A List of ELCA Social Teaching and Policy Documents

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

Wilhelm frames the issue by tracing how Lutheran educational ideals — once a primary source of contemporary higher education — were masked in the United States, and introduces a NECU initiative that uses the case of business ethics to explore Lutheran social teaching as an academic resource.

Guest Editorial: Moral Deliberation in NECU Classrooms

Ernest L. Simmons

Simmons introduces the guiding question of the NECU working group: could the ELCA’s twelve social statements and thirteen social messages — expressions of Lutheran social teaching originally formulated for congregational use — turn campuses into “academic communities of moral deliberation”?

The Responsible Professional: Vocation and Economic Life

Martha E. Stortz, Tom Morgan

Stortz and Morgan argue that the “value-added” of Lutheran higher education is a responsibility ethic — one that frames the professional as a first responder “called and empowered to serve the neighbor so that all may flourish” — and unpack the four criteria of the 1999 ELCA social statement Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All as a framework for economic deliberation.

ELCA Social Teaching for the Classroom?

Roger A. Willer

Willer argues that the body of ELCA social teaching, taken as a whole, constitutes an actual social ethic — relatively comprehensive, responsibly consistent, and remarkably cogent — whose mode of responsibility ethics commends it as a classroom resource for any discipline that wrestles with moral questions.

The Challenge of Inclusion in the Ethics Classroom

Faith Wambura Ngunjiri

Ngunjiri, the only Black woman tenured faculty member at Concordia College, reflects on her students’ resistant and resonant responses to MLK Day programming on “Not Racist: A White Moderate Myth” — and on what it takes to make the ethics classroom a place where students can “BREW”: Becoming Responsibly Engaged in the World.

Business as Usual? Marketing, God, and the Limits of Christian Callings

Emily Beth Hill

Hill, a former corporate marketing consultant turned theologian, returns to Luther’s claim that no vocation is more holy than another — and uses Luther’s Large Catechism definition of God to argue that the modern practice of branding intentionally redirects the love and worship of human beings toward capital, raising the question of whether Christian neighbor-love places limits on what professions Christians should pursue.

Responding to Student Hunger at NECU Institutions

Kristen Glass Perez

Glass Perez recounts how her work as college chaplain at Augustana and Muhlenberg evolved after a student offhandedly declared, “I am always so hungry at this school,” and shares five lessons learned from launching campus pantries, emergency grant programs, and the HOPE Survey to address food insecurity as a defining calling of NECU institutions.

Gen Z is Made for Lutheran Higher Education

W. Kent Barnds

Barnds argues that Generation Z’s defining traits — socially responsible, purpose-driven, cost-conscious, culturally open, and tech-expectant — align almost perfectly with the missions of NECU institutions, and offers concrete suggestions (from replacing “vocation” with “purpose” to embracing Gen X parents as co-pilots) for Lutheran colleges seeking to attract and serve this generation.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 10 · Fall 2000

Selbyg explains that, while Intersections usually publishes papers from the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conferences, this issue gathers presentations from a St. Olaf 125th-anniversary conference—a companion to the volume Called to Serve edited by Pamela Schwandt—because the theology and educational perspectives behind them apply to any Lutheran college and clarify what makes ELCA church-related colleges excellent institutions for students of any faith.

Perspectives on Institutional Service: All Hands on Deck

Ruth Henricks

No. 12 · Summer 2001

Henricks, President and CEO of Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska, uses Annie Dillard’s image of Christians tourist-like on Deck C to call colleges and social ministry organizations to “all hands on deck” in a church standing at a threshold of shifting demographics—a growing rich-poor gap, a coming Hispanic majority, an aging baby-boom, dual-career families, contingency workers, and for-profit Lockheed Martin-style competitors entering human services. Drawing on Foster McCurley, Andrew Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive, Justo Gonzales’s Manana, Arthur Becker, Bob Bacher, David Tiede, and the ELCA constitution, she argues that SMOs and colleges are the “hands” of the body of Christ and asks whether we have courage to require Spanish, partner ecumenically, cut services to Caucasian clients, and lead the church from the front rather than the rear.

SCAM-ing Service-Learning and Mission Trips: A Satirical Essay

Mark Wm. Radecke

No. 30 · Fall 2009

Radecke couches his research on best/worst practices in service-learning and short-term mission trips in a fictional Screwtape-style correspondence between Horatio Gumnut, CEO of “Spiritual Consultants and Mercenaries, Incorporated” (SCAM, Inc.), and Dwayne Pipe, an untenured professor seeking to sabotage a colleague’s Nicaragua mission trip — cataloging through indirection the disorienting dilemmas, commodification of the poor, exhaustion of reflective practice, and false noblesse oblige that derail such ventures, while pointing toward the genuine philoxenia, accompaniment, and structural awareness that mark a transformative experience.

The Future of Lutheran Higher Education

Mark Schwehn

No. 1 · Summer 1996

Schwehn’s keynote, framed against Otto Paul Kretzmann’s October 1940 inaugural at Valparaiso, organizes itself around four topics: the idea of a Christian University (Lutheran schools as a tributary of the Christian intellectual tradition, voices in a conversation in the spirit of H. Richard Niebuhr and Alasdair MacIntyre rather than phases of James Burtchaell’s devolutionary scheme); the pursuit of truth (against Foucauldian reduction of truth to power, with Hilary Putnam, toward a cruciform discipleship that discovers truth ambulando); the critique of knowledge (developing Christian theories of knowing in conversation with Benne, Lotz, Wolterstorff, LeClerc, and Augustine); and Christianity and liberal learning (objectivity refurbished as Thomas Haskell’s ascetic self-discipline, and the recovery of texts that have claims upon us).

From the Editor: So That We, Too, May Flourish

Colleen Windham-Hughes

No. 58 · Fall 2023

Windham-Hughes introduces the 2023 VLHE conference theme of educator flourishing, drawing on Dr. Monica Smith’s plenary challenge — “How can we flourish if only some are centered and others are at the margins?” — and invites readers to ground themselves in Us/We, the cover art by Augustana graduate William Hatchet, and join the conversation.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 47 · Spring 2018

Wilhelm celebrates that NECU schools continue to educate for vocation but warns that the culture of Lutheran higher education is at risk — sustained largely by informal cadres of individuals — and introduces NECU’s Rooted and Open statement as a first institutional step toward reclaiming the 500-year-old Lutheran intellectual and educational tradition.