“Why all this talk about vocation?” This question, the theme of last summer’s conference for Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education, was the first in-person gathering for the group since 2019, which increased the joy in seeing one another while also raising the stakes of why we gather. Why, amidst all of the disruptions to higher education and continuing concerns about community spread of COVID, would we gather for presentations, workshops, and conversations about vocation? Mark Wilhelm offered a deceptively simple answer to the question in his keynote address, printed in this issue: “Lutheran higher education…is vocation-based education.”
We talk about vocation because we must: it is who we are and what we do, even if incompletely, clumsily, and unjustly at times. Wilhelm, who has served Lutheran higher education in various capacities for multiple decades and will retire in late January of 2023, calls us to “constructive work” and “corrective work” in the next decade of our work in vocation, a call that resonates with many authors in this issue.
In this issue you will read several responses to Wilhelm’s keynote address, offered in panel format at the conference and printed here for continued conversations among us on our college/university campuses. Each in their own way, Marit Trelstad, Vic Thasiah, Drew Tucker, Mary-Paula Cancienne, and Paul Pribbenow are already pushing, via vocation, toward constructive work and corrective work, outlining a living-together in higher education that widens and deepens the work as well as the narrative of what we do when we gather to learn and to teach for the sake of the world. Vocation must not be a mark of privilege, but must instead lead us boldly into reforms that call into question and even undo unjust systems of which we are part.
Julius Crump and Madyson Ray, both of whom attended the Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education conference for the first time last summer, write in compelling ways about why the work of vocation is essential to joy and purpose in learning as well as authentic relationships between professors and students.
The final two pieces are companions, since Elli Cucksey shares the constructive work she did in her role as librarian as a response to her experience as a student of Womanist theology with Beverly Wallace. In Wallace’s co-authored piece with Yolanda Norton, they root the work of vocation in the soul (“Doing the Work One’s Soul Must Have”). Engaging Womanist theology through coursework and the Black Girl Magic Academy, and cultivating spaces of freedom and empowerment through the Beyoncé Mass and Womanist Experiential Learning Initiative, Norton and Wallace invite ELCA colleges and universities to host existing events and expand the work to undergraduate campuses.
Take action based on what you read here
1) Reach out to one of the authors printed here and continue conversation about, or schedule an event that lives out, our shared calling to “vocation-based education.”
2) Complete the short survey we have designed to understand Intersections’ past and chart its future.
3) Contribute to the Spring 2023 issue: “Vocation (in) Disruption.” We invite pieces on finding vocation amidst disruption as well as being called to disruption as a vocation. Perspectives from all areas of Higher Education at Lutheran colleges and universities are welcome, including students. Submissions are due 15 January 2023.
There are several mic-drop moments in this issue; do not miss them!
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Article
Why All This Talk About Understanding the Mission of NECU Member Institutions as a Vocation?
Mark Wilhelm
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.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Vocation, Mission and Privilege
Marit Trelstad
Trelstad affirms Wilhelm’s claim that vocation is the foundational shared mission of Lutheran higher education rather than one program among many, and presses the critique that calls to “vocational reflection” can mask privilege — arguing that an intersectional lens shows vocational discernment is in fact a matter of survival and flourishing for students from marginalized communities.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: DEI, Great; DWS (Dismantling White Supremacy), Even Better
Vic Thasiah
Thasiah argues that if Lutheran colleges and universities want to live out their commitment to the flourishing of all, DEI is good but DWS — dismantling white supremacy — is even better, and offers three Lutheran sensibilities (suspicion of self-righteousness, the decolonial shockwave of the cross, and critical thinking that can still register awe) that can make DWS a core practice of higher education.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Distinguishing Between Identity and Vocation
Andrew Tucker
Tucker proposes that NECU’s next most faithful step is to faithfully and effectively differentiate vocations and identities — arguing that identity is who you are, vocation is what you do, and that recognizing the plurality of both helps Lutheran institutions name which work is theirs to take up and which is good work that belongs to someone else.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Vocation—Wide Perspective Questions
Mary-Paula Cancienne
Cancienne, drawing on Iain McGilchrist, asks whether higher education has prioritized micro lenses at the expense of the macro view, and invites educators to hold the drama of individual vocation stories within a wider plot that includes James Webb Telescope wonder, climate grief, the long shadow of enslavement, and the resilience of native populations.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Adopting the Framework of ‘Because’ and ‘Therefore’
Paul C. Pribbenow
Pribbenow describes how Augsburg University responded to its dramatic demographic transformation (from 18% to nearly 70% BIPOC entering students over sixteen years) by adopting an institutional vocational statement and a simple “because/therefore” framework for translating particular Lutheran theological convictions into institutional programs, policies, and practices.
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Article
Work Works
Julius Crump
Crump argues that in an era of class-stratified careerism and the “ruins of neoliberalism,” commencement-speech rhetoric about heroic vocation will not resuscitate vocation — instead, professors embodying vulnerability, extemporaneity, and contemporaneity in the classroom can show students that consistent work, embodied as service to others, is itself worthy.
