I wrote my first editorial for Intersections in the Fall of 2011. It was titled, “From the Incoming Editor,” and it sat below some wise words of advice and gratitude from Bob Haak, whose last editorial was named (you guessed it): “From the Outgoing Editor.”
Now, more than a decade later, I can here give my own words of thanks from the perspective of an outgoing editor. I am passing the duties over to Colleen Windham-Hughes of California Lutheran University in order to devote more time to the planning of the annual Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education conference. Really, though, it is Colleen’s commitments to Lutheran higher education, her leadership and scholarly gifts, and her willingness to objectively evaluate where we have been, and then creatively imagine where we might go next, that makes this transition so timely. I’m excited to see how the journal, under Colleen’s stewardship, will play a broader and deeper role in NECU’s ongoing conversation about faith, learning, and the vocation of Lutheran higher education.
It has been edifying to contact potential contributors of Intersections (or more often lately, be contacted by them), consider themes that would bring diverse perspective together, and edit each issue. Working with authors and our great editorial board has meant that I now know and respect scores of colleagues spanning North America—from Texas to Saskatchewan and New York City to the Pacific Northwest.
Working with Mark Wilhelm has been life-giving. Even when currents in higher education make others anxious or cynical, Mark remains hopeful, engaged, and rightfully proud of the work that our Network is doing. We will celebrate Mark’s leadership and congratulate him on his retirement at this summer’s Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education conference. (See his publisher’s comment and page 20 for more details.)
Thank you, too, to President Steve Bahls and Provost Wendy Hilton-Morrow for allowing me to devote a portion of my work at Augustana to tasks that also benefit at least 26 other institutions. It takes foresight and deep appreciation for our institutional vocation to invest in this work when the returns on investment are harder to quantify, but valued nonetheless. Augustana will continue to publish Intersections on our open-access platform, as well as print and distribute hard copies.
Most of the essays in the present issue summarize comments given by Lutheran faculty, staff, and administrators at the 2022 national gathering of the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE). Most of our 27 NECU institutions are part of that wider network. As the authors here testify, grants and guidance from NetVUE have been instrumental in supporting their work. At the same time, Lutheran institutions—with our uniquely historical and contemporary commitments to educate for vocation—have provided noteworthy leadership within these wider networks. I think that part of the work ahead of us is to own and live into that leadership role.
I am grateful to have contributed to this work, service, and leadership, and look forward to continuing it in new and different ways. Our institution work together not only in order to educate students in order to get good paying jobs, but also so that they contribute to the flourishing of the widest of networks—local communities, our democratic country, and the whole of creation itself. You couldn’t ask for more meaningful and purposeful 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 Incoming Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes introduces herself as incoming editor by reclaiming the root of assess — “to sit by” — and committing to the question “What does this mean?” as she sits with readers in the worth of our work and the universality of vocation.
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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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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 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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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Mahn opens with Lenny Duncan’s observation that the ELCA is 96 percent white — the whitest denomination in the U.S. — and asks how teachers and administrators at historically, predominantly, and persistently white institutions can turn from white privilege and white supremacy toward spaces where people of color thrive and white people are re-formed into antiracist allies.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Wilhelm reflects on an NPR report of teenagers’ pandemic diaries and the fraught Christian history of struggling to live out Jesus’s ethic of love, framing the issue as a record of NECU institutions working out how to act for the common good through the pandemic of 2020–2021.
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Article
Learning the Language of Inclusive Pedagogy
David Thompson
No. 50 · Fall 2019
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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Reflection
Some Personal Reflections on the ELCA Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, 1998
Jennifer Sacher Wiley
No. 7 · Summer 1999
Sacher Wiley, a Unitarian Universalist with one Jewish parent and a first-year music faculty member at Susquehanna, reflects on common-ness and other-ness at the 1998 conference—Tom Christenson’s weaver’s warp and Charles Ives’s essay on American music—and proposes four markers of group identity. Against the fear of secularization expressed by some attendees, she suggests that “Christian” might be defined less by belief in Christ as Savior than by living a vocation as Jesus lived, with Cheryl Ney offered as an example of a “working prophet,” or “little Christ,” regardless of specific belief in the Trinity.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 6 · Winter 1999
Selbyg reports on the work of the Division of Higher Education and Schools to focus what makes Lutheran colleges and universities distinctive, recaps the 1998 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference at Wittenberg, previews the 1999 Susquehanna conference on “Identity and Fragmentation: Can the Lutheran Center hold?” (inspired by Yeats’s vision of the Second Coming), commends Ernest Simmons’s Lutheran Higher Education: An Introduction for Faculty (Augsburg Fortress, 1998), and announces a new NEH/NSF-style initiative called “The Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education.”
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Article
The Responsible Professional: Vocation and Economic Life
Martha E. Stortz, Tom Morgan
No. 51 · Spring 2020
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.
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Article
Renewing a Sense of Vocation at Lutheran Colleges and Universities: Insights from a Project at Valparaiso University
Marcia Bunge
No. 14 · Summer 2002
Bunge, director of the process for writing Valparaiso’s nearly two-million-dollar Lilly grant on the Theological Exploration of Vocation, argues that contemporary culture’s reduction of vocation to either paid work or self-fulfillment requires Lutheran institutions to renew attention to a rich theological concept rooted in Luther’s expansion of vocation beyond the priesthood. She outlines eight low-cost “doorways”—caring adults, prayer, worship leadership, music and the arts, service, cross-cultural experience, church camps and wilderness, study and reflection—and describes Valparaiso’s two-program structure: a Campus-Wide Program weaving vocation into Freshman Core Courses and chapel life, and a Church Vocations Program for students considering full-time ministry. She closes with four troubling questions for any institution carrying out such a grant: what faith traditions can learn from one another, how to involve parents, whether faculty and staff have space to reflect on their own vocations, and whether daily institutional practices—family policies, treatment of low-paid staff, environmental responsibility, obligations to the wider community—actually reflect a commitment to love of neighbor.