Vocare: A Spiritual Practice for the Spaces Between

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

Colleen Windham-Hughes

Windham-Hughes introduces the 2023 VLHE conference theme of educator flourishing, drawing on Dr. Monica Smith’s plenary challenge — “How can we flourish if only some are centered and others are at the margins?” — and invites readers to ground themselves in Us/We, the cover art by Augustana graduate William Hatchet, and join the conversation.

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.

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: Navigating Affirmative Action, DEI Policies, and Lutheran Vocational Identity

Lamont Anthony Wells

No. 59 · Spring 2024

Wells surveys the converging pressures on NECU institutions — the unsettled landscape of affirmative action, political and academic scrutiny of DEI work, and the preservation of distinctively Lutheran vocational identity — and previews how the issue draws on affirmative practices, sociological viewpoints, and theological responses to navigate a path forward.

Review of Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education

Tom Christenson

No. 20 · Fall 2004

Christenson reviews Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans, 2004), edited by C.W. Joldersma and G.G. Stronks. After recounting his own early prejudice against Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and his subsequent conversion through Art in Action, he focuses on two threads: Wolterstorff’s expansive reading of shalom—not merely peace but justice, community, communal responsibility, and delight—as the overall goal of Christian collegiate education, and the influence of Abraham Kuyper’s claim of “privileged cognitive access” for Christian inquirers, which Wolterstorff demonstrates rather than declares.

"The Earth is the Lord's And the Fullness Thereof": Six Theses Regarding Global Education at the Colleges of the Church

Christopher M. Thomforde

No. 18 · Fall 2003

Thomforde surveys the breadth of global education across ELCA colleges—Susquehanna, Bethany, St. Olaf, Luther’s international students, Concordia’s language villages—and then frames its future around six theses: global education is a theological enterprise that teaches the First Commandment through dialog, wonder, and disillusionment; it necessitates coming to terms with “the stranger” and “hospitality” (drawing on Diana Eck); it is in, for, and against the world; it nurtures vocation and forms L. DeAne Lagerquist’s “cosmopolitan citizens”; it requires sympathetic engagement of faculty, staff, and administration in the spirit of pioneers like Ansgar Sovik; and it calls the ELCA colleges to exercise the gift of administration to bring greater clarity and collective coordination to the portfolio of programs offered across the twenty-eight institutions.

VLHE—Wednesday Morning Sacred Pause

Ann Rosendale

No. 62 · Fall 2025

8 min audio

Rosendale draws on Esther 4:14 and the Lutheran practice of holding death and resurrection together — with “and” as the hardest word — to argue that the calling of Lutheran higher education for “just such a time as this” requires us to remember and name out loud that ours are places where God is at work.

Diversity, Integrity, and Lutheran Colleges

Florence D. Amamoto

No. 8 · Winter 2000

Amamoto—a sansei Jodo Shin Shu Buddhist who is “an inside outsider” at Gustavus Adolphus—argues that diversity and integrity belong together in Lutheran higher education, perhaps in a way unmatched by other church-related traditions. She affirms the importance of Gustavus’s 60% Lutheran student body and vibrant Christ Chapel under Richard Elvee and Brian Johnson while warning that numbers and chapel are not enough, draws on Tom Christenson, Patricia Gurin, Sylvia Hurtado, Anthony Carnevale, Martha Nussbaum, W. E. B. DuBois (the deaths of Matthew Shepard and Isaiah Shoels), Richard Hughes’s reading of finitum capax infiniti, Richard Solberg, and Mark Schwehn’s mutual hospitality model, and concludes that the real enemy is not diversity but indifference—and that Lutheran finitude grounds a theological commitment to keeping diversity and identity in creative conversation.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 10 · Fall 2000

Selbyg explains that, while Intersections usually publishes papers from the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conferences, this issue gathers presentations from a St. Olaf 125th-anniversary conference—a companion to the volume Called to Serve edited by Pamela Schwandt—because the theology and educational perspectives behind them apply to any Lutheran college and clarify what makes ELCA church-related colleges excellent institutions for students of any faith.