Every summer it happens: someone (and often more than one) says, “I finally get what Lutheran higher education is all about!” Some universities send newbies to the summer conference, as a way of accomplishing Lutheran Higher Education 101. Others send seasoned employees who serve in all different kinds of positions and are well-versed in the commitments and practices specific to Lutheran higher ed. Both newcomers and returners enjoy connecting to the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities, meeting people from other campuses to share in stories of familiar struggles and inspiring initiatives.
Whether you have been to a summer conference or not, you are likely to resonate with the encouragement offered in Dr. Mary Elise Lowe’s keynote address (pp. 11-17):
“You are co-creating people. Your work with students reflects God’s ongoing creation. You are justice-seeking people. You see the injustices in our educational system, and in big and small ways, you pursue neighbor justice with and for the students on your campuses. And you are communio people. You value students as individuals and treasure the deep fellowship that exists in your campus community. I hope that these three Lutheran whys will sustain and empower you as you live out your vocations at your own ELCA institution.” [emphasis added]
Committed to vocation at the center of our educational enterprise means holding space for the ongoing unfolding of vocation within the lives of staff, faculty, and administrators, as well as students. The whole idea of vocation is that every person is gifted and skilled AND that each person needs the gifts and skills of others. When you open the widest possible access for all persons to hone and develop their gifts and skills, the community has what it needs for all to flourish.
Our work is by definition aspirational. Opening access never ends, which means there is no finish line and we cannot do it on our own. We must, as Emma Jones, Executive Vice President of Credo, pointed out in her keynote address (pp. 6-10), become ever more trustworthy in our shared work and leadership and build structures that are focused on transparency, capability, reliability, and humanity.
In order to sustain our vocations in higher education, it is important to have opportunities for what Rev. Jen Rude, University Pastor at Pacific Lutheran University, calls “Sacred Pause.” Jen led us in three such sacred pauses, which began with these provocative prompts:
- Share about a memorable or meaningful body of water, maybe connected to where you live
- Describe how you are feeling this morning using weather as a metaphor—as in bright and sunny, eye of a hurricane, sticky humid, etc.
- Share a memorable or meaningful gathering around a table
Try prompting yourself with one of these in a quiet moment of reflection. Better yet, incorporate one of these prompts into a meeting with colleagues or students. Sacred pauses humanize us to ourselves and each other, which makes opening access both easier and more joyful.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Reflections on the 2024 Vocational Leaders in Higher Education Conference
Lamont Anthony Wells
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.
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Article
Access, Accessibility, & Change: A Call for Trustworthy Leadership in Higher Education
Emma Jones
Jones surveys the converging pressures on higher education — cost, the enrollment cliff, shifting demographics, and declining public confidence — and uses Reichheld and Dunlap’s four factors of trust (transparency, capability, reliability, humanity) to call campus leaders to rebuild trustworthy leadership from the inside out.
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Article
Creation, Justice, and Communio: Lutheran Insights Empowering Educational Access
Mary Elise Lowe
In her VLHE keynote, Lowe names three Lutheran commitments — continuing creation, neighbor justice, and communio — as the “why” that empowers ELCA colleges and universities to pursue equitable access for students often left behind by persistence and graduation gaps.
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Article
Committed to Paradox
Caryn Riswold
Riswold lifts up paradox — saint and sinner, lord and servant, Rooted and Open — as a distinctive Lutheran root that lets institutions honor the complicated truth of who their students are and embrace the messy, ever-reforming work of access and accessibility as a theology of the cross.
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Article
2024 VHLE Conference: "Rooting Access" Panel Talking Points
Guy Nave
Nave reads “access” across Deuteronomy 23, Ruth, Isaiah 56, Acts 10, and Matthew 15:21-28 as an ongoing biblical conversation that evolves from exclusion to ever-widening welcome — and presses ELCA institutions to shift their focus from “student readiness” to “institutional readiness.”
