Lynn Hunnicutt’s guest editorial of this issue reminds us that the concept of vocation points students toward a life that finds room to love and serve others. I celebrate that the schools of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities (NECU) have reaffirmed and enhanced efforts to educate for these core educational outcomes that have long been part of Lutheran higher education. Across our network, curricular and co-curricular educational programs encourage students to embrace a concern for the needs and interests of others as well as themselves.
Even so, the culture of Lutheran higher education that established and sustained these educational values and outcomes is at risk. Even though the day is long past when a Lutheran educational culture could be sustained informally by a larger ecclesiastical and ethnic Lutheran culture present on our campuses, NECU schools still depend largely on individuals or cadres of individuals who informally assemble to sustain a culture of Lutheran higher education at each school. Although there is a wide recognition that it is time to institute formal, institutional practices to sustain a valued educational culture, only fledgling and partial steps have been taken. There are some bright spots. For example, a few schools have created solid programs of orientation for new faculty and staff. But, for the most part, although many at NECU schools recognize the value of the Lutheran intellectual and educational tradition for twenty-first-century higher education, most remain uncertain about how to best articulate that value. Most are hesitant to develop institutionalized practices to maintain a culture that publicly identifies our cherished educational values and student outcomes with Lutheran higher education.
As a first important step toward addressing and repairing this situation, NECU’s Board of Directors endorsed a statement on the common calling of its schools. The statement, Rooted and Open, affirms that the Lutheran identity of a NECU school is an institutional identity, not dependent upon the individual religious identities of faculty, administrators, and students of the school. It further affirms that NECU schools share a common calling to implement the educational values and outcomes that are vitally important over the whole course of a student’s life.
Best tactics for reclaiming, transmitting, and reinterpreting the 500-year-old Lutheran intellectual and educational tradition are yet to be developed. But it is a culture worth sustaining. It is worth sustaining because it is our best bulwark against forces that would transform NECU schools into mere transmitters of knowledge instead of “transmitters” of education for vocation, for purpose, and for making a contribution to the common good. When an educational culture has frayed, it could be replaced with another that affirms such values, but it is much easier to reclaim, reinterpret, and reinvigorate the received, albeit frayed, culture. Establishing tactics for just that work still face us.
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Editorial
Guest Editorial
Lynn Hunnicutt
Hunnicutt traces the etymology of vocation through its cognates — evoke, provoke, convocation — to argue that vocation presumes a relationship between caller and called, that callings are often grounded in ordinary words and humble lives, and that recognizing vocation as plural and lifelong relieves colleges of the pressure to help students find a single calling while on campus.
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Article
One Life, Many Callings: Vocation Across the Lifespan
Katherine Turpin
Turpin, drawing on the collaborative research behind Calling All Years Good, traces how vocational discernment shifts through adolescence, younger adulthood, middle adulthood, late adulthood, and older adulthood — arguing that focusing vocation on entry into the workforce limits the capacity of intergenerational college communities to wrestle with calling throughout life.
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Article
Vocation for Emerging Adulthood: Within and Beyond College
Adam Copeland
Copeland uses scenes from Master of None, David Brooks’ columns, Meg Jay’s The Defining Decade, and the stories of two ELCA college graduates to argue that emerging adulthood has fundamentally changed — and that Lutheran colleges should call out cultural lies about work, reframe vocation as meaning-making, and help graduates take small, wise steps into their twenties.
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Article
Called to Compassion over the Course of a Life: A Buddhist Perspective
Florence D. Amamoto
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.
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Article
Vocation and Dharma throughout Life's Stages: A Hindu Perspective
Vidya Thirumurthy
Thirumurthy traces her own attempt as a Hindu faculty member at Pacific Lutheran University to grasp the Lutheran concept of vocation, finding in the Bhagavad Gita’s teaching on dharma — duty fulfilled without expectation of reward — an equivalent that, like vocation, varies across the four stages of life and calls individuals to transform others through selfless service.
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Book Review
Vocation on Campus: Reading Mark Tranvik's Martin Luther and the Called Life at Pacific Lutheran University
Alex Lund, Michael Halvorson
Halvorson and Lund — faculty member and student — review Mark Tranvik’s Martin Luther and the Called Life alongside PLU’s Wild Hope Center for Vocation, weighing the book’s warning against “vocation lite” against the challenge of speaking of God’s call to students in the Pacific Northwest’s “None Zone,” where most students have little exposure to Lutheranism.
