Author: David S. Cunningham

David S. Cunningham is executive director of the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE), an association of over 300 colleges and universities that are supporting their students as they reflect on and discern their many callings in life. NetVUE is a program of the Council of Independent Colleges and is funded through member dues and the generous support of Lilly Endowment Inc.

Four Types of Vocation

In this post, David Cunningham presents a typology of vocation through Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings and reveals four distinct types of vocation: driven individuals focused on mastery, explorers still searching for their calling, craftspeople engaged in practical work, and those who balance work with other life interests. Each type illustrates varied approaches to vocation and personal fulfillment.

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day (1876).

The construction of a typology is always a hazardous endeavor, given the necessary simplification and broad categorization required to impose a structure on a complex idea. Nevertheless, we can learn something by sketching the general contours of a multi-faceted subject such as vocation.

I recently found myself contemplating a “typology of vocation” while viewing an exhibition of the work of the French painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Many readers will recognize his best-known work, Paris Street; Rainy Day, which is usually displayed in a very prominent place at the Art Institute.

Continue reading “Four Types of Vocation”

Privilege, Justice, and Religious Freedom

David S. Cunningham examines the tension between public and private higher education institutions in the context of state and federal legislative control. He argues that while private institutions may face less direct oversight, federal grants present significant risks. Religiously affiliated schools may navigate these challenges differently, emphasizing their commitment to social justice and religious freedom.

David S. Cunningham

As certain core commitments of higher education have come under attack in recent years, I have been paying attention to the potential differences between the public and private spheres. Public institutions in states like Florida and Texas may have little choice but to surrender to the will of the state legislature, which sets budgets and has the power to dictate many of the details as to how its state institutions are run. Legislative control of private institutions is less obvious, but it can still happen—whether directly (as in states like Iowa, which control scholarship programs that can be used at the state’s private institutions) or indirectly (wherein private institutions can be shut out of certain corridors of power if they are seen as unfriendly to a state’s government).

Continue reading “Privilege, Justice, and Religious Freedom”

Fictional Narratives and Vocational Discernment

The content discusses the significance of narratives, both real and fictional, in vocational exploration and ethics. It highlights Steven Mintz’s insights on how storytelling can aid understanding and engagement in education, illustrating its practical use through ancient Greek dramas that address modern conflicts. Narratives help students navigate their vocational journeys.

light bulb beside books on shelf
Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com

Those of us who dwell in the land of vocational exploration and discernment have often been reminded of the power of narratives in supporting this work. The narratives that we employ are often real-life stories: now-famous folks whose lives began in unpromising ways, people whose winding paths eventually pointed them in a particular direction, or elders and mentors who told us of their own journeys. The field of ethics, too, has often relied on these narratives to provide examples of lives of character and virtue. But I have always believed that fictional narratives can be just as useful and important as those that come from real-life features and (auto)biographies. In fact, fiction has a couple of advantages over non-fiction in this regard.

Continue reading “Fictional Narratives and Vocational Discernment”

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.

Continue reading “Welcoming Geoffrey Bateman as the New Editor of Vocation Matters”

NetVUE at the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting

Calling all faculty members in theology, religious studies, biblical studies, and related fields! If you will be attending the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature, please join us for one or more of the following NetVUE-hosted events:
    • Reception for NetVUE Members and Friends: Sunday, November 20, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., Embassy Suites Hotel, Leadville Room: come and go as your schedule allows. Light refreshments and cash bar (subsidized for NetVUE members).
    • An SBL Session on the 2022 NetVUE Big Read Selection (Patrick Reyes’s The Purpose Gap): Sunday, November 20, 1:00 to 3:30 p.m., Denver Convention Center, Mile High 3B (Lower Level): “Empowering Communities of Color: The Role of Faculty in Religious and Biblical Studies,” featuring a panel discussion with Stephen Fowl, Armando Guerrero Estrada, Kirsten Oh, and Hannah Schell, as well as a response from Patrick Reyes.
    • Vocation and Catastrophe: A NetVUE Pre-Conference. For those who can come a day early, NetVUE hosts a pre-conference gathering from Thursday, November 17 at 2:00 p.m. through Friday, November 18 at noon, in the Sheraton Downtown, Governor’s Square rooms. The modest registration fee ($25 for those at NetVUE institutions, $50 otherwise) includes a Thursday afternoon reception and dinner. The gathering features a panel discussion of Kiara Jorgenson‘s book Ecology and Vocation: Recasting Calling in a New Planetary Era, as well as a panel on how faculty members can help students who are called into “catastrophic vocations,” and a closing plenary address by David Clough, “Living Vocationally in a World on Fire.” If you can join us for this pre-conference gathering, please help our planning by following this link to register in advance.

Information on all these events can be found on the NetVUE website. If you are coming to Denver for the AAR/SBL meeting, please join us!

