A series on vocation, the dignity of labor, and the misconceptions that prevent us from valuing all work.
“Am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing?”
Recently, I met with a group of students who were articulating the kind of sincere desires we so often hear in vocational work. One of the great joys in this kind of work with my students—which I’m sure is true for many of us—is accompanying them as they wrestle with these big questions of meaning and purpose.
At the same time, those questions often come at us like a double-edged sword, because students are not always asking them from a place of deep joy. Frederick Buechner’s classic formulation of vocation, where God calls a person to “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” is inspirational, but it can also induce anxiety. And the students with whom I recently met were asking questions from that place. Instead of being inspired, they were worried that they were somehow getting it wrong. To them, vocation feels hidden and so morally urgent that missing or misunderstanding a calling is tantamount to sin or vice. It seems to me that if the formation programs I lead create angst in my students, I might be doing something wrong.
This disquiet has grown in my spirit over time. Truthfully, it has accelerated rapidly over the past two years as I dove into research and writing on Christian labor theology. Historically, the broadly Evangelical tradition—which I come from—has been reticent to discuss questions of labor. One striking example of this reticence was Billy Graham’s coupling of evangelistic messages with an overtly negative disposition toward the labor movement in the 1950s. But that antagonism toward labor has been wider than just one man. Overall, the evangelical movement has not engaged with working class questions substantively or systematically for a few generations. Instead, the evangelical focus shifted to questions of work (as opposed to labor). There are a lot of sociological reasons for this shift, alongside some misguided theological ones.
I’ve come to believe that there is also a formation-related reason for this focus, which connects to the way we teach students about calling and vocation. I contend that traditional modes of teaching and forming students in vocation can reinforce ways of thinking about work that disregard the dignity of all labor, inadvertently underwriting social hierarchies that demean certain types of workers.
In other words, calling and vocation are too often limited to conversations about certain types of careers. (I commend vocational programs with a wider aperture for calling than career, but in higher education, career is always in the mix.) There are jobs to which students are called, and then there are entire sectors of work about which students almost never articulate a sense of calling. After all, as Susan Maros observes in Calling in Context, “serious students don’t hang sheetrock.” Here, she highlights the stigma associated with the kinds of jobs that an education allows you to escape, calling attention to how we often foster this stigma in higher education. In practice, the sense of calling we help our students discern often saves them from certain types of work. Like Maros, Patrick Reyes (in his book The Purpose Gap) testifies to a distinct but related context, focusing on the way communities of color experience calling and vocation differently—often through barriers that deny them the means of living out their callings, or even discerning them. Both Maros and Reyes have made valuable contributions to our understanding of the socially conditioned factors that influence vocational programs in higher education. I applaud them.
These examples illustrate just one of the ways in which our work with students is at cross purposes with any desires we might have to commend the dignity of labor, and to recognize the valuable contributions made by people who haven’t had the opportunity to discern their vocations on a college campus. Still, even though our vocation programming contributes to this problem, these programs can help us to express the dignity of labor and to resist ways of thinking about work that dehumanizes people on the lower rungs of any given social hierarchy.
Specifically, I see three common misconceptions at work in many of my students that I will unpack in a series of posts that follow: First, I find students often internalize and reinforce an unhealthy connection between their identity and their achievements. The classic trap of believing that “I am what I do” is ingrained in far too many of our students. Second, students are too often trapped by conventional thinking about the value of personal accomplishment and don’t always appreciate the value of social contribution. This kind of “gold star mentality” is inherently competitive and fosters systems of what Wendell Berry calls “winners and losers.” Third, the previous two dynamics foster a kind of ambition that leaves students perpetually unsatisfied and unable to truly experience the good life in community with others.
All three of these dynamics are at war within my students and in our society, and they damage a student’s ability to discern meaning and purpose in healthy ways. At the same time, they also corrupt our shared capacity to affirm the dignity of labor. If we can reimagine ways of engaging these misconceptions, we may be able to make a real difference in both arenas. In the posts that follow, I will try to untangle these misconceptions for the sake of our students—and to sharpen our own vision so that we can celebrate the work that every person does. I hope you’ll join me throughout this series as we explore some possibilities for calling and vocation programs to chart a better way.
Adam Gustine is an associate director at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good where he directs the program in virtue ethics, education, and formation. He has worked in a variety of faith-based and denominational leadership contexts within higher education. He is the author of Becoming a Just Church: Cultivating Communities of God’s Shalom and co-author of Ecosystems of Jubilee: Economic Ethics for the Neighborhood. His newest book, A Working Theology of Labor: Justice, Dignity, and the Common Good (Baker Academic) comes out in October 2026.