Tag: freedom

Dependability as Calling: Facilitating Freedom in Our Polarized Age

This post explores the challenge of supporting students with diverse callings, especially when we might differ and disagree with them. Educators are urged to foster dependable environments to facilitate students’ freedom , even amidst political and ideological differences. The story of Joseph serves as a powerful example of supporting others’ callings through dependability.

blurred motion of woman against overcast
Photo by Kseniya Kopna on Pexels.com

This past spring, I taught a new course titled “Your Life’s Calling.” One of its main goals was to help students discern what it would mean to feel called in a world that often feels noisy, angry, confusing, and devoid of reasons for hope. As we moved through the course, students—especially those who knew they wanted to become classroom teachers—wondered how an educator could support every student’s calling, especially those callings that might challenge or directly conflict with the teacher’s most firmly held beliefs.

Continue reading “Dependability as Calling: Facilitating Freedom in Our Polarized Age”

The Anxiety of Choice

As we give students choices, we need to be present with them, too, in whatever times and ways we can.

One semester in college, I earned an A-minus in private organ lessons. That minus annoyed me: I practiced my required hours and did what I was told to do. But I’d hit a stage at which I wasn’t told what to do on a crucial point: namely, how to set the stops for a piece. I had to choose for myself: Viole or flute? Trumpet or krummhorn? I balked. Hence the minus.

Despite their predictable chafing for freedom—the freedom to make choices—students often get stuck at the same place I did. They don’t actually want to make choices; they want someone else to make choices for them. This creates an obvious problem for discerning, let alone responding to, a vocation. In this post I will suggest some common reasons that we reject freedom of choice as well as some theological and practical means for overcoming these obstacles to embrace that freedom, making vocation possible.

Continue reading “The Anxiety of Choice”