theology

NetVUE at the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting

David S. Cunningham Opportunities , , ,
Calling all faculty members in theology, religious studies, biblical studies, and related fields! If you will be attending the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature, please join us for one or more of the following NetVUE-hosted events:
    • Reception for NetVUE Members and Friends: Sunday, November 20, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., Embassy Suites Hotel, Leadville Room: come and go as your schedule allows. Light refreshments and cash bar (subsidized for NetVUE members).
    • An SBL Session on the 2022 NetVUE Big Read Selection (Patrick Reyes’s The Purpose Gap): Sunday, November 20, 1:00 to 3:30 p.m., Denver Convention Center, Mile High 3B (Lower Level): “Empowering Communities of Color: The Role of Faculty in Religious and Biblical Studies,” featuring a panel discussion with Stephen Fowl, Armando Guerrero Estrada, Kirsten Oh, and Hannah Schell, as well as a response from Patrick Reyes.
    • Vocation and Catastrophe: A NetVUE Pre-Conference. For those who can come a day early, NetVUE hosts a pre-conference gathering from Thursday, November 17 at 2:00 p.m. through Friday, November 18 at noon, in the Sheraton Downtown, Governor’s Square rooms. The modest registration fee ($25 for those at NetVUE institutions, $50 otherwise) includes a Thursday afternoon reception and dinner. The gathering features a panel discussion of Kiara Jorgenson‘s book Ecology and Vocation: Recasting Calling in a New Planetary Era, as well as a panel on how faculty members can help students who are called into “catastrophic vocations,” and a closing plenary address by David Clough, “Living Vocationally in a World on Fire.” If you can join us for this pre-conference gathering, please help our planning by following this link to register in advance.

Information on all these events can be found on the NetVUE website. If you are coming to Denver for the AAR/SBL meeting, please join us!

Life Worth Living Series

mindymakant Videos , ,

A new series of videos available through Youtube offers a helpful resource for thinking about the question, “What Makes a Life Worth Living?”

One of the things the Living Well Center for Vocation and Purpose at Lenoir-Rhyne has done in response to Covid-19 is to re-create our most popular, in-person event as a virtual one. Two years ago we began a speaker series called “Lives Worth Living.” We invited four speakers a year to come to campus and respond to the question “What makes for a life worth living?” This event was held in our campus chapel and attracted not only students but a considerable number of community members. After the speaker’s lecture we had a Q&A or discussion time and on the following morning we offered students an opportunity to have coffee and follow-up conversation with the speaker. This quickly became a community-building, transformational “third space” for us, from which I have received numerous accounts of vocational “a-ha” moments.

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Theological responses to the pandemic

Hannah Schell webinar , ,

On June 17, 2020, the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) hosted a webinar on “Theological Responses to the Pandemic.” The goal of this event was to offer a range of theologically-grounded responses to the current public health crisis and to the deep social inequalities that it has laid bare. Four NetVUE scholars took on the task of thinking theologically and responding responsibly to these uncertain and sometimes terrifying times.

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An Easter Meditation on Calling

Paul J. Wadell Uncategorized , , ,

Take away Easter, and hope dies. Take away Easter, and darkness prevails. Take away Easter, and all the sorrow and suffering, all the grief and affliction, all the tears and travail, stand forever unanswered. Take away Easter, and death wins, because if God cannot free Jesus from the tomb, how can there be lasting life—unassailable life—for anyone?

Over the past few months, the world has been shrouded in death. The plague unleashed by COVID-19 has ignited so much fear, so much anxiety and stress and uncertainty, that it is easy to feel that death is winning. How can it not be when each day brings more images of graves hurriedly dug so that more bodies can fill them? How can it not be when people who were thrown suddenly out of work wonder how they can pay their bills and feed their families? How can it not be when a virus not only squeezes every breath of life from a person, but assures that they will die alone?

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Called to a Pedagogy of the Cross

Caryn Riswold Uncategorized , ,
“Lebenskreuz,” or “Cross of Life,” depicting the Seven Acts of Mercy found in Matthew 25:35-40. Wartburg College campus.

“These are the days of maximum grace.”

This is what I found myself telling my students repeatedly over the past four weeks. As our life together turned upside down and inside out because of the coronavirus pandemic, deadlines faded away, boundaries dissolved, campus became a ghost town, home became school, and we all experienced repeated seismic shocks.

The last day I was in a classroom with students was Friday, March 13. Rather than being unlucky, the day was a gift—to be in a room with them (the last time for how long?!), talking in-person about the online move I anticipated us making. One student came late to class still nursing tears over an injury suffered during what would become the last athletic practice of a college career, freshly stung with the news of cancelled spring sports seasons. Another student in another class wrote a note on the back of a reading quiz, where normally I encourage doodles and puppy cartoons as they wait for others to finish, saying plainly “just let us leave Wartburg please.” These were the days where the situation changed daily, sometimes even hourly. Administrators struggled to keep up with the current best advice from elected officials and public health experts, because what was “best advice” kept changing.

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