A well-founded premise is that public policy is initiated by self-interest. A group petitions the city to expand public parks for new pickleball courts. Residents living in a neighborhood request that their county install a stoplight at a nearby intersection. Both of these succeed because specific interests bring the concerns to those making public decisions. Democracy is rarely this simple. Often, we are driven to public advocacy because we recognize that our self-interest is at odds with others on the same issue. The stakes are higher when the conflicting public problem ties into our deeply held beliefs. Given the opportunity, should the tools of power be used to make public life mirror our deeply held beliefs? For example, should Christians invoke a state requirement to display the Ten Commandments in public schools, require Christian prayers in school, or mix Christian theology in public school curriculum?
A central problem of democracy is whether and how individuals and groups can simultaneously advocate for personal values, while also recognizing, tolerating, and respecting the public sphere as a shared space of divergent, competing, incommensurable held values. Some resolve this by an agency of dominant power in the public space, overtaking the system with the values they support at the expense of all others that disagree. In other words, some claim that since their values are the truth and the democratic majority is on their side, then what is stopping them from transferring their values into law?
Is this how faith-based institutions should equip students to engage as citizens of our democracy: teaching that faith is a catalyst to overpower and dominate other interests in society? I suggest it is not. Rather, I see faith-based institutions equipping students to understand and promote a healthy ecosystem of democracy. As Romans 3:23 states, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Human beings are flawed, imperfectly conveying God’s truth.
The tools of faith-based civic engagement should lead students to pursue universal values while acknowledging how imperfectly humanity applies them to social, political, economic, and even religious institutions.
Unlike public universities, faith-based institutions should help students embrace their faith with conviction, encouraging them to connect how their faith can guide them in addressing public problems. Faith-based institutions must promote the recognition of humanity’s incomplete grasp of truth. The tools of faith-based civic engagement should lead students to pursue universal values while acknowledging how imperfectly humanity applies them to social, political, economic, and even religious institutions.
Christian citizens should advocate their beliefs with virtue and tolerance, even when other participants are locked in a zero-sum outcome. Faith-based institutions should promote a public space more akin to an ecosystem of interests, with a healthy promotion of the American republic. Transferring religious values directly into political institutions endangers any open society, especially when those values belong to a single religious tradition. The American founders understood this in the First Amendment, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Christian citizens should advocate for public values that can best promote shared aspirations of justice, liberty, equality, and peace among all citizens and non-citizens. Instead of mounting the Ten Commandments on a wall or prayer in public schools, we should ask whether either promotes a healthy ecosystem of democracy. Teaching self-restraint and limits is a critical part of a faith-based education. An ecosystem of democracy provides a more properly understood, respectful approach to promoting self-interest in a community of competing and often incommensurable values. It should be the responsibility of faith-based institutions to cultivate the civic virtues of tolerance, respect for the law, and using reason for public discourse; some of the virtues the American Founders understood as cooperatively unifying a deeply held faith and an active democratic participation, while optimistically encouraging strong citizens for this world, as well as hope in the one to come.
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Editorial
From the Publisher & Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes, Lamont Anthony Wells
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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Reflection
I am a Treaty Partner
Kyrie Fairbairn
7 min audio
A recent California Lutheran graduate reflects on how a course on Indigenous Rights and Practices, and a conversation with a former Chairman of the Lummi Nation, led her to claim a “treaty partner” identity and to challenge readers to learn the treaties that shape the lands they call home.
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Article
Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives
William O'Brochta
15 min audio
Guest editor William O’Brochta introduces the section by overviewing the ELCA’s call to civic engagement, recapping the Fall 2025 Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives conference at Texas Lutheran University, and previewing the participant essays that follow.
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Article
Leaning-In to the Civic Lessons of Our Namesakes
A. Lanethea Mathews-Schultz
6 min audio
Mathews-Schultz uses the civic legacy of the Muhlenberg family — from General Pete’s Revolutionary call to action to President Muhlenberg’s inaugural address on the “education of conscience” — to invite students at Muhlenberg College into a shared civic inheritance.
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Article
Teaching and Mentoring in Service of Civic Engagement
Haco Hoang
6 min audio
Hoang describes how her teaching, mentoring, and research at California Lutheran University — including a multi-year collaboration with the Lutheran Office of Public Policy on Lutheran Lobby Day — cultivate civic skills grounded in ELCA social statements and the Lutheran tradition of faith and reason.
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Article
Community-Based Research as Engaged Citizenship
James Paul Old
6 min audio
Old argues that genuine citizenship requires more than charitable gestures — it demands long-term, reciprocal community partnerships — and describes how Valparaiso’s Community Research and Service Center embodies that vision even amid the financial pressures threatening such programs.
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Article
Bringing Core Values to Life through Civic Engagement
Austin Trantham
5 min audio
Trantham shows how Saint Leo University’s Benedictine Core Values shape his civic engagement work — from advising a “Why Vote?” campaign and Constitution Day panels to engaging students in the Unify Challenge for respectful cross-institutional discourse.
