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
Beyond Deep Gladness: Coming to Terms with Vocations We Don’t Choose
Deanna Thompson
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Thompson, living with incurable cancer, expands Frederick Buechner’s definition of vocation to make room for deep sadness — drawing on Arthur Frank, Shelly Rambo, Beverly Wallace, and Ross Gay to argue that practices of lament, including the public lament of Friday Flowers at St. Olaf, open space for gladness, joy, and even flourishing to emerge.
-
Article
Reconciled Diversity: Reflections on our Calling to Embrace our Religious Neighbors
Jacqueline Bussie
No. 33 · Spring 2011
Bussie offers three concrete recommendations for cultivating reconciled religious diversity on Lutheran campuses — Lutheran listening and the telling of stories, engendering encounters with religious neighbors through curriculum and bridge-building events, and choosing empathy and collaboration over evangelism and creed — arguing that what students fear most in encounters with the religious “other” is the loss of their own identity and distinctiveness, and that we can show them how loyalty to one’s own tradition and reverence for different traditions can coexist.
-
Response
A Call for Creative Education
Wendy McCredie
No. 3 · Summer 1997
McCredie of Texas Lutheran responds to Reichenbach by reframing the four ideas embedded in his claim that “the entire college community should be knowledgeably committed to the college’s mission”—community, knowledge, commitment, mission—and argues that the Lutheran tradition’s unwillingness to be separate from the world should lead us to educate the public about the Lutheran tradition rather than interrogate prospective employees about their faith. She questions whether agreement on “Christian values” is possible (or even Lutheran), and reads Reichenbach’s “creative education” as the dialectical tension between gospel and law, God’s love and our human limits, that members of communities related to the Lutheran church are uniquely positioned to inhabit.
-
Article
How Can We Keep From Singing?
Robert Scholz
No. 7 · Summer 1999
Scholz, professor of music at St. Olaf, responds to Tom Christenson’s “Freedom of a Christian” by walking through his own Nunc dimittis for the St. Olaf Christmas Festival, an Elderhostel choir of singers aged 60 to 95, and the four liberating arts (enablement and change, melioristic, embodying, and critical) as they shape conducting, composition, and music education. He defends the fine arts and folk traditions over “contemporary Christian” soft pop-rock and taped accompaniments, citing Luther’s preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae and the family of God’s need to interact in song against the virtual community of TV evangelism and the Crystal Cathedrals of the air.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Christenson opens with an invitation for reader submissions to balance the conference-paper format of the first two issues, then asks how college and universities can turn students positively toward learning. Drawing on Aristotle’s claim that study is loved for its own sake (which students greet with disbelieving laughter) and Neil Postman’s The End of Education, he argues that students lack narratives within which learning makes sense and proposes four Lutheran mega-narratives—stewardship of creation, the freedom of the Christian, the sacramental presence of the transcendent in the concrete and ordinary, and vocation—that could inspire learning at the 28 ELCA colleges and universities.
-
Response
Renewing Our Journey: Some Thoughts on Pursuing the Truth
John Rehl
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Rehl, a Capital University graduate pursuing doctorates in theology at Chicago and in economics at Wisconsin, takes up Schwehn’s invitation to think again on the nature of truth. He sets aside truth as information, as object, and as mere words; recasts the church-related college’s task as a renewed emphasis on classroom teaching (Kierkegaard’s teacher as midwife) and on brave, articulate professors. He calls for moral education in courage, discipline, patience, and love, illustrates the costs of the fact-value split with examples from economics, and argues that we honor Lutheran heritage not by preserving it as a museum piece but by testing it—Luther’s theology of the cross over a theology of glory—and by preparing students for a world of Untruth, strengthened (with Julian of Norwich) by the promise that they will not be overwhelmed.