future

Present Moment, Future Vocation

Julie Straight Uncategorized , ,

“Live in the present moment as if there were nothing to expect beyond it.” When I first encountered Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence and his relentless insistence on attention to the present, I thought him quite impractical; as teacher and parent, I always had to consider the future. Then COVID hit. As cherished plans crumpled and the future became a blank, de Caussade’s words became as practical as sanity: This moment is the only moment we have.  

At the same time, we are educators, and while John Henry Newman is right that there is a knowledge that is a treasure in itself, we are also in the business of preparing students for life after graduation. Listening for a vocation suggests hearing a call to somewhere else, to something not yet present. This post will discuss attention to the present as key to discerning that future vocation. 

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Cultivating Dissent as a Tool for Vocational Discernment

Kathleen T. Talvacchia Uncategorized , , ,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 2016 portrait

Dissents speak to a future age. It’s not simply to say, ‘My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.’ But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow.

– Ruth Bader Ginsburg, NPR interview, May 2, 2002.

This insight from the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has resonated with me in these weeks since her passing. The social movements in the name of justice that characterize our present moment require us to engage in a deeper reflection on the meaning of dissent and its effectiveness in shaping vocational direction. Dissent, used wisely and with integrity, forces us to clarify the deeply held convictions at the heart of our oppositional response. In the process of that discernment and clarification, we can discover greater purpose and meaning in our life.

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Telling our Future Stories: Hope, Loss, and Possibility

Daniel Meyers Uncategorized , , , ,

Recently I found myself in a first-year seminar college classroom conducting an interview with the students’ professor. The class was arranged so the students made a horseshoe facing their professor, who was seated in a chair with her back to the whiteboard. I posed several questions designed to tease out the vocational narrative of the professor and simultaneously charted on the board the key ideas, concepts, moments, people, and influences she mentioned. The exercise is designed to provide an example of a vocational narrative to students and to visually represent active listening on the board. As the professor turned in her chair at the end of the interview to digest what the whiteboard displayed, I noticed for myself that as a result of my questions the entire board dealt with her past. Narrative is arguably the foundation of vocational reflection. Yet, does narrative draw our attention too strongly to the past? What opportunities for vocational reflection could occur by telling our future stories?

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Back to the Future I: The Prolepsis of Vocational Discernment

John D. Barton Uncategorized , ,

“Prolepsis” is not a commonly used term, but it is helpful when talking to students about vocation. After all, what is college if it is not an opportunity to learn new vocabulary words?

Prolepsis connotes a present and active anticipation of a future reality. Said otherwise, to live proleptically is to live in the present in a way that reflects or is oriented toward an assumed future.

The DeLorean Time Machine in “Back to the Future” (1985).

To illustrate this, I ask students to take an imaginary journey back in time in my own life. While my parents’ generation might picture such an exercise through an H.G. Wells time machine, and I see myself jumping in a DeLorean equipped with a flux capacitor (at least if I can obtain some uranium or time things well during a thunderstorm), my students often choose to imagine a time-traveling drone equipped with a GoPro that can be controlled from the comfort of home. Any apparatus will do as I invite them to visit my fifteen year-old self at home in the suburbs of Philadelphia on any evening in August or September of 1982. I then tell them what they are nearly guaranteed to see. They will see my tall, lanky frame outside dribbling and shooting a basketball in the driveway until it is too dark to do so. (The full picture of my teen-self includes pre-Jordan tight shorts, socks pulled up to the knees, a headband, and Chuck Taylors.) Continue reading →