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.

Singing Faith

Adam Luebke

No. 37 · Spring 2013

Luebke describes the Waldorf College Choir as a community of faith whose daily devotions, century-long lineage from F. Melius Christiansen, and disciplined wrestling with sacred repertoire—from Fauré’s Requiem to African-American spirituals to Romans 8 sung backstage—form students spiritually as they form them musically, so that fully grasping what they sing becomes a discovery of why they sing.

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.

Critical Engagement in Public Life: Listening to Luther's Troubling Questions

Samuel Torvend

No. 35 · Spring 2012

Torvend narrates the medieval “spiritual/temporal” division and the neo-platonic devaluation of the body that shaped the world into which Luther was born, then traces the disruptive questions Paul’s letters provoked in Luther: about indulgences, the two estates, vocation, and the public reach of baptism. He argues that Luther’s reform — expressed in Kirchenordnungen, social welfare reform, public schools, and writings on lobbyists, usury, and monopolies — carries a “genetic encoding” of public engagement that Lutheran colleges should reclaim against the temptations of holy apathy and Christian nationalism.

Original Song Lyrics: "Just a Little"

Mike Blair

No. 48 · Fall 2018

Lyrics for an original song inspired by biblical images and stories, by Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” and by the faith, hope, love, and courage of immigrant friends and neighbors — led as a devotion during the 2018 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference.

A Lutheran Call for Educator Flourishing

Krista E. Hughes

No. 58 · Fall 2023

Hughes argues that without educator flourishing there is no student flourishing, traces how an exploitative “passion tax” can distort vocation, and offers seven Lutheran “third-way” value pairings — including Metrics/Grace, Efficiency/Kairos, and DEI/Priesthood of All Believers — to reframe institutional success at NECU campuses.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 36 · Fall 2012

Wilhelm argues that the rhetoric framing ELCA higher education as a binary between “secular” and “religious” is “hokum”: there is a third way of doing higher education from a Christian perspective that is religious in motivation and practice but on the ground looks secular. After more than half a century of debates, he calls on ELCA presidents to “do something” in 2013 to move forward in shared mission and vocation.