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Article
Affirming, Entrusting, and Acting: A Baptismal Grounding of Affirmative Action in Lutheran Higher Education
Peter Carlson Schattauer
Schattauer draws on the Lutheran baptism liturgy — where the gathered assembly publicly affirms what it is for and is entrusted with responsibilities for justice and peace — to argue that NECU institutions create truly inclusive communities by affirming commitments, naming responsibilities, and acting in ways that embody both.
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Reflection
Reflecting on Belonging
Melissa Woeppel
Woeppel, campus pastor at her own alma mater, wrestles with a Bethany student’s plea — “I want to feel like this is my home, like I belong” — and Mindy Makant’s reminder that we don’t choose the story of the past but do choose how we tell it forward, opening space for students from 35 faith traditions to find Lutheran institutions to be their home.
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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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Editorial
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Institutional Focus
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.
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Institutional Focus
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.
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Institutional Focus
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.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 38 · Fall 2013
Mahn reads Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy alongside Larry Rasmussen and Martha Nussbaum to ask how Lutheran schools can articulate the “value added” of vocation without commodifying it, and previews the 2013 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference papers, Patricia Lull’s sermon, and Ann Hill Duin and Eric Childers’ Project DAVID essay that make up the issue.
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Article
Beyond Deep Gladness: Coming to Terms with Vocations We Don’t Choose
Deanna Thompson
No. 58 · Fall 2023
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.
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Article
A College with a Calling: Vocation at Augsburg
Mark D. Tranvik
No. 31 · Winter 2010
Tranvik narrates Augsburg’s decade of deep engagement with vocation—from President William Frame’s 1997 visioning process and the 2002 two-million-dollar Lilly grant for Exploring Our Gifts, through five Lutheran theological principles (vocation includes the whole life, lives for the sake of others, ranks all callings equal, cannot be reduced to ethics, and engages public life), to the Wilder Foundation’s Called for Life assessment and the 2008 founding of the Augsburg Center for Faith and Learning under Dr. Tom Morgan and the Bernhard Christensen Chair held by Dr. David Tiede.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 8 · Winter 2000
Selbyg reflects on the origins of Intersections—begun out of concern that the philosophy and theology behind Lutheran higher education could be lost to retirements and other preoccupations—and credits Paul Dovre of Concordia and Robert Sorensen of the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools as key figures behind the resumption of the debate. He points to three recent books (Ernest Simmons’s Lutheran Higher Education, Paul Contino and David Morgan’s The Lutheran Reader, and Pamela Schwandt’s Called to Serve) and to the new Lutheran Academy for Scholars in Higher Education, and previews the next “Vocation of a Lutheran College” conference at Dana College in August on what differentiates Lutheran colleges within American higher education.
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Article
The Search for a Just Peace in a Globalized World
Munib A. Younan
No. 18 · Fall 2003
Younan, Lutheran Bishop in Jerusalem, grounds Palestinian Christian identity in Incarnation theology and a Lutheran theology of grace and the cross, then surveys the Evangelical movement’s nineteenth-century legacy in the Middle East—the 1864 Arabic Bible, ELCJ schools, women’s ordination, and the Middle East Council of Churches. Engaging Edward Said’s critique of Samuel Huntington, he calls for international and local mutual-recognition agreements (including the Jerusalem Lutheran-Anglican agreement and a Lutheran-Reformed agreement in the Middle East), four marks of interfaith dialogue, and a sharp distinction between Lutheran “Evangelical” identity and the Dispensationalist evangelistic Right whose Israel-Palestine scenarios he names a heresy. He closes by proposing concrete scholarship, faculty exchange, and sabbatical partnerships between U.S. Lutheran colleges and the ELCJ’s churches, schools, and Dar al-Kalima Lutheran Academy.
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Article
Necessary Disruptions: Centering Vocation in the Common Good
Erin VanLaningham
No. 57 · Spring 2023
VanLaningham previews the forthcoming NetVUE volume Called Beyond Our Selves: Vocation and the Common Good, arguing that vocation, common, and good all need to be disrupted and expanded so that students might arrive at a wider sense of individual purpose and collective well-being.