What is the worth of our work? To some extent, this question is always with us, whether or not it is spoken aloud. The pieces in this issue ask this question in various ways, guided by institutional practices of assessment. Assessment can be a cringe-worthy word, at least among students and colleagues at Cal Lutheran, where I work, yet it helps me a lot to reclaim the root of the word assess, which suggests “sitting by.” Pairing assessment with a posture of sitting slows us down for collective conversation and reflection, which Intersections does well. I am so grateful for the work of Jason Mahn and Mark Wilhelm, as well as all those who contribute to, read, circulate, and have previously edited Intersections. It is meaningful and worthwhile to sit regularly at the intersection of faith and learning and to reflect on the vocation of Lutheran higher education.
In a recent gathering with colleagues, one said, “I’m not sure what the work is right now.” By “right now” they meant late pandemic, yet they also meant this social and historical moment as well as the role of higher ed in it. Over the past few years we have been working harder, in new ways, often isolated from communal practices and support, in a context that has frequently included violence. Given what it takes sometimes to remain present in body, mind, and spirit, we insist that our work must be worthwhile. Not all of it is. And perhaps the experiences we have endured during the pandemic will strengthen us and lend courage to stop doing some of the things are not (or no longer) worthwhile.
Lutheran higher education is a strange and wonderful gift. Unabashed in its core commitments—that grace is free/unmerited/indiscriminate, that all are broken, that serving the neighbor is the practical application of every lesson learned and every skill attained—it, we, are sometimes a little too shy in telling this story or not quite equipped to convey the depth and fullness of these values within our campus communities.
With God’s grace, we continue to convene—in person, online, and through Intersections—to recommit to the values that make higher education in the Lutheran tradition treasures of inestimable worth. As incoming editor, I do not pretend to know what all of these values are, yet I am committed to the questions, chief among them, “What does this mean?,” and I will show up for the conversation. I will also confess my starting place with the worth of our work, which is centered in the universality of vocation—the giftedness of each being, manifest in different ways through the whole of life and relevant to the community’s needs. The conviction that education is for the whole of life and that it is properly directed to the common good brought me to Lutheran higher ed in the first place and continues to keep me here. I look forward to hearing from you and to sitting awhile together with the worth of our work.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm announces his planned retirement on January 31, 2023, after serving as the founding executive director of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities, and gives thanks for the privilege of helping NECU articulate a shared vision for Lutheran higher education in twenty-first-century North America.
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Editorial
From the Outgoing Editor
Jason A. Mahn
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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Institutional Focus
Building a Developmental Framework for Vocational Reflection at Thiel College
Brian Riddle, Greg Q. Butcher, Liza Anne Schaef
Riddle, Schaef, and Butcher describe how a NetVUE Program Development Grant enabled Thiel College to build “the Tomcat Way” — a four-year developmental framework with personal, social, academic, and professional domains and four phases (Explore, Envision, Belong and Lead, Launch) — that now guides every aspect of the student experience.
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Article
Assessing Self-Assessment Instruments at Finlandia University
René Johnson
Johnson surveys three self-assessment instruments presented at the NetVUE conference — PathwayU at Colorado State, the Intercultural Development Inventory at Friends University, and Mark Savickas’s Career Construction Counseling Manual at Union College — and describes Finlandia’s use of the CliftonStrengths© assessment to link students’ personhood to “behaviors that benefit the community.”
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Institutional Focus
Pivoting to Imaginative Programming in the Midst of the Pandemic at Bethany College
Arminta Fox
Fox recounts how Bethany College’s NetVUE Program Development Grant — originally designed around service-learning trips — was reimagined under COVID-19 into a guest-speaker model that tripled student participation and opened new vocational possibilities through the close, personal stories of alumni, alums-turned-volunteers, and community partners.
