Tag: virtues

A NetVUE Conversation on Vocation and Character

On February 18, NetVUE hosted a webinar discussing the connections between vocation and character, featuring scholars Paul Wadell and Hannah Schell. They explored how to inspire students towards meaningful lives rooted in values amid a success-driven culture. The session also included audience questions and additional resources for educators.

On February 18, NetVUE hosted its most recent webinar, focusing on the deep connection between vocation and character. Speakers explored the power this connection has to shape who we become and live lives of meaning and purpose, guided by values and virtues—a challenging enterprise in a world that often rewards winning and success at any cost. The webinar featured Paul Wadell and Hannah Schell, two prominent scholars on virtue who both contributed essays to At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education, the inaugural volume from the NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project. In their presentations, they highlighted the urgency of this conversation at this moment in time and its potential for cultivating hope. Sharing how they became interested in the intersection of vocation and character, they also addressed the relational nature of these concepts and encouraged viewers to understand our callings within larger communal contexts.

Paul Wadell (left) and Hannah Schell (right).
Continue reading “A NetVUE Conversation on Vocation and Character”

Cultivating Character: Michael Lamb

In the second episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings, hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton interview Michael Lamb, a faculty leader at Wake Forest University. He discusses ethics and the importance of virtues in public life, encouraging listeners to connect passions with community needs and to cultivate virtues in discovering personal callings.

Michael Lamb

In the second episode of this season of NetVUE’s podcast Callings, hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton interview Michael Lamb, the senior executive director of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. An associate professor of interdisciplinary humanities and the F.M. Kirby Foundation Chair of Leadership and Character at Wake Forest, Michael also serves as an associate fellow of the Oxford Character Project at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, a project which helps graduate students in various fields, including government, law, medicine, business, and academia, think about the role of ethics in their professions. Michael’s research and teaching focuses on the ethics of citizenship and the role of virtues in public life, all of which offers many connections to the exploration of vocation.

Continue reading “Cultivating Character: Michael Lamb”

Reimagining the Good Life: Jennifer Herdt

The final episode of this season of Callings features Jennifer Herdt, a professor of Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School, discussing virtue ethics and the good life. She emphasizes that living well isn’t about self-gain but instead about being responsive to the world. Herdt encourages asking, “What is worthy of my devotion?” to guide one’s vocation.

Jennifer Herdt

The final episode of this season of Callings features an interview with Jennifer Herdt, the Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School, where she also serves as senior associate dean of faculty affairs. She is the author of many books and articles on virtue ethics, early modern and modern moral thought, and political theology. Her most recent book, Assuming Responsibility: Ecstatic Eudaimonism and the Call the Live Well, engages with questions of calling and obligation to others. Jennifer’s research also explores science-informed theological anthropology, which has been funded by a grant by the Templeton Foundation. In her teaching and research, Jennifer explores the connection between virtues, the good life, and the “call to live well.”

Continue reading “Reimagining the Good Life: Jennifer Herdt”

Re-visioning Humility as a Virtue for Vocation

The author reflects on a classroom experience where students struggled to identify their skills and talents. This silence prompted discussions about societal expectations and humility. The piece re-imagines the practice of the virtue of humility in relation to the barriers young women especially face in recognizing their giftedness due to cultural pressures. It ultimately emphasizes the importance of acknowledging both strengths and limitations in personal growth.

students cheating during an exam
Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

One day about halfway through the semester with a class of thoughtful, generous, and talkative juniors, we were turning our attention to the role of religious practices. I wanted to prime them to think about the way “practices” take “practice,” so I asked what I thought was a fairly innocuous question to generate discussion: What is something that you are good at, and how did you get good at it? I then circulated throughout the room, eager to eavesdrop on the small group conversations of these engaged and engaging young adults. Instead, I heard only a “profound and holy silence.” Anna, a brilliant and conscientious psychology major with a great sense of humor and a small group of deeply devoted friends, sat in silence with Jillian, a compassionate and skilled nursing student with a side job as the group fitness instructor whose class everyone rushes to sign up for. Finally, Anna stammered, “Well, I guess I used to be good at dancing, but I don’t have time for that anymore.”

Continue reading “Re-visioning Humility as a Virtue for Vocation”

Assessing Character Strengths: Resources from Positive Psychology

Part of our work as educators is to help students recognize and appreciate their natural strengths so that they can share them with others.

Before starting my first semester as a professor, my department held a retreat that included discussion of our results from the VIA Inventory of Strengths (also called the VIA Survey). To my relief, my top strengths included love of learning, curiosity, and teamwork—all excellent characteristics of a new academic. They also included love and humor, however, and even though those felt accurate, I cringed with dismay. As someone who falls prey to imposter syndrome (see my previous blog post), these characteristics seemed unprofessional and “fluffy.” I didn’t want to be seen as a joker or not rigorous. Since that retreat six years ago, I have learned that these two strengths are invaluable to my work. My compassion is evident to my students, and my humor can appropriately bring levity to even challenging situations.

Many students struggle to identify their strengths and to communicate them to others, which I suspect is partly because they cannot always see the value of their strengths. This can happen because our strengths are so natural to us that they may not seem unique or consequential. Part of our work as educators is to help students recognize and appreciate their natural strengths so that they can share them with others. As a resource provided by the VIA Institute on Character (formerly Values in Action Institute), the VIA Survey is a free online tool that can help.

