Original Song Lyrics: "Just a Little"

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

Wilhelm frames the issue by reflecting on the Letter of James and the Lutheran tradition of “calling a thing what it is” — arguing that the standards of academic discourse, deeply rooted in Lutheran insistence on frankness and honesty alongside concern for the common good, give NECU institutions a solid platform for sustaining honest but not hateful discourse about divisive issues.

From the Editor

Jason A. Mahn

Mahn recounts how a participant’s probing questions at the 2018 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference turned “civil discourse” from an innocuous theme into a contested one — and previews essays that variously urge listening and common ground, or speaking truthfully even when those words sound angry.

Vocation and Civil Discourse: Discerning and Defining

Lynn Hunnicutt

Hunnicutt draws on Rabbi Amy Eilberg’s reading of Moses’ calling to identify four features of vocational discernment — attention, wonder, communal consciousness, and humility — and argues that these same qualities are also key aspects of civil discourse, so that forming students for vocational discernment is simultaneously forming them for civility.

Polarization, Incivility, and a Need for "Change"

Guy Nave

Nave argues that when Americans demand “change,” they usually mean that “others” need to see things their way — and that meaningful transformative change requires acknowledging the provisional nature of our perspectives, seeking to understand as much as to be understood, and bursting the ideological echo chambers of social media through projects like Clamoring for Change.

Putting the Kind Back in Human

Sarah Ciavarri

Drawing on Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability and Edwin Friedman’s family systems theory, Ciavarri distinguishes “kind” from “nice” and argues that courageous, vulnerable, and playful truth-telling — rather than yelling louder or trading pithy memes — is the path back to one another and to our common humanity.

It's Time to Rewrite the Rules of Civility

Jon Micheels Leiseth

Leiseth contends that the prevailing rules of civility too often function as the majority’s rules, stifling those facing real harm — and proposes that NECU institutions rewrite civility as “neighboring,” guided by the ELCA’s five values of accompaniment: mutuality, inclusivity, empowerment, sustainability, and vulnerability.

The Musician's Vocation

Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

Bell-Hanson argues that musicians, who exercise profound influence over the emotional flavor of a moment, are called not merely to technical proficiency but to a sense of vocation: understanding their art well enough to use it responsibly, to intend truthfulness rather than manipulation, and to articulate its significance in dialog with other disciplines.

Education as a Christian (Lutheran) Calling

Tom Christenson

No. 21 · Summer 2005

Christenson opens with an imaginative reconstruction of early Christian communities as radically egalitarian, pacifist, communitarian gatherings within the Roman Empire and argues that such communities are natural homes for the educational vocation. Naming two temptations for contemporary Christian higher education—the parochial Bible school and “Generic U”—he uses his friend Sig Rauspern’s tree metaphor to insist that a university is Christian in its trunk and roots rather than in grafted-on branches. Drawing on Wendell Berry, Jacob Bronowski, Walter Wink, Douglas John Hall, and his own Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education, he names faithful criticism, engaged suspiciousness, simul justus et peccator, and a fallible, love-related Lutheran epistemology as the particular gifts Lutherans bring to the Christian educational calling.

Welcome Strangers

Gregg Muilenberg

No. 15 · Winter 2002

Muilenberg, a non-Lutheran philosopher at Concordia, argues that self-consciously Lutheran colleges cannot make non-Lutheran faculty feel welcome through “institutional fit” rhetoric (he cites Concordia’s own hiring boilerplate) because identity must be sustained and developed, not preserved like a pickle. Drawing on Nikos Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco and the three marks of the “profoundly religious person”—commitment to the truth, to the power of the spirit, and to metousiosis through myth—he proposes that faith and reason are best understood as an unending struggle into which strangers must be invited as valuable and active participants, safeguarded by the strongest possible affirmation of academic freedom (citing Martha Nussbaum on Notre Dame and BYU).

Professing Religion

John D. Barbour

No. 37 · Spring 2013

Barbour reflects on the vocation of a Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College, asking when and how a teacher should disclose personal faith in the classroom. Drawing on his graduate teachers Anthony C. Yu and Langdon Gilkey, and on Augustine’s Confessions, Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, C. S. Lewis, and Kathleen Norris, he argues that teaching autobiography invites teaching autobiographically—and that professing religion is finally a matter of how one believes, not just what.

A God of Peace and Love? Reflections From a Biblical Scholar

Karla G. Bohmbach

No. 4 · Winter 1998

Bohmbach responds to Gregory Clark’s call to proclaim Jesus on Lutheran campuses with biblical-scholar reservations. Israel’s sacred texts also include the herem ban, the conquest narratives, and a God who fights for Israel; the Christian canon includes the apocalyptic violence of Revelation. To proclaim Jesus is therefore to proclaim a particular and contested figure within a tradition that has its own internal violence—not a generic God of peace and love. Bohmbach asks what it would mean for staff, administrators, and teachers on a college campus to take seriously the Jesus who made himself vulnerable to the violence of his world, even to the point of suffering for it, and whether Lutheran colleges are prepared for such a vocation.

Doing the Work One’s Soul Must Have

Beverly Wallace, Yolanda M. Norton

No. 56 · Fall 2022

Norton and Wallace describe the Womanist Experiential Learning Initiative — including the Beyoncé Mass, study-abroad partnerships in Portugal, Brazil, and Ghana, and the Black Girl Magic Academy for teenage girls — as a way of centering Black women’s voices in theological education and doing, as Katie Geneva Cannon put it, “the work…that one’s soul must have.”

Our Place in Church-Related Higher Education in the United States

Richard Hughes

No. 4 · Winter 1998

Adapting his 1997 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference address, Hughes asks how the Lutheran heritage can sustain the life of the mind in church-related higher education. He compares Reformed, Mennonite, and Catholic traditions in turn—the Reformed integration of faith and learning around a Christian worldview, the Mennonite priority of discipleship over cognition, and the Catholic sacramental affirmation of the secular as bridge—before arguing that the Lutheran heritage’s particular gifts (justification by grace, theology of the cross, two kingdoms, paradoxical sensibility, vocation, and openness to ambiguity) uniquely support rigorous inquiry, genuine pluralistic conversation, and critical analysis. Drawing on Arthur Holmes, John Howard Yoder, Mark Schwehn, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Lutheran writers including Bob Benne and Tom Christenson, Hughes contends that Lutheran finitude grounds an unusually open and self-critical academic posture.