“It Changed My Life”: Centering Relationships in Communal Living

The Anne Devenney House at Fordham University provided young adults like Gina Ciliberto with transformative experiences through intentional living and community engagement. This inclusive environment fostered relationships, deepened purpose, and supported vocational exploration. Despite its closure due to financial reasons, the impact on residents’ lives and their ongoing connections highlights the value of such communities.

A series on the impact of intentional living communities on young adults as they explore and discern their vocations.

Gina Ciliberto lives in Yonkers, just blocks from the New York City borough she loves: the Bronx. In 2012, Gina graduated from Fordham University. During her sophomore and junior years, she lived at the Anne Devenney House, a university-sponsored, off-campus community that bridged the gap between students and their neighbors in the Bronx. Asked how the community impacted her, Gina simply said, “It changed my life.” 

Members of the Anne Devenney House community sharing a meal.

The Anne Devenney House began as a project of Fordham’s campus ministry. Although it didn’t require religious affiliation, all seven residents in the first year of this intentional community identified as Roman Catholic. Living together in a standalone house a few blocks from campus in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood, they committed to the three areas of the program: community service, campus outreach, and intentional community within the house. There were mandatory dinners together once a week, but they often shared meals informally.

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Moments of Annunciation: David Brooks

David Brooks discusses vocation as akin to falling in love, emphasizing emotional exploration and self-discovery. In the inaugural episode of this season of NetVUE’s podcast Callings, he shares insights on finding one’s calling by paying to attention to feelings of admiration, indignation, and enthusiasm, suggesting that deep self-awareness is essential for meaningful vocational discernment.

David Brooks

“Finding your calling,” David Brooks suggests, “is more like falling in love than it is like making a decision. It just happens to you.” One of the most recognized public intellectuals of our time, David is the featured guest in the first episode of season seven of NetVUE’s podcast Callings. In it, he reflects on the many ways he’s come to understand vocation and calling over the course of his life and career. Educators who work with undergraduate students will find much value in David’s experiences and storytelling.

For David, vocational exploration and discernment are rooted in our emotions and desires. His “main advice” to listeners, especially students, on how to live vocationally is “to fall in love with things” and to learn how to answer the question, “What do you really want?” This question might seem like a simple one to answer, yet it remains one of the most significant ones we need to ask ourselves; it can also be one of the hardest ones to answer authentically, given the self-awareness it requires. The question is important because, as David notes (drawing on the wisdom of one of his former professors), “what distinguishes people is the ruling passion of their souls.” To know a person—or a student—is not to reduce them to their GPA or their SAT scores, but to ask them, “What do you love?” In this way, “the most important quality to cultivate” in our lives is that of “being a good lover,” a quality that is central to vocational discernment. Ultimately, as David observes, the “process of discovering what you want is the process of finding your calling.”

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The Attention Gym II: Stretching to Listen

This post discusses enhancing students’ listening abilities through class discussions, emphasizing the contrast between dialogue and conversations that function more as disconnected monologues. It advocates for viewing the classroom as an “attention gym” to strengthen active listening skills, essential for vocational discernment. The text also highlights practices to promote a culture of attentive listening among students.

A series on how to help our students strengthen their abilities to pay attention to their lives, the world, and their vocations.

When I talk with students about the purposes of class discussion, I often show them the dinner scene from my favorite Sandra Bullock film, While You Were Sleeping. I ask them to describe what they observe about the quality of the conversation happening around the dinner table, and especially to note who seems to be listening. This scene helps us distinguish between dialogue, a method of building on each other’s ideas, and conversation that proceeds more like a set of disconnected monologues (however humorous).

Students often zero in on a key difference between the two. They note that in a dialogue, participants actively listen to understand each other. In the other kind of discussion, people listen for a break in the conversation to make space for their own voice.

It is easy to make the case to students that listening is hard, and as a culture, we are not very good at it. It is harder to explain how we can get better at it. Naming the classroom an attention gym—as I described in my first post in this series—provides the framework to highlight attention as a key resource in becoming a better listener. Class discussions then become the training ground for workouts in listening.

