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Eric Childers

Eric Childers

Ph.D., Pastor

St. John's Lutheran Church, Cherryville, North Carolina

Eric Childers received his Ph.D. in higher education at the University of Virginia in 2010. His book College Identity Sagas (Pickwick, 2012) investigates religious identity at Lutheran colleges and universities. He currently serves as pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Cherryville, North Carolina.

Published Articles

Article

Reinventing Lutheran Liberal Arts: A Preliminary Report on Project DAVID

Ann Hill Duin, Eric Childers

No. 38 · Fall 2013

Duin and Childers introduce Project DAVID—Distinction, Analytics, Value, Innovation, Digital opportunity—as a framework for showcasing strategic reinvention across ELCA liberal arts institutions. Building on Childers’ College Identity Sagas and reading Selingo, Norris, and Popenici alongside the AAC&U, Adrian College, NITLE, and the Delta Cost Project, they pose framing questions about distinction, vocation, affordability, value propositions, two-track innovation, and BYOE technology that ELCA campuses can use to face their own “Goliath” moments.
Article

Luther's Theology of Learning: Discovering the Vocation of Today's Small Lutheran Liberal Arts College

Eric Childers

No. 20 · Fall 2004

In an excerpt from his Wake Forest University Divinity School senior thesis, Childers profiles six students hand-picked by presidents and chaplains at Concordia College (Moorhead), Lenoir-Rhyne College, and Muhlenberg College—Nathan Gossai, Amy Nelson, Alison Schmidt, Ryan Sigmon, Julie Christianson, and Jeffrey Slotterback—as a living testament to Luther’s theology of learning. He then draws on Solberg, Mark R. Schwehn (in Paul J. Dovre’s The Future of Religious Colleges), Robert Benne, Ernest Simmons, Mark Noll, Richard Hughes, and James Burtchaell to argue that Lutheran colleges have not yet fully articulated their own theology of education and that their vocation is to embrace, engage, and galvanize a Lutheran tradition of learning rooted in the liberal arts, Scripture, the Confessions, and confident ecumenism.

Eric Childers

Published Articles

Reinventing Lutheran Liberal Arts: A Preliminary Report on Project DAVID

Luther's Theology of Learning: Discovering the Vocation of Today's Small Lutheran Liberal Arts College