Americans stand a chance of hearing about vocation when class-conscious twenty-year-olds commence with life as young adults. Commencement speeches frequently include explicit or implicit references about the worthiness of one or another professional pursuit. Graduates aspire to a class-status that likely delimited their options for a major and, upon beginning college, effectively predetermined their career path. In an economy with strident class-stratification, incoming freshmen are encouraged to “follow the money”. Commencement speeches rarely remind graduates about that pursuit. Invariably, commencement speech themes accent vocation. Professional pursuits are deemed worthy when graduates exercise transformative agency. Graduates are tasked with shouldering the burden of engaging in transformative heroic acts. It’s highly unlikely, however, that a profession, institution or industry will be transformed. In fact, there are no guarantees that either the profession or the person will be transformed. Graduates may experience the journey as worthy and transformative in retrospect. Journeys, to be sure, are replete with risks. Consistent heroic actions are worthy because transformation is possible and, perhaps, preferable. Who wouldn’t prefer to be transformed? Those who are unbothered and apathetic. In increasingly technocratic, career-conscious academic contexts, apathy abounds. Given the kind and quantity of America’s societal problems, the mismatch is confounding. Why such apathy when social pathologies abound? How can the worthiness of pursuing unscripted journeys be redeemed? When worth emanates from consistent work. Work is worthy. Work translates. Work works.
Educators in humanities who profess to students a few times a week at small liberal arts colleges would likely agree that the number of the unbothered is growing. The number of the unbothered are increasing on both sides of the desk. Professors and students languish. What, of worthiness and work, remains?
Educators can cultivate classroom experiences that devalue heroic ideologies, eschew expressly religious heroes and embrace anti-heroines. By emphasizing just one option, professors alienate self and students. Educational endeavors should be fraught and forgiving. The joys of educational endeavors obtain when the complexity of a religious anti-heroine, like Toni Morrison’s Sethe, surfaces. Such joy is manifest when, in the context of a seminar, sojourners realize that humanist groups like the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists deideologize difference.
The risk of being employed in quasi-elite academic institutions is acute, not least because apathy abounds. The journey may not justify the risks. Interest groups deploy decadent economic imperatives among what Wendy Brown calls the “ruins of neoliberalism.” Vocation is among the ruins. The ruins help explain apathy as well as the annual calls to render heroic pursuits vocational. In the academy, explanations are necessary but insufficient. Professors and students need more. Perennial commencement speeches, intentional though they may very well be, will not resuscitate vocation. Parishioners from wisdom traditions in prior American eras commend work. When embodied as a form of service to others, work is worthy.
Post-War and post-Civil Rights churches in impoverished communities often displayed admonitions prominently in vestibules that encouraged its members as follows: “Enter to Worship, Depart to Serve” and “God first, others second, me last.” How can such deference address apathy if vocation redounds to God-talk that warrants serving elites, be they students or professionals? Many activists, Afro-pessimists and post-Socratic scholars view such religiously inspired deference as self-abnegation. Colonized Christian God-talk is antiquated. Respectability politics disrespects the impoverished. These critics make valid points. The journeys of impoverished Christians from previous generations was a risk. Merely talking about God and vocation, though a necessity for some, will not suffice. The wisdom of elders commends the kind of work such that an educators walk matches their talk. If an educator’s work is consistent and co-creative, transformative moral agency will commence.
Professors embody such work when their teaching and research consistently exudes vulnerability, extemporaneity and contemporaneity. Professors must resist the urge to model the banking theory of knowledge. Graduate school is over. Impressing intellectual elders is no longer the goal, as if it ever was. Undoubtedly, professors are the smartest in the room. If, by chance, a professor is not the expert, students are blameless. Proving one’s intellectual bona-fides is counter-productive. Assuredly, in some courses, lectures are apropos. Make them interactive. Over the course of a semester, professors should, both through in-class dialogue and paper feedback, convince students that their ideas and arguments matter. Centering student learning requires vulnerability.
Professors must also exhibit the joys of learning, in class. If proverbial light bulbs do not “go off” in class, during a session, America’s post-literature, algorithmic culture will not aid this process. This applies to professors, too. When this occurs, professors should state as much, in the moment. Learning, moreover, is a process. Students who seem to have more “light bulbs moments” need not be catered to. Attend to deliberate thinkers who might need several weeks to process ideas. Professors should structure classes so that students are encouraged to think “out loud” and explore arguments that lead to unjustifiable, even undesirable, conclusions. Over the course of a semester, professors should talk less. They should feel out-numbered. Such a state of affairs is far more likely to obtain when professors are extemporaneous.
Lastly, professors should be conversant with current events. Examples are most illustrative when students know the person or event being referenced. Professors need not necessarily be culture vultures. Pop culture is transient and, at times, distasteful. That is what makes recent examples so interesting. Positioning a fashionable contemporary cultural event or person against the backdrop of a wisdom, literary or philosophical tradition is generative. Traditions perdure because they are selective. Professors should not predetermine what could be selected. Such determinations are journeys that require the kind of co-creative—student-teacher—transformative work that occurs in the classroom for the purpose of empowering those who do not attend college, especially the impoverished.
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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: 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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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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Institutional Focus
Interfaith Campus Organizing at California Lutheran University
Allison Bermann, Mehak Sachdev
No. 44 · Fall 2016
California Lutheran University students Allison Bermann and Mehak Sachdev describe how interfaith participation at CLU grew from a grassroots movement into a sustained, integrated part of campus identity — with an intern program, Interfaith Allies, co-curricular events from Diwali dinners to Hunger Banquets, and a classroom practice of storytelling that opens the required Introduction to Christianity course to students of every faith and none.
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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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Article
Leading from Within: Peer-Learning Consultations to Explore Our Callings and Campus Capacities for Leadership
Chris Johnson
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Johnson reframes vocational leadership as “soul work” that calls for the deep mind as much as the conscious one, and offers two practices — deep listening and a modified Quaker clearness consultation — as ways for campus colleagues to listen one another into existence. Drawing on Sharon Daloz Parks, Marshall Ganz, Parker Palmer, and Mary Rose O’Reilley, he invites readers to map their stories of self, us, and now.
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Article
Called for Life — Affirming Vocational Discernment
Richard L. Torgerson
No. 31 · Winter 2010
Torgerson introduces the “Called for Life” project, a three-year, $278,437 Lilly Endowment-funded collaboration among Luther, Augsburg, and Augustana that—in partnership with Luther Seminary’s Centered Life initiative and Wilder Research—rigorously assessed the effectiveness of campus vocation programs, examining whether students’ exposure to and understanding of calling had increased, and what program elements were most effective in shaping discernment.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Wilhelm draws a parallel between the rediscovery of vocation and the rediscovery of interfaith understanding in Lutheran higher education, arguing that previously under-emphasized aspects of the Lutheran tradition point us to interfaith work and that an authentic Lutheran college or university will make interfaith understanding a feature of its mission.
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Article
Dual Citizenship: Reflections on Educating Citizens at Augsburg College
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Pribbenow argues that the vocation of Augsburg College is to educate “dual citizens”—those able to live within the messiness of common work rather than resolve every tension once and for all. Drawing on John Courtney Murray on democracy as “the intersection of conspiracies,” Bill Moyers, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Stephen Carter, and the Augsburg vision statement “We believe we are called to serve our neighbor,” he names four common commitments and five principles of civic education that ground Augsburg’s incarnational mission in its city neighborhood.