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Vocation and Pedagogy IV: Learning and Discerning in Community

Engaging students in vocational questions should begin even before explicit discussions about vocation occur. Educators can leverage specific skills taught in classes to enhance students’ vocational exploration. In collaborative learning environments, intentional structures, like role assignments, enable students to develop essential listening and interpersonal skills, fostering both academic success and vocational discernment.

Sometimes, engaging undergraduate students in questions of vocation starts before the first explicit conversation about it. As educators, we often teach them specific skills in our disciplinary contexts that can lay a strong foundation for vocational exploration later in their college experience. Taking advantage of these opportunities can strengthen our students’ academic and vocational capacities.

women in white laboratory gown standing in front of a counter
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Few places render confusion more conspicuous than a first‑semester general chemistry laboratory. This first (and sometimes only) lab experience makes it abundantly clear that students don’t know how to work together, regardless of their level of technical skill. The lab setting—its space, structure, and time—intensifies interactions and amplifies students’ insecurities and their interpersonal dynamics (even as the same kinds of interactions play out in small group work and projects in other classrooms). Learning is (and should be) hard, but learning alongside others adds additional variables, making it more complex and difficult. And as students continue to turn to AI for quick and easy answers, the friction of collaborative learning will become even less comfortable and productive.

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The Vocational Benefits of Group Projects

Group projects can elicit anxiety and resistance among students due to the necessary reliance on peers. Despite the challenges, collaboration aids personal and vocational growth, fostering essential skills for future workplaces. These projects enhance connections, aid self-discovery, and help combat loneliness, ultimately enriching students’ educational experiences and understanding of teamwork’s value in their careers.

Whenever I announce a group project, it often evokes looks of uncertainty or concern on my students’ faces. They know that such work will force themselves and their team members to rely on each other as they work toward a common goal. Differences in perspective, work ethic, and schedules will also undoubtedly emerge.

angry girl sitting at desk in classroom
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But while life would certainly be simpler if we worked alone, it wouldn’t be nearly as rich. We need other people; we need community.

Our vocational pursuits could be described as ongoing group projects. We’re typically more productive when we work with others, and in academic settings, collaborative projects can enrich students vocationally through self-discovery and connections with others. When students work with their peers and receive feedback about their contributions, they discover strengths and interests they may not have known they had.

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The “Indispensable Justice” of Vocation: Remembering Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry, who died at 92, was a profound thinker advocating for a redefined understanding of work, economy, and personal calling. His insights emphasize the importance of affection and meaningful engagement with community, arguing that true fulfillment comes from vocation rather than societal definitions of success. His legacy urges individuals to live with purpose and care.

When Wendell Berry died at the age of 92 on August 31, The New York Times headline called him a “Writer Who Extolled America’s Agrarian Past,” which doesn’t exactly scream relevance for those of us helping young people discern their present and future vocations. A better headline might have mentioned that Berry was a thinker who urged us to reimagine conventional ideas of work, economy, and success, and to remember the role of affection in discerning and living out our human callings.

Wendell Berry stands before the solar panels on his farm in Henry County, Kentucky. Photo by Guy Mendes, 2011.
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Season Six Highlights of Callings Podcast Is Now Available

NetVUE’s podcast Callings released a bonus episode focusing on vocational advice for undergraduate students. Hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton curated insights from various guests, emphasizing listening, perseverance, and the virtues. This resource aims to enhance educators’ interactions with students, fostering deeper reflections on vocation and meaningful life choices.

At the beginning of every academic year, NetVUE’s podcast Callings releases a bonus episode that highlights key conversations from the previous season. This year, Callings’ hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton have selected a number of excerpts that serve as advice for undergraduate students, featuring insights from literature professors, psychologists, theologians, and leaders in higher education renewal—all of whom care deeply about the shared work of supporting the collective work of vocational exploration. These guests share professional advice and personal stories as they emphasize the nuance and complexity of what it means to live a good life, encouraging listeners to ask good questions, to be curious, and to listen to self and others.

