Author: Stephanie L. Johnson

Article of Note: The Good Life

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A recent article in Inside Higher Ed shares research on how “good life courses” can prepare undergraduate students for more productive and meaningful lives.

Kristina Callina, Alicia Lynch, and Michael Murray conducted interviews with and collected survey data from professors and their students from 14 colleges and universities to determine if such courses work and how they work. They report their findings and explore the rising interest in such courses across the country in “Teaching the Good Life” (September 19, 2023). They identify “the essential pedagogical features of good life courses, how they impact students’ sense of purpose and well-being, and what educators can do to optimize successful implementation of good life courses at their postsecondary institutions.”

Not only do the findings show that these courses are valuable for students, but they also suggest that such courses can bring new energy to the humanities disciplines that often house and support them.

Stephanie L. Johnson is the editor of Vocation Matters.

Called to Endings

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During my graduate coursework in the late 1990s, Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction was revelatory for me. Published in 1966, it certainly wasn’t part of any hot, new direction in Victorian studies; it couldn’t even be described as canonical at the time. But it was vital for my own scholarly trajectory in its examination of our need for endings and how narratives play with temporality and shape our experiences both of reading and of living.

I’ve been thinking about endings a lot over the past year, prompted no doubt by the death of a parent and by my choosing to give up one of my administrative appointments, but also by our new realities in the post-pandemic academy. Perhaps it seems odd to consider endings just as we approach or anticipate the start of the new academic year—new classes, new students, new colleagues. But endings are bound up in beginnings, and to recognize their importance in our interpretive work brings vocational clarity. To begin anything is, paradoxically, to begin its ending.

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Callings: Season Three Highlights

Stephanie L. Johnson Podcast

NetVUE’s podcast Callings has concluded its third season with a bonus episode featuring highlights from conversations that aired throughout the year. Hosted by Erin VanLaningham and John Barton, Callings “explores what it means to live a life defined by a sense of meaning and purpose” with “particular emphasis on mentoring and supporting undergraduate students as they navigate college, career, and a life well-lived.”

In these clips, guests offer insightful advice for today’s students and for anyone who teaches or mentors young adults. Guests include Rowan Williams, Thema Bryant, Rainn Wilson, Richard Sévère, Meghan Sullivan, Deanna Thompson, Shaun Casey, and Kristin Kobes Du Mez.

Click here to listen to the third season’s bonus episode of highlights

Stephanie L. Johnson is the editor of Vocation Matters.

Special Issue on Vocation: Christian Scholar’s Review

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The Summer 2023 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review is devoted to the subject of vocation in undergraduate education. Guest edited by David S. Cunningham, executive director of NetVUE, this special issue features articles by a range of writers who have been active in the network, both on their own campuses and more broadly through their writing and speaking: Bryan Dik, Niki Johnson, Tom Perrin, Amy Santas, Paul Wadell, and Danny Wasserman. It also contains reviews of recent vocation-related books, including several whose authors have been featured at NetVUE events: Kiara Jorgenson, Jason Mahn, Patrick Reyes, and Charlie Pinches and Paul Wadell.

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Richard Sévère on Sharing Stories

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The hosts of NetVUE’s Callings podcast, Erin VanLaningham and John Barton, sit down for a conversation with Richard Sévère in the latest episode. Richard is professor of English and interim associate dean at Valparaiso University, where he also directs the Bloom Scholars Program, a program that prepares students academically, socially, and culturally for college, especially first-generation and underprepared students. In this episode, Richard shares how purposefully connecting with colleagues and students to hear their stories can allow a sense of difference to inform vocational discernment.

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Paul Hanstedt on What Matters

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The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features a conversation with Paul Hanstedt, director of the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington and Lee University. In addition to consulting on general education and on faculty and curricular development, he is author of Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World (2018) and writes on pedagogy for Inside Higher Ed and Liberal Education.

Paul shares his excitement for working with undergraduates, especially beginning students: “they have hope,” he says, and in their first year of college, we often see their important “shift from lack of agency to agency.”

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Kristin Kobes Du Mez on Holding Things Loosely

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The hosts of NetVUE’s podcast Callings recently sat down for a conversation with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Since the publication of her New York Times bestselling book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020), she has been in the middle of intense public debates about faith, nationalism, and gender in American Evangelicalism. In this episode, Kristin shares some of the story behind that story, reflecting on the role that historical research plays in public life.

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Deanna Thompson on This Vocation Now

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The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast series Callings features a conversation with scholar, writer, and speaker Deanna Thompson. She serves as the Martin E. Marty Regents Chair of Religion and the Academy at St. Olaf College, where she also directs the Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community. In this conversation with hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton, she shares her passion to talk about “the vocations we don’t choose”—the place, she says, “where a lot of us live.”

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Meghan Sullivan on the Care of the Soul

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A new episode on NetVUE’s podcast series Callings brings to listeners an interview with Meghan Sullivan, the Wilsey Family Collegiate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. She is also the founder of Notre Dame’s God and the Good Life program, for which she taught the nationally recognized course of the same name.

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