Author: Geoffrey W. Bateman

Mentoring as Vocational Practice: Reflections on the NetVUE Regional Gathering at Presbyterian College

The NetVUE Regional Gathering at Presbyterian College emphasized the importance of mentorship in the context of experiential learning as a way to support students’ vocational exploration. Keynote speakers, Andy Chan and Terese Lund, encouraged participants to accompany students in discovering their purpose, asking good questions and providing space to sit with the uncertainty as part of their growth process. The gathering explored strategies for creating a supportive mentoring culture.

According to Terese Lund, “mentoring is the relational infrastructure for formation,” a definition she offered on the second day of the NetVUE Regional Gathering at Presbyterian College that took place September 24–26 in Clinton, South Carolina. The assistant vice president of Purposeful Pathways and professor of psychology at Wingate University, Lund drew on her experience as an administrator, faculty member, and mentor as she mapped out a few significant vocational frameworks for participants to consider. She then invited them to reflect on them as they explored the role of mentoring in experiential learning as a key part of vocational exploration and discernment for undergraduate students. As Lund argued, this process is one that students “should not have to do alone.”

The theme of this gathering was Vocational and Experiential Learning: The Call to Mentorship, which focused on this central question: “How does mentorship in experiential learning opportunities foster genuine vocational formation in students?”  Over the course of three days, participants examined the role that such opportunities play in student learning, sharing concrete practices that could deepen the mentoring culture on their own campuses—all with an emphasis on this work could shape students’ sense of purpose and calling.

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Moments of Annunciation: David Brooks

David Brooks discusses vocation as akin to falling in love, emphasizing emotional exploration and self-discovery. In the inaugural episode of this season of NetVUE’s podcast Callings, he shares insights on finding one’s calling by paying to attention to feelings of admiration, indignation, and enthusiasm, suggesting that deep self-awareness is essential for meaningful vocational discernment.

David Brooks

“Finding your calling,” David Brooks suggests, “is more like falling in love than it is like making a decision. It just happens to you.” One of the most recognized public intellectuals of our time, David is the featured guest in the first episode of season seven of NetVUE’s podcast Callings. In it, he reflects on the many ways he’s come to understand vocation and calling over the course of his life and career. Educators who work with undergraduate students will find much value in David’s experiences and storytelling.

For David, vocational exploration and discernment are rooted in our emotions and desires. His “main advice” to listeners, especially students, on how to live vocationally is “to fall in love with things” and to learn how to answer the question, “What do you really want?” This question might seem like a simple one to answer, yet it remains one of the most significant ones we need to ask ourselves; it can also be one of the hardest ones to answer authentically, given the self-awareness it requires. The question is important because, as David notes (drawing on the wisdom of one of his former professors), “what distinguishes people is the ruling passion of their souls.” To know a person—or a student—is not to reduce them to their GPA or their SAT scores, but to ask them, “What do you love?” In this way, “the most important quality to cultivate” in our lives is that of “being a good lover,” a quality that is central to vocational discernment. Ultimately, as David observes, the “process of discovering what you want is the process of finding your calling.”

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Season Six Highlights of Callings Podcast Is Now Available

NetVUE’s podcast Callings released a bonus episode focusing on vocational advice for undergraduate students. Hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton curated insights from various guests, emphasizing listening, perseverance, and the virtues. This resource aims to enhance educators’ interactions with students, fostering deeper reflections on vocation and meaningful life choices.

At the beginning of every academic year, NetVUE’s podcast Callings releases a bonus episode that highlights key conversations from the previous season. This year, Callings’ hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton have selected a number of excerpts that serve as advice for undergraduate students, featuring insights from literature professors, psychologists, theologians, and leaders in higher education renewal—all of whom care deeply about the shared work of supporting the collective work of vocational exploration. These guests share professional advice and personal stories as they emphasize the nuance and complexity of what it means to live a good life, encouraging listeners to ask good questions, to be curious, and to listen to self and others.