Some of the guests featured in this episode of Callings. Top row (from left to right): Michael Lamb, Willie James Jennings, and Barbara Brown Taylor; bottom row (from left to right): Angela Duckworth, Lee C. Camp, and Almeda M. Wright.
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Hope, Resonance, and Work that Matters: Reflecting on Love’s Braided Dance

This post offers three reflections on this year’s selection for NetVUE’s Big Read program, Norman Wirzba’s Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis. Each writer provides their own response and reflection on the issues they found most significant with the intent to spark further discussion across the network.

A series of reflections on Norman Wirzba’s Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis and NetVUE’s 2026–2027 Big Read program.

In the first chapter of Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis, Norman Wirzba observes that to harness the powerful joy of authentic embodiment for our shared work, “people need the support of a loving community that affirms and encourages them.” One of the purposes of NetVUE’s Big Read program is to foster this kind of support at its member institutions and to do so by reading a book like Love’s Braided Dance together in community. Such communal meaning-making has the potential not only to help us all deepen our practices of vocational exploration, but also to affirm and encourage us in the process.

Book cover for 'Love's Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis' by Norman Wirzba, featuring artistic lettering and braided wheat illustrations.

To that end, Vocation Matters has invited three colleagues—Tara Russey, Craig Mattson, and Anna Stewart—from across the network to reflect on this year’s Big Read. In their reflections, they share powerful glimpses into what moved them and striking insights into what they found significant. In this way, they illustrate another key point from Wirzba’s opening chapter: “The most important thing” to do, he writes, “is to act on the conviction that your community needs you and is calling you to contribute in some way.”

As you reflect on their contributions, please consider them as points of departure as you and colleagues explore what significance this book might have at your institution. I think you’ll agree that we all need, and will be enriched by, the loving, resonate insights that each writer offers us.

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Assessing Community-Engaged Learning to Deepen Vocational Reflection

The final post in this series discusses the impact of community-engaged learning on students’ vocational exploration. It emphasizes the importance of reflective practice in fostering deeper learning. By revising assessment strategies and prompts, the authors enhanced students’ understanding of teamwork and intercultural competency, leading to meaningful civic engagement and a greater sense of personal responsibility within their communities.

The final post in a series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.

As educators, we want to know that our efforts impact our students, but assessment is difficult, especially when we seek to measure learning about vocation. It requires that we—alongside our students—engage in “continuous, connected, challenging and contextual” reflective practice, as recommended by one practitioner’s guide. Our last post illustrated how teamwork can be a kind of vocational praxis, offering students the opportunity to discover common ground in community with others. In our final post, we describe the outcomes of Heather and her colleague Erin Olsen-Telles’s learning, paying particular attention to the impact of embedding reflection in community-engaged learning on students’ vocational discoveries. By redesigning assessment strategies, we came to understand that reflection grounded in community contexts empowers students to engage in the deeper learning that opens the door to vocational discernment.

serious african american male with planner on city riverbank
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Vocational Ambiguities: Confronting Contradictions in The Merchant of Venice

The second post in a series on Shakespeare, pedagogy, and the power of literature to help us navigate ambiguity in our callings.

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By most estimations, reading Shakespeare carries little value as career preparation. No one—not even English majors—will be asked in a job interview to prove what they know about Shakespeare. But while knowing the content of his plays may not mean much, I’m convinced that the process of reading them may very well shape our vocational trajectories.

It did, at least, for my student MR.

Aspiring to attend law school, MR was gregarious and relational, always willing to engage and converse and dressing with a zany flair. But underneath this whimsy was a penchant for precision. They liked things crystal clear and were uncomfortable when they were in shades of gray, especially when it came to assignments and grades. In their eyes, a black-and-white answer could always be deciphered if we just took enough time to find it. This love for exactitude was both an asset and a liability for an aspiring attorney.

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