A fire that burns but does not burn us out

Remember that booth from the Peanuts cartoons where Lucy used to offer Charlie Brown psychiatric care for five cents? That’s roughly where Moses is halfway through the Book of Exodus, sitting in his wilderness booth, chin in hand, the leader of a newly formed nation of ex-slaves spending his days fielding endless disputes.

It does make you wonder what quarrels the Israelites raised in the wilderness. How do you make a class action lawsuit about manna? How do you have a meaningful dispute about sandals that never wear out?

But humans gotta human. And I confess that on most days in 2022, I would gladly take a number and stand in line for some Mosaic adjudication.

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Familismo, success, and service to others

In my last post, I considered how approaching students of color from a deficit perspective (focusing on what preparation, skills, motivations, or resources they might lack) can be harmful to them and detrimental to the mentoring relationship, especially in the situation when the mentor is white. This focus does not recognize the assets that students have and which they bring with them to campus. Tara Yosso has identified six distinct forms of capital forming what she has termed “community cultural wealth,” a robust framework for thinking about the student experience. This model moves away from a more narrow, individualized understanding of assets and capital to a broader understanding, one based on the history and lived experience of communities of color. In this post, I want to focus on two forms, aspirational capital and familial capital, and how they come together to help students in navigating the world of college (and beyond). As David Pérez has shown in his work, this is especially the case with Latino male college students, who put a high premium on family (or familismo).

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Soaring Sophomores: A Pilot Course

The start of fall semester on a college campus brings a special feeling of excitement. But sophomore students face new and different challenges in year two of college. How might vocational exploration help sophomores not only persist but soar? I developed a 2-credit hour course called “Exploring Life Purpose and Your Major” to help students dive into their major while asking big life questions.

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Let Us Break Bread Together

A series of posts about a collaborative project at Wingate University, resulting in a first-year course called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of Our Lives. This is the second of a two-part post; click here for part one.

At Wingate, our approach to Service Learning and Community Engagement (SLCE) is supported by three principles: academic integrity (direct connection of course content with community engagement); student ownership (a student voice in course and project development); and apprentice citizenship (address real problems by learning alongside community partners). The first year Food and Faith course will be a community engaged course and involve all three principles.

Will a community engaged pedagogy have the desired results, namely a positive impact on our students and their vocation pilgrimage as planetary citizens?

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Re-Imagining Life Together (Staying with the Trouble)

A series of posts about a collaborative project at Wingate University, resulting in a first-year course called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of Our Lives.

This third blog in our series will explore how our pedagogy reflects our belief in Earth’s entangled banks as a source of wisdom. We model our course design and teaching on our belief that we are all interdependent beings living in webs of relations and education for vocation is a co-creative process. We thrive when we live and learn by re-membering these elements of our identities as individuals and societies. This post will focus on our nature as co-creative creatures and how to teach with co-creativity as a guiding principle.

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Richard T. Hughes on grace and the paradoxes of vocation

Richard T. Hughes

In the latest episode of NetVUE’s podcast series, Callings, we talk with Richard Hughes about his long career as a scholar and teacher. Richard has a new book out, a “memoir of sorts,” which chronicles both his own vocational story and the trajectory of his work on Christianity in the U.S. In our conversation, Richard graciously shares significant moments of rejection and criticism in his life and how these made him reconsider his most deeply held beliefs. He reflects on the influence of Victor Frankl, Robert Bellah, James Noel, and Martin Marty on his life and work, and encourages listeners to consider the paradox of how “losing one’s self” can be a gift.

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