What is the difference between traditional academic advising and mentoring for vocational discernment? Is the latter simply an extension of the former, a way of advising “the whole student”? Or is mentoring for vocation constitutionally different enough to warrant its own set of reflections? Continue reading “Beyond Problem-Solving: The Mystery of Mentoring for Vocation”
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(Re)-reading Wendell Berry on vocation and community (part 2)
I am afraid that some amount of doubt may have crept into this project since my last post on Wendell Berry and his definition of community. My argument in that post was simple: it would be good if professionals, and those who train them, might spend at least a few moments thinking through the implications of Berry’s ideal community along with his critique on modernity — both are described in his 1969 essay, “The loss of the future.”
The doubt crept in after I took my own advice and re-read Berry’s 2014 essay, “Our deserted country,” which can be found in the 2015 collection entitled Our Only World.
The essay contains the following definition of vocation:
The idea of vocation attaches to work a cluster of other ideas, including devotion, skill, pride, pleasure, the good stewardship of means and materials. Here we have returned to intangibles of economic value. When they are subtracted, what remains is “a job,” always implying that work is something good only to escape: “Thank God it’s Friday.”
Continue reading “(Re)-reading Wendell Berry on vocation and community (part 2)”
(Re)-reading Wendell Berry on community and vocation (part 1)
One definition of “community” that I have become fond of lately comes from a quote by Wendell Berry. You don’t have to look very hard for a good quote by Wendell Berry about almost anything. I could get lost on Berry’s BrainyQuote page and never find my way out. The connection between vocation and community is strong throughout Berry’s work, but David Guthrie’s recent post, which highlights the many shortcomings of our academic communities, has convinced me that Berry has something important to say about this connection. My plan is to look at two of Berry’s essays, the first (in this post) published in 1969 and the second (next time) published in 2015, that contain definitions of community and vocation that may very well be… definitive. Continue reading “(Re)-reading Wendell Berry on community and vocation (part 1)”
Stories that inspire courage and hope
At first glance, the two women may seem to have little in common. Elise Boulding was born in 1920 and died in 2010. Emma González, until two weeks ago, was a high school student studying for her AP exams. Right now she’s more famous than Elise Boulding. These two women, especially, have had deep impact on my vocation as professor and leader: Boulding gave me courage and hope when I was a struggling young professor. González gives me hope now. Continue reading “Stories that inspire courage and hope”
With a little help from our friends: Aristotle, Thoreau and “Red Oaks” on friendship
On the subject of friendship, the following quote from Henry David Thoreau seems to be popular:
For now, we can overlook the fact that this is a slight alteration of what Thoreau actually wrote (!) and instead pause to consider what it was that he was aiming to capture about the nature of friendship. I want to explore the connection between friendship and vocation, and especially the role that genuine friendships can play in the vocational discernment of young adults. Continue reading “With a little help from our friends: Aristotle, Thoreau and “Red Oaks” on friendship”
Please Help Reshape a Collection of Readings on Vocation
The anthology Leading Lives that Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be (LLTM) has been widely used by faculty and students at NetVUE schools as a collection of texts that can be used to guide and stimulate the exploration of vocation. The book, edited by Mark Schwehn and Dorothy Bass (Eerdmans, 2006), includes a wide variety of selections — poems, short stories, essays, speeches, obituaries, screenplays, and excerpts from longer works — drawn from both religious and secular sources.
The editors are now developing a second edition, and they seek your advice.
The book was originally Continue reading “Please Help Reshape a Collection of Readings on Vocation”
Alma Mater and Vocation
Can you sing the Alma Mater of your college or university from memory?
Can your students?
Watch these Cornell University student faces as they sing one of the oldest and most beautiful alma mater songs in the country:
Calling as Summons: Treading carefully in the “cult of calling”
“So, I no longer say that ‘God calls me’ in the same smug way that I once did.” So writes Leslie Verner in a recent article on why she has left the “cult of calling.” Instead, Leslie concludes, she now uses language of calling more carefully, perhaps more reluctantly, thinking of her callings as contingent and subject to change — “if I use those words, I preface it by saying that I am called to this ‘for now.’ And if and when that calling shifts, I am left standing on solid ground, because my calling is to intimacy with Jesus Christ. And he never changes.”
Should we abandon the language of calling, even in difficult cases where our lives take an unexpected turn? Leslie’s insightful words are an invitation to think carefully about the nature of our calls — and specifically, what it means to be summoned by something or someone outside of ourselves.
Verner begins the piece recounting the idealism of her twenties. She wanted to follow Continue reading “Calling as Summons: Treading carefully in the “cult of calling””
Avoiding the BS: Education as a Relationship
What if we stopped thinking of education as an object — a system, a process, a collection of entities — and started to think of it as a relationship? What if it is meant to be nurtured and cultivated, rather than quantified and evaluated?
This was the question posed by a former student of mine, in a discussion on Facebook about Christian Smith’s recent Chronicle essay titled “Higher Education is Drowning in BS.” For those who missed it, Smith’s jeremiad is a 22-item list of everything that is wrong at the present moment, from “hypercommercialized college athletics” to “disciplines unable to talk with each other.” But one can agree with practically every item on Smith’s list and miss the larger point: that these problems stem from a failure to treat education as a relationship.
In our Facebook exchange, my former student comment that the problems that Smith identifies may be “the harvest of the ‘common grievance over parking.’” He was referring to Continue reading “Avoiding the BS: Education as a Relationship”
Doing my job and doing it right (Part 2)
In my last post (what seems like ages ago now!), I tried to argue that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first musical, In the Heights, is a special type of story that engages important themes related to vocational discernment. Specifically, I was interested in the interplay of the particular work one does, the place where the work is done, and how that work supports the flourishing of individuals and relationships in a community. In that post, I also promised to return to another story told by Mr. Miranda — not Hamilton — to support my claim that Miranda is a remarkable modern explicator of vocation. If not the greatest! But first, allow me a brief detour to explain how Miranda’s short musical, 21 Chump Street, captured my enthusiasm as something useful for engaging students with vocational discernment.
It was an otherwise typical Friday morning in March (2016!) while I was driving my daughter to school. The weekly installment of StoryCorp on NPR moved me to tears when Francois Clemmons told the story of how Fred Rogers had approached him in the late 1960’s to ask him to play the role of a police officer, Officer Clemmons, on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Continue reading “Doing my job and doing it right (Part 2)”