Author: David S. Cunningham

NetVUE at the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting

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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

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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

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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

David S. Cunningham Uncategorized

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

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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 →

Finding your calling — and playing catch

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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 →

Is God Necessary For Vocation?

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E011James Clark, writing on the blog of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, offers some thoughtful commentary on the role of God in discussions of vocation. The post includes a number of references to At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education, the first collection published by the NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project.

Previously, Clark also offered some helpful reflections on Tim Clydesdale’s book, The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to Students about Vocation.

Readers of vocationmatters.org may find these and other entries on the blog of genuine interest.

Welders, Philosophers, and “Vocational Education”

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At a recent debate among candidates for President, one participant (who, for the purposes of this blog, will remain nameless) made the following statement:

I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.

Said candidate has been criticized on many fronts. Philosophers actually make considerably more than welders, if a “philosopher” is someone who teaches philosophy.  And of course, anyone with a bachelor’s degree (in philosophy or anything else) will earn considerably more over a lifetime than someone without one.

By Sgt. William Begley (https://www.dvidshub.net/image/574004) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
By Sgt. William Begley (https://www.dvidshub.net/ image/574004) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In addition, several commentators have wryly asked why the candidate’s own academic background had not taught him the difference between “less” and “fewer.”

(I suppose that I’ve partially identified him by using “him”; however, I’m also guessing that few readers will have imagined that Carly Fiorina made this swipe, since her own undergraduate philosophy major seems to have prepared her pretty well for her career.)

These quibbles aside, what particularly struck me about the above quotation is the use of the word vocational.  The last two decades have seen huge changes in the language of vocation, such that — in the world of higher education, at least — the phrase “vocational education” is no longer so frequently used when referring to trade-school training for work such as welding, cooking, or diesel mechanics.  But as this candidate’s comment suggests, that usage is still very common in the larger political and cultural realm.

This should serve as a reminder, to those of us deeply involved in the campus conversation about vocation, that our work may not always translate easily into the wider public context.  Of course, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use the word vocation; it does mean, however, that we may want to be a bit more intentional and active as to how we define it, employ it, and explicate it.

The terminological problem also suggests that when we think about “alternative” language for vocational thinking (call and calling, lives of meaning and purpose, and so on), we might not want to think of this as merely optional. At this juncture in history — when the word vocational is still being used (and heard) as referring primarily to trade schools — we should generally seek to employ a wider range of vocabulary. This will help us to get the message out beyond our immediate contexts.

Welcome to the NetVUE Scholarly Resources Blog

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Over the next several years, a group of about forty academic leaders will be involved in a series of projects designed to create new scholarly resources on vocation and vocational exploration. This project is sponsored by NetVUE, which is administered by the Council of Independent Colleges. Our work is made possible by a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc.

While we are also publishing journal articles and several books, we are aware that this project is part of an ongoing conversation about vocation as an important dynamic in undergraduate education. We want to support and nurture that conversation by Continue reading →

Ritual, contest, image

David S. Cunningham Uncategorized

Since the inception of higher education, American colleges and universities have always claimed to be focused on the development of the whole student. The contribution by Quincy Brown in collection At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education focuses on student activity outside the classroom—particularly advising, athletics, residential life, Greek life, and campus ministry—as places where vocational discernment should and does occur. The nature and quality of these encounters are shaped by such diverse themes such as ritual (including rituals that are not specifically ecclesial), contest (athletic, artistic, or academic), and image (the outward signs of membership in a particular campus community or culture).  These themes that are not always addressed and “unpacked” in a classroom setting. He also draws on John Wesley’s conversion (and the Wesleyan understanding of transforming the world through a disciplined life) as a source for understanding the importance of co-curricular experiences for shaping our students’ vocational discernment experiences. Other sources for reflection on this theme include James Fowler, Sharon Parks, Victor Turner, Kathleen Manning, and Larry Braskamp.