Tag: work

I Am Not What I Do: The Vocational Dignity of All Work

This post discusses the importance of recognizing the dignity of all labor and the misconceptions surrounding vocational identity within achievement culture. It critiques how society values certain jobs over others, emphasizing that personal identity should not be tied to accomplishments. A call is made to affirm the inherent worth of every individual and their work.

A series on vocation, the dignity of labor, and the misconceptions that prevent us from valuing all work.

I used to direct a justice education program at the University of Notre Dame, which was part of a large institute that offered a wide array of opportunities for students to bring their academic, professional, and personal passions into alignment and to serve the common good. Part of what made this program special was the large cohort of student leaders with whom we worked each year. Assigned to a small group of their peers, these student leaders led classroom discussions, experiential learning activities, and personal reflections that connected students to many different social issues. Our center attracted students who wanted to channel their concerns for vulnerable and marginalized populations and make a difference in the world.

During one of our weekly late-night training sessions, we were reflecting on the now famous line from Bryan Stevenson that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve done.” My students embraced Stevenson’s thinking and his argument that a person’s identity is not defined by any particular failure. As he shows, to conflate identity and the blemishes on someone’s record is dehumanizing. It is why, in justice education, we try to identify and dismantle ways that even our language is demeaning. It is why we resist labels like “felons,” “illegals,” or (from even longer ago) “superpredators.” Stevenson helps us see that we must stand against these labels because what a person does and who a person is are not the same. Doing so reflects our ultimate commitment to human dignity.

Continue reading “I Am Not What I Do: The Vocational Dignity of All Work”

A Vocational Playbook: Anna Bonta Moreland

Anna Bonta Moreland, a humanities professor at Villanova University, discusses her new book, The Young Adult Playbook, designed for undergraduates. It offers guidance on vocational reflection and emphasizes the importance of work, leisure, and relationships for a fulfilling life. Moreland aims to empower students to pursue meaningful lives beyond graduation.

Anna Bonta Moreland

In April, NetVUE’s podcast Callings released an episode that featured an interview with Anna Bonta Moreland. A professor of humanities at Villanova University, Anna also holds the Anne Quinn Welsh Endowed Chair and directs the university’s honors program. While her academic expertise and research include medieval theology, interfaith dialogue, and comparative theology, she has also become passionate about educational renewal and the character and leadership formation of her students. She’s received both Templeton and Lilly Endowment grants for her work in these areas.

Recently, Anna coauthored The Young Adult Playbook: Living Like it Matters with Thomas Smith. Specifically written for undergraduates, the book invites them into and guides them in vocational reflection and discernment. But for Anna, writing the book represented her own vocational shift. It emerged out of a course she has been teaching senior honors students for the past eight years called Shaping an Adult Life—a course that helps these students, as she notes, “look beyond graduation and think about a life well lived as an adult.” While teaching the course, she felt “like I had put my finger on the raw nerve of my students’ lives,” and their “visceral” response to the course prompted her to write the book as a sort of “palate cleanser” from her previous scholarship. But it served as something more than a temporary shift in her own life as a writer, something much more significant. “This supposed palate cleanser,” she observed, “has ended up just becoming where I am, and I don’t want to leave.”

Continue reading “A Vocational Playbook: Anna Bonta Moreland”

Connecting Calling to the Dignity of Labor

The author reflects on students’ struggles with vocation and purpose, noting how traditional vocational frameworks can induce anxiety instead of inspiration. He highlights misconceptions regarding identity and achievements, emphasizing the need to evaluate vocational exploration in relation to the dignity of all labor. The series aims to confront these issues and promote a more conscientious vocational discernment for our students.

A series on vocation, the dignity of labor, and the misconceptions that prevent us from valuing all work.

“Am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing?” 

Recently, I met with a group of students who were articulating the kind of sincere desires we so often hear in vocational work. One of the great joys in this kind of work with my students—which I’m sure is true for many of us—is accompanying them as they wrestle with these big questions of meaning and purpose. 

At the same time, those questions often come at us like a double-edged sword, because students are not always asking them from a place of deep joy. Frederick Buechner’s classic formulation of vocation, where God calls a person to “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” is inspirational, but it can also induce anxiety. And the students with whom I recently met were asking questions from that place. Instead of being inspired, they were worried that they were somehow getting it wrong. To them, vocation feels hidden and so morally urgent that missing or misunderstanding a calling is tantamount to sin or vice. It seems to me that if the formation programs I lead create angst in my students, I might be doing something wrong. 

Continue reading “Connecting Calling to the Dignity of Labor”

Vocational Formation as Humane Learning: Insights from Chris Higgins’s Undeclared

In his book Undeclared, Chris Higgins criticizes the focus on job preparation in universities and proposes a vocational formation that integrates personal values and ethical understanding into work. This post explores his emphasis on the importance of practical reasoning and ethical considerations in education, and points to ways we might prepare students for a meaningful and ethical life and work.

In his new book Undeclared (available via open access from MIT Press), Chris Higgins  usefully criticizes the “jobbification” of the contemporary university. In its place, he describes an ideal of vocational formation that both inspires and has the potential to guide our actions.  

The final chapter of Undeclared begins with a familiar dilemma. A humanities department is called to justify their budget and faculty lines (if not its very existence). In response, Higgins offers what may seem like a counterintuitive suggestion. Rather than argue for how the humanities prepare students for the job market, or defend the separation of humanistic inquiry from vocational concerns (even though both have the virtue of being true), Higgins suggests that an expansive vision of vocation can reinvigorate humane learning in our time.

