From the Editor: So That We, Too, May Flourish

Maintaining Our Lutheran Identity: A Source of Strength

Lamont Anthony Wells

Wells reflects on the well-being of staff, faculty, and administration in Lutheran higher education across four pillars — rest, creativity and innovation, religious diversity and pluralism, and the preservation of Lutheran identity — and addresses the painful reality of Finlandia University’s closure as a reminder of the network’s shared mission.

A Lutheran Call for Educator Flourishing

Krista E. Hughes

Hughes argues that without educator flourishing there is no student flourishing, traces how an exploitative “passion tax” can distort vocation, and offers seven Lutheran “third-way” value pairings — including Metrics/Grace, Efficiency/Kairos, and DEI/Priesthood of All Believers — to reframe institutional success at NECU campuses.

Do One Thing: Academic Vocation in the Age of Burnout

Jonathan Malesic

Malesic draws on Oliver Burkeman’s 4,000 Weeks and Søren Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing to argue that academic burnout is fundamentally institutional — a widening gap between mission ideals and working conditions — and urges colleges to resist “projectitis” by focusing on the one thing that matters most.

Cultivating Staff Flourishing in Lutheran Higher Education: A Framework for Advocacy and Engagement

Laree Winer

Winer narrates her own “love affair” with Lutheran Higher Education to argue that the heart of the tradition — vocation, de-emphasized hierarchy, and shared humanity — equips NECU institutions to advocate for staff flourishing through data collection, professional development, and ongoing relational commitment.

Staff Governance at St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN

Don Ezra Cruz Plemons

Cruz Plemons describes how staff at St. Olaf, in the wake of a decade of difficult events, have built a three-year, glacier-paced effort toward a Staff Governance model — through affinity groups, the Council for Equity and Inclusion, and the Task Force to Confront Structural Racism — that gives staff a voice alongside faculty and students.

Vocare: A Spiritual Practice for the Spaces Between

Charlene Rachuy Cox

Cox introduces Vocare, a six-word spiritual practice developed through the Nourishing Vocation Project at St. Olaf, that uses the acronym V-O-C-A-R-E to help individuals and communities honor the spaces “between no longer and not yet” and discern their callings for the common good.

The Importance of Connection

Alex Piedras

Piedras reflects on the 2023 “So that We, Too, May Flourish” Conference at Augsburg as a refreshing space for a weary DEI advocate — surfacing burnout, the Talking Circle on Indigenous Issues, and Dr. Monica Smith’s Racial Healing Circle as opportunities to recharge the soul and build authentic connections for the long journey.

“A Decolonizing Conversation”: Indigenous Engagement at Luther College at the University of Regina

Marc Jerry, Sarah Dymund

Jerry and Dymund describe Luther College at the University of Regina’s response to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission — Land Acknowledgments, a Starblanket ceremony, the Project of Heart, an Elder in Residence, and the unedited video conversation with Elder Lorna Standingready that anchored their 2023 VLHE keynote.

Beyond Deep Gladness: Coming to Terms with Vocations We Don’t Choose

Deanna Thompson

Thompson, living with incurable cancer, expands Frederick Buechner’s definition of vocation to make room for deep sadness — drawing on Arthur Frank, Shelly Rambo, Beverly Wallace, and Ross Gay to argue that practices of lament, including the public lament of Friday Flowers at St. Olaf, open space for gladness, joy, and even flourishing to emerge.

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.

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.

From the Editor

Colleen Windham-Hughes

No. 61 · Spring 2025

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Lutheran Identity, Academic Integrity, and Religious Diversity

Storm Bailey

No. 25 · Spring 2007

Bailey argues that one might rightly say of a college “that’s a pretty good school because it’s religious,” defending the proposition under three headings: academic and curricular virtues, free inquiry, and religious diversity. Drawing on Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden, Richard Hughes on the Lutheran tradition’s “most potent theological resources” for the life of the mind, Parker Palmer, Lendol Calder, Mill’s On Liberty, Newman’s Idea of a University, and the AAUP’s 1940 Statement, he proposes a “critical mass” alternative in which the Lutheran commitment to truth-seeking and self-critique itself requires—rather than tolerates—a religiously diverse faculty whose opposing voices are needed for the mission to flourish.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 20 · Fall 2004

Selbyg reports that during 2004 a task force appointed by the ELCA Division for Church in Society has been laying the groundwork for a Social Statement on Education, with a draft to be debated in congregations and educational forums in 2006 and considered for adoption at the 2007 Churchwide Assembly. He urges Lutheran educators to obtain and study the new Task Force study document from the Division for Church in Society and submit their reactions so that the drafters know what those with ties to Lutheran educational institutions think is important.

Lutheran Tradition: Five Continuing Themes

Walter R. Bouman

No. 2 · Winter 1997

Bouman of Trinity Lutheran Seminary identifies five themes central to the Lutheran theological tradition (understood through Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of tradition as “an historically extended, socially embodied argument”): biblical (a non-oppressive authority for the Bible rooted in the gospel rather than in scholastic inerrancy, against the backdrop of Luther’s 1517 challenge to Tetzel and the post-Enlightenment marginalization of theology); catholic (continuity with the Book of Concord and the three ancient creeds, with Luther’s “Christology from below” recovering a Jewish rather than Hellenistic understanding of God, revived by Tillich, Pannenberg, Forde, and Jenson); evangelical (justification by faith as the answer to mortality’s radical question); sacramental (Word, Eucharist, and Baptism as Christ’s presence from the future of God’s consummated Reign); and world-affirming (creation as gift, vocation as God’s work in every calling, and stewardship of the ecological crisis).

Team Culture is Key to Success: Learning from Student-Athletes

Colleen Windham-Hughes

No. 59 · Spring 2024

On a December weekend in “Championship City” Salem, Virginia, both California Lutheran’s Women’s Soccer Team and St. Olaf College’s Men’s Soccer Team won NCAA Division III national titles. Windham-Hughes talks with coaches, faculty mentors, and student-athletes about how off-the-field team culture — built on trust, relationships, and shared why — translates onto the pitch and into liberal arts and sciences education.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

No. 18 · Fall 2003

Christenson draws on a ten-year alumni survey at Capital University showing that students most often credit practica, internships, travel-study, and service-learning—not classroom hours—as the places they best learned the university’s stated outcomes, and introduces this issue’s papers from the Summer 2003 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference on education and global outreach.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 19 · Summer 2004

Selbyg notes that while the primary source of articles for Intersections is the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, this issue draws on participants in the Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education, whose Lutheran Brotherhood and Lilly Endowment grants have been exhausted but which has been continued through DHES, the colleges, and especially St. Olaf’s release of DeAne Lagerquist to direct it. He draws attention to editor Tom Christenson’s new book The Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education (Augsburg Fortress).