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Article
Civic Engagement, "Baylor In Deeds," and Engaged Learning
Rebecca Flavin
6 min audio
Flavin describes how Baylor’s strategic plan “Baylor in Deeds” and its Office of Engaged Learning are building civic engagement into the Arts & Sciences core curriculum, with early Global Engagement Survey data showing gains in civic efficacy and global civic responsibility.
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Article
Fragmented in Faith: The Concerns and Hopes Found in Student Spirituality and Civic Engagement
Emma Bohmann, Monica Sitachitta
11 min audio
Two Texas Lutheran University students reflect on the cyclical pattern of low spiritual and civic engagement on their campus and argue that distinguishing Lutheran values from Lutheran practice could open space for civic engagement to become a non-optional expression of neighbor-justice for all students.
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Article
Why Martin Luther and the Reformation Matter 500 Years Later
Kathryn A. Kleinhans
No. 46 · Fall 2017
Adapted from a 2017 address to Wartburg College’s entering class, Kleinhans surveys Luther’s lasting impact in vocation, education, social service, and the necessary work of repentance — closing with the Lutheran World Federation’s Windhoek assembly and the Reformation World Exhibition’s call to live reform forward into the next 500 years.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
James M. Unglaube
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Unglaube reports on the second annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference of August 1996, where Walter Bouman of Trinity Lutheran Seminary addressed “What is Lutheran; What is the Lutheran Tradition” (biblical, catholic, evangelical, sacramental, world-affirming—the world “received, enjoyed, served as God’s Gift”). He previews presentations by Wendy McCredie of Texas Lutheran and Baird Tipson of Wittenberg on how the Lutheran tradition is embodied in its colleges, and Bob Vogel’s challenge in “Coherence—And Now what?” that the tradition comes to life in how faculty give expression to their beliefs and values in the classroom and with colleagues.
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Article
Modeling Virtue: In Which a Social Psychologist Decides He Can Do Good Without Freely Choosing It
Chuck Huff
No. 9 · Summer 2000
Huff, recalling his 1975 sophomore disillusionment with a sterile introductory psychology in South Georgia (and Danny Saunders’s question from The Chosen), defends a scientific psychology as model-making rather than meaning-finding, traces the collapse of Lawrence Kohlberg’s totalizing theory of moral development into chastened mini-theories, and presents William Damon and Anne Colby’s interview study of twenty-three “moral exemplars” whose lives were marked by self-good unity, constant self-examination in community, a felt inability to have done otherwise, religious grounding, and genuine happiness. Following Aristotle on virtue as learned habit and the Christian tradition of the “slave for Christ,” he concludes that goodness flows from the choice of constraints rather than from the lone free-will hero of fairy tales, complicating C. P. Snow’s two-cultures divide. Originally the 1998 Mellby Lecture at St. Olaf.
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Article
The Value of Evoking Vocation and the Vocation of Evoking Value
Mark Schwehn
No. 38 · Fall 2013
Schwehn answers Michael Staton’s call to “disaggregate” the components of a college degree by insisting that Lutheran education is integral and whole. Working through Bruce Kimball’s history of liberal education, Cardinal Newman, and Leon Kass on Athens and Jerusalem, he argues that Lutherans should defend liberal learning on instrumental grounds and offers the figure of the “local genius”—exemplified by his Valparaiso colleague John Strietelmeier—as the form of human excellence that Lutheran colleges uniquely cultivate.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 23 · Summer 2006
Selbyg features articles based on presentations at the 2005 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference focused on the upcoming ELCA Social Statement on Education, and urges members of the ELCA higher-education community to download the first draft (“Our Calling in Education”) from the ELCA website and submit feedback to the Task Force on Education before the October 15 deadline. He worries that the sexuality social statement on a 2009 timeline will draw more attention than the education statement, but reminds readers that, for Martin Luther and for those who work in Lutheran higher education, education is as important as sex.
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Reflection
Walls: Talk At Gustavus Adolphus College
Elizabeth Baer
No. 5 · Summer 1998
Baer’s September 11, 1997 Gustavus Adolphus chapel homily on Joshua 6 turns from the trumpets to the walls—Robert Frost’s “Mending Walls,” the walls of the Warsaw ghetto in Vladka Meed’s On Both Sides of the Wall and Margaret Zassenhaus’s Walls, the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989—and then to the autobiographical, intertextual discourse of Gustavus chapel itself as a place where misunderstandings come down. An author’s note added after the March 29 F3 tornado reports the closing line (“LET’S MAKE THOSE WALLS COME TUMBLING DOWN”) as eerily prescient: roofs, windows, and 90% of campus trees were lost, but the Chapel walls and the eternal flame in the red glass lantern stood firm.