Tag: meaning

The Craft of Teaching (and Learning): Carlo Rotella

The latest episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features Carlo Rotella, a writer and professor at Boston College. His book, What Can I Get Out of This?, explores teaching undergraduates and emphasizes meaningful engagement in the classroom. Rotella advocates for seeing education as a practice requiring persistence and presence, underscoring its relevance beyond mere career preparation.

Carlo Rotella

NetVUE’s podcast Callings has released a new episode, which features an interview with Carlo Rotella, an award-winning writer and professor of American Studies, English, and journalism at Boston College. His most recent book, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics gets at the heart of what it means to teach and to learn together with undergraduate students today. Carlo has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine since 2007. His work has appeared in collections like The Best American Essays, as well as The New Yorker, Harper’s, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Slate, and various scholarly periodicals. Recurring subjects in his writing are cities and city life, boxing, music, crime, basketball, neighborhoods, and how people get good at things. He is co-editor and founder of the University of Chicago Press’s Chicago Visions and Revisions book series.

As his career and his most recent book illustrates, Carlo is interested in the nuts and bolts of teaching—what he considers its craft and the ways we can build classroom experiences that help our students make meaning. The book follows the experience of a single cohort of students in a required introductory literature course, most of whom are not English majors. In it, Rotella tells the story of what happens when students practice discussing ideas and readings with each other over a semester and then follows up with them a few years later, revealing that the course’s impact yielded an impactful return on investment in one’s education and life. As he describes it, one of the things it explores is “how to be a student, how to do college,” helping educators better understand how our students experience and live out their vocations as students.

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A Big Enough Story: Lee C. Camp

The sixth season of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features Lee C. Camp, a public theologian and educator. Camp discusses vocational questions in higher education, emphasizing the importance of asking deeper questions about life’s meaning. He encourages students to pursue larger, more truthful narratives to foster meaningful lives and societal impact.

Lee C. Camp

NetVUE’s podcast Callings has launched its sixth season with an episode featuring Lee C. Camp, host of the podcast and nationally syndicated public radio series No Small Endeavor. In this show he’s explored what it means to live a good life in conversation with some of the country’s most notable philosophers, scientists, entertainers, and politicians. Lee is also the Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Lipscomb University, a NetVUE member institution. As a public theologian, author, and social commentator, Lee’s work focuses on Christian ethics, the intersection of faith and politics, and the meaning and pursuit of human flourishing.

In his conversation with hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton, Lee brings a wealth of experience to bear on questions of vocation in higher education. In the process, he challenges more simplistic and subjective notions of “meaningfulness,” which can often overemphasize our individual needs and perspectives. Instead, he encourages us to be good question-askers. “If we can give our students a better set of questions than the questions that they have,” he says, “it will change their lives.” For Lee, these questions often emerge out of the kinds of stories we live our lives by. He urges all of us, but especially undergraduate students, to expand the moral scope of these stories and consider this question: “Am I trying to live by a big enough, true enough story?” he asks, for “if you try to live by a too small, not true enough story, it can cause all sorts of horrific damage, to yourself and the world around you.” Ultimately, Lee encourages listeners to embrace the exciting adventure of living out these larger stories and creatively pursuing the virtuous life.

Click hereto listen to the episode featuring Lee C. Camp, “A Big Enough Story.”

Geoffrey W. Bateman is the editor of Vocation Matters.

Jason Blakely on Stories and Ideologies

The latest episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features political philosopher Jason Blakely, discussing his book, Lost in Ideology, which explores the impact of ideology on political understanding. He emphasizes the significance of critically engaging with different perspectives and the interplay between ideology and vocation in shaping meaning in life.

Jason Blakely

The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features an interview with political philosopher Jason Blakely, an associate professor of political science at Pepperdine University in California. His most recent book, Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life, considers the important role that ideology plays in shaping our political realities, exploring its roles in both orienting and disorienting us. His previous books include We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power and Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach (with Mark Bevir). In addition to his scholarly publications, he has also written for Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic.

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Finding Vocation in Loss, Suffering, and Death

One’s truest sense of vocation is always revealed in the meaning of one’s life. Here we encounter the… paradox that we must share with our students—that the question of meaning is finally dependent on the reality of death. We ask about the meaning of life because the fact of death makes our lives seem so absurd. Put another way, the fact that we will inevitably die forces each of us to ask if there is meaning in the midst of such apparent meaninglessness.

There could be no better time than the present moment, with the Covid-19 pandemic threatening human life all over the world, to ask the question, “How might we find vocation in loss, suffering, and death?” To help us think about that question, I want to begin with a story.

It was almost twenty years ago when I learned that the Lilly Endowment had awarded Pepperdine University, where I taught at that time, a $2 million grant to support the “theological exploration of vocation” with our students.

I was ecstatic, and only moments after that call, I met one of my classes and shared the news with my students. They all were delighted—all, that is, except one. Far from delighted, he seemed distressed and troubled and told me straight up, “This project strikes me as a gift to children of privilege, a project that will simply cater to their own self-absorption. Most of the people in the world,” he continued, “don’t have the luxury of thinking about their ‘vocation.’ Life for them is a struggle simply to survive.”

My student’s words hit me like a bolt of lightning and reinforced a truth I already knew—that to serve our students well, this project had to encourage them to envision their lives and careers in terms much larger than themselves.

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