Response to Mark Wilhelm: Distinguishing Between Identity and Vocation
Intersections No. 56 · Fall 2022
This response to Mark Wilhelm’s proposal for Diversity of Vocations Among Lutheran Colleges and Universities is what the Forum for Theological Exploration might call a “next most faithful step” in the process. That step is simply stated and difficult to manifest: we, as NECU institutions, must faithfully and effectively differentiate vocations and identities. For NECU institutions to robustly engage a unique diversity of vocations connected to their Lutheran rootedness, it’s vital to appreciate the distinction of identity and vocation, and the contributions of identities to vocations. This distinction is a key element in my book, 4D Formation: Exploring Vocation in Community, where I sum the distinction this way: Your identity is who you are, your vocation is what you do. Of course, we have not one vocation, but many. So perhaps it is better said this way: your vocations are how you put your identity to work in different contexts and seasons of life.
There are a number of relevant considerations. First, there’s something of a Venn diagram of identity and vocation. We live much of our lives in the area where the two circles overlap. Consider, for instance, our language. I say, “I am a pastor, a professor, a voter, and a husband.” I also say, “I am a straight, white, cisgender, invisibly disabled man.” One is a set of vocations. Another is a set of identities. The verb “to be” complicates our understanding of the separation of vocation and identity.
A second point was contained in the first: we not only have a multitude of vocations. We also have a plurality of identities. Of course, our work as NECU is focused on our shared calling, coming out of a shared identity of Lutheran higher education, but that is not the only shared identity we have. We’re also North American institutions. We’re Independent institutions. It’s essential for us to focus on our vocations as they flow out of our identity as Lutheran higher education institutions, and we should also investigate how other identities impact our vocations.
Third, not only do our identities impact how we live out our vocations. The communities in which we serve give particular timbre to the calling. So, even if you transplanted Capital University to, let’s say, St. Thomas in the USVI—that’s one of those unanswered prayers I keep bringing before God—and even if our identity remained functionally the same, the flavor profile of our vocations would shift because of where we’re planted. To embrace the identity of a Lutheran higher education institution is to embrace our place in the pluralistic project of higher education. Our diverse constituencies deserve clarity on how being a part of the Lutheran higher education tradition impacts their educational experience.
Finally, we must admit that not all work is holy work for us. Not all work is vocation, and not every vocation is ours to take up. From within the Lutheran tradition, we can point to the words of Jesus, who said he came to give life to the full, or life abundant. Vocation is work that is life-giving, that amplifies the integrity of others, rather than diminishes or destroys life. In an age of increasing responsibility and decreasing resources, we cannot do all work. We cannot even do all good work. Reflecting on what life-giving work we’re called to do in our specific contexts can enable us to say no, both to that work that is not our vocation because it’s good work that belongs to someone else, and to that work that is not vocation because it is destructive, rather than constructive.
In short, by understanding that a diversity of institutional vocations is related to a diversity of institutional identities, we can more healthfully live out our identities and more faithfully embody our vocations in the unique communities we’re called to serve.
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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: 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: 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
A God of Peace and Love? Reflections From a Biblical Scholar
Karla G. Bohmbach
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Bohmbach responds to Gregory Clark’s call to proclaim Jesus on Lutheran campuses with biblical-scholar reservations. Israel’s sacred texts also include the herem ban, the conquest narratives, and a God who fights for Israel; the Christian canon includes the apocalyptic violence of Revelation. To proclaim Jesus is therefore to proclaim a particular and contested figure within a tradition that has its own internal violence—not a generic God of peace and love. Bohmbach asks what it would mean for staff, administrators, and teachers on a college campus to take seriously the Jesus who made himself vulnerable to the violence of his world, even to the point of suffering for it, and whether Lutheran colleges are prepared for such a vocation.
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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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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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Response
Feeling at Home: Dimensions of Faculty Life
Jane Hokanson Hawks
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Hawks of Midland Lutheran College responds to Bouman by reflecting on her path from a Lutheran childhood through the BSN at St. Olaf and thirteen years at four non-church-related institutions to her present home at Midland, where teaching at a Lutheran institution finally feels “right.” Bouman’s framing of the five themes as the Lutheran argument about what it means to be human helped her ad-hoc committee articulate the spiritual role in Midland’s new faculty mentoring program (recently funded by the Lilly Foundation), and grounds her work as a nurse educator confronting the daily humanness of grief, joy, ethical dilemmas, and care across cultural and religious difference.
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Reflection
Saving Minds
Lake Lambert
No. 28 · Fall 2008
In a sermon preached in the Castle Church in Wittenberg during Wartburg College’s 2006 faculty and staff development seminar, Lambert names two sins of the mind—coveting and mental sloth (in both its rigid refusal to think and its mindless relativism)—and, drawing on Luther’s Large Catechism and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart,” calls Christians to receive the wisdom that comes when faith puts knowledge into action, sustained by the hope of the resurrection.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 43 · Spring 2016
Mahn introduces the twentieth anniversary issue of Intersections, recalling its 1996 birth at Capital University “in the twinkle of an idea” in the mind of founding editor Tom Christenson, and previewing essays by Wilhelm, Amamoto, Kleinhans, Glass Perez, and Simmons that together look back at twenty years of the journal and forward to its work in the decades to come.