We write this just a few weeks after a long and difficult presidential election. The task ahead of listening, generating empathy, and working across many different lines of difference remains what it has always been—important and difficult work. It is the work of conservatives, liberals, radicals, and other people of good will. It is the work of Muslims, Jews, Christians, seekers, skeptics, and “nones.” Certainly, as the United States becomes a nation of many faiths and cultures, educated persons need to understand the diversity and importance of religion in America and around the globe. As future leaders in church and society, persons educated at ELCA colleges and universities will also need to continue to reject religious stereotypes and intolerance that often leads to violence. The Lutheran tradition of higher education compels and challenges schools related to the ELCA to take up this work.
In early June of 2016, faculty, administrators, staff, and students from ELCA colleges and universities met at Augsburg College to participate in the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference under the theme: “Preparing Global Leaders for a Religiously Diverse Society.” No doubt colleagues on your campus are currently building upon the rich presentations and conversations from this summer. Campus delegations shared present initiatives for interfaith engagement—and ones that were on their “wish list.” The final list spans 7 pages, but here is a small sample: alternative spring break trips, “Faith Zone” training, chapel service interfaith series, “Better Together” student leaders, living-learning communities devoted to talking through and living with difference, multi-faith prayer rooms, and so on.
The Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities (NECU) is deeply committed to supporting and expanding this work. NECU’s Executive Committee (composed of 7 presidents plus the executive director) has endorsed interfaith work as a priority within Lutheran higher education. Reflecting this commitment, NECU has developed an active, collaborative relationship with the Interfaith Youth Core. Many NECU schools have also been active participants and winners of awards in the annual President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge. NECU was welcomed to leadership discussions at the White House and Georgetown University. Finally, the Rev. Mark Hanson, former presiding bishop of the ELCA and current director of the Christensen Center at Augsburg College, will chair a new steering committee to support, share, and advance interfaith initiatives.
The work of interfaith understanding and collaboration at ELCA colleges and universities is undergirded by the ELCA’s churchwide commitments to inter-religious understanding. NECU colleges and universities collaborated with the ELCA office of Ecumenical and Inter-Religious Relations to produce a book on inter-religious relations, Engaging Others, Knowing Ourselves: A Lutheran Calling in a Multi-Religious World, published by Lutheran University Press (2016).
Most of the essays of this volume were first delivered at the Vocation conference last summer, and they all were written before election results were in. If they seem especially timely now (we think they do), that is because the work of preparing global leaders for a religiously diverse society has been and will be at the heart of the mission of Lutheran colleges and universities.
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Article
Laboratories for Living in a Diverse World
Elizabeth Eaton
Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton argues that ELCA colleges and universities are called to be laboratories for living in a religiously diverse world. Reflecting on the decline of Christian privilege, the ELCA’s ecumenical and inter-religious work, and her own experience addressing the Islamic Society of North America, she offers three questions about partnerships, formation, and institutions as platforms for new collaborations.
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Article
Why Interfaith Work is Not a Luxury: Lutherans as Neighboring Neighbors
Martha E. Stortz
Stortz argues that interfaith work is not a luxury but a constitutive commitment of Lutheran higher education — institutions she describes as both “faith-based and interfaith-dependent.” Reading the parable of the Good Samaritan as both an intra-faith and inter-faith encounter, she offers a four-fold matrix of theological reflection, spiritual engagement, social action, and everyday experience as portals into the work of being neighbor.
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Article
The Promise and Peril of the Interfaith Classroom
Matthew Maruggi
Maruggi draws on his years teaching in the Augsburg religion department to identify three pairs of seeming opposites — dialogue and debate, safety and risk, commonality and particularity — that, held in creative tension, nurture a vibrant interfaith classroom where pluralism is actively engaged rather than merely present.
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Article
Religious Diversity and the Vocation of a Lutheran College
Darrell Jodock
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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Article
Risky Speech–Gifted Friendships
Sonja Hagander
Augsburg College Pastor Sonja Hagander reflects on pastoral care across faith traditions — from a campus chapel service after the 2008 murder of Muslim student Achmednur Ali, to her decade-long friendship with Jewish colleague Barbara Lehmann — and reads the Gospel of John as a roadmap for interfaith friendships marked by love, free speech, public space, and a willingness to risk being changed.
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Reflection
Mapping Interfaith Encounters
Callista Isabelle
Muhlenberg College Chaplain Callista Isabelle uses a student-designed subway map of religious and spiritual communities as an image for interfaith engagement — one that invites students to leave their “home” stations, encounter common ground and respectful disagreement, and explore the major intersections where religion meets science, environment, and mental health.
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Article
Negotiating Legitimate and Conflicting Values
Eboo Patel, Katie Bringman Baxter, Mark S. Hanson
In a closing-day conversation at the 2016 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, Mark Hanson and Eboo Patel — moderated by Katie Bringman Baxter of Interfaith Youth Core — share case studies in which legitimate religious values come into tension with one another, and make the case that Lutheran colleges should teach interfaith leadership through the hard cases rather than the easy ones.
