Amanda Tyler is the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee, which is headquartered on Capitol Hill and advocates for religious freedom for all. “From a very early age, I felt a calling to law and politics – I wanted to be a public servant in some way,” she shared during a recent conversation captured in the latest episode on the NetVUE podcast series, Callings. The episode is called “The Next Move.”
In 2019, Amanda was named “Baptist of the Year” for her leadership in the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign. We talked about this aspect of her work during our conversation, and she described how we are called to walk a line between fidelity to the past and stewardship for the future. (Amanda was recently interviewed on NPR’s “All Things Considered” on the topic of Christian Nationalism).
She also offered sage advice about vocational reflection and discernment, including the value of internships and the need to seek mentors in a variety of forms. Our vocations, she observed, unfold as we focus on the next move and not the whole game on the chessboard of life:
As you are moving on, think intentionally, deliberatively, and if its your practice spiritually, about your next move but worry less about the chessboard. I couldn’t have played out all these moves to get to this place, and yet it feels like the perfect place for me.
Amanda Tyler
Here is a short clip in which she offers this and other advice for college students:
The podcast can be accessed through Buzzsprout, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.
Hannah Schell was a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Monmouth College in Illinois from 2001-2018. She is the author of “Commitment and Community: The Virtue of Loyalty and Vocational Discernment” in At this Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education, ed. David S. Cunningham (Oxford University Press, 2015), and, more recently, “Loyalty in the Time of Catastrophe: Anthropocene Reflections” (co-written with Mark Larrimore). Currently the Online Community Coordinator and the editor of this blog, she is also a campus consultant for NetVUE. Click here to see other blog posts by Hannah.