Tag: community

Theatre for Vocational Discernment

Theatre plays a significant role in vocational exploration and community-building by encouraging students to take risks and engage deeply with their identities. Through acting classes and other theatre-related experiences, students discover their purpose and develop confidence, fostering essential skills for their future vocations and creating a supportive community environment.

A series on the role of theatre in vocation, with a focus on how it supports community-building, the uncommon good, and vocational exploration and discernment for all our students.

theater audience applauding performers on stage
Photo by Gian Tripodoro on Pexels.com

Lights up on theatre acting classroom, full equally of theatre and non-theatre students. Students stand in a circle.

STUDENT

(To the theatre instructor)

Wait, what are you asking me to do? Make a weird sound?

THEATRE INSTRUCTOR

Yes! Anything you feel inside, just let it out.

STUDENT

Um, okay, sorry, I don’t know if I’m doing this right.

THEATRE INSTRUCTOR

Try not to worry if it’s right, anything that comes out is fine. The goal is to take the risk to be silly and discover it’s okay.

team in a huddle
Photo by Yan Krukau on Pexels.com

STUDENT

(Looks around nervously and blurts out)

BAAAHHHH!!!

(Class erupts in applause and laughter.)

OTHER STUDENTS

(overlapped adlibbing)

Yes, that was great! Loved it! So good! Knew you could do it! Fun!

Lights fade as STUDENT can’t help but smile out of pride.

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Being and Becoming in Community: Hearing Vocation through the Indigo Girls

The author reflects on how the Indigo Girls’ music influenced their understanding of identity and community, especially during adolescence in a restrictive environment. Their songs foster kindness, activism, and self-reflection, serving as a catalyst for personal growth and social awareness. The music is portrayed as a bridge between the secular and sacred in life.

a couple lying down while playing ukulele
Photo of two young people enjoying music together by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

The practice of discerning and living into one’s callings is often deeply influenced not only by overt barriers but also by implicit messages that shape what seems possible in our lives. As a child of the 1980s, I yearned for representation that countered the oppressive gender roles in the world around me in the small northern Michigan town where I grew up. Most viscerally, I noticed my own discomfort with the pervasive narrative that I would have a husband and children someday, regardless of what my paid work would be. In my adolescence, queer life was invisible; but when I listened to music, I experienced a sense of being-in-community and was invited into self-reflection about who I was called to become.

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A Pilgrimage of Pain and Hope: Emmanuel Katongole

Emmanuel Katongole, a Catholic priest and theology professor, discusses his vocational journey in the most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings, emphasizing themes of identity, belonging, and the complexities of living a life that crosses boundaries. His experiences illustrate how dislocation can help explore questions of home and community and foster a deeper understanding of self and hope in creating a better world.

Emmanuel Katongole

In the most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings, our hosts John Barton and Erin VanLaningham speak with Emmanuel Katongole, a Catholic priest in Uganda and a professor of theology and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. Known for his work on violence and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, Katongole is a theologian of peacebuilding and reconciliation who confronts the complexities of callings in various contexts. He is the author of many books, his most recent being Who Are My People? Love, Violence, and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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What Are We Creating Together?

Last semester, our communication studies department came to realize fully what we had known for years: vocation exploration is something that can and should be done in community. Inspired by our current NetVUE work, we have committed to extending our vocation conversations beyond regular advisement and an occasional instructional nod to using vocation as a primary dialogue topic in several classes in our major and minor.

Major Decisions, Major Discoveries: Exploring Vocation in the Undergraduate Years, a series of posts from Nebraska Wesleyan University about helping students develop meaning and purpose as part of their major coursework 

“I was amazed that something so personal like exploring my ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’ in a group could feel so right.”

NWU communication studies student

Last semester, our communication studies department came to realize fully what we had known for years: vocation exploration is something that can and should be done in community. Inspired by our current NetVUE work, we have committed to extending our vocation conversations beyond regular advisement and an occasional instructional nod to using vocation as a primary dialogue topic in several classes in our major and minor. Our department’s guiding principle is inspired by W. Barnett Pearce and Vernon Cronen’s “Coordinated Management of Meaning,” which posits that we create meaning and manage our social reality in community. “What are we creating together?” is emblazoned on our brochures and syllabi and even stenciled on our walls as a reminder that we co-construct our environment—we have agency over and responsibility for our co-created relationships. Our students resonate so deeply with this principle that a recent graduate decorated her mortar board with it.