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Institutional Focus
Serving and Building Community at Concordia College
Larry Papenfuss
Papenfuss, director of the Dovre Center for Faith and Learning, frames eight ways Concordia College serves the world by building community — from quality teaching and liberating liberal learning to interfaith cooperation and modeling “diversity with particularity” as a Lutheran “third path” institution.
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Institutional Focus
Sharing the Gift of Vocation at (and beyond) Augsburg University
Paul C. Pribbenow
Pribbenow, drawing on a 2022 NetVUE panel with Dorothy Bass and Jodi Porter, considers how the gift of vocation forged with undergraduates can be extended — beyond undergraduate campuses to graduate students, faculty, and staff; across the vocational lifespan from high schoolers to alumni navigating the “gig economy”; and into accompaniment of faith communities through Augsburg’s Riverside Innovation Hub.
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Book Review
Assessing the Value of Liberal Arts: A Review of The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, by Richard A. Detweiler
Robert D. Haak
Haak reviews Richard A. Detweiler’s The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, in which the former president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association analyzes 240 college mission statements and interviews more than 1,000 graduates to argue that liberal arts educational experiences have a measurable impact on adult lives of consequence, inquiry, and accomplishment — and invites NECU institutions into a further conversation about how Detweiler’s methodology applies to Lutheran higher education.
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Editorial
From the Publisher & Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes, Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 63 · Spring 2026
6 min audio
Wells and Windham-Hughes frame vocation as “ground game” — the practical, public living-out of faith through civic engagement — and introduce the issue’s focus on how Lutheran higher education equips students to repair the world.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 62 · Fall 2025
5 min audio
Windham-Hughes plays on the shared Latin root of “education” and “seduction” (ducere, to lead) to warn against the No-saying seductions of giving up or condemnation, and to call educators to the riskier Yes of showing up to build third-space communities of truth-telling and hope.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 61 · Spring 2025
5 min audio
Windham-Hughes uses Fred Rogers’ neighborhood as a living embodiment of a Lutheran understanding of vocation — seeing dignity in each person, offering one’s gifts generously, and trusting that the well-being of the neighborhood is intrinsically connected to the well-being of every neighbor.
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Institutional Focus
So That All May Belong: Lutheran Roots for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice
Altheia Richardson, Angie Hambrick, Caryn Riswold, Colleen Windham-Hughes, Deanna Thompson, Marcia Bunge, Robert Clay
No. 61 · Spring 2025
22 min audio
The full NECU statement grounds DEIJ work in Luther’s 16th-century reforms and Lutheran theological claims about the image of God, equal dignity, and the limits of human knowing — offering definitions, Lutheran roots, and calls to action for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, with belonging as the outcome of DEIJ at work.
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Institutional Focus
Scriptures That Inspire Work for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice
Altheia Richardson, Angie Hambrick, Caryn Riswold, Colleen Windham-Hughes, Deanna Thompson, Marcia Bunge, Robert Clay
No. 61 · Spring 2025
9 min audio
A companion list of biblical verses — from Genesis 1:27 and Galatians 3:28 to Micah 6:8 and Luke 4:18-19 — that grounded NECU’s drafting of So That All May Belong, organized by the four DEIJ commitments and offered as an invitation to share other texts that ground and sustain the work.
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Institutional Focus
So That All May Belong: Lutheran Roots for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice [abridged]
Altheia Richardson, Angie Hambrick, Caryn Riswold, Colleen Windham-Hughes, Deanna Thompson, Marcia Bunge, Robert Clay
No. 61 · Spring 2025
8 min audio
A condensed version of the NECU statement that consolidates Lutheran theological grounding for DEIJ and a single combined call to action for Lutheran colleges and universities — offered as a shareable summary alongside the complete document.
