Tag: Big Read

The NetVUE Big Read: Exploring Diverse Perspectives and Vocational Reflection

On January 28, NetVUE hosted its first webinar of the year, discussing Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore’s book, Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling. Faculty members shared diverse experiences relating to the book’s themes of callings that encompass joys and challenges. The session included discussion, audience engagement, and resource sharing, with a recording available online.

Webinar presenters and host: (top row, left to right) C. Douglas Johnson and Esteban Loustaunau; (bottom row, left to right): Tara Brooke Watkins and Rachel Pickett.

On January 28, NetVUE hosted its first webinar of the calendar year, which explored this year’s Big Read—Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore’s Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling—from diverse perspectives and lived experiences. Three faculty members from NetVUE institutions reflected on the book’s major themes, including the reality that responding to our callings often requires us to wrestle with both the joys and the hardships that we face in our many roles in life. The presenters shared some of their vocational experiences that resonated with Miller-McLemore’s framework, hoping to help webinar participants find their way into it even if their lived experiences differ from the author’s.

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Engaging NetVUE’s Big Read with Students in the Classroom

In “Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling,” Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore discusses the complexity of vocations, highlighting their potential for both meaning and pain. A recent webinar featuring faculty from NetVUE institutions explored themes of the book, emphasizing engagement in undergraduates’ understanding of callings amid modern challenges.

In Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore explores the “double-edged” quality of our callings, grappling honestly with how we live out our vocations in all their complexities. As affirming and generative as they can be, “deeply meaningful callings,” she writes, “are also often painful!” On November 13, four faculty members from NetVUE institutions explored this issue (and many more) as they discussed Miller-McLemore’s recent contribution to vocation studies, which also serves as NetVUE’s Big Read this year. In their discussion, they reflected on ways to engage this book with undergraduate students in the classroom and how its major themes can help them understand and contextualize the challenges that come with callings to work and live in a fast-paced, modern society.  

Webinar presenters included (left to right) Brian Bowman, Deirdre Egan-Ryan, Jason Mahn, and Brad Pardue.
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The NetVUE Big Read: Exploring Our Callings to Higher Education

NetVUE’s first webinar of the academic year, held on September 16, featured Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore discussing her book, “Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling.” Participants explored the challenges of vocational discernment in higher education. Additional resources were shared for implementing vocational support on campuses through NetVUE’s Big Read program.

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore

When we explore and discern our vocations, we often wrestle with both the joys and hardships that we face in the many roles we play in life. NetVUE’s first webinar of this academic year explored this topic on September 16, and featured Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, the author of this year’s Big Read, Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling. As she discussed her book, she used insights from it to help participants contextualize and understand the challenges that we all face as we live out our callings to work in higher education. The discussion also provided context for colleagues as they being to engage their campuses in the Big Read.

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NetVUE at the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting

Calling all faculty members in theology, religious studies, biblical studies, and related fields! If you will be attending the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature, please join us for one or more of the following NetVUE-hosted events:
    • Reception for NetVUE Members and Friends: Sunday, November 20, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., Embassy Suites Hotel, Leadville Room: come and go as your schedule allows. Light refreshments and cash bar (subsidized for NetVUE members).
    • An SBL Session on the 2022 NetVUE Big Read Selection (Patrick Reyes’s The Purpose Gap): Sunday, November 20, 1:00 to 3:30 p.m., Denver Convention Center, Mile High 3B (Lower Level): “Empowering Communities of Color: The Role of Faculty in Religious and Biblical Studies,” featuring a panel discussion with Stephen Fowl, Armando Guerrero Estrada, Kirsten Oh, and Hannah Schell, as well as a response from Patrick Reyes.
    • Vocation and Catastrophe: A NetVUE Pre-Conference. For those who can come a day early, NetVUE hosts a pre-conference gathering from Thursday, November 17 at 2:00 p.m. through Friday, November 18 at noon, in the Sheraton Downtown, Governor’s Square rooms. The modest registration fee ($25 for those at NetVUE institutions, $50 otherwise) includes a Thursday afternoon reception and dinner. The gathering features a panel discussion of Kiara Jorgenson‘s book Ecology and Vocation: Recasting Calling in a New Planetary Era, as well as a panel on how faculty members can help students who are called into “catastrophic vocations,” and a closing plenary address by David Clough, “Living Vocationally in a World on Fire.” If you can join us for this pre-conference gathering, please help our planning by following this link to register in advance.

Information on all these events can be found on the NetVUE website. If you are coming to Denver for the AAR/SBL meeting, please join us!