As someone who works at my own alma mater, I’ve spent much time thinking about what it means to call this place “home.” As a young woman from a small, rural community in Nebraska, moving to a small town in Kansas didn’t feel like a huge stretch. In fact, I remember telling people that was something that drew me here. By student population, Bethany College was about the same size as my high school at the time. I was excited to be 3 hours away from home and in a different state, knowing I could feel at home here. Although I’m not Swedish, I look much like some of the first students at this institution as a white, Lutheran, farm kid.
While there was certainly great diversity represented when I was a student, that only accelerated over the 8 years I was away following graduation. In this community, we know the story of our founding well. Founded in 1881 by white, Swedish Lutheran settlers, Bethany College came into being to provide access to education for the Swedes who immigrated to this place. Very early on, the education of women was also a priority. These are stories Bethany College and the wider Lindsborg community tell through festivals, traditions, and our local culture. As I think about this legacy, I wonder what this means to the students who call this place home today.
One of our own NECU students shared, “I don’t want to feel like I’m being welcomed into your home. I want to feel like this is my home, like I belong.” As students return to our campus this fall, this articulation of belonging has stuck with me.
It is good and lovely that our NECU institutions have been home to so many of us. And…there is room to do some wrestling with our welcoming and the stories we tell. What do these Swedish, Lutheran, immigrant roots mean for our students who come from 38 states and 21 countries, who represent 35 faith traditions and a wide breadth of ethnic and cultural diversity? At Bethany, we’ve begun to think about these questions, but these experiences aren’t yet part of our institutional story.
Dr. Mindy Makant (Lenoir-Rhyne University) was on campus recently leading some vocational reflection with faculty and staff. While she invited us to think about our vocational stories, she shared, “We don’t have a choice about the story of the past, but we do get to decide how we tell that story forward.” We get to choose how who we have been shapes and informs who God is calling us to be.
By telling these stories forward, claiming them, and living them, we can decide to make space for our students in their fullness. By doing so, we are celebrating them and making space for their stories, too.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes welcomes newcomers and seasoned colleagues to the conversation, lifts up Mary Elise Lowe’s three Lutheran “whys” for educational access, and commends Rev. Jen Rude’s “Sacred Pause” practice as a way to humanize one another and make opening access both easier and more joyful.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Reflections on the 2024 Vocational Leaders in Higher Education Conference
Lamont Anthony Wells
Wells reflects on the 2024 VLHE Conference theme — “Educational Access: Lutheran Roots, Contemporary Practices” — tracing today’s commitment to inclusivity back to Martin Luther’s radical 16th-century insistence that both boys and girls be educated, and previews NECU’s expanded engagement of student leaders alongside faculty and administrators.
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Article
Access, Accessibility, & Change: A Call for Trustworthy Leadership in Higher Education
Emma Jones
Jones surveys the converging pressures on higher education — cost, the enrollment cliff, shifting demographics, and declining public confidence — and uses Reichheld and Dunlap’s four factors of trust (transparency, capability, reliability, humanity) to call campus leaders to rebuild trustworthy leadership from the inside out.
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Article
Creation, Justice, and Communio: Lutheran Insights Empowering Educational Access
Mary Elise Lowe
In her VLHE keynote, Lowe names three Lutheran commitments — continuing creation, neighbor justice, and communio — as the “why” that empowers ELCA colleges and universities to pursue equitable access for students often left behind by persistence and graduation gaps.
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Article
Committed to Paradox
Caryn Riswold
Riswold lifts up paradox — saint and sinner, lord and servant, Rooted and Open — as a distinctive Lutheran root that lets institutions honor the complicated truth of who their students are and embrace the messy, ever-reforming work of access and accessibility as a theology of the cross.
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Article
2024 VHLE Conference: "Rooting Access" Panel Talking Points
Guy Nave
Nave reads “access” across Deuteronomy 23, Ruth, Isaiah 56, Acts 10, and Matthew 15:21-28 as an ongoing biblical conversation that evolves from exclusion to ever-widening welcome — and presses ELCA institutions to shift their focus from “student readiness” to “institutional readiness.”
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Article
Affirming, Entrusting, and Acting: A Baptismal Grounding of Affirmative Action in Lutheran Higher Education
Peter Carlson Schattauer
Schattauer draws on the Lutheran baptism liturgy — where the gathered assembly publicly affirms what it is for and is entrusted with responsibilities for justice and peace — to argue that NECU institutions create truly inclusive communities by affirming commitments, naming responsibilities, and acting in ways that embody both.
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Institutional Focus
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
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.
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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.
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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 Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 9 · Summer 2000
Christenson introduces a varied issue: the VonDohlen / Ratke discussion of the two kingdoms doctrine, Rachel Hammond’s “real gem” of a talk on her time in Ecuador (with an invitation to send contributions to the Home for Perpetual Hope orphanage via her home church in Oberlin, Ohio), Chuck Huff’s essay on the effect of liberal learning on the practice of psychology, and John Reumann’s reflection on a scholarly life lived between academy and church—and notes that the cover artist is his eight-year-old daughter Zoé, whose post-circus drawing of a balancing act struck him in light of Reumann’s opening line.
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Reflection
Keeping Close from a Distance: Pandemic Reflections of a Library Coordinator
Carla Flengeris
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Flengeris reflects on a year of running Luther College’s library at the University of Regina from her basement and mourns the loss of the hourly walks through the stacks—the “roving reference” that, she realizes, were never disruptions to her work but were the work itself.
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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.