Some of the guests featured in this episode of Callings. Top row (from left to right): Michael Lamb, Willie James Jennings, and Barbara Brown Taylor; bottom row (from left to right): Angela Duckworth, Lee C. Camp, and Almeda M. Wright.
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Hope, Resonance, and Work that Matters: Reflecting on Love’s Braided Dance

This post offers three reflections on this year’s selection for NetVUE’s Big Read program, Norman Wirzba’s Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis. Each writer provides their own response and reflection on the issues they found most significant with the intent to spark further discussion across the network.

A series of reflections on Norman Wirzba’s Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis and NetVUE’s 2026–2027 Big Read program.

In the first chapter of Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis, Norman Wirzba observes that to harness the powerful joy of authentic embodiment for our shared work, “people need the support of a loving community that affirms and encourages them.” One of the purposes of NetVUE’s Big Read program is to foster this kind of support at its member institutions and to do so by reading a book like Love’s Braided Dance together in community. Such communal meaning-making has the potential not only to help us all deepen our practices of vocational exploration, but also to affirm and encourage us in the process.

Book cover for 'Love's Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis' by Norman Wirzba, featuring artistic lettering and braided wheat illustrations.

To that end, Vocation Matters has invited three colleagues—Tara Russey, Craig Mattson, and Anna Stewart—from across the network to reflect on this year’s Big Read. In their reflections, they share powerful glimpses into what moved them and striking insights into what they found significant. In this way, they illustrate another key point from Wirzba’s opening chapter: “The most important thing” to do, he writes, “is to act on the conviction that your community needs you and is calling you to contribute in some way.”

As you reflect on their contributions, please consider them as points of departure as you and colleagues explore what significance this book might have at your institution. I think you’ll agree that we all need, and will be enriched by, the loving, resonate insights that each writer offers us.

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Teaching to Live: An Interview with Almeda M. Wright

Almeda M. Wright

For Almeda Wright—who’s featured in the most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast, Callings—human flourishing depends in large part on a vision of abundance, resilience, and thriving. She notes that it does not mean that everything in our lives always goes “perfectly well,” but we do have to have “the support and the resources to encounter whatever emerges.” Even amidst difficulty, we have the capacity to flourish. “When hard times come,” she notes, you can still thrive, if “you feel that there are resources, communities, people, a sense of purpose, a sense of calling, a sense of God, or a spirituality that allows you to face it and not be overwhelmed by it.”

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Hope Circuits: Jessica Ridell

The latest NetVUE podcast episode features Jessica Riddell, a professor and researcher advocating for transformative change in higher education. In her book “Hope Circuits,” she explores fostering hope, equity, and creativity within universities. Riddell emphasizes renovating existing systems rather than destroying them, aiming for integrity and human flourishing.

Jessica Riddell

The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features Jessica Riddell, a speaker, professor, and researcher who focuses on systems change in higher education. Jessica’s recent book, Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Systems for Human Flourishing, and her previous co-authored book, Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning, cover various facets of educating and leading across the university. Jessica is a professor of early modern literature at Bishop’s University in Quebec, Canada, where she also holds the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence. She is the founder of the think tank Hope Circuits Institute and sits on the board of directors for the American Association of Colleges and Universities. In all these roles, she participates in a wide range of conversations at national and international levels about how universities fulfill the social contract to our broader society.

Committed to cultivating hope in higher education, Jessica wrote Hope Circuits to challenge educators to reconsider the assumptions with which we operate. In it, she offers innovative tools that emerge out of the stories of luminaries she gathered for the project and helps us come to a clearer understanding of systems of governance, leadership, and institutional culture so that everyone in the university can flourish. But such flourishing isn’t limited to higher education, which she argues plays an important role in fostering creativity and democracy across sectors. “Higher education,” she says, “is the place where we keep democracy and ourselves alive and awake. And my goodness, we need to stay alive and awake at this moment.”

