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
5 min audio
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
22 min audio
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
9 min audio
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
8 min audio
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 Publisher
James M. Unglaube
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Unglaube welcomes readers to the inaugural issue of Intersections, crediting Editor Tom Christenson and Capital University, and announces the new annual Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference whose continuing dialogue the journal exists to enhance. He gives thanks to the Lilly Endowment for a sizable grant supporting the 1996 conference, campus dialogues, and the birth of the publication.
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Article
Vocare: A Spiritual Practice for the Spaces Between
Charlene Rachuy Cox
No. 58 · Fall 2023
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.
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Article
A Lutheran Call for Educator Flourishing
Krista E. Hughes
No. 58 · Fall 2023
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.
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Article
Calling Economists
Lynn Hunnicutt
No. 37 · Spring 2013
Reading Luther’s Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved alongside Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, Hunnicutt asks whether economists, too, can be saved—and whether economics can host a serious conversation about vocation. She traces her own move from Utah State to Pacific Lutheran University and its Wild Hope Center for Vocation, and turns to Deirdre McCloskey and George DeMartino as economists whose work makes room for vocation and the common good within the discipline.
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Response
A Call for Creative Education
Wendy McCredie
No. 3 · Summer 1997
McCredie of Texas Lutheran responds to Reichenbach by reframing the four ideas embedded in his claim that “the entire college community should be knowledgeably committed to the college’s mission”—community, knowledge, commitment, mission—and argues that the Lutheran tradition’s unwillingness to be separate from the world should lead us to educate the public about the Lutheran tradition rather than interrogate prospective employees about their faith. She questions whether agreement on “Christian values” is possible (or even Lutheran), and reads Reichenbach’s “creative education” as the dialectical tension between gospel and law, God’s love and our human limits, that members of communities related to the Lutheran church are uniquely positioned to inhabit.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Wilhelm introduces essays from the 2008 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference held at Luther College under the theme “Educating for Responsible Citizenship,” previewing contributions from Paul Pribbenow on dual citizenship at Augsburg, Wanda Deifelt on Luther College’s engagement with civic vocation, Jose Marichal on the promise and peril of digital citizenship, and Arne Selbyg on his three experiences of being educated for citizenship.