In his recent book, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S., Lenny Duncan reminds us that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is 96 percent white—the whitest in the land. The colleges and universities affiliated with that church body are much more diverse, and are continuing to diversify quickly. And yet, most if not all of them remain historically, predominately, and persistently white institutions.
What is more, even if our student populations and (more slowly) faculty and administrator populations are increasingly “including” underrepresented groups, that “inclusion” is only the first step toward the full inclusion, the sense of belonging, and the equal justice that we want everyone on our campuses to experience. How do we teachers and administrators at historically, predominantly, and persistently white institutions turn from the white privilege and even the white supremacy (in the broadest sense) in which so many of us have been schooled, and from which we receive a legion of cultural and material benefits? How can our campuses become spaces in which people of color thrive and where white people get re-formed into antiracist allies?
These are difficult questions, and our responses must be courageous and ongoing. This summer, I was honored to join Dr. Monica Smith, Augustana’s inaugural Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as part of a campus cohort attending the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Institute at Villanova University. One lesson that I learned more deeply there is just how painful and recursive (a Christian might add, repentant) the healing of racial truth-telling is. There is no way of going forward toward full inclusion and equality without going back through the stories that we have told about our country, our religious heritage, and our institutions.
Leaders at my institution proudly speak of our founding as a Lutheran college for immigrants and others who did not have access to higher education. This year, we also commemorate a national Black Power Symposium that was held—not without controversy—on our campus fifty years ago. While we rightfully tell these positive stories, we also need to return to our blind spots, exclusions, and injustices, however unintentional they were and are. For example, while celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of our Black Student Union at homecoming last year, it became clear that a number of our alumni of color had little ongoing relationship with the college. Some graduates hadn’t set foot on campus since graduating fifty years ago, even though they still live just a few miles away. They came “home” for the special BSU homecoming event, but did not otherwise think of our college as a home for them. Why not? Our work is to keep asking and answering that question as truthfully as possible.
It is in that spirit that the planning committee organized the 2019 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference under the theme: “Beyond Privilege: Engaging Diversity, Inclusion and Equity” and that the authors put forward the following essays. They are written by faculty, diversity officers, chaplains, and provosts; by white folks and persons of color; by males and females and non-binary persons. We hope that together they inspire and structure the truth-telling work of moving from diversity to full inclusion and equity for everyone on our campuses.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
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
Making Diversity Matter: Inclusion is the Key
Monica Smith
Smith, Augustana’s inaugural Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, frames the work of a Chief Diversity Officer as that of a disrupter and argues that while diversity in higher education is already happening, inclusion is a choice — one requiring a fundamental institutional transformation that diversifies faculty and staff, infuses diversity into the curriculum, invests in professional development, and draws on senior leadership to dismantle barriers.
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Article
The Perils and Promise of Privilege
Guy Nave
Nave argues that privilege is always used in one of two ways — to preserve privilege by promoting inequity, or to challenge privilege by promoting diversity, inclusion, and equity — and uses examples from Indianapolis Catholic schools, Martin Luther, and equity-mindedness research to call Lutheran institutions to address the racist practices and policies that reproduce whiteness on their campuses.
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Article
The Vocation of White People in a Racist Society
Caryn Riswold
Riswold proposes that whiteness is a weakness borne of apathy, atrophy, and ignorance — an atrophied muscle of race-consciousness — and offers concrete practices (reading, adjusting one’s gaze, consuming media differently, drawing on ELCA social statements like the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery) for exercising that muscle and naming the vocation of white people in a racist and white supremacist culture.
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Article
Learning the Language of Inclusive Pedagogy
David Thompson
Thompson frames inclusive pedagogy as a foreign language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and cultural values, and reflects on a year of immersing himself in readings, conversations, and workshops — arguing that proficiency grows when instructors study and practice these languages repeatedly and atrophies when ignored.
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Article
The "V" Word: Different Dimensions of Vocation in a Religiously Diverse Classroom
Martha E. Stortz
Stortz responds to a sea of blank stares when she used the word “vocation” in a religiously diverse required course by offering five metaphors — place, path, relationships, lens, and story — that point to different dimensions of vocation across the world’s religions and help students articulate their callings on their own terms.
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Book Review
The American Myth of White Supremacy: A Review of Myths America Lives By
Susan VanZanten
VanZanten reviews Richard T. Hughes’s Myths America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories that Give Us Meaning, which argues that the United States grounds its identity in five myths — Chosen Nation, Nature’s Nation, Christian Nation, Millennial Nation, and Innocent Nation — all informed by the primal myth of white supremacy, and considers what Lutheran theological values can offer for resisting that myth.
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Reflection
Seeing in a New Way: A Meditation
Kara Baylor
Baylor, the only Black campus pastor in the NECU, weaves Psalm 25, the parable of the Good Samaritan as re-read through Lenny Duncan, and the “crimson thread of divine justice” from Allen Dwight Callahan into a meditation that closes with the invitation she offered at the 2019 conference — to tie a crimson thread around the wrist as a symbol of collective commitment to moving beyond privilege toward inclusion and equity.
