Response to Mark Wilhelm: DEI, Great; DWS (Dismantling White Supremacy), Even Better
Intersections No. 56 · Fall 2022
The purpose of higher education at Lutheran colleges and universities is to contribute to the flourishing of all. DEI is great, but if Lutheran colleges and universities want to up their game, DWS (dismantling white supremacy) is even better. Dismantling white supremacy is essential to the flourishing of all. Thus, it should be a core practice of our higher education.
The protests and rebellion around the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and others have helped the wider/whiter public in the United States understand both the importance and urgency of dismantling white supremacy. Around the same time, Trump-appointed, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan confirmed white supremacy to be our greatest domestic threat.
Given how hot this summer has been, we could also make connections between white supremacy on the one hand, and climate disruption and environmental degradation on the other, like James Cone does.
“The logic that led to slavery and segregation in the Americas, colonization and apartheid in Africa, and the role of white supremacy throughout the world is the same one that leads to the exploitation of animals and the ravaging of nature. It is a mechanistic and instrumental logic that defines everything and everybody in terms of their contribution to the development and defense of white world supremacy.”
What is white supremacy, and what is a key harm to BIPOC communities? According to Frances Ansley,
“White supremacy is a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”
If any part of the above quote describes business as usual at our colleges and universities, it’s time for a long, hard look at ourselves in light of our commitment to the flourishing of all.
There are some Lutheran sensibilities that can help us make dismantling white supremacy a core practice of higher education. I’ll just mention three.
1) To Lutherans, self-righteousness is totally sus. Lutheran understandings of human beings as created and loved by God, and of infinite worth, make them skeptical about self-justification, attempts to earn and prove your worth. We’re thus free to see our beauty and our flaws.
My own higher education has often felt like a seemingly endless valorization, endorsement, and aggrandizement of the West and whiteness. Whether it’s been about the Enlightenment/Enwhitenment, science and technology, industry and development, or equality and democracy, the sense of white superiority has been at once tedious and terrible. But if classic scary movies have taught us anything, it’s that what you disavow comes back to haunt you. We’re being haunted by the legacies of genocide, slavery, and colonialism today. It’s time to interrogate this past, undo its impacts in the present, and work for a better future.
2) To Lutherans, the death of Jesus was a decolonial shockwave, still reverberating across space and time. We’re all living in a state of thrownness because of it. It turns out that the eye-averting execution of this thirty-something, Palestinian-Jewish construction worker—condemned for blasphemy by his religious community and viewed as a threat to society by the political regime—inspires our solidarity with marginalized peoples, those subordinated by white supremacy. It also turns out that this particular death generates momentum in decolonizing higher education. It’s time to rewrite general education based on a more diverse and inclusive range of sources.
3) Finally, Lutheran colleges and universities are supposed to deliver higher education that lays a foundation for critical thinking that can still register awe. Dismantling white supremacy means more awe, and thus more wonder and joy, based on a much richer, broader cross-section of human experience. It also contributes to intellectual curiosity and humility.
How can Lutheran colleges and universities make a stronger commitment to DEI? By making the dismantling of white supremacy a core practice of higher education.
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Editorial
From the Editor: Why All This Talk About Vocation?
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes introduces the Fall 2022 issue built around Mark Wilhelm’s keynote “Why all this talk about vocation?” and previews five panel responses, two first-time conference reflections, and companion pieces on Womanist theology — framing vocation as a call not to privilege but to constructive and corrective work that undoes unjust systems.
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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: 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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Article
The Face of the Neighbor: An Interview with Four Capital University Faculty About Their Recent Visit to Cuba
Brian Forry Wallace, Michael Yosha, Reg Dyck, Susan Narita
No. 7 · Summer 1999
Four Capital University faculty—political scientist Brian Wallace (returning to Cuba a third time after the 1994 boat lift), English professor Reg Dyck, ESL teacher Susan Narita, and political scientist Michael Yosha—recount their summer 1998 trip with Pastors for Peace, describing Cuban priorities of education, health care, and military (in that order), the cultural richness of Havana from sixteenth-century cloisters to Miramar, the Cuban Foreign Service’s vision of a Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, the counter-productive U.S. embargo (including its effect on kidney dialysis machines), Castro’s 1991 reconciliation with religious communities, and a recurrent image of a little girl named Marguerite singing at a school for amputee and terminally ill children. The interview was conducted by Capital senior Jessica Brown and Tom Christenson.
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Article
Negotiating Legitimate and Conflicting Values
Eboo Patel, Katie Bringman Baxter, Mark S. Hanson
No. 44 · Fall 2016
In a closing-day conversation at the 2016 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, Mark Hanson and Eboo Patel — moderated by Katie Bringman Baxter of Interfaith Youth Core — share case studies in which legitimate religious values come into tension with one another, and make the case that Lutheran colleges should teach interfaith leadership through the hard cases rather than the easy ones.
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Article
Lutheran Higher Education in Global Context: Called to Serve the World
R. Guy Erwin
No. 27 · Spring 2008
Erwin advances three theses on the global vocation of Lutheran higher education: that the vocation of a Lutheran college is to live out its mission in a service-oriented way; that Luther’s definition of vocation as love of neighbor must today have global dimensions; and that a Lutheran college best fulfills its vocation when it fosters a global perspective in its community, curriculum, and ethos. Drawing on Gustav Wingren and Luther’s catechisms, sermons on schooling, and three-realms ethics, he surveys the mission statements and websites of all twenty-eight ELCA colleges and universities for evidence of globalist commitment.
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Institutional Focus
So That All May Flourish Study Guide
No. 57 · Spring 2023
A chapter-by-chapter study guide to So That All May Flourish (Fortress Press 2023), a new volume by NECU authors that develops the central tenet of “Rooted and Open” and offers discussion questions for use in orientation programs, classes, workshops, task forces, and professional development settings.
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Article
What's in a Name?
Matthew J. Marohl
No. 40 · Fall 2014
St. Olaf College Pastor Matt Marohl tells the story of designing The Undercroft’s prayer and meditation room with a campus meditation group whose members began as “Matt” and ended — as their mutual respect grew — calling him “Pastor Matt,” a counterintuitive movement toward a more formal address that signals what intentional Lutheran-Christian hospitality looks like in practice.
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Response
“My Wife, We Have Not Come to the End of All Our Trials, but a Measureless Labor Yet”: The Lutheran Argument in Colleges
Steven Paulson
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Paulson of Concordia College responds to Bouman by invoking Penelope’s unreasonable patience for Odysseus and asking whether Bouman’s five “principles” deliver the “continuities of conflict” that MacIntyre’s account of a living tradition demands. He argues that the proper Lutheran “continuity of conflict” is the praxis of proclamation—Christ crucified as “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles”—which is given outside the institution’s walls and which colleges and universities, as socially embodied arguments, “can’t like” because it places truth beyond their control. The Lutheran problem, he concludes, is not the Enlightenment or Post-Modernism but the “old Adam,” the Odysseus still unsure of his identity.