I consider myself bad at change, yet I believe in the power of transformation.
I have undergone many transformations in my life. I moved from a Japanese-speaking preschool to an English kindergarten at age 5. My parents divorced when I was 11. I moved from Japan to the US, alone, at 18. I came out as non-binary and gay at 19. Each time, there was a period of intense discomfort before a dramatic transformation in how I understood myself and more importantly, in how I saw others.
There is a natural human instinct to live in the moment. I often forget that I have had a storied past, and will likely have a storied future. We tend to see ourselves as monolithic, as though the current version of ourselves was always who we were and who we will always be.
“We tend to see ourselves as monolithic, as though the current version of ourselves was always who we were and who we will always be. This is false.”
This is false. All of us have undergone dramatic (and not-so-dramatic) changes throughout our lives. Literature abounds with stories of transformation: the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, personal accounts of Born-again Christians; the archetypal hero’s journey ends with the hero transformed.
Of course, transformation doesn’t mean throwing everything out; it just means removing what is unnecessary, much like smelting metal from ore. Many of us have been hurt, and we have built trauma responses as armor against that pain. When we become free from the hurt, that armor can begin to get in the way of our lives and our relationships. It can be difficult and scary, but shedding that armor is an important part of the healing process.
Cultural and institutional reform is much the same. In any institution, there is something about it that holds good, or it would not survive. The work of reformation is discarding what has become no longer useful, while keeping that which still holds value.
Change is uncomfortable. Biologically, a change in our environment requires us to expend resources to adapt, and so we have evolved to shy away from anything that might cause change. That armor of personal inertia is the first obstacle to transformation. Here is where I am drawn to an idea I have encountered at Cal Lutheran about living with—and engaging—that discomfort; many people simply turn away from that discomfort, suppressing it in order to remain in the comfort of familiarity. But without engaging that discomfort, it becomes much harder to change for the better.
“The work of reformation is discarding what has become no longer useful, while keeping that which still holds value.”
And here I must add: not all change is a life-changing, revelatory experience. Most change is slow and unnoticed. It can be for the better, or for the worse. But that is also the most important kind of change, as it is the kind that shapes us the most. The question then becomes how we can shape that change to become closer to the people we want to be.
For me, forgiveness also begins with this belief. I have been hurt by many of the people in my life. But as long as I can see them working to improve themselves, then I can believe that the person they are becoming will be better than the person they were when they hurt me.
My thoughts have been shaped by a class I am taking on the criminal justice system; in society we see incarcerated people as criminals, and much of the system is built on the precept that they will always be criminals. We do not try to transform them for the better, or to reintegrate them back into society. In the class, we try to press into the question of what it means to be human, and whether the systems of society seek to dehumanize people. I think that our institutions should allow us to become more human—more empathetic and connected to each other, more knowledgeable and with agency to live our lives the way we want to.
If we all endeavor to become the most human that we can be, then the work of transformation that begins in each of us will be reflected in our institutions as well.
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Editorial
From the Editor: Vocation as Action in the Affirmative
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes frames vocation as practicing “at the borders of our incompetence” — every small yes to the callings we experience, every effort made in the direction of life, is action in the affirmative — and previews the issue’s essays on diversity, transformation, AI, championship team culture, and dreaming big within and beyond our limitations.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Navigating Affirmative Action, DEI Policies, and Lutheran Vocational Identity
Lamont Anthony Wells
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.
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Article
Forming the Division for Access, Equity & Belonging at Susquehanna University
Amy Davis, Dena Salerno, María L. O. Muñoz, Nina Mandel, Scott Kershner
Five Susquehanna University colleagues trace the institution’s 166-year arc from a Missionary Institute founded to remove barriers to education through the formation of a new Division for Access, Equity & Belonging in 2023, arguing that access rooted in Lutheran origins must continue to drive policy revision, infrastructure, and belonging for minoritized communities today.
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Article
On Recruiting Diverse Students, Rooted in Mission
Eric Rowell, Jason A. Mahn
Jason Mahn interviews Eric Rowell, Assistant Director of Admissions and Diversity Outreach at Augustana College, about how recruiting students from a wide variety of backgrounds — rooted in Augustana’s Lutheran commitment to vocation and educating across difference — remains essentially unchanged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions on affirmative action.
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Article
What Our Lutheran Heritage Entails for Lutheran Colleges and Affirmative Action
Mark Ellingsen
Ellingsen argues that the Lutheran Two-Kingdom Ethic — far from leading to political reaction — supports the church-relatedness of ELCA colleges and obligates them to keep affirmative action alive, even reading a Chief Justice Roberts “loophole” in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as an open door for Black community partnerships, ELCA congregations, and Lutheran colleges to act in the affirmative.
