Episodes
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Season 2 · Episode 10
VLHE—Wednesday Morning Sacred Pause
8 min
Rosendale draws on Esther 4:14 and the Lutheran practice of holding death and resurrection together — with “and” as the hardest word — to argue that the calling of Lutheran higher education for “just such a time as this” requires us to reme...
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Season 1 · Episode 10
Fragmented in Faith: The Concerns and Hopes Found in Student Spirituality and Civic Engagement
11 min
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 becom...
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Season 2 · Episode 9
Fostering Moral Imagination and Inclusivity: The Role of Ethical Leadership in ELCA Colleges and Universities Amid Societal Challenges
12 min
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...
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Season 1 · Episode 9
Civic Engagement, "Baylor In Deeds," and Engaged Learning
6 min
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 effica...
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Season 1 · Episode 8
Bringing Core Values to Life through Civic Engagement
5 min
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-institutio...
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Season 2 · Episode 8
What Does Ethical Leadership in a Changing World Require?
5 min
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 fo...
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Season 1 · Episode 7
An Ecosystem of Democracy
6 min
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 acknowledg...
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Season 2 · Episode 7
What is Required of You?: Higher Education Leadership in a Moral Key
15 min
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 stud...
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Season 1 · Episode 6
Community-Based Research as Engaged Citizenship
6 min
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 f...
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Season 2 · Episode 6
Ethical Leadership for a Changing World: A Shared Calling from Cradle to Career
5 min
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 p...
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Season 1 · Episode 5
Teaching and Mentoring in Service of Civic Engagement
6 min
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 soc...
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Season 2 · Episode 5
Ethical Leadership: Rooted, Open, Generative, and Mindful
25 min
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 larv...
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Season 1 · Episode 4
Leaning-In to the Civic Lessons of Our Namesakes
15 min
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...
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Season 2 · Episode 4
Building a Third Space in the Age of AI: A Conversation with Dr. Walter Earl Fluker
11 min
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 educato...
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Season 1 · Episode 3
Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives
15 min
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 participan...
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Season 2 · Episode 3
Wake Up Running! A Call to Ethical Leaders in Quest of Democratic Space
44 min
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-justi...
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Season 2 · Episode 2
From the Editor
5 min
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-spac...
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Season 1 · Episode 2
I am a Treaty Partner
7 min
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...
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Season 2 · Episode 1
From the Publisher
5 min
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...
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Season 1 · Episode 1
From the Publisher and Editor
6 min
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.