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.

Valuing Poetry

Allison Wee

No. 37 · Spring 2013

Writing from California Lutheran University as “value” in higher education collapses into “can it get you a job?”, Wee makes a case for poetry as a life-saving discipline. Drawing on William Carlos Williams, Shakespeare, the Psalms, Wordsworth, Pattiann Rogers, Mary Oliver, and her own Environmental Literature assignment that sends students outside for an hour of attentive stillness, she argues that the poet’s skill of translation cultivates the close attention, fresh perspective, and immaterial dimensions of life her students need most.

Colleges Lead Way: Curiosity, Faith, Discernment, Mission are Key

Mark S. Hanson

No. 28 · Fall 2008

Reprinted from The Lutheran (November 2007), Hanson names four marks of the colleges of this church—nurturing unquenchable curiosity, nourishing faith formation and exploration, modeling public moral deliberation, and preparing students for engagement in the world—and gives thanks for the colleges’ vocation to call us to stand outside ourselves and reach out in mission for the sake of the world.

Of Fathers and Feminism: How One Lutheran Woman Came to a Vocation

Karla G. Bohmbach

No. 14 · Summer 2002

Bohmbach, a recently tenured Susquehanna University feminist biblical scholar one month shy of forty, traces her vocation back through a Vacation Bible School injury, an LCMS upbringing in which only men could preach or preside, her father’s contradictory message that she could do anything while modeling a church that limited women, St. Olaf’s revelation of a Lutheran female face, and a Duke graduate seminar on the History of Feminist Thought with Carol Meyers. Her published feminist work on biblical daughters and on the concubine of Judges 19 is read alongside Kathleen Norris’s account of word-bombardment in church, Michel Tournier on childhood as “ardent confusion,” and her own recent participation as both student and teacher in an Authorized Lay Worship Leaders Program.

In the Beginning of the Reformation Was the Word

George Connell

No. 46 · Fall 2017

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.

Embodying the Tradition: The Case of Wittenberg University

Baird Tipson

No. 2 · Winter 1997

Tipson, President of Wittenberg University, locates Wittenberg in the “American” strain of Ohio Lutheranism founded in 1845 under Ezra Keller (a Pennsylvania College and Gettysburg Seminary graduate and disciple of Samuel Simon Schmucker), with English-language preaching, financial support from the pan-Protestant New England Society, Presbyterians on the Board, and an Episcopalian teaching Latin. He names two ongoing challenges—remaining authentically Lutheran while welcoming a pluralistic student body (just under a quarter are Lutheran in a primary service area that is 5% Lutheran), and making the tradition clear and compelling to non-Lutheran or lukewarm Lutheran students—and presents the five things every Wittenberg graduate should be able to do (respond to the human condition; recognize, define, and solve problems; develop a sense of vocation; assume servant-leadership; take moral responsibility) as authentic expressions of the Gospel and of the university’s ELCA relationship.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 31 · Winter 2010

Wilhelm traces his decades-long enthusiasm for the Lutheran doctrine of vocation from his St. Olaf days reading Luther’s Open Letter to the German Nobility, notes Parker Palmer’s lecture-circuit ministry and Mark C. Taylor’s reflections on calling, and argues that ELCA colleges should claim vocation as the defining mark of Lutheran higher education—yet warns that vocation risks becoming “the program du jour” rather than a permanent hallmark.