I teach and serve at Saint Leo University, a private Catholic institution rooted in long-standing Benedictine values. These Core Values — Community, Excellence, Integrity, Personal Development, Respect, and Responsible Stewardship — inform the daily work of our students, faculty, and staff, and are held in high esteem across campus. Whether working with civically minded students, promoting democratic discourse on campus with my faculty colleagues, or directly educating students in the classroom, my civic engagement efforts are guided by a desire to advance these founding principles.
I was honored to serve as a Faculty Advisor for Saint Leo’s “Why Vote?” campaign, helping to guide student leaders to promote the inviting and inclusive theme of “Empower, Elevate, and Educate.” Everyone worked tirelessly to plan and execute the university’s first “Civic Engagement Day.” Multiple community organizations participated in informative sessions discussing the impact of civic engagement, and the direct impact that college students can make through targeted activism. The event culminated with a conversation between the student organizers and a member of the Florida House of Representatives. This gathering demonstrated our Community Core Value, inviting “all of us to listen, to learn, to change, and to serve.” Subsequent activities included presentations and informal events aligning with National Voter Registration Day and Civic Engagement Week. This work illustrates the Saint Leo Core Value of Excellence, which includes a call to “develop the character, learn the skills, and assimilate the knowledge essential to become morally responsible leaders.”
Each year, I am privileged to collaborate with colleagues on an event celebrating Constitution Day that meaningfully engages the Saint Leo community. We invite faculty members from various disciplines to discuss a thematic issue relating to civic engagement and constitutionalism in order to link Founding principles to modern political and social issues. In 2025, I moderated our conversation on “Immigration, Citizenship, and the Constitution” with professors in criminal justice, history, and political science. While differences of opinion were expressed on topics regarding assimilation and cultural heritage, the evening cultivated with insightful student questions. I thoroughly enjoyed leading an event that directly engages our Core Value of Respect, noting the importance of “unity and diversity…the free exchange of ideas, and… learning, living, and working harmoniously.”
Finally, I strive to cultivate civic awareness through my teaching by connecting students directly with community leaders and opportunities for democratic dialogue. In my American State and Local Government course, students covered with a former student, Luke King, now Judge/Executive of Cumberland County, Kentucky. He discussed the creation of the Cumberland County Civics Club, a pioneering initiative in youth civic engagement. Students in my Introduction to Politics class participate in the Unify Challenge, practicing respectful discourse on policy issues with peers from other institutions holding differing political perspectives. Though some are initially nervous about this prospect, all come away appreciating the opportunity to hone their civic knowledge, critical thinking, and oral communication skills. These efforts correlate with the Saint Leo Core Value of Personal Development and our emphasis on the “development of every person’s mind…to help strengthen the character of our community.”
Though some are initially nervous about this prospect, all come away appreciating the opportunity to hone their civic knowledge, critical thinking, and oral communication skills.
It is gratifying to work at a faith-based institution that intentionally strives to promote Core Values, and my work in civic engagement has certainly benefited from engaging with these mission-based practices to educate and empower students, colleagues, and the community.
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Editorial
From the Publisher & Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes, Lamont Anthony Wells
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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Reflection
I am a Treaty Partner
Kyrie Fairbairn
7 min audio
A recent California Lutheran graduate reflects on how a course on Indigenous Rights and Practices, and a conversation with a former Chairman of the Lummi Nation, led her to claim a “treaty partner” identity and to challenge readers to learn the treaties that shape the lands they call home.
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Article
Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives
William O'Brochta
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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Article
Leaning-In to the Civic Lessons of Our Namesakes
A. Lanethea Mathews-Schultz
6 min audio
Mathews-Schultz uses the civic legacy of the Muhlenberg family — from General Pete’s Revolutionary call to action to President Muhlenberg’s inaugural address on the “education of conscience” — to invite students at Muhlenberg College into a shared civic inheritance.
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Article
Teaching and Mentoring in Service of Civic Engagement
Haco Hoang
6 min audio
Hoang describes how her teaching, mentoring, and research at California Lutheran University — including a multi-year collaboration with the Lutheran Office of Public Policy on Lutheran Lobby Day — cultivate civic skills grounded in ELCA social statements and the Lutheran tradition of faith and reason.
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Article
Community-Based Research as Engaged Citizenship
James Paul Old
6 min audio
Old argues that genuine citizenship requires more than charitable gestures — it demands long-term, reciprocal community partnerships — and describes how Valparaiso’s Community Research and Service Center embodies that vision even amid the financial pressures threatening such programs.
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Article
An Ecosystem of Democracy
David Thomason
6 min audio
Thomason argues that faith-based institutions should equip students not to dominate the public sphere with their convictions but to cultivate an “ecosystem of democracy” — pursuing universal values with virtue and tolerance while acknowledging humanity’s incomplete grasp of truth.
