Month: August 2024

NetVUE’s Podcast Callings Releases Season Four Highlights

NetVUE’s podcast “Callings” concluded its fourth season with an annual bonus episode featuring highlights from the season’s interviews. The episode offers insights on vocation, purpose, and meaning from various perspectives, providing valuable reflections for students and faculty. Guests encourage resilience, risk-taking, and addressing injustices, emphasizing the value of personal identity and love in vocational journeys.

NetVUE’s podcast Callings has concluded its fourth season with the release of its annual bonus “Highlights” episode. Featuring clips from this season’s interviews, it offers students, in particular, ways to think about vocation and the search for purpose and meaning in their lives from multiple perspectives. These excerpts not only give listeners a chance to hear some of this season’s gems, but also provide faculty with brief reflections that might be useful for classroom activities, or engaging points of departure for anyone working with undergraduate students in other settings.

Guests include (top row, left to right) Christi Belcourt, Sarah Bassin, and Katharine Hayhoe; and (bottom row, left to right) Shirley Hoogstra, Parker Palmer, and Anantanand Rambachan.

The highlights in this episode explore a range of themes, from encouraging us all to cultivate a profound sense of rightness in ourselves, our bodies, and the larger world, as well as attending generously to how we muddle through the challenges that we face. Guests encourage students to resist fear, worry less, and take supported risks, emphasizing the power of building resiliency and the belief that we can meaningfully address the injustices in the world. Focusing on valuing who we are, rather than what we do, the episode also points to the power of accountability and love in our vocational journeys. It features guests Parker Palmer, Norman Wirzba, Katharine Hayhoe, Shirley Hoogstra, Miroslav Volf, Sarah Bassin, Anantanand Rambachan, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Geoffrey Bateman, and Christi Belcourt.

Click hereto listen to the fourth season’s bonus episode of highlights.

Geoffrey W. Bateman is the editor of Vocation Matters.

Dependability as Calling: Facilitating Freedom in Our Polarized Age

This post explores the challenge of supporting students with diverse callings, especially when we might differ and disagree with them. Educators are urged to foster dependable environments to facilitate students’ freedom , even amidst political and ideological differences. The story of Joseph serves as a powerful example of supporting others’ callings through dependability.

blurred motion of woman against overcast
Photo by Kseniya Kopna on Pexels.com

This past spring, I taught a new course titled “Your Life’s Calling.” One of its main goals was to help students discern what it would mean to feel called in a world that often feels noisy, angry, confusing, and devoid of reasons for hope. As we moved through the course, students—especially those who knew they wanted to become classroom teachers—wondered how an educator could support every student’s calling, especially those callings that might challenge or directly conflict with the teacher’s most firmly held beliefs.

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Vote for NetVUE Sessions at SXSW EDU Conference in 2025

NetVUE is excited to share that we have proposed several sessions for the 2025 SXSW EDU Conference and Festival, which will take place in Austin, Texas, from March 6-8, 2025. The selection process includes a public vote, and we would love your support!


Our proposals include:

Voting ends this Sunday, August 18th. If you’d like to support NetVUE’s participation in this event, vote today by creating a free account here. There is no limit to the number of sessions you can vote for, and every vote helps promote NetVUE’s presence at this important event.

Echoed Vocation III: A Call to Justice

This series of posts explores the author’s experiences with teaching virtues in connection with his two autistic children. The focus is on the virtue of justice and the challenges of teaching it, as well as the need for understanding different perspectives on justice. The author emphasizes the importance of persistence in nurturing a vision of justice.

A series of posts about virtue, autism, vocation, and the teaching of history.

Martin Dotterweich

In the first two installments of this series, I explored how the virtues I teach are echoed as callings to me through my two autistic children. As I teach courage, they call me to be present with them in their fear. As I teach moderation, they call me to examine myself rather than judge others. The third echo, justice, is the focus of this post.

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Welcoming Geoffrey Bateman as the New Editor of Vocation Matters

Geoffrey Bateman, a professor at Regis University, has been appointed as the new editor of Vocation Matters, succeeding Stephanie Johnson. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Bateman aims to encourage diverse perspectives on vocational exploration and discernment. He plans to maintain the blog’s focus on timely contributions to the field and practical reflections on mentoring students.

With this post on Vocation Matters, I’m announcing a transition in the editorial responsibilities for NetVUE’s blog. Thanks to the dedicated work of Hannah Schell, its first editor, and to Stephanie Johnson, who has overseen the blog for the past two years, this experimental vehicle—once a small sideline within one of NetVUE’s programs—has matured into an important resource for our member institutions and beyond. It offers outstanding online writing at a level of depth and breadth that couldn’t have been imagined when it was launched some eight years ago. The blog is visited weekly by people around the world, including 147 different countries and territories in addition to the United States; it is now visited some 20,000 times each year.

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