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Article
The Lutheran Theological Tradition and Recruiting Lutheran Students
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Simmons opens with an Abraham-and-Isaac “Windows 98” joke to illustrate the dialectic of faith and learning, then argues that in a new market era of limited religious background, intentional mission and marketing go together. Drawing on Levine and Cureton’s When Hope and Fear Collide for the Millennial Generation born in 1982 and Tom Beaudoin’s Virtual Faith for their GenX parents, he reads “Reclaiming Lutheran Students” survey results showing 86% strong community at ELCA colleges versus 54% at flagship publics and 61% alumni mentoring versus 39%. He then develops three areas where the Lutheran tradition uniquely equips its colleges—community, mentoring and vocation, and the integration of faith and values—using Luther’s “two kingdoms” image of the “Left Hand” (reason) and “Right Hand” (faith) of God, with academic freedom as a product of Ahlstrom’s “Critical Current” in the tradition, and closes with three challenges: recruiting and retaining mentoring faculty, educating church leaders, and reaching potential students and parents.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 7 · Summer 1999
Christenson introduces the issue’s contents—papers from the 1998 Vocation conference by Cheryl Ney and Robert Scholz, a response by Jennifer Sacher Wiley, an interview with four Capital University faculty about Cuba, a meditation by St. Olaf senior Erik Haaland, and the journal’s first letter to the editor—and commends the Mount Mary College volume Wagering on Transcendence as a model of a faculty community sustained by Friday-afternoon conversation over a glass of wine.
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Article
The Idea of a Christian University
Richard Hughes
No. 11 · Spring 2001
Hughes’s lecture at the inauguration of Andrew K. Benton as the seventh president of Pepperdine argues that a Pepperdine-wide “strategy of community-wide conversation,” carried by the new Pepperdine University Center for Faith and Learning, can sustain the school as a Christian university by leaning into the paradox of Christian particularity rather than around it. Drawing on the incarnation, the Matthew 5 and Luke 14 teachings of Jesus, the Quaker and Cane Ridge (Joseph Thomas) abolition traditions, Galatians 2 and Romans 8, and Luther’s simul Justus et peccator as the gospel that frees the scholar to be wrong, to doubt, and to confess “Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief,” he mines the Churches of Christ heritage—Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone, and John Rogers of Carlisle, Kentucky—as a unity-and-freedom tradition that grounds both diversity and academic freedom.
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Article
Religious Diversity and the Vocation of a Lutheran College
Darrell Jodock
No. 44 · Fall 2016
Jodock argues that a college which takes its Lutheran values seriously is well positioned to foster inter-religious relations along a “third path” that is both religiously rooted and inclusive. He traces the relational and communal character of Lutheran theology, develops a Lutheran understanding of deeper freedom, the theology of limits, and human complexity, and shows how a down-to-earth image of God offers theological resources for overcoming the anxiety and fear that block interfaith engagement.
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Article
Lutheran Colleges: Past and Prologue
Paul J. Dovre
No. 30 · Fall 2009
Dovre offers a reminiscence rather than a research paper, drawing on Aristotle’s ethos, logos, and pathos to trace fifty years of change at Midwestern Lutheran colleges through the key issues of survival, respectability, faithfulness, and relationship to the church — from the dependence of the 1950s through the independence of the late twentieth century to the partnership of the 2000s — and identifies key variables (the student marketplace, faculty formation, and the identity/diversity paradox) for shaping the identity and mission of Lutheran colleges into the future.
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Article
The Lutheran Calling in Education: Context and Prospect
Paul J. Dovre
No. 23 · Summer 2006
Dovre, President Emeritus of Concordia College and co-chair of the ELCA Task Force on Education, undertakes three tasks: focusing on the current social context (young people’s spiritual lives, the state of mainline denominations, the family map, schools, communities, and higher education); reflecting on why Lutherans care about education (creation in God’s image, vocation, Luther’s legacy, the priesthood of all believers, civic righteousness, and hope); and considering the prospects and possibilities for addressing the calling (biblical, confessional, theological, and pedagogical legacies; the renewal of apostolic ministry, the Christian-college renaissance, K–12 reform, and the congregational education explosion).