Continue reading “Vocational Formation as Humane Learning: Insights from Chris Higgins’s Undeclared”

“Quiet Quitting” and Vocation

To believe that we are called to our work is not necessarily to see work as an end in itself and to martyr ourselves for the cause. Rather, a vocational framework can help us see work as a path that is not good for us if it does not lead us towards self-realization.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted our perspective on a lot of things, not least of which may be our relationship with our work and workplace—and hence our sense of vocation and how we communicate it to our students. Even just two years out, I’m startled by memories of things most of us did to make pandemic learning successful: the late-night sessions making Screencast-o-Matic videos, the “check-ins,” the on-the-fly attempts to share audio via Zoom without creating a cringe-worthy feedback loop in the physical classroom. Even if those memories seem distant, though, I—and I’m guessing I’m not alone—still feel bruised by the demands of the last few years. Based on the number of articles about “quiet quitting” that have recently cropped up in my news feed (perfectly timed to coincide with the start of classes), we are only now gaining some clarity about the pandemic’s rippling effects.

Continue reading ““Quiet Quitting” and Vocation”

Being stressed out isn’t your purpose

Is it possible to be both in the profession and line of service you were meant to be in and yet not be living out your vocation?

You may have carefully explored what you value and the talents or strengths you possess. You have used these and your passions to identify a job that aligns with who you are. You know the work you are doing is important, you have passion for this work, and you value it. Beyond this you are good at this type of work—your abilities set you up to excel.  This work is truly your vocation, your purpose, so, you embrace this work and fill your life with as much of it as you can—more is better right? You over-schedule yourself with this type of work—but you are doing the work you were meant to do. So goes the cycle of so many, and many serving in ministry, academia, student affairs and administration reach a point of burnout.

Could the work we are called to do possibly be bad for us?

Continue reading “Being stressed out isn’t your purpose”

Idealized Versions of Vocation

Shahn’s program for educating artists is ultimately idealized because his program assumes that access to it is a matter of will or volition. His program glosses over real, socio-economic or socio-cultural barriers to its access.

One of my favorite texts, written more than fifty years ago, is The Shape of Content (1957) by Ben Shahn (1898-1969), a Lithuanian-born American artist and a lecturer at Harvard University.  Originally presented as the annual Norton Lectures, The Shape of Content begins with this sentence: “I have come to Harvard with some very serious doubts as to whether I ought to be here at all. I am a painter; I am not a lecturer about art nor a scholar of art. It is my (calling) to paint pictures, not to talk about them.”

Continue reading “Idealized Versions of Vocation”

The Economy and Ecology of Neighbor Love

The photojournalist turned his camera toward the angry protesters, freeze-framing their raw rage and shouts of protest over stay-at-home orders… What does all this have to do with the calling to educate for meaning, purpose, responsibility, and commitments to the common good? How about the central vocation that Christians share with other religious and nonreligious people of good will—the calling to love and serve the neighbor in need?

My vote for the press photo of the year would be the one taken by Joshua Bickel on April 13 and circulated widely since. Covering a Coronavirus response update from within the Ohio Statehouse, the photojournalist turned his camera toward the angry protesters with flags, red Trump hats, and masks outside—freeze-framing their raw rage and shouts of protest over stay-at-home orders.

The photo captures some of the painful divisions and complex ironies of our political/economic/cultural fabric—including, here, the irony of “law-and-order” conservatives defying local laws and taking to the streets, the President goading them on. One hopes that the new activists will gain some measure of empathy for more experienced protesters within Black Lives Matter, MeToo, or immigrants’ rights movements. One hopes, too, that liberals quick to relish in their anger can see also the real pain and anxiety underneath it. We may yet find ways to connect.

Continue reading “The Economy and Ecology of Neighbor Love”

Work and Sabbath at the Dawn of Covid-19

During this unprecedented pandemic that has evacuated our campuses and sent us all home, we may not be able to offer sophisticated vocation programs. But insofar as vocation is about “whole personhood,” those of us committed to vocation in higher education are more than equipped to offer and to encourage this basic practice: to meet students where they are. In order to do that well though, we must be able to meet ourselves where we are.

In preparation for helping my congregation both think about and live into new ways of being the church, I have been re-reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World. It is a lovely text—accessible yet profound, grounded in deep knowledge of the Christian tradition and also of the earth. Many chapters have spoken to me, but especially timely is “The Practice of Saying No.” It meditates on the gift of Sabbath practice and how difficult it is to choose to engage in such a practice when our world is calling us constantly to either produce or consume. How radical it is just to stop, to sit, to observe, to breathe… to say no to the cycles of production and consumption that dominate our society.

Now that many of us have been forced by the Covid-19 pandemic into a withdrawal from our usual activities, the chapter reads differently than it has in the past. On the one hand, social distancing and shelter-in-place orders have slowed our participation in commerce and literally called us home. On the other, most of us have moved our jobs from our offices into our homes, in some cases right next to family members and their work. How do we manage the contradictions and blurred boundaries brought about by this collective upheaval? There are some striking reflections making the social media rounds about the silver linings of this crisis, specifically how it might bring us back to some simpler ways of living and sharpen our eyes for what is truly important. Especially notable is Lynn Unger’s poem Pandemic, which explicitly names the calls for social distancing and sheltering in place as opportunities to reconsider the practice of Sabbath.

Continue reading “Work and Sabbath at the Dawn of Covid-19”

Passion vs. Duty

Should work be construed in the terms of passion or of duty? This is the question posed by a recent piece in the New York Times. The author, a philosopher by training, suggests the Stoic wisdom of Seneca as an antidote to our culture’s obsession with finding meaning through work. If we approach work in terms of duty, as Seneca advised, rather than as an expression of one’s passions, we will be less likely to fall prey to the threat of what another writer has described as “the religion of workism,” and the accompanying burn-out that could eventually develop.

Continue reading “Passion vs. Duty”