“For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”
—Esther 4:14
The book of Esther in the Bible is a story about calling, or ”vocation,” we like to say, at Lutheran colleges and universities. It’s a story about a calling that Esther discovers by understanding herself, understanding the moment, and seizing an opportunity.
In case you’re new to the book of Esther, or need a refresher, here’s a quick synopsis of the story:
Esther, a Jew, has been appointed queen by the King of Persia.
The king’s advisor, Hamaan, is plotting to have every Jew in the empire killed because Esther’s cousin, Mordecai, refuses to bow down and worship Hamaan, and that has left a bad taste in Hamaan’s mouth for all Jews.
Mordecai, knowing that his cousin, now Queen Esther, holds a unique (perhaps even providential) place in the kingdom, convinces Esther that she is the one called to use her influence to save her people from destruction.
Mordecai speaks that famous line to Esther: “Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”
The story has a predictably happy ending. Esther reveals her Jewish identity, and Hamaan’s heinous plot to the King, and Esther and her people are saved.
The title of our conference is “Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education,” which suggests that it is not just individuals, like Esther or you or me who have a vocation; but that institutions, and even whole enterprises; this broad thing called “Lutheran Higher Education,” has a calling.
And perhaps the vocation of Lutheran Higher Education, perhaps the calling of my beloved institution, and yours, is for just such a time as this.
We like to say that no other kind of institution is better positioned for such a time as this. We want to believe that we are the special ones. In the midst of challenges facing enrollment and finances, in the midst of changes in young adults, staffing, technology, educational models, values, the list goes on…perhaps our colleges and universities have been called to and for this very moment.
But what is it in particular that sets our institutions apart, and sets us up for this time and this calling?
We could quote Rooted and Open here, and list all the buzz words: liberal arts, freedom from and for, intellectual humility, service of neighbor, hospitality.
But there’s another idea that we don’t talk about all that much. And it may just be the thing that positions our colleges and universities best for this moment. It is the very Christian, very Lutheran notion of death and resurrection.
And just like “rooted and open,” the hardest word in the phrase “death and resurrection” is the word “and.”
Death and resurrection. It’s both.
We are so often tempted into either/or thinking. Especially about death and resurrection. Either we live or we die. We flourish or we fail. It’s one or the other.
But Jesus always says it’s both. We don’t have life without death. We don’t have success without failure. And every end is met with a beginning. Everything old is met with something new that God is doing.
Death and Resurrection. Finding life and losing it. The “and” is the hardest part.
But ask 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.
I don’t know of other kinds of institutions that can say this with the same honesty or the same hope. We live and we die. There is truth and promise in both.
Esther discovered her calling by understanding herself, understanding the moment, and seizing an opportunity.
Those last two we’re pretty good at. We understand the moment, the stakes, and we’re ready to seize every opportunity.
The reminder we need now is to understand ourselves; what it is that is distinctive about us as leaders, and about our institutions, that calls us into this very moment.
For Esther it was understanding her identity as a Jew.
For us it is understanding our colleges and universities as places founded on and fueled by faith. It is not lost on me that the book of Esther never once mentions God, which maybe gives us license not to talk about God too much at our institutions either. To be sure, at many of our schools it is becoming rarer and rarer to hear God’s name uttered…and when we do talk about our church-relatedness, we prefer to emphasize “Lutheran” over “Christian,” which I think is helpful to some of us because “Lutheran” feels, oddly, more specific and less specific at the same time.
But Esther needed reminders of her identity, and we do too. And I am of the (sometimes unpopular) opinion that naming God, out loud, as an active subject at our institutions is a good way to remind ourselves and others of who we are.
Friends, we are spiritual people. We are God’s people. Our institutions are Christian places, even if the majority of the people who live and work and learn there aren’t Christians. Our colleges and universities are not churches, but they are places where God is at work; where God is doing death and resurrection work. And the callings we have, they don’t come to us out of thin air. Someone is doing the calling. We believe that it is God who calls us. We can, and should, give God credit for that.
For just such a time as this. We are called. By God. To live, to die, and to live again.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Lamont Anthony Wells
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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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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Article
The Ought
Ned Wisnefske
No. 19 · Summer 2004
Wisnefske observes that students and faculty raise contradictory objections to moral education—that students are already morally formed, and that teachers must not form them—and argues that both share the same fear of “the Ought.” He proposes that the Ought is best encountered not in front of us but behind us, nudging us, as we exercise impartiality, sympathy, and free will and discover that the persons participating in moral inquiry deserve respect; the Ought can then reform our past formations and transform our wants, so that it is never too late, or a mistake, to be shaped by it.
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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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Editorial
From the Outgoing and Incoming Editors
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Outgoing editor Robert D. Haak reflects on a six-year run inheriting Intersections from founder Tom Christenson, the “powerful voices” that have driven the conversation (Dovre, Jodock, Christenson, Simmons, Morgan, Olsen, Wilhelm) and the newer ones now entering (Mahn, Bussie); incoming editor Jason A. Mahn, picked up from the airport in Bob’s pickup truck five years ago, names central issues that “Lutherans on Faith and Learning” engages and previews essays by Dovre, Jodock, McDonald, Hill, Turnbull, and Jodock again.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Vocation—Wide Perspective Questions
Mary-Paula Cancienne
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Cancienne, drawing on Iain McGilchrist, asks whether higher education has prioritized micro lenses at the expense of the macro view, and invites educators to hold the drama of individual vocation stories within a wider plot that includes James Webb Telescope wonder, climate grief, the long shadow of enslavement, and the resilience of native populations.
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Response
Feeling at Home: Dimensions of Faculty Life
Jane Hokanson Hawks
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Hawks of Midland Lutheran College responds to Bouman by reflecting on her path from a Lutheran childhood through the BSN at St. Olaf and thirteen years at four non-church-related institutions to her present home at Midland, where teaching at a Lutheran institution finally feels “right.” Bouman’s framing of the five themes as the Lutheran argument about what it means to be human helped her ad-hoc committee articulate the spiritual role in Midland’s new faculty mentoring program (recently funded by the Lilly Foundation), and grounds her work as a nurse educator confronting the daily humanness of grief, joy, ethical dilemmas, and care across cultural and religious difference.
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Article
Honesty of Mind: On the Uses and Abuses of Socratic Ignorance in Environmental Studies, Religion, and the Classroom
Don Braxton
No. 15 · Winter 2002
Braxton, taking his cue from David James Duncan’s defense of ignorance as a fly-fisher’s most crucial tool and from Socrates’ midwife’s art in the Theaetetus, defends a doctrine of “honesty of mind” resting on four premises—knowledge is constructed, judgments are wagered amid imperfect knowledge, expertise can disable learning, and we are encumbered by other ways of knowing. He field-tests the disposition against three domains: the climate-change and creationism debates in environmental studies, the post-September 11 turn toward religious pluralism (engaging Union Seminary’s Joseph Hough and Hauer and Young’s “three-world” approach to the Bible), and the liberal arts classroom where students “become democrats of the mind” through Reinhold Niebuhr’s balance of conviction and contrition.