I teach and serve at Saint Leo University, a private Catholic institution rooted in long-standing Benedictine values. These Core Values — Community, Excellence, Integrity, Personal Development, Respect, and Responsible Stewardship — inform the daily work of our students, faculty, and staff, and are held in high esteem across campus. Whether working with civically minded students, promoting democratic discourse on campus with my faculty colleagues, or directly educating students in the classroom, my civic engagement efforts are guided by a desire to advance these founding principles.
I was honored to serve as a Faculty Advisor for Saint Leo’s “Why Vote?” campaign, helping to guide student leaders to promote the inviting and inclusive theme of “Empower, Elevate, and Educate.” Everyone worked tirelessly to plan and execute the university’s first “Civic Engagement Day.” Multiple community organizations participated in informative sessions discussing the impact of civic engagement, and the direct impact that college students can make through targeted activism. The event culminated with a conversation between the student organizers and a member of the Florida House of Representatives. This gathering demonstrated our Community Core Value, inviting “all of us to listen, to learn, to change, and to serve.” Subsequent activities included presentations and informal events aligning with National Voter Registration Day and Civic Engagement Week. This work illustrates the Saint Leo Core Value of Excellence, which includes a call to “develop the character, learn the skills, and assimilate the knowledge essential to become morally responsible leaders.”
Each year, I am privileged to collaborate with colleagues on an event celebrating Constitution Day that meaningfully engages the Saint Leo community. We invite faculty members from various disciplines to discuss a thematic issue relating to civic engagement and constitutionalism in order to link Founding principles to modern political and social issues. In 2025, I moderated our conversation on “Immigration, Citizenship, and the Constitution” with professors in criminal justice, history, and political science. While differences of opinion were expressed on topics regarding assimilation and cultural heritage, the evening cultivated with insightful student questions. I thoroughly enjoyed leading an event that directly engages our Core Value of Respect, noting the importance of “unity and diversity…the free exchange of ideas, and… learning, living, and working harmoniously.”
Finally, I strive to cultivate civic awareness through my teaching by connecting students directly with community leaders and opportunities for democratic dialogue. In my American State and Local Government course, students covered with a former student, Luke King, now Judge/Executive of Cumberland County, Kentucky. He discussed the creation of the Cumberland County Civics Club, a pioneering initiative in youth civic engagement. Students in my Introduction to Politics class participate in the Unify Challenge, practicing respectful discourse on policy issues with peers from other institutions holding differing political perspectives. Though some are initially nervous about this prospect, all come away appreciating the opportunity to hone their civic knowledge, critical thinking, and oral communication skills. These efforts correlate with the Saint Leo Core Value of Personal Development and our emphasis on the “development of every person’s mind…to help strengthen the character of our community.”
Though some are initially nervous about this prospect, all come away appreciating the opportunity to hone their civic knowledge, critical thinking, and oral communication skills.
It is gratifying to work at a faith-based institution that intentionally strives to promote Core Values, and my work in civic engagement has certainly benefited from engaging with these mission-based practices to educate and empower students, colleagues, and the community.
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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
An Ecosystem of Democracy
David Thomason
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
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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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 37 · Spring 2013
Wilhelm reports that decisions at the February 2013 LECNA and ELCA presidents’ meetings authorized reviews of funding and organizational practices and appointed a working group to draft a presidential statement on what it means to be a college or university of the ELCA, signaling a more substantive future role for the annual presidents’ gathering in shaping the shared identity and common mission of ELCA schools.
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Article
Making Dry Bones Stand: Lutheran Higher Education at Century's End
Diane Scholl
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Scholl reads John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” the banishment of Anne Hutchinson, de Crevecoeur’s American farmer, Olaudah Equiano, Phyllis Wheatley, and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter alongside Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones to ask how a Lutheran college can be a community that holds difference and commonality together. Drawing on Ernest Simmons’s warning against collapsing into either dogmatic absolutism or thoroughgoing relativism and Bruce Reichenbach’s companion essay in this issue, she identifies five features of shared life at a Lutheran college—the liberal arts, political process, the arts, the community of caring, and the recognition of difference and the right to dissent—and argues that the necessary tension between individualism and corporate identity, framed by theological vision, is “our best legacy and our best hope for the future.”
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 33 · Spring 2011
Wilhelm notes that while the ELCA’s vocation in higher education remains vibrant, the landscape of churchwide leadership has shifted dramatically with the dissolution of the Vocation and Education unit, and expresses appreciation for the faculty and staff at ELCA colleges and universities who have stepped up to sustain the network during this time of transition.
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Article
Down and Out: First Year Students Encounter Lutheran Theology
Lindsey Leonard
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Leonard describes how Wartburg’s IS 101 first-year seminar wove the Dalai Lama, Paul Kingsnorth, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Mary Robinson’s Climate Justice into the Fall 2020 reader so the “COVID class” could encounter Lutheran theology’s call to serve the neighbor across the pandemics of disease, racism, and climate change.
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Response
Of Imaginary Cows and a White Toy Sheep: The Freedom of a Christian College
Ryan La Hurd
No. 6 · Winter 1999
La Hurd, president of Lenoir-Rhyne and a former Thiel English professor and Augsburg academic dean, responds to Christenson by insisting (with Robert Kegan’s story of Tommy’s imaginary cattle farm) that a college is composed of people but is not itself a person, and so cannot share in Luther’s freedom of the Christian. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, George Marsden, Mark Schwehn, Jacques Barzun, and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable, he distinguishes the “imagined college” (the gift-economy realm of teaching and the alma mater) from the “real college” (the commodity-economy realm of fund-raising, deferred maintenance, and federal aid reconciliation that does not have such freedom)—and ends with Pablo Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry” and the marvelous white toy sheep offered through a hole in a fence.
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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.