Aligning Passion and Profession

A career-oriented seminar program at Le Moyne College helped Alex Cimino Jr. (left) decide that he wanted to work at coordinating large-scale disaster-response efforts. (Photo courtesy of Le Moyne College, for the Chronicle.)

I was on vacation in early September, and wouldn’t you know it—that’s exactly when the Chronicle of Higher Education would decide to publish a brief article about two NetVUE institutions and their highly successful vocational exploration programs. I missed it at the time, but it’s certainly not too late to read about the Manresa program at Le Moyne and the Messina program at Loyola University of Maryland. (And if the words Manresa and Messina are obscure to you, the clue is that these are both Jesuit institutions; search on Ignatius of Loyola for more information.) The article is titled At 2 Jesuit Colleges, Aligning Passion and Profession. It’s behind a firewall, but many libraries have a site license, so check with them if you can’t access it. Shout-outs to the visionary leaders at these NetVUE campuses who added their comments to the article: At Loyola, president Brian Linnane, and at Le Moyne, Deborah Cady Melzer, VP for student development, and Steven Affeldt of the philosophy faculty, who is also our NetVUE campus contact.

 

A More Inclusive Understanding of Vocation

The National Catholic Center for the Laity is an independent organization founded to continue the discussion prompted by the Second Vatican Council and the 1977 Chicago Declaration of Christian Concern, both of which emphasized the role of the laity. The May 2019 issue of the Center’s newsletter Initiatives featured a front-page article titled Image of NCL's Initiatives newsletter“Vocations,” which provides a nicely-worded account of the importance of understanding calling as broadly as possible. The article offers a welcome corrective to the tendency to limit the term vocation to those called to religious life. It also includes a very nice shout-out to NetVUE, to Tom Perrin’s recent New York Times article on vocation, and to the recent InsideHigherEd piece, “What College Students Need Most.”

NCL’s reproducible “Spirituality of Work” booklets, each specific to a workaday vocation, can be obtained from The Pastoral Center (1212 Versailles Ave., Alameda, CA 94501; https://pastoral.center/work). More information about the National Catholic Center for the Laity is available on its website at www.catholiclabor.org.

 

Knowledge, Love, and the Meaning of Life

Drawing of Hayden White
Drawing of Hayden White by A.E. Kieren for The Chronicle of Higher Education

I suspect that anyone involved with the teaching of undergraduates will appreciate this interview (from 2008, but heretofore unpublished) with the historian Hayden White, who died last year.  I encountered White’s work in graduate school, when his Metahistory changed the way I thought about scholarship. In this interview, practically every response he offers contains multiple gems of insight, and those who are interested in helping students with matters of vocational exploration and discernment may find his thoughts quite inspiring. In addition, those readers who work at liberal arts institutions may be particularly interested in the person whom White considers to be the greatest teacher of all time.

Robert Pogue Harrison, who introduces the interview for the Chronicle, notes that “As departments shutter and enrollments plummet, White’s thoughts on professionalism, vocation, and love are more relevant than ever.”

The interview can be found here. It may be behind a firewall, but most academic institutions subscribe to the Chronicle and their libraries can provide access for anyone who hits a roadblock.

I hope others find this short interview as inspiring and enlightening as I did!

Be Like Lulu

She’s all over the internet these days: soft brown eyes, deep in thought, with beautiful, shiny black . . . fur. Lulu is a service dog from Susquehanna who was enrolled in the CIA’s “puppy class” to be trained for explosive detection and other K-9 tasks. She has been showing up all over the web during the last few days for having failed to make the grade in her training.

It seems that Lulu was showing signs that she just wasn’t interested in the work. She was easily distracted; even when her trainers provided more incentives (in the form of food or play), she just wasn’t enjoying herself. She wanted to sniff for rabbits, rather than bombs.  She wanted work that provided Continue reading “Be Like Lulu”

Finding your calling — and playing catch

The language of “vocational discernment” is finding a foothold in higher ed these days, but occasionally some critics have asked whether this is just a fancy way of talking about “deciding what to do in life.” playing-catchInstitutions may have adopted new language, but aren’t they simply doing what they’ve always done—namely, helping students to choose a major and to embark on a career?  Or does “vocational reflection and discernment” really point to a genuinely different way of helping students think about their future lives? I believe that it does, and that one way to understand this difference is to think about playing catch.

I don’t usually find myself turning to sports for metaphors, but I think this one works.  For most sports, there are certain things that one can do alone: learning about the game, undergoing physical conditioning, and watching the techniques of the greats.  In some cases, one can even practice a sport alone: go for a run, hit tennis balls against a wall, or throw softballs and baseballs into one of those “pitch-back” nets. But all athletes know that these experiences are not the same as Continue reading “Finding your calling — and playing catch”