the better, or for the worse. But that is also the most important kind of change, as it is the kind that shapes us the most. The question then becomes how we can shape that change to become closer to the people we want to be.
For me, forgiveness also begins with this belief. I have been hurt by many of the people in my life. But as long as I can see them working to improve themselves, then I can believe that the person they are becoming will be better than the person they were when they hurt me.
My thoughts have been shaped by a class I am taking on the criminal justice system; in society we see incarcerated people as criminals, and much of the system is built on the precept that they will always be criminals. We do not try to transform them for the better, or to reintegrate them back into society. In the class, we try to press into the question of what it means to be human, and whether the systems of society seek to dehumanize people. I think that our institutions should allow us to become more human—more empathetic and connected to each other, more knowledgeable and with agency to live our lives the way we want to.
If we all endeavor to become the most human that we can be, then the work of transformation that begins in each of us will be reflected in our institutions as well.
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Editorial
From the Editor: Vocation as Action in the Affirmative
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes frames vocation as practicing “at the borders of our incompetence” — every small yes to the callings we experience, every effort made in the direction of life, is action in the affirmative — and previews the issue’s essays on diversity, transformation, AI, championship team culture, and dreaming big within and beyond our limitations.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Navigating Affirmative Action, DEI Policies, and Lutheran Vocational Identity
Lamont Anthony Wells
Wells surveys the converging pressures on NECU institutions — the unsettled landscape of affirmative action, political and academic scrutiny of DEI work, and the preservation of distinctively Lutheran vocational identity — and previews how the issue draws on affirmative practices, sociological viewpoints, and theological responses to navigate a path forward.
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Article
Forming the Division for Access, Equity & Belonging at Susquehanna University
Amy Davis, Dena Salerno, María L. O. Muñoz, Nina Mandel, Scott Kershner
Five Susquehanna University colleagues trace the institution’s 166-year arc from a Missionary Institute founded to remove barriers to education through the formation of a new Division for Access, Equity & Belonging in 2023, arguing that access rooted in Lutheran origins must continue to drive policy revision, infrastructure, and belonging for minoritized communities today.
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Article
On Recruiting Diverse Students, Rooted in Mission
Eric Rowell, Jason A. Mahn
Jason Mahn interviews Eric Rowell, Assistant Director of Admissions and Diversity Outreach at Augustana College, about how recruiting students from a wide variety of backgrounds — rooted in Augustana’s Lutheran commitment to vocation and educating across difference — remains essentially unchanged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions on affirmative action.
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Article
What Our Lutheran Heritage Entails for Lutheran Colleges and Affirmative Action
Mark Ellingsen
Ellingsen argues that the Lutheran Two-Kingdom Ethic — far from leading to political reaction — supports the church-relatedness of ELCA colleges and obligates them to keep affirmative action alive, even reading a Chief Justice Roberts “loophole” in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as an open door for Black community partnerships, ELCA congregations, and Lutheran colleges to act in the affirmative.
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Article
The Critical Role of Lutheran Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Jose Marichal, Maya Goehner, Tyler Haug
A Cal Lutheran political science professor and two of his students draw on Rooted and Open to argue that Lutheran higher education is uniquely positioned to stake out a middle path between AI utopianism and AI doom — cultivating a “healthy sense of human limit,” resisting data colonialism, and forming students to see the neighbor rather than the enemy as the world becomes increasingly synthetic.
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Article
Team Culture is Key to Success: Learning from Student-Athletes
Colleen Windham-Hughes
On a December weekend in “Championship City” Salem, Virginia, both California Lutheran’s Women’s Soccer Team and St. Olaf College’s Men’s Soccer Team won NCAA Division III national titles. Windham-Hughes talks with coaches, faculty mentors, and student-athletes about how off-the-field team culture — built on trust, relationships, and shared why — translates onto the pitch and into liberal arts and sciences education.
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Article
Low-Hanging Fruit, Moonshots, and Coffee: Dreaming Big Within and Beyond Our Limitations
Jeremy Myers
Myers shares the process used by Augsburg’s Christensen Center for Vocation to help teams move from a shared experience to next steps — an Ignatian-rooted Awareness Examen followed by naming low-hanging fruit, moonshots, and the coffee conversations that build the coalition to make it all happen.
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Article
Impelled to Pluralism: Thoughts About Teaching in a Lutheran University
Jim Huffman
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Huffman traces his personal journey through three stages of faith—the “comfortable Christ” of his Midwestern Christian childhood, Clark Pinnock’s “faith principle” of accessible salvation, and finally Christ as the “humble teacher”—to a pluralism that rejects religious triumphalism without abandoning Christian commitment. Drawing on Diana Eck, Wesley Ariarajah, John Cobb, the Catholic novelist Endo Shusaku, and the histories of Confucian China and imperial Japan, he then describes how this commitment shapes his teaching of East Asian religion and nationalism at Wittenberg University: insisting on respectful language, working sympathetically through doctrines like Buddhist non-attachment, and helping students see the pernicious effects of triumphalism in both religious and political life.
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Institutional Focus
Putting Principles into Practice: An Interview with Kenneth Foster about Concordia's Sustainability Council
Kenneth Foster
No. 36 · Fall 2012
Foster, chair of Concordia College’s President’s Sustainability Council, describes the Council’s formation under President William Craft in 2011 as a re-energization of stalled task-force work, its coordination with grass-roots campus initiatives, and its strategy of moving from principles to practice in stewardship of natural resources at a Lutheran liberal arts college.
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Book Review
Assessing the Value of Liberal Arts: A Review of The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, by Richard A. Detweiler
Robert D. Haak
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Haak reviews Richard A. Detweiler’s The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, in which the former president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association analyzes 240 college mission statements and interviews more than 1,000 graduates to argue that liberal arts educational experiences have a measurable impact on adult lives of consequence, inquiry, and accomplishment — and invites NECU institutions into a further conversation about how Detweiler’s methodology applies to Lutheran higher education.
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Reflection
Shelter in Place: Reflections from March 22, 2020
Jason A. Mahn
No. 53 · Spring 2021
On the fourth Sunday of Lent in 2020, Mahn meditates on the etymology of “shelter” (from shield) and on an email from a former student in Boston whose mutual-aid organizing models a Lutheran understanding of vocation: the upending of ego by divine love that frees us, finally, to see and serve the neighbor.
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Article
Resistance in the Age of Trump: An Interview with Ivonne Wallace Fuentes
Jason A. Mahn, M. Ivonne Wallace Fuentes
No. 45 · Spring 2017
In conversation with Jason Mahn, Roanoke College historian Ivonne Wallace Fuentes describes how she launched a local chapter of Indivisible after the 2016 election, how the skills of teaching and historical research carry over into grassroots advocacy, and how her sense of vocation (vocare) has become intertwined with the work of advocacy (advocare).
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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).