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Reflection
Why All This Talk About Vocation?
Madyson Ray
Ray, a junior at Midland University and the only student attendee at the 2022 conference, reflects on four workshops — on teaching womanist thought, on supporting student-athletes, on resistance to the word “vocation,” and on vocational reflection — and brings home concrete ideas including a women’s-history scavenger hunt and semester-long vocational reflections.
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Institutional Focus
LibGuide: Introduction to Womanist Theology
Elli Cucksey
Cucksey, the head librarian at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, recounts how Beverly Wallace’s Introduction to Womanist Theology class — the first offering of the ELCA Seminaries’ Womanist Theology Initiative — led her to build a publicly available LibGuide that amplifies Black women’s voices and gathers the resources of the course for future students.
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Article
Doing the Work One’s Soul Must Have
Beverly Wallace, Yolanda M. Norton
Norton and Wallace describe the Womanist Experiential Learning Initiative — including the Beyoncé Mass, study-abroad partnerships in Portugal, Brazil, and Ghana, and the Black Girl Magic Academy for teenage girls — as a way of centering Black women’s voices in theological education and doing, as Katie Geneva Cannon put it, “the work…that one’s soul must have.”
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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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Book Review
The Courage to Change: Creating New Hearts with Palmer and Zajonc
Martha E. Stortz
No. 39 · Spring 2014
Stortz reads Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc’s The Heart of Higher Education from the landscape of Lent and notes that the book’s strategies all target students, not their professors. Drawing on her own Faculty Formation Group at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Ignatian Colleagues Program at Jesuit institutions, she asks what a Lutheran analogue might look like that would form the educators who teach for transformation.
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Article
Lutheran Higher Education and the Public Intellectual
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Simmons argues that college faculty and administrators are, like it or not, public intellectuals, and that Lutheran higher education’s dialectical understanding of Christ and culture is well suited to support four functions of the public intellectual: articulating constructive critique of received social explanation (especially the “collage identity” described by Renate Schacht); presenting a transcendent theological perspective through the theology of the cross that takes seriously God’s hiddeness, the presence of ambiguity, and the reality of suffering; pursuing the common good amid the demise of the “commons” through H. Richard Niebuhr’s “Christ and Culture in Paradox”; and educating for citizenship through Christian vocation by connecting the practical and existential dimensions of the question “Why are you here?”
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Reflection
The Long Pilgrimage of 2020-21
Kara Baylor
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Drawing on Martha Stortz’s definition of pilgrimage as “intentional dislocation, for the sake of transformation, where the body teaches the soul,” Baylor invites students and educators worn out by the 2020-21 academic year to ask what is essential, to listen to what their bodies are telling their souls, and to be more open to the transformations the dislocation might still yield.
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Article
Vocational Discernment: A Comprehensive College Program
Darrell Jodock
No. 14 · Summer 2002
Jodock, whose Gustavus Adolphus was one of twenty colleges to receive a Lilly “Theological Exploration of Vocation” grant in 2000, defines vocation not as occupation but as a self-understanding that nests the self in community. Reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone on the collapse of secondary communities alongside Luther’s ethic of community benefit and five Lutheran principles (graciousness, Christian freedom, community, God active in the world, the theology of the cross), he walks through Gustavus’s three-level design—a definition of vocation open to other faith traditions, “middle principles” drawn from Sharon Parks’s Common Fire, and a long menu of programs coordinated by a new Center for Vocational Reflection—hoping that, in the language of Holocaust studies, graduates will be “resisters” and “rescuers” rather than bystanders.
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Editorial
Guest Editorial
Kristen Glass Perez, Richard Priggie
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Glass Perez and Priggie introduce the issue by recounting the campus conversations and the June 2014 Interfaith Understanding Conference at Augustana College that gave rise to it, framing the central question, “What does it mean to be Interfaith at a Lutheran College?,” as a living example of the praxis of being a Lutheran college in the twenty-first century.
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Article
Lutheran Heritage Across the Curriculum: Reflections from a Faculty/Staff Development Seminar
Cynthia Bane, Fred Waldstein, Kathryn A. Kleinhans, Penni Pier
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Four Wartburg College colleagues share fruits of the 2006 Lilly-funded “Discovering and Claiming Our Callings” faculty/staff development seminar in Wittenberg, Eisenach, and Neuendettelsau. Kleinhans frames the curriculum and books used; Bane (psychology) finds Lutheran convictions about the value of humans, the affirmation of creation, and the universality of sin congruent with her discipline; Pier (communication arts) reads Luther as a model of dialectical rhetoric that gives educators permission to challenge students with uncomfortable ideas; and Waldstein (political science) reflects on the paradox of humility and self-confidence in Luther and on the Luther-Melanchthon collaboration as a model for the seminar group’s own work.