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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Article
In a Diverse Society, Why Should Lutheran Colleges/Universities Claim their Theological Roots?
Darrell Jodock
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Jodock develops his “third path” account of the Lutheran college — neither sectarian nor non-sectarian but both rooted and open — analogizing the college to a bridge whose deck of daily activities rests on pillars of shared educational priorities, which in turn rest on theological footings; he then answers six common objections to claiming Lutheran roots and explains why those footings still matter.
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Article
Ethical Leadership for a Changing World: A Shared Calling from Cradle to Career
Cory Newman, Janelle Rozek Hooper
No. 62 · Fall 2025
5 min audio
Hooper and Newman recount how an ELCA Barna survey on early childhood education sparked the realization at VLHE 2025 that ELCA colleges and the 1,200 Lutheran schools and early learning centers share identical challenges — and an untapped potential to form ethical leaders across the full educational continuum from cradle to career.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Selbyg reports that Executive Director Leonard Schulze has challenged the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools to develop a comprehensive communications plan reaching high school students, college students, parents, pastors, and journalists, and invites Intersections readers to review the redesigned elcacolleges.org website, the “FREE STUFF” brochures, the journal’s advertisements in The Lutheran and related publications, Ernie Simmons’ new Augsburg-Fortress book Lutheran Higher Education: An Introduction, and the ELCA video magazine Mosaic—and to send in their own ideas.
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Article
Committed to Paradox
Caryn Riswold
No. 60 · Fall 2024
Riswold lifts up paradox — saint and sinner, lord and servant, Rooted and Open — as a distinctive Lutheran root that lets institutions honor the complicated truth of who their students are and embrace the messy, ever-reforming work of access and accessibility as a theology of the cross.
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Response
Knowing and a Tradition to be Known
Kurt Keljo
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Keljo, University Pastor at Capital, embraces Schwehn’s vocational call but challenges his epistemological framing. We are called to bear witness to the Truth more than to pursue it; truth and power need not be dissociated when power is understood cruciform-ly as love and service; alongside objectivity, a case can be made from the tradition for connected knowing (image of God, idolatry, repentance, Incarnation). Christians offer not a particular epistemology but a foundation for epistemology—a tradition to be known. He closes with James Fowler’s four marks of the “public church”: particularly Christian, prepared for pluralism, balancing intimacy with public engagement, and unafraid of ideological pluralism in confident, nondefensive civility.
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Article
Vocational Re-Formation for a Multi-Religious World
Elizabeth Eaton
No. 40 · Fall 2014
ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton frames vocational formation for a multi-religious world as one of the most significant challenges facing the church and the liberal arts today, calling ELCA colleges and universities to live into Darrell Jodock’s “third path” that is both deeply rooted and dialogical.