Mapping Interfaith Encounters

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Walls: Talk At Gustavus Adolphus College

Elizabeth Baer

No. 5 · Summer 1998

Baer’s September 11, 1997 Gustavus Adolphus chapel homily on Joshua 6 turns from the trumpets to the walls—Robert Frost’s “Mending Walls,” the walls of the Warsaw ghetto in Vladka Meed’s On Both Sides of the Wall and Margaret Zassenhaus’s Walls, the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989—and then to the autobiographical, intertextual discourse of Gustavus chapel itself as a place where misunderstandings come down. An author’s note added after the March 29 F3 tornado reports the closing line (“LET’S MAKE THOSE WALLS COME TUMBLING DOWN”) as eerily prescient: roofs, windows, and 90% of campus trees were lost, but the Chapel walls and the eternal flame in the red glass lantern stood firm.

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.

Fostering Moral Imagination and Inclusivity: The Role of Ethical Leadership in ELCA Colleges and Universities Amid Societal Challenges

Lamont Anthony Wells

No. 62 · Fall 2025

12 min audio

Wells argues that “moral imagination” — the capacity to envision ethical alternatives, empathize across difference, and respond creatively to injustice — is the heart of ethical leadership in NECU institutions, and that anchoring leadership in this principle positions Lutheran higher education to cultivate socially responsible citizens.

The Face of the Neighbor: An Interview with Four Capital University Faculty About Their Recent Visit to Cuba

Brian Forry Wallace, Michael Yosha, Reg Dyck, Susan Narita

No. 7 · Summer 1999

Four Capital University faculty—political scientist Brian Wallace (returning to Cuba a third time after the 1994 boat lift), English professor Reg Dyck, ESL teacher Susan Narita, and political scientist Michael Yosha—recount their summer 1998 trip with Pastors for Peace, describing Cuban priorities of education, health care, and military (in that order), the cultural richness of Havana from sixteenth-century cloisters to Miramar, the Cuban Foreign Service’s vision of a Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, the counter-productive U.S. embargo (including its effect on kidney dialysis machines), Castro’s 1991 reconciliation with religious communities, and a recurrent image of a little girl named Marguerite singing at a school for amputee and terminally ill children. The interview was conducted by Capital senior Jessica Brown and Tom Christenson.

Truth, Reconciliation, and Redemption in South Africa

Brian Forry Wallace

No. 13 · Winter 2002

Wallace, a 24-year veteran political science professor at Capital University, recounts five weeks of post-apartheid peace-building travel-study with students living south of Cape Town—visiting townships, schools, day-care centers, a children’s AIDS hospital, Robben Island, and Nelson Mandela’s cell—and offers vivid sketches of his student companions Amy, Brian, Meghan, Karrie, Patrick, Meredith, Cheryl, Corin, Debbie, April, and Audra. He concludes that these students—atheists and agnostics and Buddhists and Methodists and Baptists, headed for social work, nursing, teaching, ministry, and parenthood—embody vocation by responding to a voice that calls them out of themselves to be present and to heal in this world, and that they are his link to the redemption of a lost and broken soul.

Called to Compassion over the Course of a Life: A Buddhist Perspective

Florence D. Amamoto

No. 47 · Spring 2018

Amamoto, an associate professor at Gustavus Adolphus shaped by Jodo Shin Shu Buddhism, argues that although Buddhism has no “caller” God, it has a strong sense of calling — we are called by the world to respond to the suffering around us with mindfulness, egolessness, and compassion — and that this lifelong journey is enriched by encounter with the Lutheran vocational tradition.