Tag: virtue

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.

Echoed Vocation IV: A Call to Wisdom

The author reflects on a journey with his autistic children, emphasizing the virtues of wisdom and humility. Despite his initial misguided decisions during a trip to the Carrowkeel Passage Tombs in Ireland, he learns valuable lessons from his children. Their insights illustrate how wisdom is cultivated through shared experiences and the acknowledgment of limits.

A series of posts about virtue, autism, vocation, and the teaching of history.

Teaching courage, my children echo a call to presence; teaching moderation, a call to self-examination; teaching justice, a call to persistent conversation. The call that is echoed to me by my autistic children with regard to wisdom is perhaps the most important of all.

Continue reading “Echoed Vocation IV: A Call to Wisdom”

Echoed Vocation III: A Call to Justice

This series of posts explores the author’s experiences with teaching virtues in connection with his two autistic children. The focus is on the virtue of justice and the challenges of teaching it, as well as the need for understanding different perspectives on justice. The author emphasizes the importance of persistence in nurturing a vision of justice.

A series of posts about virtue, autism, vocation, and the teaching of history.

Martin Dotterweich

In the first two installments of this series, I explored how the virtues I teach are echoed as callings to me through my two autistic children. As I teach courage, they call me to be present with them in their fear. As I teach moderation, they call me to examine myself rather than judge others. The third echo, justice, is the focus of this post.

Continue reading “Echoed Vocation III: A Call to Justice”

Echoed Vocation II: A Call to Moderation

Ultimately, the call of temperance is a call to self-examination, for each of us knows the things that consume us personally. Moderation is best judged from the inside.

A series of posts about virtue, autism, vocation, and the teaching of history.

Martin Dotterweich

My first exploration of the echoing of vocation between my students and my children suggested ways in which the latter demonstrate exceptional courage. For this second exploration, which will consider the call to moderation, their example for me is more problematic—like the virtue itself.

Continue reading “Echoed Vocation II: A Call to Moderation”

Introduction: Teaching Virtue and Vocation in History 

Often I’ve found that I carry aspects of the teacher’s call to my children, and—as I’ll explore in my upcoming series of posts—my parenting informs my pedagogy in return.

A series of posts about virtue, autism, vocation, and the teaching of history.

Martin Dotterweich

Vocations inform each other, and two of mine seem to be in constant dialogue, deep calling to deep: teaching and parenting. Often I’ve found that I carry aspects of the teacher’s call to my children, and—as I’ll explore in my upcoming series of posts—my parenting informs my pedagogy in return. I’m sure this is a common experience, but mine has a twist that keeps surprising me. This is because both of my children have autism.

It has been easy to see the ways that my teaching has affected my parenting, and Kathleen and Peter would probably attest with a roll of the eyes that, yes, Dad drags us to places he likes and talks a lot. There exists a video of me explaining a thatched roof to them in which they wander off while I keep talking. It’s on brand. 

More surprising has been how much my call as a parent has shaped my teaching and how much my children shape me as a person. I realize how much I learn from them. Specifically, they have helped me understand something that I teach in my history courses: the four cardinal virtues. 

Continue reading “Introduction: Teaching Virtue and Vocation in History “

Mentoring for the Cultivation of Virtue in the Sciences

Through the intentional and explicit inclusion of Christian Practices in a research experience, we hope to help students better understand that living vocationally transcends the work we do and encompasses discerning and prioritizing who we want to be as individuals and community members in work (and other) environments.

Part of a series of posts written by a team of faculty and students at Calvin University who are developing a curriculum to support team-based research. Their hope is that this blog series will spark a dialog about measures of success that are not typically prioritized in scholarly work and ways this project could be expanded to other colleges and universities, both within and beyond the Christian tradition. This post was written by Rachael Baker, Julie Yonker, and Amy Wilstermann.

In the first three blogs in this series, we introduced our Team Sciences and Christian Practices project—an initiative aimed at preparing undergraduate scientists-in-training to work effectively in interdisciplinary environments through the development of faith-based virtue practices. Many students in the sciences have a narrow view of vocation that overemphasizes the value and importance of their paid work and their productivity in those spaces. Through the intentional and explicit inclusion of Christian Practices in a research experience, we hope to help students better understand that living vocationally transcends the work we do and encompasses discerning and prioritizing who we want to be as individuals and community members in work (and other) environments. Our curriculum aims to encourage students to think more deeply about what it means to engage fully in community and to equip them to do so in current and future research settings, classrooms, their local community, and beyond. In this last post we describe how we prepare faculty to discuss, model, and encourage employment of faith-based virtue practices in their undergraduate research settings and how we are assessing the impact of our curriculum.

