Podcast

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.

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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Rowan Williams on Imagining and Creating Common Ground

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The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast series Callings features a conversation with Rowan Williams, one of the most recognized Christian leaders of our era. Rowan is a professor, public theologian, author, and poet, and from 2002 to 2012, he served as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, which is the senior leadership position in the Church of England and the ceremonial head of the Anglican Communion worldwide.

Rowan describes his youth as being “immensely well-blessed with communities and pastors who encouraged that sense . . . that living with the Christian Gospel was living in a larger world, not a smaller one.” Even in retirement, his sense of vocation is grounded in the call from others’ needs and pain. He is guided by the questions, “What is being given to me here? And what is being asked of me here?” Our calling, he says, comes from those around us who are saying, “We want to see Jesus.”

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Shaun Casey on Diplomacy and Hope

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In a new episode of NetVUE’s podcast series Callings, hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton speak with Shaun Casey, founding director of the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the U.S. State Department.

Shaun’s work explores the overlapping concerns of religion, diplomacy, and public life. Trained as a theologian with an interest in public policy, Shaun held multiple academic positions before he was called to his work at the U.S. State Department by Secretary of State John Kerry. “I want to be a faithful disciple,” he says, “wherever I end up.”

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Thema Bryant on Finding Home

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The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast series Callings features Thema Bryant, president-elect of the American Psychological Association. Thema is a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Los Angeles; a professor at Pepperdine University, where she directs the Culture and Trauma Research Lab, and an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The American Psychological Association awarded her the Emerging Leader of Women in Psychology Award in 2007 for her scholarship and clinical work on violence against women, and recognized her for Distinguished Early Career Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest in 2013. Her most recent book is Home Coming: Overcome Fear and Trauma to Reclaim Your Whole Authentic Self. She also hosts The Home Coming Podcast.

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