“Duc. Duc. Goose.” My point is not about animals or the children’s game, it’s about the “duc” in “education” and “seduction” because it turns out to be the same “duc” from the Latin ducere, to lead.
Education is the key note of our charism–the drawing out or leading out of learners to lead according to their calling and vocation.
Seduction is our kryptonite, our Achilles’ heel, the flip side of our charism because it’s the same power turned away. In other words, our considerable powers and giftedness, steered in the wrong direction, may not promote the life of the world God loves.
I can see two broad paths of seduction today, and they’re not all that different from dangers Martin Luther observed in his day. One path of seduction is to be taken in by the life of the world and particularly human delights. This path sets the world/creation over or above the creator and makes us greedy for its pleasures. The second path denies the world and deprives us of receiving it as a gift. This is the path of judgment and condemnation–a kind of No to the world.
To give no attention to the present or to deny and negate it is to say it has no meaning. Faced with suffering, one must not compound the suffering by searching for hidden meanings or by condemning all life as beyond meaning. Instead, through education we are freed to tell the truth about suffering, to proclaim its meaninglessness and senselessness, and to embrace whatever meaning could be fashioned with the truth about suffering as the starting point.
Right now there’s no denying that the world we inherited and have contributed to building is crumbling. We see it in decay and destruction, and we feel this is the end of the world. It is—as we know it. And some issues really are as urgent as we think they are—namely climate change and the human suffering that goes with it. Yet much of what we wring our hands over is not the end of the world as such. We’ve become so anesthetized to our own creativity, we cannot remember the call to act for the life of the world God loves. Two big threats right now are cessation of effort and the limited agency of condemnation—because meaning is stripped or the leader is gone or we do not like the one we have. If we give up, the world does not stop.
We must not lend our energies to No-saying forces that destroy the planet, ignore the poor, and shun our neighbors. Saying Yes to the world when the world is crumbling looks foolish and ignorant. Showing up to affirm one another and confess, “I don’t know” is vulnerable and risky, especially when education is our calling.
“[A]sk any person, at any of our NECU institutions, and they are doing it. They’ll tell you a story about how their institution is dying and how it is finding new ways to live. How their students are thriving and they are floundering.” Speakers/contributors such as Rev. Ann Rosendale, quoted here, are finding ways to tell the truth of our current moment and summon Yes-saying energies of hope and world-building efforts. These yesses make third spaces of trustworthy communities, built on the vulnerability and resilience of people prepared to show up, be present, and do the work. As Ann reminds us, “The ‘and’ is the hardest part.”
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Lamont Anthony Wells
5 min audio
Wells frames the issue as a record of the 2025 VLHE Conference at Augsburg under the theme “Ethical Leadership in a Changing World,” arguing that vocation is never solitary but a collective, public witness of ethical formation, theology and care, flourishing and belonging, and leadership rooted in God’s grace.
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Article
Wake Up Running! A Call to Ethical Leaders in Quest of Democratic Space
Walter Earl Fluker
44 min audio
Abridged from his VLHE keynote, Fluker draws on Habakkuk and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower to call a new generation of ethical leaders to “wake up running” toward democratic futures, packing their runaway bags with love-filled-justice, grace-filled-empathy, and hope-filled-resiliency for the soul-filled work the moment requires.
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Article
Building a Third Space in the Age of AI: A Conversation with Dr. Walter Earl Fluker
Elizabeth Kubek
11 min audio
Prompted by AI chatbots being marketed to students as a safer alternative to messy human relationships, Kubek interviews Fluker on how Howard Thurman’s vision of common consciousness, somaesthetics, and nature-rooted learning offers educators a “third space” alternative to AI’s hall of mirrors.
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Article
Ethical Leadership: Rooted, Open, Generative, and Mindful
John Arthur Nunes
25 min audio
As he prepares to teach an Ethical Leadership First Year Seminar at California Lutheran, Nunes organizes his pedagogy around three mutually-reinforcing “turns” — inward, outward, and intellectual — grounded in Luther’s mandatum dei and larvae dei, Bonhoeffer’s estates, and Howard Thurman’s call to hear “the sound of the genuine” in oneself.