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A Vocational Playbook: Anna Bonta Moreland

Anna Bonta Moreland, a humanities professor at Villanova University, discusses her new book, The Young Adult Playbook, designed for undergraduates. It offers guidance on vocational reflection and emphasizes the importance of work, leisure, and relationships for a fulfilling life. Moreland aims to empower students to pursue meaningful lives beyond graduation.

Anna Bonta Moreland

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.”

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The Craft of Teaching (and Learning): Carlo Rotella

The latest episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features Carlo Rotella, a writer and professor at Boston College. His book, What Can I Get Out of This?, explores teaching undergraduates and emphasizes meaningful engagement in the classroom. Rotella advocates for seeing education as a practice requiring persistence and presence, underscoring its relevance beyond mere career preparation.

Carlo Rotella

NetVUE’s podcast Callings has released a new episode, which features an interview with Carlo Rotella, an award-winning writer and professor of American Studies, English, and journalism at Boston College. His most recent book, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics gets at the heart of what it means to teach and to learn together with undergraduate students today. Carlo has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine since 2007. His work has appeared in collections like The Best American Essays, as well as The New Yorker, Harper’s, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Slate, and various scholarly periodicals. Recurring subjects in his writing are cities and city life, boxing, music, crime, basketball, neighborhoods, and how people get good at things. He is co-editor and founder of the University of Chicago Press’s Chicago Visions and Revisions book series.

As his career and his most recent book illustrates, Carlo is interested in the nuts and bolts of teaching—what he considers its craft and the ways we can build classroom experiences that help our students make meaning. The book follows the experience of a single cohort of students in a required introductory literature course, most of whom are not English majors. In it, Rotella tells the story of what happens when students practice discussing ideas and readings with each other over a semester and then follows up with them a few years later, revealing that the course’s impact yielded an impactful return on investment in one’s education and life. As he describes it, one of the things it explores is “how to be a student, how to do college,” helping educators better understand how our students experience and live out their vocations as students.

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Grit and Purpose: Angela Duckworth

In a recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings, Angela Duckworth discusses her book “Grit” and the significance of passion and perseverance. The conversation touches on mentoring, the importance of connection in education, and the relationship between human flourishing and serving others. Duckworth emphasizes goal setting and intentionality in pursuing one’s vocation.

Angela Duckworth

NetVUE’s podcast Callings recently released an episode featuring an interview with Angela Duckworth, the author of the well-known book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, a number one New York Times bestseller. Her TED talk on this topic is one of the most watched of all time. A 2013 MacArthur Fellow, Angela is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor in the department of psychology and faculty co-director of the Behavior Change for Good initiative in the Wharton School, both at the University of Pennsylvania. Angela’s wide experience includes having advised the World Bank, NBA and NFL teams, Fortune 500 CEOs, as well as working as a math and science teacher in the public school system. She founded a summer school for underserved children and co-founded the Character Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing scientific insights that help children thrive. Angela holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Pennsylvania.

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A Call to the Small: Barbara Brown Taylor

The latest episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features Barbara Brown Taylor, a renowned author and public theologian. She discusses the importance of recognizing personal and external callings, emphasizing the value of small, local actions. Taylor encourages prioritizing life-affirming pursuits and remaining attentive to personal vocations amidst life’s demands.

Barbara Brown Taylor

NetVUE’s podcast Callings has released its first episode of the new year, featuring New York Times best-selling author Barbara Brown Taylor. In addition to the many award-winning books that she has written—including Holy Envy, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and An Altar in the World—Barbara has served as an Episcopal priest, a teacher, and a public theologian. For many years, she held an endowed chair in religion and philosophy at Piedmont University, a NetVUE member institution, and she has served on several seminary faculties as well as the theological studies certificate program at Arrendale State Prison for women. Barbara has been recognized as one of the most effective preachers in the English-speaking world by Baylor University, and in 2014, Time magazine included her on its list of “The 100 Most Influential People.” She has been named the Georgia Woman of the Year and recently elected to the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame. And beyond all these accolades, she continues to write and speak and serve as the caretaker of a farm in rural Georgia.

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