Over the past few years, interfaith participation at California Lutheran University has grown from a grassroots movement to a sustainable and integral part of our campus identity. We have integrated several aspects of interfaith into our campus and have created a variety of opportunities into which students to immerse themselves.
Interfaith at CLU
During the 2015-2016 academic year, interfaith experiences reached approximately 550 individuals, logged about 28 programming hours, and hosted 15 original programs. The key components of interfaith at California Lutheran University include the following:
Intern Program
Our intern program is integrated into our Student Life Office. Students are able to apply for an on-campus internship through Student Employment. We hire approximately 3-4 interns per semester to work for the Community Service Center. For the first time in 2016-17, we will also hire a Graduate Assistant. Interns are responsible for interfaith programming and logistics. They put together events, manage social media pages, host weekly meetings, and serve as liaisons with other campus groups.
Interfaith Allies
The Interfaith Allies are a group of students, faculty, and staff that promote interfaith cooperation and dialogue between faiths and non-faith groups. Allies focus on fostering a more inclusive campus community by working across all lines of religious difference.
Co-Curricular Programming and Tools
Interfaith at California Lutheran implements a variety of programs and tools on campus. These include the following:
- Weekly Meetings: The Interns host weekly meetings at the coffee shop on campus for the Interfaith Allies. Each week, the group is presented with a discussion topic that can range from current events to dialogue about love.
- Events: We host gatherings with food for all to learn about religious festivals, to partner in serving refugees, and to hear students’ reflections on their research in religious communities. Past events include a Diwali Dinner, Children of Abraham (which was hosted when the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur coincided with the Muslim holiday of Eid El Adha), and Engaged Buddhism (where students experience a 4 day retreat).
- Alternative Tablings: Tabling events are held once or twice a month. There is usually a monthly theme where we have an open question and answer period with the Interfaith Interns. We give away swag, along with informational postcards about our organization, events, and meetings. We also hold tabling events to promote our larger events.
- Fast-A-Thon/Hunger Banquet: The Interfaith Hunger Banquet was created through our partnership with Oxfam America. We collect food for a local food bank and invite speakers from local hunger agencies. Their insights leave a lasting impact on participants.
- Interfaith Prayer for the World: We host these prayers when tragedies occur around the world. They occur at the main campus flagpole during the ten minute break between classes.
- Come Together Now: Campus Ministry and Interfaith Allies collaborate for Come Together Now dinners. They are casual dinners where we have topics (such as rest, sacrifice, love) and dialogue about how religion and our faith/non-faith traditions tie into the topic. A few speakers are invited to speak on the topic, followed by open discussion for all.
- Resident Assistant/Peer Assistant Training: Non/religious identities and interfaith cooperation are included regularly in diversity training for student leaders on campus.
Additional programs include staff luncheons, interfaith meditation chapel, and other collaborations and cooperation with other departments and existing programs.
Students Teaching through Stories
On our campus, every student is required to take Introduction to Christianity. Some students are uncomfortable or even unwilling to be involved with this subject matter. I (Allison) was definitely one of these students at first, mostly because I was worried that as a non-Lutheran student, my religious traditions would be ignored or even viewed as unacceptable. However, because my professor taught us the importance of interfaith cooperation and made the space an inclusive one, the study of religion has become a big part of my college career. I believe that without a focus on creating a safe and comfortable space for interfaith discussion, no one in our class would have been willing to talk about our personal identities and share our stories. Not every professor that teaches this class puts an emphasis on interfaith, but I believe that made all the difference.
In my sophomore year, students from my interfaith seminar taught a lesson on interfaith for the introductory class in religion. We opened the lesson by telling our personal stories, focusing on why we were involved in interfaith. We talked about our own personal struggles with our religious identity, times where we had a memorable experience with a person of a different faith tradition, and how we want to continue interfaith work in our careers and throughout our lives. By sharing our experiences with fellow Millennials, we were all able to connect and empathize with one another and the new students became less apathetic about the subject matter. Regardless of whatever religious or non-religious tradition they adhered to, they were able to find similarities between our stories and their life experiences, which made all of us more comfortable discussing sometimes difficult subject matters.
Through these and other experiences, students in the Interfaith Seminar have realized how essential and helpful storytelling is when connecting with others. We look forward to making our campus an even stronger community by hearing one another’s stories.
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Editorial
From the Publisher and Editor
Jason A. Mahn, Mark Wilhelm
Writing weeks after the 2016 presidential election, Wilhelm and Mahn frame interfaith engagement as the urgent and ongoing work of ELCA colleges and universities, recap NECU’s growing commitments to inter-religious leadership, and introduce essays first delivered at the summer 2016 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference under the theme “Preparing Global Leaders for a Religiously Diverse Society.”
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Article
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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
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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
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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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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 22 · Spring 2006
Haak introduces himself as the new editor inheriting the journal from Tom Christenson and frames the issue around the question of what ELCA colleges might contribute to conversations about human sexuality. He summarizes the contributions of Yeager, Benne, Williams, Bussie, and Nack, and shares previously uncollected National Study of Youth and Religion data on the sexual attitudes and behaviors of Lutheran teens—including that 25% of regularly-attending ELCA teens report the church has done nothing to help them with their sexuality.
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Article
Martin Luther, Vocation, and Church Colleges: Nurturing Future Leaders for Faith and Community
Richard W. Rouse
No. 14 · Summer 2002
Rouse, citing Arne Selbyg’s statistic that thirteen of sixteen newly elected ELCA bishops graduated from a Lutheran college (and 49 of 65 in the new Conference of Bishops), argues that ELCA colleges are training grounds for future church and community leaders because of Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and his distinction between vocation and station—the basis of PLU’s motto “educating for lives of service, inquiry, leadership, and care.” He describes “Paths Unknown: Where is God Leading Me?” a Western Mission Cluster collaboration of California Lutheran, Luther Seminary, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, PLU, and Trinity Lutheran College that used a dedicated web site (godleading.com), a January-February 2001 online virtual forum reaching over 300 participants in 40 states and Canada and Mexico, and one-day interactive video workshops featuring Trump’s play “Holy Odors,” and reports LECNA’s Reclaiming Lutheran Student Project findings on teaching, community, and faith integration at Lutheran schools.
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Editorial
From the Publisher & Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes, Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 63 · Spring 2026
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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Article
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Karl Stumo, Tom Crady
No. 38 · Fall 2013
Drawing on Sallie Mae and UCLA enrollment data, the websites of competitor institutions, and candid voices from the field, Crady and Stumo describe a recruitment landscape in which yield rates have collapsed, discount rates have soared, and the word “Lutheran” often presents an obstacle until it is patiently unpacked. They survey mission language at Augsburg, PLU, Gustavus, and Wartburg and argue that strategic message development is the only way for ELCA schools to make vocation and Lutheran identity “credible, relevant, differentiating, and compelling” to prospective families.
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Article
Students in the Cloud: Creating Digital Citizens
Jose Marichal
No. 29 · Spring 2009
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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Reflection
Danya Tazyeen
Danya Tazyeen
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Tazyeen, a Pakistani-American Muslim student at Augustana College, reads Qur’an 49:13 — that God made us into peoples and tribes “that you may know one another” — as a charge to break down fear with open dialogue and to see one another as flawed and relatable fellow human beings.