In April, NetVUE’s podcast Callings released an episode that featured an interview with Anna Bonta Moreland. A professor of humanities at Villanova University, Anna also holds the Anne Quinn Welsh Endowed Chair and directs the university’s honors program. While her academic expertise and research include medieval theology, interfaith dialogue, and comparative theology, she has also become passionate about educational renewal and the character and leadership formation of her students. She’s received both Templeton and Lilly Endowment grants for her work in these areas.
Recently, Anna coauthored The Young Adult Playbook: Living Like it Matters with Thomas Smith. Specifically written for undergraduates, the book invites them into and guides them in vocational reflection and discernment. But for Anna, writing the book represented her own vocational shift. It emerged out of a course she has been teaching senior honors students for the past eight years called Shaping an Adult Life—a course that helps these students, as she notes, “look beyond graduation and think about a life well lived as an adult.” While teaching the course, she felt “like I had put my finger on the raw nerve of my students’ lives,” and their “visceral” response to the course prompted her to write the book as a sort of “palate cleanser” from her previous scholarship. But it served as something more than a temporary shift in her own life as a writer, something much more significant. “This supposed palate cleanser,” she observed, “has ended up just becoming where I am, and I don’t want to leave.”
In this episode , we hear the story of this new passion and how it has led to different kinds of interactions with her students, to the development of new courses, and to the revamping of old ones. The book itself grapples human flourishing and how to help undergraduate students pursue lives that will lead to their own flourishing and that of others. She uses the metaphor of a fountain for what a well-lived adult life looks like, in contrast to the sponge of being a young person. “When you’re a younger person and you’re moving into adulthood,” she says, “you’re really absorbing a lot from influences and you’re being formed and being filled in a really important way. And as you transition into adulthood, you become a fountain where having been filled, then you give out to others.” Ultimately, for Anna, a “life well lived is one in which you’re serving the common good of your community.”
In what follows, she explores what she describes as the three building blocks of a flourishing adult life: work, leisure, and relationships. The first and last of these topics might be familiar and comfortable to many readers of this blog, especially those who work with students; but the inclusion of leisure in this list might surprise us. Anna argues that even as students are surprised that they should consider it, “leisure is integral to a life well lived,” because it “changes” our students, “shapes them, molds them just as much as work.” And even as many of our students express a desire for significant romantic relationships in their lives, “there’s precious little” she argues, “that this culture is offering these young people to prepare them for that project, for that desire.”
The Young Adult Playbook represents an attempt by Anna and her co-author to rectify this gap (and other gaps) in what we offer our students. Throughout the book, students—and all readers—encounter stories from young people like themselves and reflective activities and exercises to guide them through their own discernment process. Throughout, Anna shares her deep desire to help all young adults think about education, social engagements, and career aspirations in holistic and life-affirming ways, especially in light of the many challenges they face. As she says as she concludes the interview, “I want to say to any young listener out there: you deserve more. You deserve more in your work life, you deserve more in your leisure life, and you deserve more in your love. Do what you deserve, have more hope for yourself.”
Click hereto listen to the episode featuring Anna Bonta Moreland, “A Vocational Playbook.”
Geoffrey W. Bateman is the editor of Vocation Matters.