Continue reading “Mentoring for the Cultivation of Virtue in the Sciences”

First Year, First Virtue: Attentiveness, Technology, and First Year Writing

Attentiveness is essential to beginning our vocational journeys. And few things are under greater assault in our culture.

If I want to rile students up and get debate going, I mention Vermont State Senator John Rodger’s recent proposed bill to ban smartphones for anyone under 21, and his remark that smartphones are “just as dangerous as guns.” Student response to the debate over technology is a mixture of spirited defense and despairing acknowledgement of its harms. More and more, this debate has taken a vocational inflection for me. I think that the first-year writing course is an excellent place to begin to make students aware of, concerned by, and proactive about that which imperils their ability to thoughtfully and responsibly engage in their many callings, and especially their calling to conversations.

In Living Vocationally: The Journey of the Called Life, Paul J. Wadell and Charlie Pinches suggest that the first virtue required to begin our vocational journeys is attentiveness. Paying attention, so the argument runs, matters because “at the basis of every calling, whether a friendship, a career, or being patient with a stranger, is a summons to responsibility; however, we cannot be responsible without an accurate perception of reality, and we cannot accurately perceive reality without growing in attentiveness” (159). For Wadell and Pinches, attention is a “situating virtue” (along with humility and gratitude) because “instead of the thoughtlessness or indifference by which we turn in on ourselves and become carelessly disengaged with life, the virtue of attention forms us into persons who are fully present to life” (157). I agree that attentiveness is essential to beginning our vocational journeys. And few things are under greater assault in our culture than attentiveness.

Continue reading “First Year, First Virtue: Attentiveness, Technology, and First Year Writing”

Seeking Moral Clarity in a Time of Epistemic Confusion

Drawing upon the insights of Michelle Boulous Walker’s Slow Philosophy, Andrew Irvine continues his rumination on the wisdom found in “still deciding.”

Really, is there value in reserving judgment in critical times—like ours? The very fact we speak of crises signals the urgency of making up our minds. Over the course of three previous posts, I have described, analyzed, and praised as a virtue the capability of “Still Deciding.” But I make myself impatient. What more am I waiting for—while the meaning of our common life is at stake now?

Mural depicting Hannah Arendt near her birthplace in Hanover (Wikimedia Commons).

Continue reading “Seeking Moral Clarity in a Time of Epistemic Confusion”

The wisdom of “still deciding”

Wisdom counsels patience: with these times, with ourselves, with the general and inevitable difficulty of life. Wisdom calls us to love and learn of the complexity of our world, still deciding that in time we may learn a richer and truer path to simplicity than that of impatiently sacrificing ourselves for simplistic ideals.

In my previous posts on “Still Deciding,” I tried to describe this virtue as a kind of intellectual courage to keep oneself from sheer indecision on one hand and shameless dogmatism on another. Still deciding, then, is actually a positive excellence, that helps to integrate and enrich the value of a person’s style of life.

Like moral courage, to which I suppose it is strongly related, still deciding is a form of practice—far more so than either indecision or dogmatism, which are both ways of ceding oneself to circumstance. Thus, still deciding takes practice. If we want its form to in-form the shape of our daily decisions, we must exercise ourselves, cultivate in ourselves a capacity to hold alternatives in contrast, entertain various ways in which we might resolve the alternatives, estimate the relative worths of each resolution, and then decide, attentive to both what we are choosing and what not.

Continue reading “The wisdom of “still deciding””

Character and calling in a time of crisis

No doubt you have seen the advice, attributed to Mister Rogers’ mother, that we should look to the helpers in those times when the news is scary. As the frightening realities about the spread of the Covid-19 virus have unfolded over the last few weeks, there are also plenty of stories of heroes and heroines on the national and local level. Paying attention to their stories and especially to the virtues that they embody in this harrowing situation can be an opportunity for students to consider how the virtues intersect with calling. Here, I’ll mention two examples, but there are many others now just as there will be in the weeks and months ahead.

Continue reading “Character and calling in a time of crisis”