Baylor University’s mission is “to educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment within a caring community.” The University’s current strategic plan, “Baylor in Deeds,” strives to deepen this commitment to preparing our students for civic engagement through academic and character formation and expands our longstanding motto, Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana, with an additional, broader global focus — Pro Mundo. “Baylor in Deeds” is inspired by Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, where he instructs us, “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). Among the foundational pillars of this strategic plan is providing students with a “transformational undergraduate educational experience” including experiential learning opportunities outside the classroom.
Baylor’s Office of Engaged Learning (OEL) is a campus hub that connects students to these opportunities for engagement beyond the classroom including research, internships, and public service work in local, state and national communities, endeavoring to embody Paul’s exhortation in the First Epistle to Timothy, “to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share…so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life” (I Timothy 6:18-19). Through these learning experiences, the OEL equips students to “transform the cultural, social, economic, and political contexts around them so that they might help to create a world that is more just, fair, inclusive, equitable, and sustainable — one in which all flourishing is mutual.” We achieve our goals when our students orient their learning toward the needs of others, participating in civic engagement not for self-interested reasons such as bolstering their resumes but in service of the greater good.
We achieve our goals when our students orient their learning toward the needs of others, participating in civic engagement not for self-interested reasons such as bolstering their resumes but in service of the greater good.
One of OEL’s more recent initiatives is working alongside academic departments across campus to build the Engaged Learning Distribution List (ELDL) for Baylor’s College of Arts & Science’s Core Curriculum. While the requirement is only in its second year, the EL DL already boasts approximately 50 unique undergraduate courses from more than 20 distinct departmental prefixes, including disciplines spanning Arts and Sciences divisions as well as offerings from other colleges. Moreover, over 75% of these courses are either newly developed or revised for this requirement, underscoring widely shared enthusiasm for this work that will continue to blossom through “Baylor in Deeds.”
The College’s learning objectives for the ELDL include an explicit commitment to civic engagement: “Students will use knowledge gained and skills developed in the course to cultivate civic virtues and contribute to the public good.” Among the courses currently offered in the ELDL, those in the Philanthropy and Public Service Program (PPS) enroll the most total students, including PPS 1101 Learning for the World and PPS 2101 Community Based Global Learning. Each of these courses requires between ten and twenty hours of community-engaged service during the semester, with most students in PPS 1101 and PPS 2101 volunteering with English as a Second Language (ESL) programs offered at a local church and community college. Data from the Global Engagement Survey (GES) for courses offered in the 2024-2025 academic year is encouraging and indicates that students show improvement in both civic efficacy and global civic responsibility between the pre-test administered at the start of the semester and the post-test administered at the end of the class. These results bear witness to the positive impact that community engaged learning has in our quest to train students for “worldwide leadership and service” grounded in our Christian commitment to love our neighbor as ourselves.
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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
Bringing Core Values to Life through Civic Engagement
Austin Trantham
5 min audio
Trantham shows how Saint Leo University’s Benedictine Core Values shape his civic engagement work — from advising a “Why Vote?” campaign and Constitution Day panels to engaging students in the Unify Challenge for respectful cross-institutional discourse.
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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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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Christenson explains that this issue breaks from the first two issues’ single-focus pattern to feature three principal papers on the environment, the education of desire, and hiring and personnel policies, plus two poems and a piece of reflective bemusement. He then commends George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford, 1997) and challenges Lutheran scholars to articulate how the particulars of their faith inform their scholarship—in conversation with Calvinist work like Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and Art in Action—rather than remaining silently complicit in the view that faith has no place in the academy.
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Article
Engaging the Local Community: Why Bother?
Mary S. Carlsen
No. 27 · Spring 2008
Carlsen traces the often adversarial history of town-gown relations from the medieval universities through the Battle of St. Scholastica Day to the “ivory tower” pattern of American higher education, then argues that Lutheran colleges should engage their local communities for practical, educational, ecological, moral, and theological reasons. Drawing on her work in social work education at St. Olaf and on Ira Harkavy, Ernest Boyer, and the ELCA’s “Our Calling in Education,” she offers a recipe for engagement that is Passionate, Ethical (Needed, Welcomed, Mutual, Long-term, Attentive to diversity, Strengths-based, Respectful), and Reflective.
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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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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 39 · Spring 2014
Wilhelm interrogates the widely used phrase “the model is broken,” arguing that it blames the victim, masks the demographic and public-funding pressures actually facing ELCA higher education, and distracts from the work of modifying—rather than discarding—a model of educating the whole person that has successfully adjusted across the centuries.
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Article
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.
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Article
Finding Purpose in Chaos: Reflection In and Beyond the Public Health Classroom
Lena R. Hann
No. 52 · Fall 2020
When the pandemic hit her new public health professionalism course, Hann recalibrated her teaching from the “how” of professional preparation to the “why” of vocational reflection — and recounts how Augustana public health students and alumni found purpose in the chaos through food banks, disaster response, palliative care, and research on health inequities.