The seventh episode of NetVUE’s podcast features Kiran Singh Sirah, a renowned storytelling artist and folklorist. He discusses storytelling’s role in fostering connection, agency, and communal healing in relation to vocation. A past president of the International Storytelling Center, Kiran’s initiatives have received global recognition. He emphasizes the importance of sharing personal narratives to bridge divides.
Kiran Singh Sirah
The seventh episode of this season of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features Kiran Singh Sirah, an award-winning storytelling artist and folklorist. He is the creative lead for Storytelling: A Gift of Hope, a project that harnesses the art of storytelling to create intimate healing and justice spaces to build dialogue, agency, and change for communities on their own terms. As well, he is the past president of the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee.
The post discusses the interplay between vocation and mythos, exploring how personal and cultural narratives shape individual identity and calling. It advocates for a critical examination of inherited stories, encouraging reflection and rewriting as means to align one’s life with values of love and justice. Mythos serves as a guiding framework for vocational discernment.
A series of posts on the relationship between vocation and rhetoric, focusing on how ethos, logos, pathos, and mythos offer a fresh perspective for creatives, educators, and scholars to conceptualize their professional and personal callings.
Reginald Bell, Jr.
In rhetorical terms, mythos refers to the stories that shape how we understand who we are, where we come from, and what we are called to become; these stories center the deeper cultural and spiritual narratives that frame both individual identity and collective belonging. The roots of mythos lie in the Sophist tradition of pre-Aristotelian rhetoric, in which storytelling was seen not just as persuasion, but as a means of conveying truths about the human condition. Not only a rhetorical appeal, mythos is also a way of being—helping us locate ourselves within larger moral, communal, and historical arcs.
The content discusses the significance of narratives, both real and fictional, in vocational exploration and ethics. It highlights Steven Mintz’s insights on how storytelling can aid understanding and engagement in education, illustrating its practical use through ancient Greek dramas that address modern conflicts. Narratives help students navigate their vocational journeys.
Those of us who dwell in the land of vocational exploration and discernment have often been reminded of the power of narratives in supporting this work. The narratives that we employ are often real-life stories: now-famous folks whose lives began in unpromising ways, people whose winding paths eventually pointed them in a particular direction, or elders and mentors who told us of their own journeys. The field of ethics, too, has often relied on these narratives to provide examples of lives of character and virtue. But I have always believed that fictional narratives can be just as useful and important as those that come from real-life features and (auto)biographies. In fact, fiction has a couple of advantages over non-fiction in this regard.
The first episode of season five of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features an interview with John Inazu, a distinguished professor of law and religion. Inazu discusses his book, Learning to Disagree, emphasizing empathy in disagreements. He reflects on his experiences as a lawyer and teacher, advocating for understanding and honoring differences in diverse environments.
John Inazu
NetVUE’s podcast Callings has released its first episode of season five, which features hosts John Barton and Erin VanLaningham’s interview with John Inazu, the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Prior to teaching law, Inazu clerked for Judge Roger L. Wollman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and served as an associate general counsel with the Department of the Air Force at the Pentagon.
In this episode, he reflects on his vocation as a lawyer and teacher, and shares insights and examples from the classroom to the courtroom. He highlights the importance of honoring the humanity of others and explores how we can all improve in our abilities to navigate diversities and disagree well. As we do so, he encourages us to hold things loosely and honor our particularities. In his view, engaging difference might be as central to vocation as finding common beliefs with which to identify.
Click hereto listen to the episode featuring John Inazu titled “Learning to Disagree.”
NetVUE’s Spring 2023 webinar on February 7 focused on vocational narratives as a creative and effective way to find meaning in challenging times.
As students continue to navigate ever-changing, demanding times in higher education and the world, feeling a sense of purpose and control over one’s life is important. NetVUE’s Spring 2023 webinar on February 7 focused on vocational narratives as a creative and effective way to find meaning in challenging times. The webinar featured three speakers who discussed their experiences and strategies for integrating vocational narratives in our work with students.
