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
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
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
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
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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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 15 · Winter 2002
Selbyg announces that the 2001 ELCA Churchwide Assembly has commissioned a new social statement on education, placing it alongside the economy, the environment, abortion, sexuality, health, and peace, and invites Intersections readers to submit input on which topics within the field of education the statement should address.
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Article
Why Lutheran Colleges Need to Engage Civil Society
Ann M. Svennungsen
No. 35 · Spring 2012
Svennungsen makes the case that Lutheran colleges must engage the larger civil sphere, drawing on her work with The Presidents’ Pledge Against Global Poverty, Darrell Jodock’s seven fundamental experiences for vocational discernment, David Brooks on civility and modesty, and Michael Sandel’s argument that the affluent are seceding from public life. She urges Lutheran educators to invest in the infrastructure of civic renewal so that service-learning and civic engagement remain central to the Lutheran college curriculum.
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Article
The Breadth and the Depth: Dimensions of Christian-Muslim Relations at Educational Institutions of the ELCA
Mark N. Swanson
No. 33 · Spring 2011
Swanson reflects on the spatial metaphors of depth and breadth that shape Lutheran higher education and argues that the study of Islam and real conversation between Christians and Muslims can contribute to both the broadening of horizons and the deepening of faith, drawing on his experience at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and pointing to hospitality as a Christian practice in which depth and breadth come together.
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Article
What is Required of You?: Higher Education Leadership in a Moral Key
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 62 · Fall 2025
15 min audio
Drawing on Micah 6:8 and Stephen Carter’s “etiquette of democracy,” Pribbenow describes the three things Augsburg requires of every incoming student — show up, pay attention, and do the work — as a democratic social ethic that prepares students for engaged citizenship in a fractured public life.
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Article
The Lutheran Liberal Arts College and Care for the Earth
H. Paul Santmire
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Santmire, author of The Travail of Nature, proposes three mandates for the Lutheran liberal arts college: take responsibility for spiritual particularity by confronting the ambiguities of the classical Christian tradition (Lynn White’s charge against anthropocentric Christianity vs. the Franciscan ecological tradition from Irenaeus through Luther) and of classical Lutheran social ethics (the Two Kingdoms, Romans 13, the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer); promote responsible cultural criticism (against Thoreau’s sociopathic anti-urban suburbanism); and promote a holistic environmental ethos through an interdisciplinary core curriculum with ecology as the queen of the sciences, a community that liberates the social imagination (Mumford, Marcuse), a cosmic Liturgical praxis rooted in the Colossians 1:15–20 hymn to the cosmic Christ, and an academy that models ecological responsibility.
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Article
Lutheran Education in the None Zone
Samuel Torvend
No. 23 · Summer 2006
Torvend, Associate Professor of Religion at Pacific Lutheran University, argues that any ELCA social statement on education must speak not only to those raised within the cultural and theological traditions of ELCA Lutheranism but also to the diverse communities of the “none zone” — the Pacific Northwest and other regions where religious affiliation is increasingly unaffiliated. The statement must therefore equip Lutheran colleges, congregations, and schools for engagement with religious pluralism and cultural diversity rather than presuming a Lutheran cultural baseline.