Author: Matthew Duperon

I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Susquehanna University, a small liberal arts university in Selinsgrove, PA. I study and teach comparative religious ethics, specializing in early Chinese religious thought and American Pragmatism. I live with my wife and four children in the beautiful Susquehanna River Valley.

The Transfiguring Magic of Ritual

Ritual has two functions: to give us a chance to remember which way is “up” and make sure we’re still generally pointed in that direction, and to provide guidelines for living well with each other so that we’re not stepping on each other’s toes, but even more that we are actively helping each other to get better.

The chaplain invited me to give the sermon at our University’s weekly chapel service the Sunday before Lent. This is Transfiguration Sunday in many Christian traditions, where the Gospel reading is Matthew 17:1-9, which recounts an episode where the disciples see Jesus transfigured in divine glory on a mountain. Even though I am not a Christian, it proved to be a great opportunity for reflecting on vocation and how we can collectively examine shared patterns of meaning and purpose in a pluralistic society, where many of us strongly disagree about the ultimate sources of meaning and purpose.

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In Defense of School Spirit

If we keep in mind the ideals for which the mascot stands, pride in and commitment to one’s college or university can function as a powerful motivator to seek a more noble way of life.

Working with traditional aged college students one almost immediately encounters FOMO—fear of missing out. It manifests in anxiety over daily matters of whether they are included in friends’ social media exploits all the way to big-picture fears about picking the “right” major to end up with the “right” career twenty years later. {For more on FOMO and vocation, see Daniel Meyers’ “Making Hard Choices.”}

Writing in the NetVUE volume At This Time and In This Place, William T. Cavanaugh has pointed out how this obsession with maximizing choice usually just works to obscure potential inputs and inspiration for determining one’s most satisfying life path. I want to suggest here a somewhat sneaky way to get students to focus on more immediate goals, helping them learn how to identify noble goals in the future and thereby chart a course for a meaningful life: start by cheering on your mascot and wearing school colors.

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Confucian Metaphors for Discerning Meaning

For those of us who care about guiding students along the path to finding meaning in their lives and work, it seems obvious why a person would want to find such a path. Unfortunately, a big part of that guidance is just convincing students that striving for “meaning” is worthwhile in the first place. That’s because to discern a more meaningful way of life, you must be willing to admit that some ways of life are not as meaningful, and thus not worth pursuing. Even more complicated yet, the ones most worth pursuing will almost certainly require accepting unpleasantness and constraint. Job number one in vocational discernment is identifying why you should even care to “aim higher.” Some metaphors from the early Confucian thinker Mencius (or Mengzi. who would have understood himself as a Ruist rather than as a Confucian) are helpful in working through this problem with students.

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Wendell Berry on Being More than a Consumer

One of the key skills needed for vocational discernment is the ability to know who or what one is besides being just a consumer.

Counterpoint Press, 2019

Over the last couple of months I have been slowly savoring Wendell Berry’s latest collection of essays and short fiction, The Art of Loading Brush. Many of us who think carefully about vocation and teaching vocational discernment love Berry’s writing, and this collection reminded me why. He explicitly discusses vocation in the context of creating life-giving local economies, and in thinking through his argument I found a useful way of talking to students about vocation: making a distinction between being a consumer and being a producer, and the value of thinking of oneself as something more than just a consumer.

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