As readers of Intersections know well, the spring issue of this journal each year typically carries essays from the prior year’s “Vocation of a Lutheran College” conference. We continue that tradition with this issue, presenting essays from the 2008 conference which was held at Luther College, Decorah, Iowa, under the theme: “Educating for Responsible Citizenship.”
Paul Pribbenow, President of Augsburg College in Minneapolis, delivered an unofficial keynote for the conference last summer. In his paper, “Dual Citizenship: Reflections on Educating Citizens at Augsburg College,” Pribbenow argues (rightly, I think) that the vocation of a Lutheran college includes helping students take up what he calls “dual citizenship,” namely, being a contributing member of one’s own society and culture while understanding oneself as belonging to a wider community at the same time. Wanda Deifelt, professor of religion at Luther College, relates the experience of the 2008 vocation conference’s host school as it explored and developed programs for teaching and learning about civic engagement by drawing more deeply upon the Lutheran understanding of vocation. Jose Marichal, professor of political science at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California, took the conference through an assessment of the utopian and dystopian aspects of the digital revolution and the meaning of “digital citizenship.” Finally, Arne Selbyg, the retiring director of colleges and universities for the ELCA’s churchwide organization, reflected on the “three opportunities (he) had to be educated for citizenship,” in Norway, in America as a resident alien, and as an American citizen.
The 16th century Lutheran Reformation’s emphasis on education and the development of schools in Germany grew in part from the reformers’ concerns for an educated citizenry. The importance of our mission in higher education for developing citizens in the 21st century remains a core aspect of the vocation of a Lutheran college.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
Haak frames the issue’s essays around the question of Lutheran colleges and the role of citizen, noting H. Richard Niebuhr’s typology in Christ and Culture and Luther’s own complex understanding of Christian and state, and offers a fitting farewell to Arne Selbyg with Mike Blair’s tribute song “A Fine Norwegian.”
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Article
Dual Citizenship: Reflections on Educating Citizens at Augsburg College
Paul C. Pribbenow
Pribbenow argues that the vocation of Augsburg College is to educate “dual citizens”—those able to live within the messiness of common work rather than resolve every tension once and for all. Drawing on John Courtney Murray on democracy as “the intersection of conspiracies,” Bill Moyers, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Stephen Carter, and the Augsburg vision statement “We believe we are called to serve our neighbor,” he names four common commitments and five principles of civic education that ground Augsburg’s incarnational mission in its city neighborhood.
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Article
Students in the Cloud: Creating Digital Citizens
Jose Marichal
Marichal weighs the utopian and dystopian views of the “networked information economy,” drawing on Yochai Benkler, Manuel Castells, Henry Jenkins, Cass Sunstein, Robert Putnam, Nicholas Carr, and Andrew Keen to chart the promise and peril of life “in the cloud,” and proposes Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of phronesis—developed through Hubert Dreyfus’s five stages of skill acquisition—as the goal of digital citizenship for college faculty and their students.
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Article
From Alien to Citizen
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg reflects on three experiences of being educated for citizenship—growing up in Norway under the legacy of Lutheran pastors and public school teachers who resisted the Nazi occupation, arriving in America as a resident alien, and becoming a naturalized American citizen—and proposes the jazz ensemble as a better metaphor for American society than the melting pot, one in which different citizens learn skills, study other instruments, and dialog with one another in service to the common music.
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Article
Seeking the Common Good: Lutheran Contributions to Global Citizenship
Wanda Deifelt
Deifelt draws on Luther’s account of neighborly love in “The Freedom of a Christian” and on his Two Kingdoms theology to argue that a Lutheran ethics of care fosters a sense of responsibility, accountability, and compassion that broadens citizenship beyond rights and virtues. Engaging William Galston’s typology of civic virtues, Sylvia Walby on women’s citizenship, Serene Jones on communitarianism, and Manuel Castells on globalization, she proposes that Lutheran theology equips the church to educate for transformative participation in world affairs.
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Article
Why All This Talk About Understanding the Mission of NECU Member Institutions as a Vocation?
