Insights and Conversations from the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE)
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”By calling us to alertness without first asking us how credible we are in the eyes of the world, how important we are in the various hierarchies with which we are afflicted, awe is nothing less than an affirmation of our immeasurable dignity, our worthiness to grow in wisdom.
In his recent article in Christian Scholar’s Review, Paul Waddell suggests that every human being is called to live wisely and well. In practical terms, responding to this shared calling means becoming “skillfully attuned, each day, to the myriad ways in which we are summoned out of ourselves in response to the beauty, loveliness, and goodness of the created order—as well as in response to its suffering and affliction.” To me, this sounds at once true, simple, and utterly countercultural, as perhaps simple and true things often are.
Waddell’s account of growth in wisdom certainly runs counter to what many people these days expect a college education to accomplish. Professors and university administrators are asked by pundits, legislators, parents, and prospective students about placement rates, career-readiness, and trending programs, but not very often about what it means to live well. I personally can’t recall any conversations in which outsiders to the university have asked me if we give students the capacity to be skillfully attuned to beauty and suffering. And the truth is that in an atmosphere of precarity, many of us might prefer simply to focus on “giving them what they want,” which seems to be a clear and comfortable path to a lucrative credential.
Except that we do still talk about learning, and I want to propose that the necessary connection between learning and awe is the reason that college still can and should produce the kind of attunement to calling that Waddell talks about. In fact, if we do learning right, it must at least potentially give students the capacity for living wisely and well.
Continue reading “Learning and Living Through Awe”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”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””