The mission of California Lutheran University (Cal Lutheran) is to “educate leaders for a global society” who are committed to service and justice, and to help our students “discover and live their purpose.” Faith-based and liberal arts institutions, such as Cal Lutheran, are poised to cultivate a civic-minded ethos that embraces values and reason. As a political science faculty member, I foster a culture of civic engagement through my teaching, mentoring, service and scholarship. As an educator, I teach courses that examine phenomena which shape political life, such as Community Development, Public Policy, and Women and Politics. In these courses, students examine how public policy impacts stakeholders in all spheres of society, and they develop skills to be civically engaged. Students read original policy documents to mitigate content bias and are taught how to analyze policy by identifying real world issues, examining the causes of problems, and proposing recommendations that are feasible. By understanding the complexity of political life, students develop the skills and knowledge to be civic-minded individuals and agents of change in society. Student projects have addressed topics including maternal morbidity rates among Black women, violence against Native American women, youth activism, and generational wealth in low-income communities.
Most, if not all, students in political science pursue internships, service, or volunteer opportunities with political campaigns, local government and civic organizations, which I help them identify and secure through the personal and professional networks I cultivated while working in public policy and political campaigns. By involving students in research, I mentor students on how to use their academic skills to produce scholarship that contributes to public discourse and civic engagement. For example, my students and I have presented our research findings about the impact of the Dobbs abortion ruling at academic conferences and in the larger community, particularly during the 2022 and 2024 elections.
One of the most effective ways that my civic engagement activities and Cal Lutheran’s mission align is the meaningful collaboration I forged with the Lutheran Office of Public Policy, which is based in Sacramento. For the past two years, a delegation of Cal Lutheran students participated in Lutheran Lobby Day to advocate for legislation that supports the ELCA’s social statements and priorities in California’s proposed budget. The ELCA social statements are the denomination’s most authoritative teaching documents on major social issues. The purpose of the statements is to guide the Church’s teaching, policy advocacy, and moral deliberation. For 3 months, I prepared students by having them research the ELCA’s social statements and current issues facing California. They are trained to be policy advocates through mock policy writing and practicing oral presentations. Students work with the ELCA members to lobby legislators in the California State Assembly and Senate on legislation that aligns with the Lutheran Church’s social statements, including affordable housing, child tax credits, clean water in schools, environmental justice, and immigration reform.
Faith-based institutions like Cal Lutheran serve as incubators for students, faculty and the entire community to develop civic skills, norms, and a sense of community, which are essential to meaningful and transformative civic participation.
I am fortunate to be able to teach and produce scholarly work that cultivates knowledge and foster skills that can be applied to civic-minded activities, such as public policy, advocacy, and community activism. Faith-based institutions like Cal Lutheran serve as incubators for students, faculty and the entire community to develop civic skills, norms, and a sense of community, which are essential to meaningful and transformative civic participation. During these tumultuous political times, the ELCA social statements facilitate and strengthen our resolve at Cal Lutheran to root our civic education of students in academic analysis and the Lutheran tradition of higher education that engages both faith and reason.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Article
Gen Z is Made for Lutheran Higher Education
W. Kent Barnds
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Barnds argues that Generation Z’s defining traits — socially responsible, purpose-driven, cost-conscious, culturally open, and tech-expectant — align almost perfectly with the missions of NECU institutions, and offers concrete suggestions (from replacing “vocation” with “purpose” to embracing Gen X parents as co-pilots) for Lutheran colleges seeking to attract and serve this generation.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Mahn narrates a year of crisscrossing pandemics — Covid-19, economic collapse, partisan politics, and the long pandemic of white supremacy revealed anew by the murder of George Floyd — and argues that Lutheran liberal arts schools, by educating for vocation, are uniquely poised to help students respond with character and capable callings.
-
Article
Called for Life
Brian Pittman, Ellen Shelton, Greg Owen
No. 31 · Winter 2010
Owen, Shelton, and Pittman of Wilder Research present the key findings of the Called for Life study, comparing the class of 2007 “Lilly graduates” from Luther, Augsburg, and Augustana to a pre-Lilly cohort from the class of 2001. They report that Lilly graduates were more than twice as likely to associate vocation with “calling” rather than “just a job,” and they identify four common ingredients of effective programming: relationships with caring adults, experiential learning outside the classroom, vocation-infused courses, and peer relationships within a pervasive campus culture of vocational exploration.
-
Article
Diversity, Integrity, and Lutheran Colleges
Florence D. Amamoto
No. 8 · Winter 2000
Amamoto—a sansei Jodo Shin Shu Buddhist who is “an inside outsider” at Gustavus Adolphus—argues that diversity and integrity belong together in Lutheran higher education, perhaps in a way unmatched by other church-related traditions. She affirms the importance of Gustavus’s 60% Lutheran student body and vibrant Christ Chapel under Richard Elvee and Brian Johnson while warning that numbers and chapel are not enough, draws on Tom Christenson, Patricia Gurin, Sylvia Hurtado, Anthony Carnevale, Martha Nussbaum, W. E. B. DuBois (the deaths of Matthew Shepard and Isaiah Shoels), Richard Hughes’s reading of finitum capax infiniti, Richard Solberg, and Mark Schwehn’s mutual hospitality model, and concludes that the real enemy is not diversity but indifference—and that Lutheran finitude grounds a theological commitment to keeping diversity and identity in creative conversation.
-
Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Adopting the Framework of ‘Because’ and ‘Therefore’
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Pribbenow describes how Augsburg University responded to its dramatic demographic transformation (from 18% to nearly 70% BIPOC entering students over sixteen years) by adopting an institutional vocational statement and a simple “because/therefore” framework for translating particular Lutheran theological convictions into institutional programs, policies, and practices.
-
Article
A God of Peace and Love? Reflections From a Biblical Scholar
Karla G. Bohmbach
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Bohmbach responds to Gregory Clark’s call to proclaim Jesus on Lutheran campuses with biblical-scholar reservations. Israel’s sacred texts also include the herem ban, the conquest narratives, and a God who fights for Israel; the Christian canon includes the apocalyptic violence of Revelation. To proclaim Jesus is therefore to proclaim a particular and contested figure within a tradition that has its own internal violence—not a generic God of peace and love. Bohmbach asks what it would mean for staff, administrators, and teachers on a college campus to take seriously the Jesus who made himself vulnerable to the violence of his world, even to the point of suffering for it, and whether Lutheran colleges are prepared for such a vocation.