“Duc. Duc. Goose.” My point is not about animals or the children’s game, it’s about the “duc” in “education” and “seduction” because it turns out to be the same “duc” from the Latin ducere, to lead.
Education is the key note of our charism–the drawing out or leading out of learners to lead according to their calling and vocation.
Seduction is our kryptonite, our Achilles’ heel, the flip side of our charism because it’s the same power turned away. In other words, our considerable powers and giftedness, steered in the wrong direction, may not promote the life of the world God loves.
I can see two broad paths of seduction today, and they’re not all that different from dangers Martin Luther observed in his day. One path of seduction is to be taken in by the life of the world and particularly human delights. This path sets the world/creation over or above the creator and makes us greedy for its pleasures. The second path denies the world and deprives us of receiving it as a gift. This is the path of judgment and condemnation–a kind of No to the world.
To give no attention to the present or to deny and negate it is to say it has no meaning. Faced with suffering, one must not compound the suffering by searching for hidden meanings or by condemning all life as beyond meaning. Instead, through education we are freed to tell the truth about suffering, to proclaim its meaninglessness and senselessness, and to embrace whatever meaning could be fashioned with the truth about suffering as the starting point.
Right now there’s no denying that the world we inherited and have contributed to building is crumbling. We see it in decay and destruction, and we feel this is the end of the world. It is—as we know it. And some issues really are as urgent as we think they are—namely climate change and the human suffering that goes with it. Yet much of what we wring our hands over is not the end of the world as such. We’ve become so anesthetized to our own creativity, we cannot remember the call to act for the life of the world God loves. Two big threats right now are cessation of effort and the limited agency of condemnation—because meaning is stripped or the leader is gone or we do not like the one we have. If we give up, the world does not stop.
We must not lend our energies to No-saying forces that destroy the planet, ignore the poor, and shun our neighbors. Saying Yes to the world when the world is crumbling looks foolish and ignorant. Showing up to affirm one another and confess, “I don’t know” is vulnerable and risky, especially when education is our calling.
“[A]sk any person, at any of our NECU institutions, and they are doing it. They’ll tell you a story about how their institution is dying and how it is finding new ways to live. How their students are thriving and they are floundering.” Speakers/contributors such as Rev. Ann Rosendale, quoted here, are finding ways to tell the truth of our current moment and summon Yes-saying energies of hope and world-building efforts. These yesses make third spaces of trustworthy communities, built on the vulnerability and resilience of people prepared to show up, be present, and do the work. As Ann reminds us, “The ‘and’ is the hardest part.”
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Lamont Anthony Wells
5 min audio
Wells frames the issue as a record of the 2025 VLHE Conference at Augsburg under the theme “Ethical Leadership in a Changing World,” arguing that vocation is never solitary but a collective, public witness of ethical formation, theology and care, flourishing and belonging, and leadership rooted in God’s grace.
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Article
Wake Up Running! A Call to Ethical Leaders in Quest of Democratic Space
Walter Earl Fluker
44 min audio
Abridged from his VLHE keynote, Fluker draws on Habakkuk and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower to call a new generation of ethical leaders to “wake up running” toward democratic futures, packing their runaway bags with love-filled-justice, grace-filled-empathy, and hope-filled-resiliency for the soul-filled work the moment requires.
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Article
Building a Third Space in the Age of AI: A Conversation with Dr. Walter Earl Fluker
Elizabeth Kubek
11 min audio
Prompted by AI chatbots being marketed to students as a safer alternative to messy human relationships, Kubek interviews Fluker on how Howard Thurman’s vision of common consciousness, somaesthetics, and nature-rooted learning offers educators a “third space” alternative to AI’s hall of mirrors.
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Article
Ethical Leadership: Rooted, Open, Generative, and Mindful
John Arthur Nunes
25 min audio
As he prepares to teach an Ethical Leadership First Year Seminar at California Lutheran, Nunes organizes his pedagogy around three mutually-reinforcing “turns” — inward, outward, and intellectual — grounded in Luther’s mandatum dei and larvae dei, Bonhoeffer’s estates, and Howard Thurman’s call to hear “the sound of the genuine” in oneself.
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Article
Ethical Leadership for a Changing World: A Shared Calling from Cradle to Career
Cory Newman, Janelle Rozek Hooper
5 min audio
Hooper and Newman recount how an ELCA Barna survey on early childhood education sparked the realization at VLHE 2025 that ELCA colleges and the 1,200 Lutheran schools and early learning centers share identical challenges — and an untapped potential to form ethical leaders across the full educational continuum from cradle to career.
