vocation matters

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.

Building Connections and Community through NetVUE’s Big Read

NetVUE’s Big Read program promotes connections among educators, students, and communities in higher education by focusing on vocational exploration. This year features Norman Wirzba’s “Love’s Braided Dance” as a catalyst for meaningful discussions on hope and community building. The program includes webinars and resources to enhance campus engagement.

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.

One of the greatest gifts of working in higher education is the opportunity to connect: with students, with colleagues, and with community. Educators focus on such connection throughout the academic year—as students learn and grow through all aspects of their undergraduate experience. The Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) hosts an annual Big Read program, which offers member institutions a significant way to deepen connection around our common purpose of helping students discern their callings and lead meaningful lives, while helping us connect with each other on our campuses.

The Big Read is a way for campus leaders to invite others into conversations about vocation and to cultivate expertise in vocational exploration across campus and within different parts of the undergraduate experience. The program provides an opportunity to engage with NetVUE resources, including this blog, the podcast Callings, the scholarship of vocation, and Studies in Vocation and Calling, NetVUE’s new journal. It can bring fresh and challenging ideas to the ways you might be thinking about vocation. It also can build meaningful connections and community, helping seasoned and new colleagues—faculty members, staff, and administrators—forge a common purpose. Reading can be, as I’ve written elsewhere, a “catalyst for considering and contributing to collective well-being.”

The Great Adventure of Vocational Discernment

Each course within the Bluffton Blueprint has a focusing question, as we seek to engage students, whatever their faith background, with foundational questions: Who am I? Who am I in community? Who am I in the world? and What then shall we do?

Many small, faith-based colleges have long embraced the centrality of their students’ vocational discernment but sometimes find it difficult to help prospective students connect with these significant goals. This challenge rings true for us at Bluffton University, a Mennonite-affiliated liberal arts college in northwest Ohio. Students often have important questions about their life’s direction, but they have been conditioned to have a clear, simple answer to the “what is your major” question.

To create space for students to reflect together on key vocational questions, we have developed the Bluffton Blueprint, a four-year sequence of courses taken by all students. We have made the Bluffton Blueprint a central part of our message to prospective students. The Blueprint allows us to engage students, most of whom know little about Mennonites, with vocational ideas from an Anabaptist perspective that resonate with a wide audience. As our vice president of enrollment and advancement described in a recent Inside Higher Ed article, we believe that foregrounding these key questions of meaning and purpose has resonated with prospective students.

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Category: Program

Hope, Resonance, and Work that Matters: Reflecting on Love’s Braided Dance

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Building Connections and Community through NetVUE’s Big Read

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The Great Adventure of Vocational Discernment

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