Updated on April 8, 2022.
We find ourselves in a time of rapid change, fear, and great uncertainty. Whatever your campus role, you have likely been engaged in a kind of triage in order to hold your campus community together throughout these unusual academic years. Here is a short list of pieces from Vocation Matters that directly or indirectly address themes relevant to this time of crisis:
- Julia Lambert Fogg asks ‘What is Our Work Now?” (March 2022)
- Jason Mahn on “Neighbor Love” (November 2021)
- Letter to a Young Colleague (September 2021)
- “Good enough” pedagogy: the importance of interpersonal connections (August 2021)
- Vocation and Mass Shootings (July 2021)
- Pivotal Moments (June 2021)
- Our Love and Terror: Affect, Political Emotions, and the Seat of Terror (April 2021)
- A Skeptic’s Hope (February 2021)
- Resting into Vocation (February 2021)
- A Call for Empathy and Honesty (February 2021)
- ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, 2020
- Good Opportunism (December 2020)
- Who and What Should I Believe? (December 2020)
- Care in the Classroom (November 2020)
- To Know Thyself, You Must Know Thine History (November 2020)
- Attending to Voices (October 2020)
- Hope as the Will to Turn Things Upside Down (October 2020)
- Rethinking and Unlearning: Imagining New Ways of Being in Community (October 2020)
- A Call for Care in the Academy (October 202)
- Transitions: Navigating Vocation in an Uncertain Present (September 2020)
- Of Casseroles and Community (September 2020)
- Hope, history, and the redress of vocation (September 2020)
- Staying home with Jane Austen (August 2020)
- Discontinued: our fragile vocations (August 2020)
- Vocation virtually: calling this time of twin pandemics (August 2020)
- The power of proximity (August 2020)
- Back to basics: holistic mentoring in times of crisis (July 2020)
- Theological responses to the pandemic (July 2020)
- The hard realities of reduced “bandwidth” (June 2020)
- Clarity of mission (June 2020)
- Reaffirming our Vocational Authenticity with Courage and Humility (June 2020)
- Resiliency vs. Audacity (May 2020)
- The Pandemic Mirror (May 2020)
- The Economy and Ecology of Neighbor Love (May 2020)
- Pandemic reflections: the virtual body of Christ (May 2020)
- Grief as the garden of compassion (April 2020)
- Life in the Resurrection Zone: Vocation in the midst of pandemic (April 2020)
- Vocation in a time of Coronavirus: Reflections on C.S. Lewis’ “Learning in Wartime” (April 2020)
- Neighboring and Sheltering in Place (April 2020)
- Called to a Pedagogy of the Cross (April 2020)
- Work and Sabbath at the dawn of Covid-19 (March 2020)
- Character and calling in a time of crisis (March 2020)
- Finding vocation in suffering, loss, and death (March 2020)
Relevant pieces written prior to 2020:
- Caring for the care-givers (November 2019)
- Comedy or tragedy: some Shakespearean wisdom for vocation (September 2019)
- Vocation and the apocalypse (August 2019)
- Care for the whole person (June 2019)
- Optimism vs. hope (February 2019)
- Vocation in a time of crisis: reflections from Pepperdine (November 2018)
- The massacre generation (November 2018)
- Suffering and vocation: a matter of perspective (November 2013)
As short, publicly accessible writings, please share these pieces with your colleagues and friends. You might consider using them as the starting point for a discussion among students, faculty and staff, or other members of your campus community.
If you find a particular post insightful or thought-provoking, please use the comments section to let the author know, and to encourage a wider conversation about how these thoughts have a new resonance.