When the ELCA’s churchwide organization and the institutions of higher education related to the ELCA agreed to establish the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities (NECU), the presidents and church leaders did not have in mind the 2017 commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. The topic of Lutheran identity in higher education did receive focused attention in the formation of NECU and that attention has continued during our initial two years of operation. But NECU did not take up this work because the five-hundredth anniversary year was pending. Interest among the presidents caused us to focus attention on the topic of Lutheran identity.
A survey of the presidents taken in the years leading up to the establishment of NECU revealed their hope that the new association could help them explain the Lutheran identity of their schools. This topic was the only one that all the presidents agreed was a priority for NECU among an array of activities historically offered by the churchwide organization for ELCA colleges and universities. In a time when all ELCA schools are no longer populated mostly by Lutherans, the presidents wanted assistance in personally understanding and professionally articulating to their diverse constituencies Lutheran identity in higher education. They knew their schools had been founded by the Lutheran church and remained formally part of it. But what did it mean for schools to be Lutheran in the twenty-first century? Now that most schools were no longer connected to the Lutheran church through personal and cultural ties, why and how were they Lutheran?
A faculty working group spent the last academic year developing a short document that responded to those questions. NECU presidents gathered in June 2017 at the Lutheran Center in Chicago to review a draft of “Rooted and Open: Our Common Institutional Calling.” A revised document, edited in light of comments made during the June meeting, will be presented to the January 2018 annual meeting of NECU.
The document describes Lutheran higher education as an institutional commitment that is held in common by NECU institutions but not dependent on the personal religious commitments of those at NECU institutions. The shared commitment is to certain educational practices and outcomes derived from Lutheran intellectual and educational traditions. Those traditions developed in the wake of what we now call the Lutheran Reformation. NECU’s work on Lutheran identity may not have arisen because we wanted a project appropriate to the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, but I cannot think of a better way to commemorate the anniversary of that movement.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn returns to Luther’s opening thesis on whole-life repentance to argue that the deepest critique of the indulgence economy — and of our own American meritocracy — is the very assumption that grace and human striving can be measured, exchanged, and earned.
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Article
Why Martin Luther and the Reformation Matter 500 Years Later
Kathryn A. Kleinhans
Adapted from a 2017 address to Wartburg College’s entering class, Kleinhans surveys Luther’s lasting impact in vocation, education, social service, and the necessary work of repentance — closing with the Lutheran World Federation’s Windhoek assembly and the Reformation World Exhibition’s call to live reform forward into the next 500 years.
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Article
Celebrating the Reformation: The Lutheran Foundation of a Called Life
Mark D. Tranvik
Tranvik traces vocation from the monastic impulse through Luther’s rejection of the monk’s vow as the only true calling, and translates the “called life” for twenty-first-century Lutheran colleges — institutions that see students as made in the image of God, enlist the whole community in discernment, and make room for faith and its convictions.
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Article
Reforming Our Visions of City Nature
Lea F. Schweitz
Through a Chicago story of Canada geese at North Pond, Schweitz takes up two Reformation-era ways of reading the “Book of Nature” — Konrad Rosbach’s moral readings and Philip Melanchthon’s scientific ones — and proposes a third: Luther’s sacramental principle that the finite is capable of the infinite, worn as “reading glasses” for an urban planet.
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Article
Both Priest and Beggar: Luther among the Poor
Martha E. Stortz
Reading Luther’s deathbed remark “We are all beggars” against his “priesthood of all believers,” Stortz argues that priest and beggar are two sides of a human reality — one that locates civic responsibility for the poor at the heart of the Reformation legacy and that pushes beyond paternalistic service toward the systemic question of justice.
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Article
In the Beginning of the Reformation Was the Word
George Connell
Drawing on a Concordia faculty pilgrimage to German Luther sites, Connell appropriates John’s prologue to frame the Reformation as a movement about words — the printed page, the university classroom, the Marburg confession, the Wartburg translation, Bach’s music, and the dining-room conversations of Table Talk — while soberly noting that words can wound as well as heal.
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Article
Luther's Sutra: An Indian, Subaltern (Dalit) Perspective
Surekha Nelavala
Nelavala traces how Luther’s “sutra” — grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone, Christ alone — reached the mud hut of her Dalit grandparents in rural India, transforming three generations, and then reads the parable of the vineyard laborers from a subaltern perspective in which grace for all is the heart of God’s alternative kingdom.
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Article
Reforming Lutheran Higher Education: Ecclesiological Reflection and Theological Leadership
Brian Beckstrom
Beckstrom diagnoses an “identity crisis” at ELCA colleges and universities rooted in inherited Enlightenment assumptions and a thin functional ecclesiology, and proposes that a Trinitarian, perichoretic understanding of God offers an ecclesiological foundation that holds together unity and diversity in a pluralistic, post-Christian context.
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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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Book Review
Post-Secular Religion on Campus: Conversing with Jacobsen and Jacobsen
L. DeAne Lagerquist
No. 39 · Spring 2014
Lagerquist guides readers through Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen’s No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education and its companion volumes, unpacking the authors’ three-act story of campus religion (Protestant, Privatized, Pluriform), their three-by-two framework of historic/public/personal religion in belief and behavior, and the six questions they pose for campus conversations. She lifts up interfaith etiquette and vocation as especially fruitful zones for Lutheran campuses.
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Institutional Focus
A List of ELCA Social Teaching and Policy Documents
No. 51 · Spring 2020
A reference list, as of September 2019, of the ELCA’s twelve social statements, fourteen social messages, and over 150 social policy resolutions — with Spanish translations where available.
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Article
Forming the Division for Access, Equity & Belonging at Susquehanna University
Amy Davis, Dena Salerno, María L. O. Muñoz, Nina Mandel, Scott Kershner
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Five Susquehanna University colleagues trace the institution’s 166-year arc from a Missionary Institute founded to remove barriers to education through the formation of a new Division for Access, Equity & Belonging in 2023, arguing that access rooted in Lutheran origins must continue to drive policy revision, infrastructure, and belonging for minoritized communities today.
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Reflection
Some Personal Reflections on the ELCA Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, 1998
Jennifer Sacher Wiley
No. 7 · Summer 1999
Sacher Wiley, a Unitarian Universalist with one Jewish parent and a first-year music faculty member at Susquehanna, reflects on common-ness and other-ness at the 1998 conference—Tom Christenson’s weaver’s warp and Charles Ives’s essay on American music—and proposes four markers of group identity. Against the fear of secularization expressed by some attendees, she suggests that “Christian” might be defined less by belief in Christ as Savior than by living a vocation as Jesus lived, with Cheryl Ney offered as an example of a “working prophet,” or “little Christ,” regardless of specific belief in the Trinity.
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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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Institutional Focus
Serving and Building Community at Concordia College
Larry Papenfuss
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Papenfuss, director of the Dovre Center for Faith and Learning, frames eight ways Concordia College serves the world by building community — from quality teaching and liberating liberal learning to interfaith cooperation and modeling “diversity with particularity” as a Lutheran “third path” institution.