Scriptures That Inspire Work for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice

From the Publisher

Lamont Anthony Wells

Wells introduces So That All May Belong: Lutheran Roots for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice as a theological and institutional articulation of NECU’s commitments, and previews four accompanying essays that frame vocation as a societal responsibility rooted in justice and not solely an individual pursuit.

From the Editor

Colleen Windham-Hughes

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

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.

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

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.

Vocation at Full Stretch: Reflections on Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling and its Use among College Students

Jason A. Mahn

Mahn engages Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling as required reading in a sophomore religion course, showing how her categories of missed, blocked, conflicted, fractured, unexpected, and relinquished callings empower young adults to perceive embodied, unplanned, and often painful dimensions of life as essential parts of vocation — and help close the gap between mission-driven and tuition-driven realities.

How Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Reminds Us About Work

Than Oo

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.

Ecotones of Faith

Tracy Paschke-Johannes

Paschke-Johannes draws on the ecological metaphor of the ecotone — the life-teeming transitional space between two ecosystems — to claim that we are not called to minister in the world of the past or one fifty years hence, but to nurture the kairos moments God is creating in the freshwater-to-saltwater present.

Finding the Miracle in the Intersection of Mission and Limitations: Lessons from Latin America

Kat Peters

Peters draws on her time interning with Lutheran World Relief and leading a study abroad program in Central America — including a Costa Rican women’s farm cooperative whose ecotourism project was “unprofitable” but life-giving — to argue that the intersection of God’s preference for struggle and God’s desire for abundant life is itself the miracle higher education can claim amid scarcity.

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

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.

Committed to Paradox

Caryn Riswold

No. 60 · Fall 2024

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.

From the Editor

Colleen Windham-Hughes

No. 60 · Fall 2024

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.

From the Editor: Vocation as Action in the Affirmative

Colleen Windham-Hughes

No. 59 · Spring 2024

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.

Team Culture is Key to Success: Learning from Student-Athletes

Colleen Windham-Hughes

No. 59 · Spring 2024

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.

The Marks of an ELCA College: One Bishop's Reflections

Stanley Olson

No. 15 · Winter 2002

Olson, speaking as a bishop and “Harness Boy” whose job is to keep the church’s connections working, replaces his original four-noun outline (fealty, ingenuity, insouciance, focus) with eight marks the ELCA should be able to observe in its colleges: intentional Lutheran identity, significant Lutheran presence, Christian faith at every table, freedom of inquiry, coaching toward vocation, gravity and grace, nurtured community, and excellence by its own standards. Drawing on his survey of all twenty-eight ELCA college mission statements (two tables) and on Darrell Jodock and Mark Edwards, he argues that the Lutheran connection must be made explicit in mission, marketing, and faculty searches, and closes with six reciprocal expectations the colleges should hold of the ELCA—commissioner, mature parent, supporter of adventurous teenagers, advocate, steward of graduates, and a church faithful to its own Lutheran mission.

Where Your Feet are Standing: Institutional Engagement and Place

Melissa Maxwell-Doherty

No. 54 · Fall 2021

Maxwell-Doherty draws on Cal Lutheran’s Hispanic-Serving Institution designation and its location on Chumash, Fernandino Tataviam, and Ohlone lands to ask how the university’s mission might shift if it depended on where its students are standing — not just where the institution sits.

A Traveler's Manifesto for Navigating the Creation

Ann Pederson

No. 36 · Fall 2012

Pederson asks who we are, where we are, and how then we shall live within the Epic of Evolution and the doctrines of creation, incarnation, and imago dei. Drawing on John 3:16 (“For God so loved the cosmos…”), Luther on God’s presence “in the veins of a leaf,” Augustine’s City of God, Phil Hefner’s “created co-creator,” Joseph Sittler’s “Called to Unity,” and Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, she argues for a cosmic reading of incarnation in which all of creation—not only the human—bears the image of God.

Critical Engagement in Public Life: Listening to Luther's Troubling Questions

Samuel Torvend

No. 35 · Spring 2012

Torvend narrates the medieval “spiritual/temporal” division and the neo-platonic devaluation of the body that shaped the world into which Luther was born, then traces the disruptive questions Paul’s letters provoked in Luther: about indulgences, the two estates, vocation, and the public reach of baptism. He argues that Luther’s reform — expressed in Kirchenordnungen, social welfare reform, public schools, and writings on lobbyists, usury, and monopolies — carries a “genetic encoding” of public engagement that Lutheran colleges should reclaim against the temptations of holy apathy and Christian nationalism.

Luther's Sutra: An Indian, Subaltern (Dalit) Perspective

Surekha Nelavala

No. 46 · Fall 2017

Nelavala traces how Luther’s “sutra” — grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone, Christ alone — reached the mud hut of her Dalit grandparents in rural India, transforming three generations, and then reads the parable of the vineyard laborers from a subaltern perspective in which grace for all is the heart of God’s alternative kingdom.

Paul Dovre, ed.: The Future of Religious Colleges

Baird Tipson

No. 15 · Winter 2002

Tipson, president of Wittenberg University, reviews Paul Dovre’s edited proceedings of the October 2000 Harvard Conference on the Future of Religious Colleges (Eerdmans, 2002), summarizing essays by Douglas Sloan on the failure of the “two-realm theory of truth,” George Marsden on faith-shaped scholarship, DeAne Lagerquist, Father David O’Connell, Mark Noll, Robert Benne, Mark Roche on Notre Dame, Joel Carpenter on neo-Calvinist Kuyperianism, and Mark Schwehn on a Lutheran “college-related church” and the centrality of vocation. Against Benne’s suggestion that only two or three robustly Lutheran colleges can be sustained, Tipson defends a less robust but still authentically Lutheran model embodied at places like Wittenberg, Gettysburg, and Roanoke, arguing for the enlightenment commitment to subjecting all truth claims to rigorous criticism and for hiring Marsden-style faith-shaped scholars rather than counting Lutheran heads.