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Article
What is Required of You?: Higher Education Leadership in a Moral Key
Paul C. Pribbenow
15 min audio
Drawing on Micah 6:8 and Stephen Carter’s “etiquette of democracy,” Pribbenow describes the three things Augsburg requires of every incoming student — show up, pay attention, and do the work — as a democratic social ethic that prepares students for engaged citizenship in a fractured public life.
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Article
What Does Ethical Leadership in a Changing World Require?
Kristina Frugé
5 min audio
Frugé argues that ethical leadership in a changing — perhaps ending — world means cultivating trustworthy communities through patient, co-created relationship work, drawing on her experience stewarding the writing community behind Hungry for Hope: Letters to the Church from Young Adults.
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Article
Fostering Moral Imagination and Inclusivity: The Role of Ethical Leadership in ELCA Colleges and Universities Amid Societal Challenges
Lamont Anthony Wells
12 min audio
Wells argues that “moral imagination” — the capacity to envision ethical alternatives, empathize across difference, and respond creatively to injustice — is the heart of ethical leadership in NECU institutions, and that anchoring leadership in this principle positions Lutheran higher education to cultivate socially responsible citizens.
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Reflection
VLHE—Wednesday Morning Sacred Pause
Ann Rosendale
8 min audio
Rosendale draws on Esther 4:14 and the Lutheran practice of holding death and resurrection together — with “and” as the hardest word — to argue that the calling of Lutheran higher education for “just such a time as this” requires us to remember and name out loud that ours are places where God is at work.
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Editorial
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Institutional Focus
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.
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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
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.
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Institutional Focus
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Article
Why Lutheran Colleges Need to Engage Civil Society
Ann M. Svennungsen
No. 35 · Spring 2012
Svennungsen makes the case that Lutheran colleges must engage the larger civil sphere, drawing on her work with The Presidents’ Pledge Against Global Poverty, Darrell Jodock’s seven fundamental experiences for vocational discernment, David Brooks on civility and modesty, and Michael Sandel’s argument that the affluent are seceding from public life. She urges Lutheran educators to invest in the infrastructure of civic renewal so that service-learning and civic engagement remain central to the Lutheran college curriculum.
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Article
Ethical Deliberation and the Biblical Text—A Lutheran Contribution to Reading the Bible
Ritva Williams
No. 22 · Spring 2006
Williams articulates a Lutheran “critical traditionalist hermeneutic”—a phrase borrowed from her Hebrew Bible professor Robert Polzin—that honors Scripture as queen while keeping Christ as its king, and tests it by critiquing Robert Gagnon’s use of Romans 1:18-32 in The Bible and Homosexual Practice. Drawing on Lazareth, Lotz, Philip Esler’s Conflict and Identity in Romans, Stanley Stowers’ Rereading Romans, and Ben Witherington III, she proposes an alternative reading in which Paul recites a Hellenistic-Jewish ethnic caricature in 1:18-32 only to overturn it in 2:1-16, making the passage a critique of self-righteous stereotyping rather than the foundation of a moral doctrine on same-sex intercourse.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Reflections on the 2024 Vocational Leaders in Higher Education Conference
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 60 · Fall 2024
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
Vocational Discernment: A Comprehensive College Program
Darrell Jodock
No. 14 · Summer 2002
Jodock, whose Gustavus Adolphus was one of twenty colleges to receive a Lilly “Theological Exploration of Vocation” grant in 2000, defines vocation not as occupation but as a self-understanding that nests the self in community. Reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone on the collapse of secondary communities alongside Luther’s ethic of community benefit and five Lutheran principles (graciousness, Christian freedom, community, God active in the world, the theology of the cross), he walks through Gustavus’s three-level design—a definition of vocation open to other faith traditions, “middle principles” drawn from Sharon Parks’s Common Fire, and a long menu of programs coordinated by a new Center for Vocational Reflection—hoping that, in the language of Holocaust studies, graduates will be “resisters” and “rescuers” rather than bystanders.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 24 · Fall 2006
Haak introduces the issue’s essays by Stanley N. Olson, Kathryn L. Johnson, Gail Summer, Lake Lambert, and Steven C. Bahls; argues that on Lutheran campuses, professional programs in business, education, and nursing are not “second-class citizens” but integral to the institution’s vocation; cites Olson’s mantra (“Because of Christ, the world; because of the world, vocation; because of vocation, education”); and thanks Matt Marohl for assisting with the editing.
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Article
Leadership in Lutheran Key at a Time of Pandemics
Deanna Thompson
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Thompson draws on Luther’s theology of the cross and Shelly Rambo’s theology of trauma to sketch a Lutheran model of leadership for a season of pandemics — one that is attentive to pain, responsive to need, and intentionally nourished by food, friends, and deep conversation.