Tag: conflict

Bonnie Miller-McLemore and the Double Edge of Calling

Episode three of the fifth season of NetVUE’s podcast features Bonnie Miller-McLemore discussing her book, Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling. She delves into the complexities of vocational discernment, highlighting the challenges and conflicts individuals face regarding their vocations. Bonnie emphasizes the need for self-kindness and the enduring pursuit of meaningful callings amidst difficulties.

Bonnie Miller-McLemore

Episode three of this season of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features Bonnie Miller-McLemore, whose new book, Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling, brings forward the more difficult nuances and complexities of vocational discernment. Bonnie is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair and Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture Emerita at Vanderbilt University. Nationally recognized for her leadership in women’s and childhood studies and pastoral and practical theologies, she has published eighteen books in these areas, as well as over a hundred chapters and journal articles. (She has also contributed a post to Vocation Matters: Follow Your Bliss? Bad Advice for Calling.)

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Peace, Conflict Resolution, and Vocation: A Call to Respond

NetVUE’s November 2023 Webinar focused on vocational elements of peacemaking and conflict resolution in the context of existing conflict and violence in various parts of the world, such as Gaza and Ukraine.

Engaging students in the classroom continues to be an essential part of undergraduate education but is often a challenging task. Current world events can be complicated, stressful, and difficult to understand. NetVUE’s November 2023 Webinar focused on vocational elements of peacemaking and conflict resolution in the context of existing conflict and violence in various parts of the world, such as Gaza and Ukraine. Exploring meaning and purpose as peacemakers can help students connect academic topics as well as personal development to global and local realities. On November 21, three speakers discussed experiences and strategies for how we can integrate global events in our work with students.

John Barton (top left); Geoffrey Bateman (top right);
Jonathan Golden (bottom left); Rachel Pickett (bottom right)
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Growing up In Between: Some Thoughts on Formative Tensions and Vocational Discernment

What underlies all of my teaching and writing is a deep desire to hold in tension with one another life and learning, book smarts and street smarts, the Ivory Tower and the Trailer Park. I want these two worlds to inform, resist, and, above all, to speak to one another because each contains good and bad, insight and ignorance, that serve as redress to the other.

In an essay entitled “Place and Displacement: Reflections on Some Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland,” Seamus Heaney observes of the people of Ulster that they live in two places: “Each person in Ulster lives first in the Ulster of the actual present, and then in one or other Ulster of the mind.” Just as the two-mindedness of Northern Ireland shaped Heaney’s vocation as a poet, so the conflicts inherent in my native place and upbringing—a tension between the Trailer Park and the Ivory Tower—have fundamentally shaped my vocation and its trajectory. Indeed, my life could well be encapsulated by the only two diplomas I’d ever hang on my office wall if I ever got around to decorating my office, my GED and my PhD. Between these two lie my vocation.

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