Tag: story-telling

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.

Write Your Life: The Vocational Gifts of Creative Writing

Creative writing pedagogy offers valuable insights for vocational teaching across disciplines. By emphasizing storytelling, community feedback, and personal narrative, educators can guide students in reflecting on their vocational journeys. Creative writing pedagogies foster specificity, helping students articulate their experiences while navigating challenges like self-doubt and imposter syndrome.

A series of posts on what creative writing pedagogy has to offer vocational teaching in any discipline.

At a recent workshop on vocation at my university, I heard a colleague use a beautiful metaphor to describe the vocational journey: “It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I love this metaphor, and it’s one I know well as a creative writing instructor because the original quote refers not to vocation but rather to writing. This metaphor’s source is a Paris Review interview with American novelist E.L. Doctorow, in which he describes the writing process.

It’s not surprising to find wisdom about writing popping up in conversations about vocation. After all, when we ask students to reflect on their vocational journeys, we’re usually asking them to tell a story about themselves, and creative writing is the discipline of storytelling. That’s why—in this post and those that follow—I offer several frameworks, tools, and activities from the field of creative writing that instructors in any discipline can use as they integrate vocation into their teaching and advising.

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Storytelling as Vocation: Kiran Singh Sirah

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.

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Mythos and Vocation: A Journey of Narrative and Purpose

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.

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Counter Storytelling in The Purpose Gap

Patrick Reyes makes effective use of his own stories yet this is much more than simply “sharing” his perspective or conveying his personal story. It is a powerful example of counter-storytelling.

Patrick Reyes’ The Purpose Gap: Empowering Communities of Color to Find Meaning and Thrive is an engaging, highly readable, and thought-provoking book that can be used to spark important conversations with students. The book does several things simultaneously. At one level, it offers a timely and needed challenge to the traditional discourse about vocation, and for that reason alone readers of this blog should pay close attention. It weaves together insights about how personal and communal thriving are intertwined; the import of design thinking—the physical design of urban spaces as well as the power of stargazing far away from visual noise; institutional vocation; cultural commutes and the challenges of “going home” when that commute is vast; the power of networking; and attending to daily practices. In short, there is A LOT packed into this book of less than 200 pages. Reyes intersperses these discussions with reflection questions for the reader, making the book user-friendly and ready-to-use with students both in and out of the classroom.

Reyes also uses stories from his own life to underscore his larger point about “the purpose gap.” In its pedagogical use of autobiographical anecdotes combined with an invitation to the reader to reflect on their own life, the book is not unlike Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak, and yet there is a world of difference between the two books and the stories they tell. That difference is both a matter of privilege and of the target audience for each book. In this post, I want to explore how Reyes makes effective use of his own stories because it is much more than simply “sharing” his perspective or conveying his personal story. It is a powerful example of what critical race theory calls counter-storytelling.

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Letters of recommendation: the need for humility

We are often in a position to tell our students’ stories.

Last year, I wrote a Vocation Matters reflection on telling our students’ stories in recommendation letters. I meditated on the fact that, in order to learn their stories, faculty and staff members have to be authentic cooperators and collaborators with their students. We cooperate with them in developing a narrative even as we faculty members craft a formal one, later, on behalf of our students. This requires one to balance the interests of formation and assessment, early, with promotion later. Our student subjects are dynamic and developing, so updates are needed on their states of mind and future plans. Finally we, as embedded institutional actors, need to understand our own subjectivities. All this comes together in what are very often long-term relationships. We become the keepers of their flames of desire.

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“When Hope and History Rhyme”: Some Thoughts on Imagination and Vocation

Cliffs of Moher on the west coast of the Republic of Ireland. Photo taken by the author.

“Whatever is given,” says Nobel prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, “can always be reimagined.” For the past six years I’ve taken students to Northern Ireland (as well as the Republic of Ireland), and each time I have two thoughts. First, nothing seems less able to help than the imagination. Bombs, shootings, riots, marches. Violent murals, omnipresent flags, banners, and painted curbs (red, white, and blue in Loyalist areas, green, orange, and white in Republican areas) all of which serve as warnings to the zone of loyalties one is entering. Then there are the peace walls, the ironically named concrete and barbed wire monstrosities erected by the British army to keep neighbors from murdering each other. “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?”

My second thought is that nothing is more urgently needed than imaginative push back. In his essay “Frontiers of Writing,” collected in The Redress of Poetry, Heaney (with a little help from American poet Wallace Stevens) voices an astounding call to exercise the civic imagination on behalf of the common good. Heaney says of the Loyalist majority in Northern Ireland that “everything and everybody would be helped were they to make their imagination press back against the pressure of reality and re-enter the whole country of Ireland imaginatively, if not constitutionally” (202). Because Northern Ireland and the work of Seamus Heaney have taught me so much about the power and limits of the imagination, my mind drifted to them during Dr. Robert Franklin’s closing plenary at the NetVUE gathering in Louisville last month, in which he argued for the imagination as a virtue to be practiced in leadership and institutions in the face of the challenges confronting America (challenges enumerated by Dr. Rebecca Chopp in her opening plenary). As I listened, I found myself wondering: Could America be helped if we began to believe that meaningful change could at least begin with the imagination? Could I persuade students that imaginative resistance and push back is itself a vocation? What happens when we think about the imagination as a confrontation with possibility?

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