Mark Wilhelm
No. 56 · Fall 2022
In his valedictory keynote, retiring NECU Executive Director Mark Wilhelm argues that Lutheran higher education is, properly understood, vocation-based education — outlining four core practices recovered over the past fifty years and naming the constructive and corrective work still to be done, including a fuller embrace of DEIJ and of the diverse vocations of NECU’s 27 institutions.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Wilhelm announces his planned retirement on January 31, 2023, after serving as the founding executive director of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities, and gives thanks for the privilege of helping NECU articulate a shared vision for Lutheran higher education in twenty-first-century North America.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Wilhelm reflects on an NPR report of teenagers’ pandemic diaries and the fraught Christian history of struggling to live out Jesus’s ethic of love, framing the issue as a record of NECU institutions working out how to act for the common good through the pandemic of 2020–2021.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Wilhelm argues that the “hackneyed” expressions of higher education — “you are not just a number,” “the college experience,” “risen to the challenge” — tell the simple truth about NECU institutions even as the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed budgets, employees, and campus life to the breaking point.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Wilhelm frames the issue by tracing how Lutheran educational ideals — once a primary source of contemporary higher education — were masked in the United States, and introduces a NECU initiative that uses the case of business ethics to explore Lutheran social teaching as an academic resource.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Wilhelm frames the issue by noting that a federal court’s vindication of Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process is a win for higher education’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion — and argues that for Lutheran higher education, the commitment to diversity is an old and foundational claim, rooted in Christianity’s openness to all and reflected in the four diverse gospels of the New Testament.
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Response
“My Wife, We Have Not Come to the End of All Our Trials, but a Measureless Labor Yet”: The Lutheran Argument in Colleges
Steven Paulson
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Paulson of Concordia College responds to Bouman by invoking Penelope’s unreasonable patience for Odysseus and asking whether Bouman’s five “principles” deliver the “continuities of conflict” that MacIntyre’s account of a living tradition demands. He argues that the proper Lutheran “continuity of conflict” is the praxis of proclamation—Christ crucified as “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles”—which is given outside the institution’s walls and which colleges and universities, as socially embodied arguments, “can’t like” because it places truth beyond their control. The Lutheran problem, he concludes, is not the Enlightenment or Post-Modernism but the “old Adam,” the Odysseus still unsure of his identity.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 38 · Fall 2013
Mahn reads Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy alongside Larry Rasmussen and Martha Nussbaum to ask how Lutheran schools can articulate the “value added” of vocation without commodifying it, and previews the 2013 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference papers, Patricia Lull’s sermon, and Ann Hill Duin and Eric Childers’ Project DAVID essay that make up the issue.
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Article
Lutheran Education in the None Zone
Samuel Torvend
No. 23 · Summer 2006
Torvend, Associate Professor of Religion at Pacific Lutheran University, argues that any ELCA social statement on education must speak not only to those raised within the cultural and theological traditions of ELCA Lutheranism but also to the diverse communities of the “none zone” — the Pacific Northwest and other regions where religious affiliation is increasingly unaffiliated. The statement must therefore equip Lutheran colleges, congregations, and schools for engagement with religious pluralism and cultural diversity rather than presuming a Lutheran cultural baseline.
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Reflection
On the Power of Transformation and Becoming Human
Ken Yanai Flores
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Flores, a Cal Lutheran sophomore, reflects on personal and institutional transformation as the slow work of shedding the armor of trauma responses, engaging discomfort rather than turning away, and trusting that the work of becoming more human — more empathetic, knowledgeable, and free — will be reflected in our institutions as well.
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Editorial
From the Editor: So That We, Too, May Flourish
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Windham-Hughes introduces the 2023 VLHE conference theme of educator flourishing, drawing on Dr. Monica Smith’s plenary challenge — “How can we flourish if only some are centered and others are at the margins?” — and invites readers to ground themselves in Us/We, the cover art by Augustana graduate William Hatchet, and join the conversation.
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Article
Bringing Core Values to Life through Civic Engagement
Austin Trantham
No. 63 · Spring 2026
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.