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Article
Civic Engagement, "Baylor In Deeds," and Engaged Learning
Rebecca Flavin
6 min audio
Flavin describes how Baylor’s strategic plan “Baylor in Deeds” and its Office of Engaged Learning are building civic engagement into the Arts & Sciences core curriculum, with early Global Engagement Survey data showing gains in civic efficacy and global civic responsibility.
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Article
Fragmented in Faith: The Concerns and Hopes Found in Student Spirituality and Civic Engagement
Emma Bohmann, Monica Sitachitta
11 min audio
Two Texas Lutheran University students reflect on the cyclical pattern of low spiritual and civic engagement on their campus and argue that distinguishing Lutheran values from Lutheran practice could open space for civic engagement to become a non-optional expression of neighbor-justice for all students.
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Article
Ivory Tower or Holy Mountain? Faith and Academic Freedom
Nicholas Wolterstorff
No. 11 · Spring 2001
Wolterstorff defines infringement of academic freedom as impairing a faculty member’s standing on account of the ideological content of her position, argues that academic freedom (like free speech) is “duly qualified” rather than absolute, and offers eight considerations bearing on religiously based institutions: Weber’s differentiation of Wissenschaft, religious pluralism within a liberal polity, the vitality of American civil society, a decentralized educational system, the “holistic” character of much American religion, the post-Kuhnian collapse of classical foundationalism and of the “generically human” academy, the fact that ideas matter, and the personhood violated by infringement (the desecration of an image of God). He concludes that the private sector offers wider academic freedom than the public, that religious qualifications are not inherently inappropriate (any more than St. John’s Great Books commitment), but that religiously based colleges too often apply them unjustly—arbitrarily, secretly, without recourse—and that the AAUP’s best service is model codes of procedure.
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Article
Honoring the Word: Lutherans and Creative Writing
Carol Gilbertson
No. 16 · Winter 2003
Gilbertson argues that “honoring the Word” in Lutheran colleges means cherishing the sacred power of human language as God’s gift across three sites—the chapel talk, the classroom of wonder, and the poem—and illustrates her argument by reading aloud her own poems: “The Refiner’s Fire and Leaping Calves,” “Late June,” “Early June,” “Sweet July,” “Good Friday,” “Pondering These Things,” “The Limbs of Words,” and “Night Rising,” drawing on Darrell Jodock, John Updike, Martha Nussbaum, George Steiner, and T. S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages” to claim writing as a Christian vocation that “incarnate[s] the unseen sacred.”
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Article
The Musician's Vocation
Jeffrey Bell-Hanson
No. 48 · Fall 2018
Bell-Hanson argues that musicians, who exercise profound influence over the emotional flavor of a moment, are called not merely to technical proficiency but to a sense of vocation: understanding their art well enough to use it responsibly, to intend truthfulness rather than manipulation, and to articulate its significance in dialog with other disciplines.
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Article
Gift and Calling: A Lutheran Perspective on Higher Education
Darrell Jodock
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Jodock argues that a Lutheran perspective on higher education rests on three underlying ideas—that we are gifted (a giftedness that calls forth wonder, awe, gratitude, a sense of humor, and vocation as response to neighbor); that the Lutheran tradition affirms a particular kind of God who is down-to-earth and at work in the world for justice and human wholeness; and that a Lutheran “third path” can be both rooted in the tradition and inclusive of others. He draws out ten implications for higher education, from wonder as the heart of religion through liberal learning oriented toward the freedom of its members.
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Article
Religious Diversity and the Vocation of a Lutheran College
Darrell Jodock
No. 44 · Fall 2016
Jodock argues that a college which takes its Lutheran values seriously is well positioned to foster inter-religious relations along a “third path” that is both religiously rooted and inclusive. He traces the relational and communal character of Lutheran theology, develops a Lutheran understanding of deeper freedom, the theology of limits, and human complexity, and shows how a down-to-earth image of God offers theological resources for overcoming the anxiety and fear that block interfaith engagement.
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Book Review
Richard T. Hughes: How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind
Tom Christenson
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Christenson reviews Richard Hughes’s How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind (Eerdmans, 2001), which argues, drawing on Tillich’s notion of “religion breaking through its own particularity,” that faith is a means to the open pursuit of truth rather than its enemy. Christenson reads the argument as a natural fit for a Lutheran tradition of semper reformanda but notes Luther’s own dogmatism toward fellow reformers, and wishes Hughes had drawn a sharper line between an absolute truth that relativizes all human truths and a postmodern abandonment of truth altogether. The book was the most-cited title at the November meeting of North American Lutheran academic officers.