Continue reading “Assessing Character Strengths: Resources from Positive Psychology”

Echoed Vocation I: A Call to Courage

As I call to my children, I hear an echoed call from them, uncontained and unpredictable and unsettling, that reverberates back into my teaching.

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

Martin Dotterweich

With this opportunity to reflect in four parts for Vocation Matters, I want to explore something that I have not really noticed until recently: how much my children have taught me about vocation and about the virtues. These posts will describe an echoed vocation. As I call to my children, I hear an echoed call from them, uncontained and unpredictable and unsettling, that reverberates back into my teaching. I write these posts with their knowledge and approval.

I have spoken and written about my calling as a father to my two children, Kathleen and Peter, for many years. That calling has been informed by my calling as a teacher of history, part of which involves presenting the virtues clearly and winsomely to my students. The past not only offers examples of virtue (and vice) but it also calls us to virtues as rememberers of the past. I have tried to teach virtue to my children as well with attention and creativity because they both have autism. In doing so, I have discovered both their unique challenges and their unique insights.

Continue reading “Echoed Vocation I: A Call to Courage”

How Much Does Loyalty Weigh?

Loyalty comes before a discerning intelligence; it makes me listen and understand first, even while I may be struggling internally with my preferences for what I think is right or correct or better or true.

This post will try to explain a way of thinking about our vocational interactions in which loyalty might weigh more than intelligence.

Before the technologies of notes apps and simple word processing software were created, I collected and saved memorable quotations on notecards, using a typewriter. Then I’d file the typed and titled cards alphabetically in an old, wooden, recipe card box. In that box, in the Ls, is a card titled LOYALTY. The card contains a quotation from San Martin, “The Liberator,” whose idea about loyalty was found repurposed on a factory wall in Argentina in the 1980s. The quotation ended with “Remember: an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of intelligence.”

I can’t remember where I came across the quotation or in what context it was used, but I’m pretty sure I made the effort to capture the thought because I was intrigued by its comparative equivalency in favor of an unthinking loyalty. At the time, and until recently, I was suspicious of loyalty, especially as a tool used to manipulate people to act without thinking.

Continue reading “How Much Does Loyalty Weigh?”

Hopeful Waiting: Advent and Vocation

Advent points to a specific conclusion, but it is also a season of caring about the process—the process of renewing our hope that we can ready ourselves for what is to come.

Year after year, the academic calendar brings the gift of a rhythmic return to the same moments. If it’s mid-December, then I’m invariably scraping through exam week while ignoring the Christmas cards that should have been in the mail two days ago. As much as this month is about wanting to wind up the current semester, however, it also involves looking ahead. Just this week, I finalized—belatedly and guiltily—the book order for one of my spring classes. Doing so brought a familiar surge of excitement and anticipation. I have taught this class several times, but each new section offers the opportunity to tinker, improve, and of course meet new students. As I clicked “submit” on that book order, I was struck by the similarity between the renewal promised by the academic calendar and that embedded in the liturgical calendar. At this time of year, both calendars ask us to look ahead with hope. And that regular return of hopeful expectation, founded in students’ academic experience, can be a powerful vocational resource.

Continue reading “Hopeful Waiting: Advent and Vocation”

Familismo, Success, and Service to Others

It is incumbent upon those of us who care about helping students in their vocational discernment to understand the nuances of familismo and ganas, how they come together in forming Latinx students’ reasons for being in college, foundation for resiliency, and orientation toward the future.

In my last post, I considered how approaching students of color from a deficit perspective (focusing on what preparation, skills, motivations, or resources they might lack) can be harmful to them and detrimental to the mentoring relationship, especially in the situation when the mentor is white. This focus does not recognize the assets that students have and which they bring with them to campus. Tara Yosso has identified six distinct forms of capital forming what she has termed “community cultural wealth,” a robust framework for thinking about the student experience. This model moves away from a more narrow, individualized understanding of assets and capital to a broader understanding, one based on the history and lived experience of communities of color. In this post, I want to focus on two forms, aspirational capital and familial capital, and how they come together to help students in navigating the world of college (and beyond). As David Pérez has shown in his work, this is especially the case with Latino male college students, who put a high premium on family (or familismo).

Continue reading “Familismo, Success, and Service to Others”

Playing Devil’s Advocate: Vocational Wisdom from The Screwtape Letters

Reading The Screwtape Letters can help us preempt our demons; it can help us see our blind spots and remind us that good things can be traps and seemingly bad things can contain blessings. I’ve found that having students write their own Screwtape letters offers them an eye-opening way of looking at the circumstances of their own lives. Playing devil’s advocate to one’s own vocation is a generative exercise.

In a previous post, I wrote about assigning “Learning in Wartime” in a vocation seminar when COVID first hit. I wrote about how profound that text was for my students and about their moving responses to Lewis’ sermon. Here, I want to describe the next reading I assigned, The Screwtape Letters, which was equally engaging to students, similarly insightful about vocation, and provided them with an essential skill for persisting in the right direction: playing devil’s advocate.

Continue reading “Playing Devil’s Advocate: Vocational Wisdom from The Screwtape Letters”