Tag: character development

Cultivating Character: Michael Lamb

In the second episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings, hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton interview Michael Lamb, a faculty leader at Wake Forest University. He discusses ethics and the importance of virtues in public life, encouraging listeners to connect passions with community needs and to cultivate virtues in discovering personal callings.

Michael Lamb

In the second episode of this season of NetVUE’s podcast Callings, hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton interview Michael Lamb, the senior executive director of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. An associate professor of interdisciplinary humanities and the F.M. Kirby Foundation Chair of Leadership and Character at Wake Forest, Michael also serves as an associate fellow of the Oxford Character Project at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, a project which helps graduate students in various fields, including government, law, medicine, business, and academia, think about the role of ethics in their professions. Michael’s research and teaching focuses on the ethics of citizenship and the role of virtues in public life, all of which offers many connections to the exploration of vocation.

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The Grace of Troubling Questions

I did not discover that my church actually had a human founding and a human history in the United States until I was roughly twenty years old. But what was that history? What were our roots? What were the cultural and religious forces that had produced this tradition and, by extension, the forces that had shaped me? These questions were hardly academic. These were questions that assaulted my very sense of self since my sense of self was so completely bound up with my church’s claim to be true and right while others were false and wrong.

Finding good work to do—work that can enrich and satisfy the soul, not just for a moment but for a lifetime—is an incredible gift of grace.

That gift can enter our lives in such mysterious ways, however, that we often fail to see it for what it is. In fact, grace can sometimes appear in such profoundly negative ways—in defeat or despair or rejection, for example—that we often resist the very grace that can make us whole.

In my case, the grace that opened up a lifetime of good and satisfying work first appeared in the form of deeply troubling questions about the church in which I was raised, the Church of Christ.

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Wrestling with White Supremacy

Second edition published in 2014.

In an essay published in December in The Cresset that is now available online, Richard T. Hughes recounts how he slowly came to see the myth of white supremacy as one of the most significant in forming American history and identity. The author of Myths America Lives By (published by the University of Illinois Press in 2004 and revised in 2014), Richard shares how a comment offered during a panel at the American Academy of Religion initiated a change in his thinking:

I had spent years thinking about the Great American Myths. I had taught classes and written books and articles on that subject. While I acknowledged the persistence of racism in American life, not once had I considered the notion of white supremacy as an idea that has been central to the American mythos. I understood that avowed white supremacists stalked the American landscape, but I had always viewed them as standing on the margins of American life. To suggest that white supremacy was a defining American myth struck me as preposterous.

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A heresy worth considering…

Image result for geek heresy images
Geek Heresy

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Kentaro Toyama back in February 2018 when he visited our campus for an engaging seminar on the role of technology in addressing social problems. Dr. Toyama is the W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan, and his 2015 book, Geek Heresy, articulates what I consider “hard won” insight into the role of technology in society and, more specifically, how technology impacts social change.

Toyama began his career as a computer scientist working for Microsoft in their research division.  If you have ever enjoyed the Kinect accessory in Microsoft’s XBox—the stereo imaging system that converts a player’s motion into real-time video game inputs—you are at least tangentially familiar with some of Toyama’s early research that led to the development of Kinect.  Ultimately, though, Toyama found this work unfulfilling and a far cry from the idealism of his youth that had drawn him to the sciences in the first place.  His original goal was to help solve the energy crisis. Continue reading “A heresy worth considering…”