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.

From the Publisher: Reflections on the 2024 Vocational Leaders in Higher Education Conference

Lamont Anthony Wells

No. 60 · Fall 2024

Wells reflects on the 2024 VLHE Conference theme — “Educational Access: Lutheran Roots, Contemporary Practices” — tracing today’s commitment to inclusivity back to Martin Luther’s radical 16th-century insistence that both boys and girls be educated, and previews NECU’s expanded engagement of student leaders alongside faculty and administrators.

Integrity and Fragmentation: Can the Lutheran Center Hold?

Robert Benne

No. 8 · Winter 2000

Benne answers the conference’s question pessimistically—“the Lutheran center cannot hold in many, if not most of our colleges, because it was never there in an articulated form in the first place”—and distinguishes “Christ of culture” colleges like the Midland Lutheran of his youth (Lutheran by ethno-religious ethos rather than by articulated theology) from James Burtchaell’s “confessional colleges” that operated from a theologically distilled Lutheran humanism. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre and Mark Schwehn’s First Things essay on Christian universities, he sketches what a Lutheran center looks like (unity, universality, integrity, a tradition of thought) and how its distortion—reducing the Gospel to justification and ceding everything else to autonomous reason—splits Christ and culture as dangerously as the German church separated Gospel and politics. For colleges that have lost their center, he proposes an “intentional, robust pluralism” that guarantees a Lutheran voice in every department and an “affirmative action for Christians” in hiring.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 51 · Spring 2020

Wilhelm frames the issue by tracing how Lutheran educational ideals — once a primary source of contemporary higher education — were masked in the United States, and introduces a NECU initiative that uses the case of business ethics to explore Lutheran social teaching as an academic resource.

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).

Freedom, Humor, and Community: A Lutheran Vision for Higher Education

Darrell Jodock

No. 13 · Winter 2002

Jodock’s inaugural lecture for the Bernhardson chair at Gustavus Adolphus develops three interlocking themes drawn from the Lutheran tradition as a deeper grounding for the liberal arts college than contemporary American assumptions. A sense of humor rests on Luther’s discovery that God takes the initiative—Luther could call himself a beggar, joke about the epistle of James, and credit Wittenberg beer for the Reformation—and underwrites the freedom of inquiry that John Updike traces to Grace Lutheran Sunday School in Shillington. Community, grounded in Augsburg Confession VII and Luther’s 1524 letter to the German city councils, makes the college a community of discourse pursuing wisdom rather than “the same old blockheads.” Freedom is both “freedom from” and “freedom for,” illustrated by Nechama Tec’s Polish Holocaust rescuers and by Jodock’s Holocaust-class corporate role-play in which students voted to build a factory in a death camp rather than risk losing their board seats—a vivid case for educating toward “a passion for justice.”

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.