In this issue of Intersections, we are excited to share some of the powerful dialogue and learning that came out of the 2025 Vocation in Lutheran Higher Education Conference (VLHE) hosted by the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities (NECU) and held at Augsburg University.
Convening under the conference theme “Ethical Leadership in a Changing World,” presidents, provosts, faculty, administrators, bishops, chaplains and other leaders from 28 Lutheran colleges and universities joined together to explore and discern together what it means to lead in an age of deep division.
We are reminded that vocation is never a solitary endeavor but a collective one, a public witness into which we are called:
Ethical Formation: “Peace if possible, truth at all costs,” Martin Luther famously wrote. As such, we work to form character and conscience for leadership in social and cultural upheaval.
Theology and Care: Rooted in Lutheran core values, and in solidarity with those from other faiths, the event was infused with an ethic of care that attends to the wholeness of community.
Flourishing and Belonging: Planting vocational seeds with a new generations of learners, diversifying curriculum for a more expansive enrichment, global learning and more—to name just a few were key takeaways from the many workshops.
Leadership and Witness: Drawing from both scholarly and practitioner perspectives, Dr. Walter Fluker and other faculty leaders in NECU called for the work of ethical formation and academic excellence as an expression of faithfulness. NECU leaders joined one another at the conference in witnessing to Lutheran higher education’s renewed relevance and commitment to impact.
The overarching message coming out of this year’s conference is that vocation is a practice that is best cultivated communally. It is strengthened and made clear in conversation, in contemplation and in action that is sometimes bold, often creative and always rooted in God’s grace. Our world is rife with fragmentation and instability, both systemic and existential. In response to these challenges, God is raising up our communities and institutions to be beacons of hope, to tell the truth and to partner in God’s work of making all of God’s people flourish.
At the heart of our theme: “Ethical Leadership in a Changing World” was an understanding that leadership is not simply positional but intrinsically vocational. Lutheran higher education is both a calling and a call to lead well, with humility and with boldness, to discern faithfully in an age of rapid change and to embody justice, equity and love in practice. Ethical leadership, as envisioned and experienced at the conference, was less about checklists of rules and more about the formation of people of care and conscience who would make decisions that are moved by God’s grace, guided by evidence and shaped in response to the brokenness in the world around them.
We hope you will read this issue of Intersections with the spirit of holy listening and creative vision that was modeled at the VLHE Conference. May these pages strengthen your call and renew your commitment to our common ministry of serving, leading and loving.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
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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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 Publisher
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 61 · Spring 2025
5 min audio
Wells introduces So That All May Belong: Lutheran Roots for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice as a theological and institutional articulation of NECU’s commitments, and previews four accompanying essays that frame vocation as a societal responsibility rooted in justice and not solely an individual pursuit.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Reflections on the 2024 Vocational Leaders in Higher Education Conference
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 60 · Fall 2024
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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Editorial
From the Publisher: Navigating Affirmative Action, DEI Policies, and Lutheran Vocational Identity
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 59 · Spring 2024
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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Editorial
Maintaining Our Lutheran Identity: A Source of Strength
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Wells reflects on the well-being of staff, faculty, and administration in Lutheran higher education across four pillars — rest, creativity and innovation, religious diversity and pluralism, and the preservation of Lutheran identity — and addresses the painful reality of Finlandia University’s closure as a reminder of the network’s shared mission.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Introduction and Invitation
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 57 · Spring 2023
Wells introduces himself as the new Executive Director of NECU, succeeding Rev. Dr. Mark Wilhelm, and frames this Spring issue as a passionate response to the crises facing higher education amid threats to academic freedom and the well-being of educators.
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Reflection
Fumbling Toward Integrity: A Sermon on Mark 8:34-38, Pastor Kaj Munk, and Father Maximilian Kolbe
Darrell Jodock
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Preached at the 2007 ELCA Convocation of Teaching Theologians at Lenoir-Rhyne College, Jodock holds up two World War II martyrs—Polish Franciscan Father Maximilian Kolbe, who took the place of a condemned father in Auschwitz’s starvation bunker, and Danish pastor-playwright Kaj Munk, who was shot by the Nazis after helping save 97 percent of Denmark’s Jews—as mirrors for our own priorities. Drawing on the rescuer characteristics identified by Samuel and Pearl Oliner (agency, moral independence, universalistic caring, a history of care-giving) and on Jesus’s words in Mark 8:34-38, Jodock asks how we who routinely opt out at the first sign of opposition might fumble toward integrity in our own time.
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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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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.
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Article
The Face of the Neighbor: An Interview with Four Capital University Faculty About Their Recent Visit to Cuba
Brian Forry Wallace, Michael Yosha, Reg Dyck, Susan Narita
No. 7 · Summer 1999
Four Capital University faculty—political scientist Brian Wallace (returning to Cuba a third time after the 1994 boat lift), English professor Reg Dyck, ESL teacher Susan Narita, and political scientist Michael Yosha—recount their summer 1998 trip with Pastors for Peace, describing Cuban priorities of education, health care, and military (in that order), the cultural richness of Havana from sixteenth-century cloisters to Miramar, the Cuban Foreign Service’s vision of a Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, the counter-productive U.S. embargo (including its effect on kidney dialysis machines), Castro’s 1991 reconciliation with religious communities, and a recurrent image of a little girl named Marguerite singing at a school for amputee and terminally ill children. The interview was conducted by Capital senior Jessica Brown and Tom Christenson.
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Article
Community-Building On Campus and Beyond
Krista E. Hughes
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Hughes describes Newberry College’s effort to build a “culture of community” that mirrors South Carolina’s demographics while reckoning with the institution’s founding ties to slavery — and names the challenges and promising city-college collaborations that shape this ongoing work.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Christenson thanks the departing Jim Unglaube, recommends Ronald A. Wells’s Keeping Faith: Embracing the Tensions in Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans) as both an interesting collection of essays and a model worth imitating at ELCA institutions, previews the issue’s pieces by Richard Hughes, Carl Skrade and Spencer Porter, Gregory Clark, and Karla Bohmbach, and introduces three new features of the journal: “What I Have Learned” (an essay by a senior or emeritus faculty member, inaugurated by Richard Ylvisaker), “Reviews” (initiated by Karla Bohmbach), and a “Bulletin Board” for cross-campus announcements.