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Article
Conciliatory and Queer: The Radical Love of Lutheran Higher Education
Kiki Kosnick, Sharon Varallo
Kosnick and Varallo reflect in conversation on how Augustana’s Five Faith Commitments and its conciliatory ecumenical roots in the Augsburg Confession have given them — a non-binary queer first-generation faculty member and a twenty-one-year veteran — the “street cred” to act on radical love, build bridges to imprisoned and non-binary communities, and discover that Augustana is welcoming not despite the fact that it is Lutheran, but because of it.
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Article
Vocation at Full Stretch: Reflections on Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling and its Use among College Students
Jason A. Mahn
No. 61 · Spring 2025
Mahn engages Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling as required reading in a sophomore religion course, showing how her categories of missed, blocked, conflicted, fractured, unexpected, and relinquished callings empower young adults to perceive embodied, unplanned, and often painful dimensions of life as essential parts of vocation — and help close the gap between mission-driven and tuition-driven realities.
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Article
On Recruiting Diverse Students, Rooted in Mission
Eric Rowell, Jason A. Mahn
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Jason Mahn interviews Eric Rowell, Assistant Director of Admissions and Diversity Outreach at Augustana College, about how recruiting students from a wide variety of backgrounds — rooted in Augustana’s Lutheran commitment to vocation and educating across difference — remains essentially unchanged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions on affirmative action.
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Editorial
From the Outgoing Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Mahn closes out a decade of editing Intersections, passes the duties to Colleen Windham-Hughes, gives thanks to Mark Wilhelm and Augustana College, and introduces an issue largely drawn from comments by Lutheran faculty, staff, and administrators at the 2022 NetVUE national gathering.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Mahn introduces the “Called to Place” theme of the 2021 VLHE Conference, arguing that Lutheran higher education’s emphasis on vocation must be grounded in particular geographies and embodied communities — for, as Wallace Stegner put it, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
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Reflection
Shelter in Place: Reflections from March 22, 2020
Jason A. Mahn
No. 53 · Spring 2021
On the fourth Sunday of Lent in 2020, Mahn meditates on the etymology of “shelter” (from shield) and on an email from a former student in Boston whose mutual-aid organizing models a Lutheran understanding of vocation: the upending of ego by divine love that frees us, finally, to see and serve the neighbor.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Mahn narrates a year of crisscrossing pandemics — Covid-19, economic collapse, partisan politics, and the long pandemic of white supremacy revealed anew by the murder of George Floyd — and argues that Lutheran liberal arts schools, by educating for vocation, are uniquely poised to help students respond with character and capable callings.
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Article
Take Heart: Is Neutrality Really What We Need Right Now?
Abbylynn Helgevold
No. 57 · Spring 2023
Helgevold, an ethicist at Wartburg College, argues that calls for faculty neutrality on abortion in the post-Roe classroom stifle the courageous conversations Lutheran higher education is uniquely positioned to host — conversations grounded in “Rooted and Open” and the ELCA’s 1991 Social Statement on Abortion.
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Article
Mentoring in the Academy: Of Gurus, Coaches, and Sponsors
Faith Wambura Ngunjiri
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Ngunjiri urges faculty, staff, and administrators in faith-based institutions to assemble a “personal board of directors” of mentors — connectors, sponsors, taskmasters, motivators, dreamers, sages, and proofers — and reflects on how race and gender complicate mentoring in predominantly white, male-led ELCA institutions, where women and minorities must reach out to build the “cloud of witnesses” they need to thrive.
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Reflection
The Neglected Miracle of Pentecost
Susan M. O'Shaughnessy
No. 32 · Spring 2010
O’Shaughnessy, in a homily delivered at Concordia College in 2008, reads the Pentecost narrative of Acts 2 through Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman’s 1983 critique of white feminism’s cultural imperialism. She argues that the miracle is not the disciples’ speaking but the immigrant Jews’ hearing—and that the writer of Acts withholds the content of what was said precisely to teach disciples that people of privilege know less than the foreigner, the immigrant, the oppressed, the woman, the child, and must learn to listen in new languages before they can speak.
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Article
Vocation and Civil Discourse: Discerning and Defining
Lynn Hunnicutt
No. 48 · Fall 2018
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.
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Article
Point / Counterpoint: What It Means to be a "College of the Church"
Robert Benne, Tom Christenson
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Moderated by Wartburg College pastor Larry Trachte and introduced by Kathryn Kleinhans, this Wartburg campus conversation between Robert Benne (Roanoke College) and Thomas Christenson (Capital University) probes what it means to be a college of the church—Benne emphasizing ethos, vocation, and the Christian intellectual tradition over against secularization and generic education, and Christenson lifting up persistent vocational questions, the gift of difference, and induction into a community of discourse—and finds large common ground around hiring for mission, pedagogy that asks deep questions, and the courage to claim a living religious tradition while inviting everyone to the banquet.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Christenson introduces an issue featuring “young and old, angry and encouraging, prophetic and hopeful” voices unified by the assumption that Christians engaged in thinking and educating will ask hard questions: how to raise concerns about militarism and the new American “imperialism,” what a Lutheran law school will say about training a new generation of attorneys, and what Lutheran colleges communicate to undergrads about vocation. Such faithful criticism, he argues, is part of who Lutheran institutions are.