Month: February 2024

Miroslav Volf on the Soul’s Landscape

Hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton speak with Miroslav Volf on the most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings.

Hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton speak with Miroslav Volf on the most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings. Miroslav is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and the founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, as well as one of the most influential Christian theologians of this generation. His latest book, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most (co-authored with Matthew Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz), is based on the “Life Worth Living” course that they teach at Yale University.

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What Are We Creating Together?

Last semester, our communication studies department came to realize fully what we had known for years: vocation exploration is something that can and should be done in community. Inspired by our current NetVUE work, we have committed to extending our vocation conversations beyond regular advisement and an occasional instructional nod to using vocation as a primary dialogue topic in several classes in our major and minor.

Major Decisions, Major Discoveries: Exploring Vocation in the Undergraduate Years, a series of posts from Nebraska Wesleyan University about helping students develop meaning and purpose as part of their major coursework 

“I was amazed that something so personal like exploring my ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’ in a group could feel so right.”

NWU communication studies student

Last semester, our communication studies department came to realize fully what we had known for years: vocation exploration is something that can and should be done in community. Inspired by our current NetVUE work, we have committed to extending our vocation conversations beyond regular advisement and an occasional instructional nod to using vocation as a primary dialogue topic in several classes in our major and minor. Our department’s guiding principle is inspired by W. Barnett Pearce and Vernon Cronen’s “Coordinated Management of Meaning,” which posits that we create meaning and manage our social reality in community. “What are we creating together?” is emblazoned on our brochures and syllabi and even stenciled on our walls as a reminder that we co-construct our environment—we have agency over and responsibility for our co-created relationships. Our students resonate so deeply with this principle that a recent graduate decorated her mortar board with it.

Photo by the author
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Mentoring in Community

There is value in the constancy of a single, life-long mentor, but what incredible ego to think that I—and I alone—can or should play such a singular role in any person’s life. There is another kind of value in a mentorship community made up of diverse voices, experiences, and perspectives—a community made up of people who come and go, who agree and disagree, who give different kinds of advice, who model different choices, and who collectively open up all kinds of ways to think, do, and live in the world.

Throughout my career as a university educator, I have mentored dozens of college students during a concentrated and intentional season of their vocational discernment, specifically young women interested in the vocational possibilities of literacy, storytelling, and advocacy. Many of these are students of literature, writing, and education, but they are also students of film, theology, social work, psychology, physical therapy, chemistry, and engineering. Sometimes we meet for an official meeting in my office, but more often mentorship looks like a quick hallway chat, a wave across the library, a text message update, a walk around campus, catching up over coffee and then more coffee, an internship program forwarded by email, comments on a class assignment, or advice on a job application. In my experience, mentoring these students involves a series of tiny and ordinary moments that can sometimes stretch out over several years but that usually end, often abruptly.

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