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Article
The Critical Role of Lutheran Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Jose Marichal, Maya Goehner, Tyler Haug
A Cal Lutheran political science professor and two of his students draw on Rooted and Open to argue that Lutheran higher education is uniquely positioned to stake out a middle path between AI utopianism and AI doom — cultivating a “healthy sense of human limit,” resisting data colonialism, and forming students to see the neighbor rather than the enemy as the world becomes increasingly synthetic.
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Article
Team Culture is Key to Success: Learning from Student-Athletes
Colleen Windham-Hughes
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.
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Article
Low-Hanging Fruit, Moonshots, and Coffee: Dreaming Big Within and Beyond Our Limitations
Jeremy Myers
Myers shares the process used by Augsburg’s Christensen Center for Vocation to help teams move from a shared experience to next steps — an Ignatian-rooted Awareness Examen followed by naming low-hanging fruit, moonshots, and the coffee conversations that build the coalition to make it all happen.
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Article
Why Interfaith Understanding is Integral to the Lutheran Tradition
Jason A. Mahn
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Mahn returns to the root of the Lutheran tradition — church, theology, and pedagogy — to argue that interfaith encounter is not the vanishing point of Lutheran identity but central to it, beginning with confession of Luther’s anti-Judaic legacy, working through the typology of exclusivism / inclusivism / pluralism, and showing how the kenotic Christ and the theologian of the cross open Lutherans to authentic encounter with religious others.
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Article
Uneasy Partners? Religion and Academics
Storm Bailey
No. 11 · Spring 2001
Bailey, a philosopher at Luther College, takes up the reflex of describing church-related colleges as “pretty good in spite of the religion” and argues instead that religious commitment serves academic goals on three fronts: service as central academic purpose (Richard Hughes on Mennonite colleges in Models of Christian Higher Education), educational community (Plato’s dialogues, Parker Palmer, and Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden), and integration of knowledge across disciplines against Nelson and Watt’s “entrepreneurial disciplinarity.” He then defends academic freedom on Christian grounds by drawing on Mill’s On Liberty argument from fallibilism, the centrality of epistemic weakness in the Christian tradition, and Wolterstorff’s claim that to infringe academic freedom is to desecrate an image of God—making personal and institutional religious commitment a foundation, not a foe, of the liberal academic ideal.
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Response
“My Wife, We Have Not Come to the End of All Our Trials, but a Measureless Labor Yet”: The Lutheran Argument in Colleges
Steven Paulson
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Paulson of Concordia College responds to Bouman by invoking Penelope’s unreasonable patience for Odysseus and asking whether Bouman’s five “principles” deliver the “continuities of conflict” that MacIntyre’s account of a living tradition demands. He argues that the proper Lutheran “continuity of conflict” is the praxis of proclamation—Christ crucified as “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles”—which is given outside the institution’s walls and which colleges and universities, as socially embodied arguments, “can’t like” because it places truth beyond their control. The Lutheran problem, he concludes, is not the Enlightenment or Post-Modernism but the “old Adam,” the Odysseus still unsure of his identity.
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Article
Women Presidents in Higher Education: How They Experience Their Calling
Aimee Goldschmidt, Gary McLean, Katherine A. Tunheim
No. 42 · Fall 2015
Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifteen women college presidents and a transformative-learning-theory framework, Tunheim, McLean, and Goldschmidt trace a three-stage journey — identifying, interpreting, and pursuing the call — and ask what the language of vocation contributes to the preparation and mentoring of women leaders in higher education.
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Book Review
In Search of a Calling: The College's Role in Shaping Identity
Karla G. Bohmbach
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Bohmbach reviews Thomas O. Buford’s In Search of a Calling: The College’s Role in Shaping Identity (Mercer University Press, 1995), which diagnoses a meaning-crisis among college students and traces two historical aspects of “calling”: the biblical, communitarian aspect rooted in the Hebrew Bible and the practical, individualistic aspect rooted in the Renaissance. She praises Buford’s reconstruction of imago dei as imagination rather than copy of God’s rationality, his broad disciplinary range (biblical studies, theology, educational psychology, business management), and his identification of the tension between freedom and limitation as the field of calling. She is sharply critical, however, of his final chapter’s wariness of canon-revisionists and multiculturalists, his caricature of “special-interest groups,” and his presumption of a homogeneous student body—a presumption that, she argues, never matched American college reality and matches it less today.
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Article
An Ecosystem of Democracy
David Thomason
No. 63 · Spring 2026
6 min audio
Thomason argues that faith-based institutions should equip students not to dominate the public sphere with their convictions but to cultivate an “ecosystem of democracy” — pursuing universal values with virtue and tolerance while acknowledging humanity’s incomplete grasp of truth.