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
Ethical Deliberation and the Biblical Text—A Lutheran Contribution to Reading the Bible
Ritva Williams
No. 22 · Spring 2006
Williams articulates a Lutheran “critical traditionalist hermeneutic”—a phrase borrowed from her Hebrew Bible professor Robert Polzin—that honors Scripture as queen while keeping Christ as its king, and tests it by critiquing Robert Gagnon’s use of Romans 1:18-32 in The Bible and Homosexual Practice. Drawing on Lazareth, Lotz, Philip Esler’s Conflict and Identity in Romans, Stanley Stowers’ Rereading Romans, and Ben Witherington III, she proposes an alternative reading in which Paul recites a Hellenistic-Jewish ethnic caricature in 1:18-32 only to overturn it in 2:1-16, making the passage a critique of self-righteous stereotyping rather than the foundation of a moral doctrine on same-sex intercourse.
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Article
Rich and Poor in an Era of Globalized Religion and Economies: Challenges to Lutheran Colleges
Pamela K. Brubaker
No. 25 · Spring 2007
Brubaker opens with two World Council of Churches communion stories—a generous Aymara potato meal in Bolivia and a gated invitation-only lunch at a prosperous immigrant German Lutheran church in Brazil—to frame the question of which stance Lutheran colleges will adopt toward diversity. Drawing on Richard Hughes and Ernest Simmons on Lutheran “ecumenical confessionalism,” Linell Cady, Ulrich Beck, Held and McGrew, the World Bank’s 2006 Equity and Development report, Mark Juergensmeyer’s Global Religions, Harvey Cox on the Market as God, the WCC’s “economy of life” / AGAPE document, and Larry Rasmussen on universal human rights, she argues that part of the academic work of Lutheran colleges is to educate for critical citizenship by questioning neo-liberal assumptions and equipping students to claim social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights for the whole human family.
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Institutional Focus
Diversity and Dialogue: Gustavus Adolphus College
Florence D. Amamoto
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Amamoto, a third-generation Japanese-American Buddhist who teaches American literature at Gustavus Adolphus and regularly attends daily chapel, writes as an “inside outsider.” Engaging Schwehn’s closing call to refurbish the Lutheran college, she argues that church-related colleges are vitally important to society, that “refurbishing” must take up diversity, and describes how Lutheranism is manifest at Gustavus: Christ Chapel as the highest point on campus, the ecumenical chapel program led for thirty years by Chaplain Richard Elvee, the Nobel Conferences that pair scientists with philosophers and theologians, the First-term Seminar and Tuesday Conversations, the India study-abroad program organized by Deane Curtin, and the Sponberg Chair in Ethics. She names the pressures of money, secularization, and the publications-driven push for “excellence” that threaten this creative tension.
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Institutional Focus
So That All May Flourish Study Guide
No. 57 · Spring 2023
A chapter-by-chapter study guide to So That All May Flourish (Fortress Press 2023), a new volume by NECU authors that develops the central tenet of “Rooted and Open” and offers discussion questions for use in orientation programs, classes, workshops, task forces, and professional development settings.
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Book Review
Old and New Ideas of the Liberal Arts: A Review of Claiming Our Callings
David Crowe, Katie Hanson
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Crowe and Hanson review Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts (Oxford 2014), a collection of thirteen essays by St. Olaf faculty edited by Kaethe Schwehn and L. DeAne Lagerquist. They commend the book’s thoughtful, sincere engagement with consumerism, sustainability, Buddhist meditation, and Lutheran-Bonhoefferian theology — and recommend it for any liberal arts campus pulled between idealistic mission and career-minded pressure.
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Article
Seeking the Common Good: Lutheran Contributions to Global Citizenship
Wanda Deifelt
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Deifelt draws on Luther’s account of neighborly love in “The Freedom of a Christian” and on his Two Kingdoms theology to argue that a Lutheran ethics of care fosters a sense of responsibility, accountability, and compassion that broadens citizenship beyond rights and virtues. Engaging William Galston’s typology of civic virtues, Sylvia Walby on women’s citizenship, Serene Jones on communitarianism, and Manuel Castells on globalization, she proposes that Lutheran theology equips the church to educate for transformative participation in world affairs.