The mission of California Lutheran University (Cal Lutheran) is to “educate leaders for a global society” who are committed to service and justice, and to help our students “discover and live their purpose.” Faith-based and liberal arts institutions, such as Cal Lutheran, are poised to cultivate a civic-minded ethos that embraces values and reason. As a political science faculty member, I foster a culture of civic engagement through my teaching, mentoring, service and scholarship. As an educator, I teach courses that examine phenomena which shape political life, such as Community Development, Public Policy, and Women and Politics. In these courses, students examine how public policy impacts stakeholders in all spheres of society, and they develop skills to be civically engaged. Students read original policy documents to mitigate content bias and are taught how to analyze policy by identifying real world issues, examining the causes of problems, and proposing recommendations that are feasible. By understanding the complexity of political life, students develop the skills and knowledge to be civic-minded individuals and agents of change in society. Student projects have addressed topics including maternal morbidity rates among Black women, violence against Native American women, youth activism, and generational wealth in low-income communities.
Most, if not all, students in political science pursue internships, service, or volunteer opportunities with political campaigns, local government and civic organizations, which I help them identify and secure through the personal and professional networks I cultivated while working in public policy and political campaigns. By involving students in research, I mentor students on how to use their academic skills to produce scholarship that contributes to public discourse and civic engagement. For example, my students and I have presented our research findings about the impact of the Dobbs abortion ruling at academic conferences and in the larger community, particularly during the 2022 and 2024 elections.
One of the most effective ways that my civic engagement activities and Cal Lutheran’s mission align is the meaningful collaboration I forged with the Lutheran Office of Public Policy, which is based in Sacramento. For the past two years, a delegation of Cal Lutheran students participated in Lutheran Lobby Day to advocate for legislation that supports the ELCA’s social statements and priorities in California’s proposed budget. The ELCA social statements are the denomination’s most authoritative teaching documents on major social issues. The purpose of the statements is to guide the Church’s teaching, policy advocacy, and moral deliberation. For 3 months, I prepared students by having them research the ELCA’s social statements and current issues facing California. They are trained to be policy advocates through mock policy writing and practicing oral presentations. Students work with the ELCA members to lobby legislators in the California State Assembly and Senate on legislation that aligns with the Lutheran Church’s social statements, including affordable housing, child tax credits, clean water in schools, environmental justice, and immigration reform.
Faith-based institutions like Cal Lutheran serve as incubators for students, faculty and the entire community to develop civic skills, norms, and a sense of community, which are essential to meaningful and transformative civic participation.
I am fortunate to be able to teach and produce scholarly work that cultivates knowledge and foster skills that can be applied to civic-minded activities, such as public policy, advocacy, and community activism. Faith-based institutions like Cal Lutheran serve as incubators for students, faculty and the entire community to develop civic skills, norms, and a sense of community, which are essential to meaningful and transformative civic participation. During these tumultuous political times, the ELCA social statements facilitate and strengthen our resolve at Cal Lutheran to root our civic education of students in academic analysis and the Lutheran tradition of higher education that engages both faith and reason.
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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
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
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
Low-Hanging Fruit, Moonshots, and Coffee: Dreaming Big Within and Beyond Our Limitations
Jeremy Myers
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Myers shares the process used by Augsburg’s Christensen Center for Vocation to help teams move from a shared experience to next steps — an Ignatian-rooted Awareness Examen followed by naming low-hanging fruit, moonshots, and the coffee conversations that build the coalition to make it all happen.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Adopting the Framework of ‘Because’ and ‘Therefore’
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Pribbenow describes how Augsburg University responded to its dramatic demographic transformation (from 18% to nearly 70% BIPOC entering students over sixteen years) by adopting an institutional vocational statement and a simple “because/therefore” framework for translating particular Lutheran theological convictions into institutional programs, policies, and practices.
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Article
Preaching in Christ Chapel on Yom HaShoah: Reflections on Interfaith Relations at a Lutheran College
Sarah Ruble
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Ruble shares her 2019 Holocaust Remembrance Day homily preached before the cross in Christ Chapel at Gustavus Adolphus, then reflects on whether “professional Christians” on Lutheran campuses might practice a non-mutual, witnessed confession before colleagues of other traditions as a check on Christian self-deceit.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 25 · Spring 2007
Selbyg notes that most papers in this issue grew out of a pan-Lutheran conference organized by the Association of Lutheran College Faculties in fall 2006 rather than the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, and argues that the ELCA’s ecumenical posture—truthful but open to learning from others—is a good foundation for institutions of higher education whose faculty likewise profess while remaining subject to change based on new research and insights.
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Article
Educating for Peace: 21st Century Models for Thinking Globally and Acting Locally
Janet E. Rasmussen
No. 18 · Fall 2003
Rasmussen opens with a rabbinic story about the one-step distance between East and West and describes Pacific Lutheran University’s four-phase “Global Education Continuum”—Introductory, Exploratory, Participatory, Integrative—developed with Teagle Foundation support and grounded in Perry, Bennett, and Musil. She illustrates intentional global/local partnership through three case studies: Barbara Temple-Thurston’s Trinidad-and-Salishan initiative; the China Partners Network with the Amity Foundation, Good Samaritan Hospital, and PLU’s Wang Center; and Ann Kelleher’s three-institution “Norway in Namibia” partnership with Hedmark University College, the University of Namibia, NAMAS, and the Ondao mobile schools for the Himba people. She closes with Daloz, Keen, Keen, and Parks’s Common Fire research and Lee Knefelkamp’s call to be “communities of peace.”
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Editorial
From the Editor
Robert D. Haak
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Haak introduces the issue with the question of whether “our Lutheranism” should have any discernible effect on how we operate as Lutheran colleges, and proposes a working list of “Lutheran” values that characterize our institutions — complexity, real evil, suffering as part of human experience, the centrality of discourse, transcendent values, attention to place, institutional self-criticism, and unity over division — inviting campuses to extend the conversation begun by Simmons, O’Hara, and the Wartburg colleagues.