Many colleges and universities have begun using the language of vocation, which originates in Christian theology, to help undergraduates think about their futures. The contributors to this volume seek to reexamine and re-think this language for the contemporary multi-faith context.
This volume champions vocation and calling as key elements of undergraduate education. It offers a historical and theoretical account of vocational reflection and discernment, as well as suggesting how these endeavours can be implemented through specific educational practices. Against the backdrop of the current national conversation about the purposes of higher education, it argues that the undergraduate years can provide a certain amount of relatively unfettered time, and a 'free and ordered space', in which students can consider their callings.
"The language of vocation and calling can encourage faculty and students to venture out of their academic silos and to reflect on larger questions of meaning and purpose. With contributors from across the disciplines, the book demonstrates that vocation can reframe current debates about the role of higher education today"--
Restoring the Vocation of a Christian College examines the vocation of a Christian institution of higher learning—to faithfully educate students—and how individual Christian teachers and scholars can participate in this process no matter their discipline. It surveys and engages developments over the last few decades in Christian worldview studies, Christian pedagogy, character formation, and vocational reflection. Through individual essays by college administrators, cocurricular staff, and faculty from a wide range of disciplines, it provides both thoughtful reflection and concrete application of these often abstract concepts to specific institutional settings and the actual classroom experience.
Vocation is more than a job. It is our relationships and responsibilities woven into the work of God. In following our calling to seek the welfare of our world, we find that it flourishes and so do we. Garber offers here a book for parents, artists, students, public servants and businesspeople—for all who want to discover the virtue of vocation.
At the end of his landmark 1994 book, The Soul of the American University, historian George Marsden asserted that religious faith does indeed have a place in today’s academia. Marsden’s contention sparked a heated debate on the role of religious faith and intellectual scholarship in academic journals and in the mainstream media. The contributors to Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation expand the discussion about religion’s role in education and culture and examine what the relationship between faith and learning means for the academy today. The contributors to Confessing History ask how the vocation of historian affects those who are also followers of Christ. What implications do Christian faith and practice have for living out one’s calling as an historian? And to what extent does one’s calling as a Christian disciple speak to the nature, quality, or goals of one’s work as scholar, teacher, adviser, writer, community member, or social commentator? Written from several different theological and professional points of view, the essays collected in this volume explore the vocation of the historian and its place in both the personal and professional lives of Christian disciples.
In the thick of modern life, we are tempted to forget what we are doing and why we are doing it. We are busy socializing, building careers, and looking for fun—but what’s it all for? The ancient concept of “vocation” has recently gained popularity as we return to questions about the meaning of life. Almost all religions include the idea that divine purposes should guide our lives; Christianity has particularly accented it. The God who called Israel and sent Jesus has something in mind for us. God’s call challenges us, but also opens us to the best sort of life imaginable. In Living Vocationally, the challenge and the joy of the called life is thoroughly explored. Part one considers the benefits of living vocationally, biblical traditions of call, and subsequent Christian understandings. Part two examines why vocation pertains not only to careers, but indeed touches every dimension of our lives and encompasses our full journey through life. Because every person’s life includes many callings, some very difficult, part three considers the virtues we need to live the called life well. Living Vocationally demonstrates why to have found a calling is to have found a good way to live.
Amy Sherman unpacks Proverbs 11:10--"When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices"--to develop a theology and program of vocational stewardship. Here is practical help for churches, ministries and other faith communities to navigate the complex process of following Jesus in those places where we happen to prosper.
Exchanges of women between men occur regularly in Greek tragedy—and almost always with catastrophic results. Instead of cementing bonds between men, such exchanges rend them. They allow women, who should be silent objects, to become monstrous subjects, while men often end up as lifeless corpses. But why do the tragedies always represent the transferal of women as disastrous? Victoria Wohl offers an illuminating analysis of the exchange of women in Sophocles' Trachiniae, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and Euripides' Alcestis. She shows how the attempts of women in these plays to become active subjects rather than passive objects of exchange inevitably fail. While these failures seem to validate male hegemony, the women's actions, however futile, blur the distinction between male subject and female object, calling into question the very nature of the tragic self. What the tragedies thus present, Wohl asserts, is not only an affirmation of Athens' reigning ideologies (including its gender hierarchy) but also the possibility of resistance to them and the imagination of alternatives.
In this insightful book, accounts of voice hearers are presented, evaluated and interpreted by a Christian theologian and psychiatrist. By listening to the first-hand experiences of voice hearers and evaluating them in the light of Christian theology, the book enables the reader to understand the experiences of voice hearers as a part of Christian experience and to engage with the theological issues raised by them, including the nature of revelation. This engaging and thought-provoking collection looks at a range of stories - ranging from comforting to complex to simply conversational - to encourage debate and search for meaning and also show how the reader can adapt clinical and pastoral practice to better aid people in this situation.