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Institutional Focus
Interfaith Campus Organizing at California Lutheran University
Allison Bermann, Mehak Sachdev
California Lutheran University students Allison Bermann and Mehak Sachdev describe how interfaith participation at CLU grew from a grassroots movement into a sustained, integrated part of campus identity — with an intern program, Interfaith Allies, co-curricular events from Diwali dinners to Hunger Banquets, and a classroom practice of storytelling that opens the required Introduction to Christianity course to students of every faith and none.
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Article
Vocation at Full Stretch: Reflections on Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling and its Use among College Students
Jason A. Mahn
No. 61 · Spring 2025
Mahn engages Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling as required reading in a sophomore religion course, showing how her categories of missed, blocked, conflicted, fractured, unexpected, and relinquished callings empower young adults to perceive embodied, unplanned, and often painful dimensions of life as essential parts of vocation — and help close the gap between mission-driven and tuition-driven realities.
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Article
On Recruiting Diverse Students, Rooted in Mission
Eric Rowell, Jason A. Mahn
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Jason Mahn interviews Eric Rowell, Assistant Director of Admissions and Diversity Outreach at Augustana College, about how recruiting students from a wide variety of backgrounds — rooted in Augustana’s Lutheran commitment to vocation and educating across difference — remains essentially unchanged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions on affirmative action.
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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 Outgoing Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Mahn closes out a decade of editing Intersections, passes the duties to Colleen Windham-Hughes, gives thanks to Mark Wilhelm and Augustana College, and introduces an issue largely drawn from comments by Lutheran faculty, staff, and administrators at the 2022 NetVUE national gathering.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Mahn introduces the “Called to Place” theme of the 2021 VLHE Conference, arguing that Lutheran higher education’s emphasis on vocation must be grounded in particular geographies and embodied communities — for, as Wallace Stegner put it, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
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Article
Sharing Leadership within Colleges and Universities
Leanne Neilson
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Building on Jodock’s framework, Neilson applies vocational leadership to the unique work environment of higher education — mission statements, faculty governance, the slow pace of consensus, and the sometimes uneasy relationships between faculty and staff — and asks how leaders, followers, and team players can create an atmosphere of mutual empowerment on Lutheran college campuses.
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Article
Well, Well…Plumbing Our Depths, Telling Our Stories
Ann Boaden
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Beginning with a college visit that turned into a grieving mother’s confidence about her daughter’s last moments, Boaden uses John 4’s well of living water to argue that an interfaith education worthy of the name requires Lutherans to plumb the depths of their own tradition’s wells — with rituals, stories, and seasons intact — before they can see, respectfully, into the wells from which others drink.
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Article
How Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Reminds Us About Work
Than Oo
No. 61 · Spring 2025
Drawing on a Season 15 arc of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in which residents redirect pool funds to fix a plumbing problem, Oo finds in Fred Rogers’ vocation-honoring storytelling a reminder that limited resources are an invitation to creativity, perseverance, and optimism in higher education.
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Article
Even Lutheranism Can Be Cool Now: Changes in Religion and American Culture
Mark Wilhelm
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Wilhelm names two major changes in the role of religion in American culture—the rise of a rhetoric of religious individualism, exemplified by “Sheilaism” in Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, and a proliferation of religious options driven by the democratization of authority, the end and beginning of ethnicity, the success of ecumenism, and the information revolution—and draws implications for Lutheran-related higher education, including support for Stephen Prothero’s call for core religious literacy and a confident reclaiming of each college’s religious heritage as a platform for engaging the religious diversity of America.
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Article
The Lutheran Calling in Education: Context and Prospect
Paul J. Dovre
No. 23 · Summer 2006
Dovre, President Emeritus of Concordia College and co-chair of the ELCA Task Force on Education, undertakes three tasks: focusing on the current social context (young people’s spiritual lives, the state of mainline denominations, the family map, schools, communities, and higher education); reflecting on why Lutherans care about education (creation in God’s image, vocation, Luther’s legacy, the priesthood of all believers, civic righteousness, and hope); and considering the prospects and possibilities for addressing the calling (biblical, confessional, theological, and pedagogical legacies; the renewal of apostolic ministry, the Christian-college renaissance, K–12 reform, and the congregational education explosion).
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Reflection
Confessions of a Collaborator
Chuck Huff
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Huff of St. Olaf offers a tongue-in-cheek public confession of his lifelong sin of collaboration—from elementary-school reports on dinosaurs and Cliff notes on Faulkner, through high-school algebra and college group projects, to borrowed syllabi, group work imposed on resentful students, tutorials, independent studies on every form of self-reliance, and circulated drafts. Even this confession was collaborated on, and (he confesses) he enjoyed it.