Photo by the author
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Mentoring in Community

There is value in the constancy of a single, life-long mentor, but what incredible ego to think that I—and I alone—can or should play such a singular role in any person’s life. There is another kind of value in a mentorship community made up of diverse voices, experiences, and perspectives—a community made up of people who come and go, who agree and disagree, who give different kinds of advice, who model different choices, and who collectively open up all kinds of ways to think, do, and live in the world.

Throughout my career as a university educator, I have mentored dozens of college students during a concentrated and intentional season of their vocational discernment, specifically young women interested in the vocational possibilities of literacy, storytelling, and advocacy. Many of these are students of literature, writing, and education, but they are also students of film, theology, social work, psychology, physical therapy, chemistry, and engineering. Sometimes we meet for an official meeting in my office, but more often mentorship looks like a quick hallway chat, a wave across the library, a text message update, a walk around campus, catching up over coffee and then more coffee, an internship program forwarded by email, comments on a class assignment, or advice on a job application. In my experience, mentoring these students involves a series of tiny and ordinary moments that can sometimes stretch out over several years but that usually end, often abruptly.

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Parker Palmer on Muddling Through

The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton speaking with Parker Palmer.

The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton speaking with Parker Palmer. Well before vocation and calling developed their current popularity, Parker was recognized as one of the foremost scholars, authors, and speakers on the topic. The author of ten books, including Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, he is also the founder of the Center for Courage & Renewal.

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Contemplating the Contours of Calling through Geographical History

In an era of recognizing the importance of geography and heritage, such as through indigenous land acknowledgments, we can learn a great deal about ourselves, each other, our world, and our vocations through our senses of place. This post considers what geographical history might teach us about vocation, particularly the systematic and individual influences at play. 

Photograph by the author

As the fall semester gets underway, many students are returning to familiar spaces on their campuses, while new students are navigating unfamiliar terrain. This time of year also illuminates the divisions between “town and gown,” even though many leaders in both communities value bridge-building. As recently highlighted by the pandemic, the physical, economic, and relational health of our communities near and far are closely intertwined. In an era of recognizing the importance of geography and heritage, such as through indigenous land acknowledgments, we can learn a great deal about ourselves, each other, our world, and our vocations through our senses of place. Grounded in my dissertation research on the Appalachian region, this post considers what geographical history might teach us about vocation, particularly the systematic and individual influences at play. 

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Re-Imagining Life Together (Staying with the Trouble)

Since we cannot escape our interdependence and interconnectedness, we are forced to confront our life together as kin (or “oddkin,” as Harraway says). To re-configure our relations, we must unmake, make, and remake; we must indulge in the work of imaginating, speculating, and fabulating a future for all creatures and life forms. This is not fantasy, but justice.

A series of posts about a collaborative project at Wingate University, resulting in a first-year course called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of Our Lives.

This third blog in our series will explore how our pedagogy reflects our belief in Earth’s entangled banks as a source of wisdom. We model our course design and teaching on our belief that we are all interdependent beings living in webs of relations and education for vocation is a co-creative process. We thrive when we live and learn by re-membering these elements of our identities as individuals and societies. This post will focus on our nature as co-creative creatures and how to teach with co-creativity as a guiding principle.

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Table Fellowship: Re-Imagining Vocation

Part two in a series of posts about a collaborative project at Wingate University, resulting in a first-year course called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of Our Lives.

A series of posts about a collaborative project at Wingate University, resulting in a first-year course called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of Our Lives.

In our last post, we asked was whether a cosmic horizon of meaning for vocation––one inspired by Darwin’s entangled bank––would help navigate some campus challenges in a post-COVID world? Our answer was emphatically “yes.” Why? Because a cosmic horizon reveals that we are caught up in inescapable networks of giving and taking, feeding and being fed. Thus, by our existence we are given a place setting at a great cosmic feast and festival. This worldview appreciates vocatio as James Fowler does: the discovery, cultivation, and integration of rich patterns of our whole lives, including our plates, palates, and tables.

Embracing vocation as calling in this context inextricably grounds it in three central tenets: We are all interdependent, we live in overlapping networks of mutuality, and co-creativity is central to life and flourishing. With these tenets in mind, we have developed a Food and Faith course set to unfold in the Fall of 2022. This posts muses on the cornerstone metaphor that grounds our commitment in this course: table fellowship.

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