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Article
Luther, the Catechisms, and Intellectual Disability
Courtney Wilder
Wilder confronts Luther’s deeply troubling response to a child with disabilities at Dessau, then mines his Small and Large Catechisms for a Lutheran theology of inclusion — reading the Third Article of the Creed, the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, and the sacrament of baptism as resources that affirm the full humanity of people with intellectual disabilities as faithful children of God.
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Article
Lutheran Higher Education in the Land of Anxiety
Jon Micheels Leiseth
Leiseth, returning to Concordia from work with the ELCA’s Young Adults in Global Mission in Southern Africa, draws on Bessel van der Kolk and Babette Rothschild to argue that pervasive student anxiety functions as low-grade trauma that hijacks the storytelling at the heart of vocational discernment — and explores embodied, breath-based practices that might help students reclaim their stories.
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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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Article
Making Dry Bones Stand: Lutheran Higher Education at Century's End
Diane Scholl
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Scholl reads John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” the banishment of Anne Hutchinson, de Crevecoeur’s American farmer, Olaudah Equiano, Phyllis Wheatley, and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter alongside Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones to ask how a Lutheran college can be a community that holds difference and commonality together. Drawing on Ernest Simmons’s warning against collapsing into either dogmatic absolutism or thoroughgoing relativism and Bruce Reichenbach’s companion essay in this issue, she identifies five features of shared life at a Lutheran college—the liberal arts, political process, the arts, the community of caring, and the recognition of difference and the right to dissent—and argues that the necessary tension between individualism and corporate identity, framed by theological vision, is “our best legacy and our best hope for the future.”
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Article
"Our Calling in Education": An Educator's Perspective
Cheryl Budlong
No. 23 · Summer 2006
Budlong, Professor of Education at Wartburg College, asks educators to reexamine their ‘mental models’ of what education itself means in light of the rapidly expanding literature on how young people learn. Drawing on Malcolm Gladwell, Eric Jensen, Ruby Payne, Judith Harris, Robert Slavin, and the AACTE’s Leading a Profession retrospective on the AACTE agenda 1980–2005, she calls on Lutheran educators to articulate vocation intentionally in their classrooms and to ground curricular and pedagogical reform in Wartburg’s focus on Discovering our Calling.
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Article
Cultivating Transformative Responsible Dialogue: Community of Moral Deliberation and Lutheran Higher Education
Per Anderson
No. 35 · Spring 2012
Anderson proposes that ELCA colleges and universities embrace a project of “transformative responsible dialogue” that advances the ELCA’s commitment to be a “community of moral deliberation” and answers the LIFT Report’s call for a culture of faithful discernment. Drawing on Michael Meyer’s “liberal civility,” Martha Nussbaum, Hans Jonas’s responsibility ethic, Patrick Keifert’s ecclesiology of strangers, and Kathryn Tanner on culture, he argues that liberal education at our schools can form students whose dialogue knits together civility, responsibility, and Christian openness to the other.
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Editorial
Guest Editorial
Kristen Glass Perez, Richard Priggie
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Glass Perez and Priggie introduce the issue by recounting the campus conversations and the June 2014 Interfaith Understanding Conference at Augustana College that gave rise to it, framing the central question, “What does it mean to be Interfaith at a Lutheran College?,” as a living example of the praxis of being a Lutheran college in the twenty-first century.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 60 · Fall 2024
Windham-Hughes welcomes newcomers and seasoned colleagues to the conversation, lifts up Mary Elise Lowe’s three Lutheran “whys” for educational access, and commends Rev. Jen Rude’s “Sacred Pause” practice as a way to humanize one another and make opening access both easier and more joyful.
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Reflection
Caught in a Place Between Caesar and God
Darrel D. Colson
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Colson reflects on his anguish, as Wartburg’s president, over an Iowa law that prevents him from requiring student COVID-19 vaccinations — reading Luther’s “Whether One May Flee From a Deadly Plague” alongside the conflict between obeying the law and serving neighbor.