“For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”
—Esther 4:14
The book of Esther in the Bible is a story about calling, or ”vocation,” we like to say, at Lutheran colleges and universities. It’s a story about a calling that Esther discovers by understanding herself, understanding the moment, and seizing an opportunity.
In case you’re new to the book of Esther, or need a refresher, here’s a quick synopsis of the story:
Esther, a Jew, has been appointed queen by the King of Persia.
The king’s advisor, Hamaan, is plotting to have every Jew in the empire killed because Esther’s cousin, Mordecai, refuses to bow down and worship Hamaan, and that has left a bad taste in Hamaan’s mouth for all Jews.
Mordecai, knowing that his cousin, now Queen Esther, holds a unique (perhaps even providential) place in the kingdom, convinces Esther that she is the one called to use her influence to save her people from destruction.
Mordecai speaks that famous line to Esther: “Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”
The story has a predictably happy ending. Esther reveals her Jewish identity, and Hamaan’s heinous plot to the King, and Esther and her people are saved.
The title of our conference is “Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education,” which suggests that it is not just individuals, like Esther or you or me who have a vocation; but that institutions, and even whole enterprises; this broad thing called “Lutheran Higher Education,” has a calling.
And perhaps the vocation of Lutheran Higher Education, perhaps the calling of my beloved institution, and yours, is for just such a time as this.
We like to say that no other kind of institution is better positioned for such a time as this. We want to believe that we are the special ones. In the midst of challenges facing enrollment and finances, in the midst of changes in young adults, staffing, technology, educational models, values, the list goes on…perhaps our colleges and universities have been called to and for this very moment.
But what is it in particular that sets our institutions apart, and sets us up for this time and this calling?
We could quote Rooted and Open here, and list all the buzz words: liberal arts, freedom from and for, intellectual humility, service of neighbor, hospitality.
But there’s another idea that we don’t talk about all that much. And it may just be the thing that positions our colleges and universities best for this moment. It is the very Christian, very Lutheran notion of death and resurrection.
And just like “rooted and open,” the hardest word in the phrase “death and resurrection” is the word “and.”
Death and resurrection. It’s both.
We are so often tempted into either/or thinking. Especially about death and resurrection. Either we live or we die. We flourish or we fail. It’s one or the other.
But Jesus always says it’s both. We don’t have life without death. We don’t have success without failure. And every end is met with a beginning. Everything old is met with something new that God is doing.
Death and Resurrection. Finding life and losing it. The “and” is the hardest part.
But ask 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.
I don’t know of other kinds of institutions that can say this with the same honesty or the same hope. We live and we die. There is truth and promise in both.
Esther discovered her calling by understanding herself, understanding the moment, and seizing an opportunity.
Those last two we’re pretty good at. We understand the moment, the stakes, and we’re ready to seize every opportunity.
The reminder we need now is to understand ourselves; what it is that is distinctive about us as leaders, and about our institutions, that calls us into this very moment.
For Esther it was understanding her identity as a Jew.
For us it is understanding our colleges and universities as places founded on and fueled by faith. It is not lost on me that the book of Esther never once mentions God, which maybe gives us license not to talk about God too much at our institutions either. To be sure, at many of our schools it is becoming rarer and rarer to hear God’s name uttered…and when we do talk about our church-relatedness, we prefer to emphasize “Lutheran” over “Christian,” which I think is helpful to some of us because “Lutheran” feels, oddly, more specific and less specific at the same time.
But Esther needed reminders of her identity, and we do too. And I am of the (sometimes unpopular) opinion that naming God, out loud, as an active subject at our institutions is a good way to remind ourselves and others of who we are.
Friends, we are spiritual people. We are God’s people. Our institutions are Christian places, even if the majority of the people who live and work and learn there aren’t Christians. Our colleges and universities are not churches, but they are places where God is at work; where God is doing death and resurrection work. And the callings we have, they don’t come to us out of thin air. Someone is doing the calling. We believe that it is God who calls us. We can, and should, give God credit for that.
For just such a time as this. We are called. By God. To live, to die, and to live again.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Lamont Anthony Wells
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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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
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.
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Article
Wake Up Running! A Call to Ethical Leaders in Quest of Democratic Space
Walter Earl Fluker
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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Article
A Fifth Teat on a Cow: The Irrelevance of the Lutheran Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms for Academic Life
Richard VonDohlen
No. 9 · Summer 2000
VonDohlen, responding to Richard Hughes, Carol LaHurd, David Ratke, Philip Nordquist, and Robert Benne, argues that the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms as commonly deployed in recent discussions of Lutheran higher education rests on a faulty sociology (taking Luther’s sixteenth-century structure for our highly differentiated society) and an epistemological monism (assuming a single neutral reason against the pluralism described by Alasdair MacIntyre and others), making it anti-intellectual, hostile to interdisciplinary dialogue and Christian social ethics, and ultimately as a defense of theology’s relevance about as useful as “a fifth teat on a cow.” Drawing on his experience on the Catawba Valley Hospice Ethics Committee, his Dutch Reformed and dispensationalist background, and the ELCA social statement “Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All,” he calls for an “intellectually ecumenical” dialogue between Lutherans and non-Lutherans willing to take each other’s paradigms seriously.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Wilhelm celebrates the leadership of ELCA colleges and universities within American higher education — from presidential service in major higher-education agencies to recognized leadership in global education and interfaith understanding — and lifts up the health of the ELCA network of schools as a church-related community that maintains shared identity while living as good citizens of the larger academy.
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Article
"Our Calling in Education": Working Together to Generate a Strong Social Statement on Public Schools, Lutheran Schools and Colleges, and the Faith Formation of Children and Young People
Marcia Bunge
No. 23 · Summer 2006
Bunge, Professor of Theology and Humanities at Christ College, Valparaiso University, makes two claims about the ELCA’s forthcoming social statement on education: first, that it should be built on a robust Lutheran understanding of vocation, addressing four common misconceptions (vocation as occupation, as self-fulfillment, as ordained ministry, and as “vo-tech”) and recovering the breadth of Luther’s teaching; and second, that the statement should narrow its focus to three urgent areas affecting children and young people — public schools, Lutheran schools and colleges, and faith formation — rather than addressing the full lifespan of education in equal depth.
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Article
Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives
William O'Brochta
No. 63 · Spring 2026
15 min audio
Guest editor William O’Brochta introduces the section by overviewing the ELCA’s call to civic engagement, recapping the Fall 2025 Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives conference at Texas Lutheran University, and previewing the participant essays that follow.
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Editorial
Guest Editorial: Moral Deliberation in NECU Classrooms
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Simmons introduces the guiding question of the NECU working group: could the ELCA’s twelve social statements and thirteen social messages — expressions of Lutheran social teaching originally formulated for congregational use — turn campuses into “academic communities of moral deliberation”?
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Response
Hitting a Moving Target
Harry Jebsen
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Jebsen, former Provost of Capital University, responds to Reichenbach by arguing that the institutions, the ELCA, congregations and pastors, students, and curriculum are all moving targets. Drawing on Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and his own fifteen years of hiring as Dean and Provost (a candidate who hoped the cross out front didn’t mean anything), he traces the drift from the “Mr. Chips” faculty who personified Dana and Midland Lutheran to a campus culture where “everybody is nice to each other” has replaced theological substance, and where MBA programs, conservatories, law schools, and adult-education programs further dilute the focus of the residential Lutheran college.