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Article
Ethical Leadership for a Changing World: A Shared Calling from Cradle to Career
Cory Newman, Janelle Rozek Hooper
5 min audio
Hooper and Newman recount how an ELCA Barna survey on early childhood education sparked the realization at VLHE 2025 that ELCA colleges and the 1,200 Lutheran schools and early learning centers share identical challenges — and an untapped potential to form ethical leaders across the full educational continuum from cradle to career.
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Article
What is Required of You?: Higher Education Leadership in a Moral Key
Paul C. Pribbenow
15 min audio
Drawing on Micah 6:8 and Stephen Carter’s “etiquette of democracy,” Pribbenow describes the three things Augsburg requires of every incoming student — show up, pay attention, and do the work — as a democratic social ethic that prepares students for engaged citizenship in a fractured public life.
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Article
What Does Ethical Leadership in a Changing World Require?
Kristina Frugé
5 min audio
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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Article
Fostering Moral Imagination and Inclusivity: The Role of Ethical Leadership in ELCA Colleges and Universities Amid Societal Challenges
Lamont Anthony Wells
12 min audio
Wells argues that “moral imagination” — the capacity to envision ethical alternatives, empathize across difference, and respond creatively to injustice — is the heart of ethical leadership in NECU institutions, and that anchoring leadership in this principle positions Lutheran higher education to cultivate socially responsible citizens.
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Reflection
VLHE—Wednesday Morning Sacred Pause
Ann Rosendale
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.
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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. 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
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 60 · Fall 2024
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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Article
Education as a Christian (Lutheran) Calling
Tom Christenson
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Christenson opens with an imaginative reconstruction of early Christian communities as radically egalitarian, pacifist, communitarian gatherings within the Roman Empire and argues that such communities are natural homes for the educational vocation. Naming two temptations for contemporary Christian higher education—the parochial Bible school and “Generic U”—he uses his friend Sig Rauspern’s tree metaphor to insist that a university is Christian in its trunk and roots rather than in grafted-on branches. Drawing on Wendell Berry, Jacob Bronowski, Walter Wink, Douglas John Hall, and his own Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education, he names faithful criticism, engaged suspiciousness, simul justus et peccator, and a fallible, love-related Lutheran epistemology as the particular gifts Lutherans bring to the Christian educational calling.
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Article
Committed to Paradox
Caryn Riswold
No. 60 · Fall 2024
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
Putting the Kind Back in Human
Sarah Ciavarri
No. 48 · Fall 2018
Drawing on Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability and Edwin Friedman’s family systems theory, Ciavarri distinguishes “kind” from “nice” and argues that courageous, vulnerable, and playful truth-telling — rather than yelling louder or trading pithy memes — is the path back to one another and to our common humanity.
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Reflection
Gifty Arthur
Gifty Arthur
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Reading John 10:3 as a Ghanaian Christian student at Luther College, Arthur reflects on how Luther’s Journey Conversations have deepened her own spirituality precisely by giving room for students to share the personal experiences and beliefs at the center of their own traditions.
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Article
Lutheran Heritage Across the Curriculum: Reflections from a Faculty/Staff Development Seminar
Cynthia Bane, Fred Waldstein, Kathryn A. Kleinhans, Penni Pier
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Four Wartburg College colleagues share fruits of the 2006 Lilly-funded “Discovering and Claiming Our Callings” faculty/staff development seminar in Wittenberg, Eisenach, and Neuendettelsau. Kleinhans frames the curriculum and books used; Bane (psychology) finds Lutheran convictions about the value of humans, the affirmation of creation, and the universality of sin congruent with her discipline; Pier (communication arts) reads Luther as a model of dialectical rhetoric that gives educators permission to challenge students with uncomfortable ideas; and Waldstein (political science) reflects on the paradox of humility and self-confidence in Luther and on the Luther-Melanchthon collaboration as a model for the seminar group’s own work.
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Article
Sustaining Sustainability
Baird Tipson
No. 36 · Fall 2012
Tipson—former Provost of Gettysburg College, President of Wittenberg University, and President of Washington College—reads Romans 12:2 (“be not conformed to this world…”) against Victor Ferrall’s Liberal Arts at the Brink and the contemporary financial reality of small Lutheran colleges. He tells three case-study stories from Washington College’s Center for the Environment and Society—the Chino Farms partnership, the Chesapeake Semester, and the acquisition of the work boat Callinectes—to show how presidents must engage “the world” to secure resources for sustainability work without being conformed to it.