As someone who works at my own alma mater, I’ve spent much time thinking about what it means to call this place “home.” As a young woman from a small, rural community in Nebraska, moving to a small town in Kansas didn’t feel like a huge stretch. In fact, I remember telling people that was something that drew me here. By student population, Bethany College was about the same size as my high school at the time. I was excited to be 3 hours away from home and in a different state, knowing I could feel at home here. Although I’m not Swedish, I look much like some of the first students at this institution as a white, Lutheran, farm kid.
While there was certainly great diversity represented when I was a student, that only accelerated over the 8 years I was away following graduation. In this community, we know the story of our founding well. Founded in 1881 by white, Swedish Lutheran settlers, Bethany College came into being to provide access to education for the Swedes who immigrated to this place. Very early on, the education of women was also a priority. These are stories Bethany College and the wider Lindsborg community tell through festivals, traditions, and our local culture. As I think about this legacy, I wonder what this means to the students who call this place home today.
One of our own NECU students shared, “I don’t want to feel like I’m being welcomed into your home. I want to feel like this is my home, like I belong.” As students return to our campus this fall, this articulation of belonging has stuck with me.
It is good and lovely that our NECU institutions have been home to so many of us. And…there is room to do some wrestling with our welcoming and the stories we tell. What do these Swedish, Lutheran, immigrant roots mean for our students who come from 38 states and 21 countries, who represent 35 faith traditions and a wide breadth of ethnic and cultural diversity? At Bethany, we’ve begun to think about these questions, but these experiences aren’t yet part of our institutional story.
Dr. Mindy Makant (Lenoir-Rhyne University) was on campus recently leading some vocational reflection with faculty and staff. While she invited us to think about our vocational stories, she shared, “We don’t have a choice about the story of the past, but we do get to decide how we tell that story forward.” We get to choose how who we have been shapes and informs who God is calling us to be.
By telling these stories forward, claiming them, and living them, we can decide to make space for our students in their fullness. By doing so, we are celebrating them and making space for their stories, too.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes welcomes newcomers and seasoned colleagues to the conversation, lifts up Mary Elise Lowe’s three Lutheran “whys” for educational access, and commends Rev. Jen Rude’s “Sacred Pause” practice as a way to humanize one another and make 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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Article
Building an Interfaith Bridge
Belle Michael
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Drawing on the holiday of Shavuot, the Book of Ruth, and Martin Buber’s I-Thou, Rabbi Belle Michael picks up Patel’s bridge metaphor and identifies three building blocks for it: experiences with people of different ethnic and religious groups, genuine and long-lasting relationships, and the holy curiosity to ask the questions we are otherwise afraid to ask.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Christenson explains that this issue breaks from the first two issues’ single-focus pattern to feature three principal papers on the environment, the education of desire, and hiring and personnel policies, plus two poems and a piece of reflective bemusement. He then commends George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford, 1997) and challenges Lutheran scholars to articulate how the particulars of their faith inform their scholarship—in conversation with Calvinist work like Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and Art in Action—rather than remaining silently complicit in the view that faith has no place in the academy.
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Article
ELCA Social Teaching for the Classroom?
Roger A. Willer
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Willer argues that the body of ELCA social teaching, taken as a whole, constitutes an actual social ethic — relatively comprehensive, responsibly consistent, and remarkably cogent — whose mode of responsibility ethics commends it as a classroom resource for any discipline that wrestles with moral questions.
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Article
What Does Ethical Leadership in a Changing World Require?
Kristina Frugé
No. 62 · Fall 2025
Frugé argues that ethical leadership in a changing — perhaps ending — world means cultivating trustworthy communities through patient, co-created relationship work, drawing on her experience stewarding the writing community behind Hungry for Hope: Letters to the Church from Young Adults.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 32 · Spring 2010
Wilhelm invites readers to enjoy or revisit the presentations from the 2009 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference, then reflects on the Higher Learning Commission’s denial of Dana College’s request to transfer accreditation to a for-profit purchaser—an event that effectively ended Dana’s sale and prompted ELCA colleges and universities to welcome Dana students and faculty—and argues that the irreversible entry of for-profit operators into liberal arts education gives the Lutheran community further reason to continue the conversation about the vocation of a Lutheran college.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Wilhelm bids farewell to Robert D. Haak, who is leaving the editorship of Intersections and the Augustana College Center for Vocational Reflection for a chief-academic-officer post at Hiram College in Ohio, and welcomes Jason A. Mahn as the incoming editor. He celebrates Haak’s tireless work to integrate the Lutheran concept of vocation into the practices and rhetoric of Augustana and ELCA higher education through six years of Intersections, and frames the journal as a vital tool for sustaining the conversation about education in a Lutheran key—even at colleges and universities where most students, faculty, and staff are not Lutheran themselves.