In the latest episode of the NetVUE podcast series, I talked with both Stephanie Johnson and Erin VanLaningham. What ensued was a lively conversation about what drew each of them into the study of literature, the complexities of literary interpretation, the misuse of poetry, and the future of scholarship about vocation.
A new book co-edited by Stephanie Johnson and Erin VanLaningham explores how literature and literary studies can expand our understanding of vocation. In the latest episode of the NetVUE podcast series, I talked with both Stephanie and Erin (who normally plays the role of co-host) about the book. What ensued was a lively conversation about what drew each of them into the study of literature, the complexities of literary interpretation, the misuse of poetry, and the future of scholarship about vocation.
Students have fallen for many single stories of vocation. “Vocation” as trade or career is perhaps the most common single story. Another single story of vocation is the “one thing I was put on earth to do” mentality that confines and confuses students.
What is the single story that you most believe about yourself? About others? About your vocation? About love or justice? About death? Is that single story a river whose strong current is fed by the tributaries of many stories and experiences? Or is that single story a cage? The power of stories to trap us inside them is subtle and formidable. It takes additional stories to liberate us from stories.
I suppose I had an intuition of the power of single stories to make us unwitting viewers of incomplete, sometimes dangerous, always limiting perspectives. But it wasn’t until I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay based on her Tedtalk of the same title, “The Danger of a Single Story,” that I found a way of helping my students (and myself) look at their view of the world and its formation in a way that didn’t make them defensive and left them feeling hopeful that they could grow into a more complex view of the world.
Should we be talking about vocation with first year students?
This fall, St. Olaf received a NetVUE grant that supported faculty and staff to participate in communities of practice, exploring ways we can be more intentional about how we integrate vocation into our equity and inclusion efforts, our new general education curriculum, co-curricular activities, and other moments in our students’ academic lives. I signed up for the Vocation and the First Year Seminar group, partly out of curiosity to learn: How can we have meaningful conversations about vocation with students in their first year of college?
Reflecting on readings from Hearing Vocation Differently: Meaning, Purpose, and Identity in the Multi-faith Academy (ed. David S. Cunningham 2019), my colleagues shared ways that they mentor students to think about what they don’t want to do as a way to find a path for themselves; ways that encountering difference can help students clarify their values; and ways of cultivating affective ways of knowing.
But one colleague interrupted the conversation about how to integrate vocation in FYS to ask why: “Should we be talking about vocation with first-year students?” Is cultivating curiosity to explore new subjects and ideas more important than adding pressure to eighteen year olds to choose a track for a major and career? Does vocation really need to be one more thing in the bucket, along with how to find a book in the library, how to get a tutor, and how to get involved in a club? The question is a fair one.
At any given point in time all you can see is the cairn behind you and the cairn in front of you. There is no clear path to follow. But, if you trust the cairns (and the people who placed them there) you can safely get to the top of the mountain from which there is an amazing view.
Rock cairns are wonderful metaphors for vocation, and especially vocational discernment. The rock at the top of the cairn is rectangular in shape. It lines up with the opening beneath it. That rock and that opening point from one cairn to the next. At any given point in time all you can see is the cairn behind you and the cairn in front of you. There is no clear path to follow. But, if you trust the cairns (and the people who placed them there) you can safely get to the top of the mountain from which there is an amazing view.
Understanding this dimension of vocation offers an invitation to become the author of your own story. To do that, students must first discover they have a story to tell. Authoring one’s own story creates agency.
Part 5 of a series describing an electronic “vPortfolio” (vocation portfolio) developed at Augsburg University and centered on five metaphors for vocation: place, path, perspective, people, and story.
A fifth metaphor of vocation is story, which underscores the sense that everyone has a story to tell. There is a narrative arc to each life, and that story has a beginning, middle, and end. This dimension of vocation invites students to author their own stories and, in the telling, claim agency. “In the beginning, I/we….” or “Once upon a time, I/we….”
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