From the Publisher

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why All This Talk About Understanding the Mission of NECU Member Institutions as a Vocation?

Mark Wilhelm

No. 56 · Fall 2022

In his valedictory keynote, retiring NECU Executive Director Mark Wilhelm argues that Lutheran higher education is, properly understood, vocation-based education — outlining four core practices recovered over the past fifty years and naming the constructive and corrective work still to be done, including a fuller embrace of DEIJ and of the diverse vocations of NECU’s 27 institutions.

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.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 52 · Fall 2020

Wilhelm argues that the “hackneyed” expressions of higher education — “you are not just a number,” “the college experience,” “risen to the challenge” — tell the simple truth about NECU institutions even as the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed budgets, employees, and campus life to the breaking point.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 51 · Spring 2020

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.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 50 · Fall 2019

Wilhelm frames the issue by noting that a federal court’s vindication of Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process is a win for higher education’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion — and argues that for Lutheran higher education, the commitment to diversity is an old and foundational claim, rooted in Christianity’s openness to all and reflected in the four diverse gospels of the New Testament.

Rooted and Open: Background, Purpose, and Challenges

Mark Wilhelm

No. 49 · Spring 2019

Wilhelm traces Rooted and Open’s seventy-year backstory — from Conrad Bergendoff’s 1948 call for a Lutheran philosophy of education through the recovery of the vocation tradition — and describes the document’s process, purpose as a teaching and study resource, and the embodiment, contextual, and cultural challenges it implies for NECU institutions.

The Vocation of a Lutheran College

L. DeAne Lagerquist

No. 12 · Summer 2001

Lagerquist places the twenty-eight ELCA-affiliated colleges in the context of American higher education from Harvard (1636) through the “old time college,” the post-Civil-War research university, and the postwar expansion—drawing on Christopher Lucas, Philip Schaff’s Neo-Lutheran/moderate/Old Lutheran categorization, Sydney Ahlstrom’s scholastic/pietistic/critical currents, Luther’s appeal to the German nobility, Lewis Hyde’s gift economy, and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. She proposes five characteristic practices (the school as learning community, study of Bible and Christian tradition, participation in the arts as makers and audience, application of learning in service, and on-campus Christian worship) grounded in Lutheran teaching about grace, image-and-fall, gratitude, and revelation through created “masks,” and four virtues these practices engender in graduates—loving gratitude, faithful wisdom, bold freedom, and hopeful humility.

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.

From the Publisher

Lamont Anthony Wells

No. 62 · Fall 2025

5 min audio

Wells frames the issue as a record of the 2025 VLHE Conference at Augsburg under the theme “Ethical Leadership in a Changing World,” arguing that vocation is never solitary but a collective, public witness of ethical formation, theology and care, flourishing and belonging, and leadership rooted in God’s grace.

Leading Students to Distinguish Between Career and Vocation: Reflections from a Lutheran Law School

Steven C. Bahls

No. 20 · Fall 2004

Bahls, writing as former dean of the Capital University Law School, argues that most law students and many legal educators confuse vocation with career—asking “what kind of lawyer do you want to be?” rather than “who do I want to be?” Drawing on John O. Mudd’s five attributes of a well-prepared lawyer and Susan Daicoff’s empirical research on lawyer dissatisfaction and the “amoral professional role,” he turns to Ernest L. Simmons’s and Darrel Jodock’s articulations of Luther’s understanding of vocation and proposes five steps—reflection, assessment, vision, integrative thinking, and reassessment—along with explicit leadership from law school deans, engagement of career services offices, and leadership within the profession (illustrated by Capital’s joint venture with the Columbus Bar Association).

A Fifth Teat on a Cow: The Irrelevance of the Lutheran Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms for Academic Life

Richard VonDohlen

No. 9 · Summer 2000

VonDohlen, responding to Richard Hughes, Carol LaHurd, David Ratke, Philip Nordquist, and Robert Benne, argues that the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms as commonly deployed in recent discussions of Lutheran higher education rests on a faulty sociology (taking Luther’s sixteenth-century structure for our highly differentiated society) and an epistemological monism (assuming a single neutral reason against the pluralism described by Alasdair MacIntyre and others), making it anti-intellectual, hostile to interdisciplinary dialogue and Christian social ethics, and ultimately as a defense of theology’s relevance about as useful as “a fifth teat on a cow.” Drawing on his experience on the Catawba Valley Hospice Ethics Committee, his Dutch Reformed and dispensationalist background, and the ELCA social statement “Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All,” he calls for an “intellectually ecumenical” dialogue between Lutherans and non-Lutherans willing to take each other’s paradigms seriously.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

No. 4 · Winter 1998

Christenson thanks the departing Jim Unglaube, recommends Ronald A. Wells’s Keeping Faith: Embracing the Tensions in Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans) as both an interesting collection of essays and a model worth imitating at ELCA institutions, previews the issue’s pieces by Richard Hughes, Carl Skrade and Spencer Porter, Gregory Clark, and Karla Bohmbach, and introduces three new features of the journal: “What I Have Learned” (an essay by a senior or emeritus faculty member, inaugurated by Richard Ylvisaker), “Reviews” (initiated by Karla Bohmbach), and a “Bulletin Board” for cross-campus announcements.