About the Cover and Artist

About Rooted and Open: The Common Calling of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities

An institutional framing piece introducing Rooted and Open — NECU’s statement on Lutheran identity in higher education — with a roster of the faculty working group and writing team and an orientation to the essays in this special issue.

Rooted and Open: Background, Purpose, and Challenges

Mark Wilhelm

Wilhelm traces Rooted and Open’s seventy-year backstory — from Conrad Bergendoff’s 1948 call for a Lutheran philosophy of education through the recovery of the vocation tradition — and describes the document’s process, purpose as a teaching and study resource, and the embodiment, contextual, and cultural challenges it implies for NECU institutions.

In a Diverse Society, Why Should Lutheran Colleges/Universities Claim their Theological Roots?

Darrell Jodock

Jodock develops his “third path” account of the Lutheran college — neither sectarian nor non-sectarian but both rooted and open — analogizing the college to a bridge whose deck of daily activities rests on pillars of shared educational priorities, which in turn rest on theological footings; he then answers six common objections to claiming Lutheran roots and explains why those footings still matter.

Roots and Shoots: Tending to Lutheran Higher Education

Jason A. Mahn

Mahn revisits why “education-for-vocation” has become a leitmotif for the 27 NECU schools, distinguishes institutional vocation from individuals’ religious identities and educational priorities from their theological grounding, and offers a friendly critique of Jodock’s bridge metaphor: Lutheran colleges grow in two directions like plants — deep roots and wide branches alike require constant tending.

Marked by Lutheran Higher Education

Martha E. Stortz

Stortz offers an “operating manual” to Rooted and Open by tracing how the writing team moved from descriptive marks of the institutions to aspirational verbs that mark people — “called and empowered, to serve the neighbor, so that all may flourish” — and shows how each mark generates educational priorities theologically grounded in the radical mystery of God, the wild generosity of God, and the God who became one of us.

Deep Roots, Big Questions, Bold Goals

Colleen Windham-Hughes

Adapted from a presentation to the California Lutheran University Board of Regents, Windham-Hughes reads the title Rooted and Open as both reaching back into the Lutheran tradition and opening forward into a shared future, then unpacks the document’s “called and empowered — to serve the neighbor — so that all may flourish” through the lenses of freedom of inquiry as a third path, vocation-centered education, radical hospitality, and civil discourse oriented toward the common good.

Rooted and Open as Resource for Expanding Opportunities on Your Own Campus

Katherine A. Tunheim, Marcia Bunge

Bunge and Tunheim describe how Gustavus Adolphus College has paired Rooted and Open with its own companion volume Rooted in Heritage, Open to the World — in board workshops, new-faculty orientation, and classroom assignments — and survey several Network-wide opportunities (the Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, the LECNA Fellows Program, the Association of Lutheran College Faculties, the Tuition Exchange Program, and international partnerships) that give the common calling tangible institutional form.

"Faithful Nones" and the Importance of a Rooted and Open Pedagogy

John Eggen

Drawing on a student survey from his D.Min. thesis at Midland University, Eggen identifies a distinctive subset of religious “nones” — the “faithful nones” — who reject institutional religion yet retain substantive beliefs and practices, and argues that the non-binary, third-path pedagogy commended by Rooted and Open is uniquely positioned to engage a generation that has disambiguated faith, religion, and spirituality.

Finding Flourishing: Teaching Self-Care as Course Content

Emily Kahm

Kahm argues that teaching self-care, self-awareness, and stress-coping as explicit classroom content embodies the “radical hospitality” of Rooted and Open and supports vocational formation against a consumerist culture, then offers concrete classroom techniques — a one-to-five energy check-in, ninety-second silence exercises, and full-day spiritual practices — that can be adapted across disciplines at NECU institutions.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 11 · Spring 2001

Selbyg admits that promoting Lutheran colleges and universities can feel Sisyphean—clueless faculty or staff, fundraising treadmills, students and parents treated poorly by admissions, pastors with no sense of the colleges’ mission—but reports that alumni satisfaction surveys, ELCA-college faculty seminars, an engaging bishop, Ernie Simmons’s Lutheran Higher Education: An Introduction, and renewed reader interest in Intersections all show the stone is not at the bottom of the hill.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

No. 2 · Winter 1997

Christenson opens with an invitation for reader submissions to balance the conference-paper format of the first two issues, then asks how college and universities can turn students positively toward learning. Drawing on Aristotle’s claim that study is loved for its own sake (which students greet with disbelieving laughter) and Neil Postman’s The End of Education, he argues that students lack narratives within which learning makes sense and proposes four Lutheran mega-narratives—stewardship of creation, the freedom of the Christian, the sacramental presence of the transcendent in the concrete and ordinary, and vocation—that could inspire learning at the 28 ELCA colleges and universities.

Endtimes

Dave Hill

No. 34 · Fall 2011

A four-stanza meditation on the “last perfect day” when an unblemished Sun makes the cool Ocean roll—and on the relation of each questing mind to the Deep, of each frail mortal to the pulse of the Sea at the edge of the grave. “Let it die full of Life! Let its murmurs and sighs / Give the drama a meaning. Let it not, Lord, die dead.”

Making the Common Good Common

René Johnson

No. 42 · Fall 2015

Johnson reflects on the Servant Leadership House for women at Finlandia University — from a sweaty trip to the local landfill to weekly habits of campus presence — to argue that the common good becomes truly common when it is embedded in the ordinary details of vocational living, and that Luther’s sense of neighbor calls servant leaders to “little bits of good” as well as to more radical pursuits of justice.

Reflections on Our Shared Commitments

Mark S. Hanson

No. 25 · Spring 2007

Originally delivered to the Lutheran Educational Conference of North America in March 2007, Hanson’s address describes the ELCA as “an ecology of interdependent ecosystems” and locates the church’s relationship to its twenty-eight colleges and universities in a shared mission rather than in older anxieties about church-relatedness. Drawing on Wittenberg’s Lutheran Identity Study, Augustana’s “Five Faith Commitments,” Pamela Jolicoeur’s Concordia address, W. Robert Connor on “big questions,” Joseph Sittler on grace, Walter Brueggemann on fear, Jonathan Strandjord on being “other-wise,” and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s Public Church for the Life of the World, he names four marks of shared mission: communities of free inquiry, encouragement of religious expression in a diverse society, education for the common good, and the formation of leaders for church and religious communities worldwide.

Meditation—Band Chapel Service, St. Olaf College

Erik Haaland

No. 7 · Summer 1999

Haaland, a St. Olaf senior, offers a brief Band Chapel meditation that defines art as “the expression of what is deeply human through the manipulation of the physical world” and defends worship—architecture, stained glass, music, eloquence—as an art form requiring our best and most sincere efforts. When the God we worship and the salvation we proclaim do not seem near, artful worship offers not propositions but something real and tangible to hold on to.