Insights and Conversations from the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE)
Author: Catherine Wright
Catherine Wright (B.Sc, B.Ed, M.Div, Ph.D.) is an interdisciplinary Christian ecotheologian working at Wingate University (North Carolina) in the Religion and Philosophy Department. As a scholar-practitioner, she has helped to create a new institute on campus grounded in the principles of sustainable development called The Collaborative for the Common Good and was chosen to be its first Executive Director on August 1, 2020.
Her thesis work focused on the implications of the new cosmology -- cosmogenesis -- on contemporary understandings of human suffering which is the topic of her first text: "Creation, God, and Humanity: Engaging the Mystery of Suffering within the Sacred Cosmos" (Paulist Press, 2017). She was ecstatic when it won an Association of Catholic Publishers (ACP) Excellence in Publishing award in the category of Theology in 2018.
As a Christian ethicist, she issues via the intertwining lenses of eco-theology, liberation theology, ecofeminism, sustainability, and service-learning and community engagement. She constantly strives to communicate her Christ-centered approach to physical, social and spiritual healing in the many talks, fundraisers, think-tanks, lyceums, advisory boards, retreats, field trips, and panels she participates in or hosts, and with the student organizations, she advises on campus.
After immersing herself in the ethos of Wingate and teaching a diverse number of courses such as Global Perspectives on Ethics, Systematic Theology, Religion and Science, Theological Responses to Our Ecological Crisis, Suffering and Joy, Christian Missions in the 21st Century, and EcoJustice another text was imagined and published in 2020 with Paulist Press. Her book is called “Caring for Our Common Home: A Practical Guide to Laudato Si'” and is intended to invite readers to new just behaviors with interactive exercises aimed to change hearts, heads, and hands. It gives new life to the tenet of being the "hands and feet of Christ" and since its publication, several book groups have used it as a guide.
Catherine also loves supporting Creation Care and Catholic Social Justice teams across many dioceses as well as spending time with her family and friends in the great outdoors -- taking time to do some ‘holy noticing.’ A great joy for her is to work alongside passionate people of faith in her local community who are laboring to empower others to wholeness and happiness.
Her fur babies keep her grounded as does her gardens, her daughter Draven, and husband Todd.
Education for vocation must be a co-creative process highlighting interconnectivity and reciprocity.
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.
Donovan O. Schaefer’s Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (2022) sets out to dismantle the binary between feeling and thinking. It uses an excerpt from Charles Darwin’s 1863 letter to a botanist as an example: “for love of heaven, favour my madness & have some scraped off & sent me. I am like a gambler, & love a wild experiment.”
Darwin was stirred and led by his excitement much like we have been. For Darwin and ourselves, feeling and emotion are ways of making knowledge and learning a more sensual experience. Everything we learn is thus saturated with feelings of our whole sentient being, our universal self. We are both contributors and participants in life’s wild experimentation. Our series of blog posts displays how classrooms can transform when shaped by
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?
Since we cannot escape our interdependence and interconnectedness, we are forced to confront our life together as kin (or “oddkin,” as Harraway says). To re-configure our relations, we must unmake, make, and remake; we must indulge in the work of imaginating, speculating, and fabulating a future for all creatures and life forms. This is not fantasy, but justice.
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.
Part two in 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.
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.
In our last post, we asked was whether a cosmic horizon of meaning for vocation––one inspired by Darwin’s entangled bank––would help navigate some campus challenges in a post-COVID world? Our answer was emphatically “yes.” Why? Because a cosmic horizon reveals that we are caught up in inescapable networks of giving and taking, feeding and being fed. Thus, by our existence we are given a place setting at a great cosmic feast and festival. This worldview appreciates vocatio as James Fowler does: the discovery, cultivation, and integration of rich patterns of our whole lives, including our plates, palates, and tables.
Embracing vocation as calling in this context inextricably grounds it in three central tenets: We are all interdependent, we live in overlapping networks of mutuality, and co-creativity is central to life and flourishing. With these tenets in mind, we have developed a Food and Faith course set to unfold in the Fall of 2022. This posts muses on the cornerstone metaphor that grounds our commitment in this course: table fellowship.
What if we took Darwin’s vision of our participation within a community of creation seriously and contemplated Earth’s entangled banks as a source of wisdom for addressing challenges facing higher education? This post begins a series that will describe the co-creation of a high-impact general education class for first year students developed at Wingate University called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of our Lives.
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.
Mr. Darwin’s Lovely Thought – detail 1; susanskuseart.com
Elizabeth Johnson’s Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (2015) offers much to those looking to explore vocation in a COVID world. For Johnson, the human vocation is to praise the Creator and care for the natural world rather than destroy it. She suggests that in the process of falling in love with the Creator via caring for creation, human beings will find our true identities reimagined as “vital members of the community of creation rather than as a species divorced from the rest.” The entangled bank, an overlooked metaphor offered by Darwin, could be our guide:
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
What if we took this vision of our participation within a community of creation seriously and contemplated Earth’s entangled banks as a source of wisdom for addressing challenges facing higher education? This post begins a series that will describe the co-creation of a high-impact general education class for first year students developed at Wingate University called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of our Lives.
