Vocation
Vocation

Author: Douglas J. Schuurman

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9780802801371

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The Protestant doctrine of vocation has had a profound influence on American culture, but in recent years central tenets of this doctrine have come under assault. Vocation: Discerning Our Callings in Life explores current responses to the classic view of vocation and offers a revised statement and application of this doctrine for contemporary North American Christians. According to Douglas Schuurman, many Christians today find it both strange and difficult to interpret their social, economic, political, and cultural lives as responses to God's calling. To renew this biblical perspective, Schuurman argues, Christians must recover the language, meaning, and reality of life as vocation, and his book helps do just that. Developed in dialogue with audiences as diverse as college students, industrial workers, business leaders, church leaders, and professional theologians and ethicists, the book examines the theological and ethical dimensions of vocation as these have been understood historically and in relation to our modern social setting.

Living the Call
Living the Call

Author: Michael Novak

Publisher: Encounter Books

Published: 2011-09-13

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1594035873

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Since 1965 the number of priests in the United States has fallen by some 30,000. But over that same time period, more than 30,000 laypeople have come into the employ of parishes and other Church institutions. Laypeople have stepped up to serve in a variety of new ministries, and they are relieving their pastors of many administrative burdens, enabling them to focus on their proper priestly duties. Lay teachers now outnumber nuns, brothers, and priests in Catholic schools by at least 19 to 1. In the history of the Church, laypeople have never been asked to do so much. William E. Simon, Jr. and Michael Novak call attention to this great shift in Living the Call. The first part of the book tells the personal stories of nine faithful laypeople now serving the Church in new and diverse ways. Simon and Novak’s insight is that more and more who work in the Church feel the need to shape their lives in a new way, matched to their different needs and adjusted to the new base of knowledge about the world with which they begin. In response to this need, the second part of Living the Call offers practical examples and reflections on a number of themes, including entering into the presence of God and learning different forms of prayer, reading that refreshes the mind and deepens the soul, and the graces of the sacraments and how being a spouse contributes to holiness.

Lived Vocation
Lived Vocation

Author: Timothy K. Snyder

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1506481353

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Lived Vocation is a collection of short reflective essays based on stories of contemporary work. Together these reflections offer a window into the struggle to find meaning at work today. These stories explore how we come to our work and jobs, the hardship and "toil" of our working lives, and the surprisingly small but powerful ways in which God may nonetheless be at work in these stories. Author Tim Snyder asks: What if vocation were less about being certain that you're following God's master plan for your life and more about noticing the presence of God as we tell our stories from everyday life? The book challenges congregational leaders to listen to the stories of actual Christians putting their faith into action. It offers ordinary Christians the assurance that they are not alone in their struggle to make sense of faith in everyday life. The book provides congregational leaders with an accessible window into the lives of ordinary Christians trying to put their faith into action at work. It helps such leaders empathize with the difficulties of integrating faith in everyday life today and inspires them to listen to and tell more stories of their own.

God at Work
God at Work

Author: Gene Edward Veith Jr.

Publisher: Crossway

Published: 2011-08-02

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 143351608X

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When you understand it properly, the doctrine of vocation—"doing everything for God's glory"—is not a platitude or an outdated notion. This principle that we vaguely apply to our lives and our work is actually the key to Christian ethics, to influencing our culture for Christ, and to infusing our ordinary, everyday lives with the presence of God. For when we realize that the "mundane" activities that consume most of our time are "God's hiding places," our perspective changes. Culture expert Gene Veith unpacks the biblical, Reformation teaching about the doctrine of vocation, emphasizing not what we should specifically do with our time or what careers we are called to, but what God does in and through our callings—even within the home. In each task He has given us—in our workplaces and families, our churches and society—God Himself is at work. Veith guides you to discover God's purpose and calling in those seemingly ordinary areas by providing you with a spiritual framework for thinking about such issues and for acting upon them with a changed perspective.

Visions of Vocation
Visions of Vocation

Author: Steven Garber

Publisher: InterVarsity Press

Published: 2014-01-27

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0830896260

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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.

Vocations
Vocations

Author: Jenna M. Cooper

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781599821504

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This course leads high school juniors and seniors toward a deeper understanding of God's call in the life of his people. The course covers the call of the laity and the four states of life: married, single, ordained, and consecrated.

Living Vocationally
Living Vocationally

Author: Paul J. Wadell

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2021-01-27

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 172527339X

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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.

Need to Know
Need to Know

Author: John G. Stackhouse Jr.

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-05-30

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0199790736

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How should a Christian think? If a serious Christian wants to think seriously about a serious subject--from considering how to vote in the next election to choosing a career; from deciding among scientific theories to selecting a mate; from weighing competing marketing proposals to discerning the best fitness plan--what does he or she do? This basic question is at the heart of a complex discourse: epistemology. A bold new statement of Christian epistemology, Need to Know presents a comprehensive, coherent, and clear model of responsible Christian thinking. Grounded in the best of the Christian theological tradition while being attentive to a surprising range of thinkers in the history of philosophy, natural science, social science, and culture, the book offers a scheme for drawing together experience, tradition, scholarship, art, and the Bible into a practical yet theoretically profound system of thinking about thinking. John Stackhouse's fundamental idea is as simple as it is startling: Since God calls human beings to do certain things in the world, God can be relied upon to supply the knowledge necessary for human beings to do those things. The classic Christian concept of vocation, then, supplies both the impetus and the assurance that faithful Christians can trust God to guide their thinking--on a "need to know" basis.

Discerning Vocations to the Apostolic Life, the Contemplative Life, and the Eremitic Life
Discerning Vocations to the Apostolic Life, the Contemplative Life, and the Eremitic Life

Author: Marie Theresa Coombs

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2018-09-25

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1532634218

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Throughout the spiritual journey, God’s love engenders within every Christian active, contemplative, and solitary inclinations. Consequently, each person wants to do some good, to have a basic receptivity to God, and at times to be alone with God. As life unfolds, God’s love also calls forth within a person an overriding attraction toward one of those three orientations, which in due course impels the individual toward a corresponding vocational lifestyle: an apostolic life, a contemplative life, or an eremitic life. In this book, the authors identify the core features of those three vocational lifestyles. In light of each vocational core, they then discuss an ensemble of signs and patterns that point to an authentic calling from God. This study offers wisdom and insight to those pondering the mystery of their personal vocations, to those discerning their vocational direction, and to spiritual directors, formation personnel, ecclesial leadership, and Christian educators who accompany them in their quest.

Ecology of Vocation
Ecology of Vocation

Author: Kiara A. Jorgenson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1978700229

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Critically surveying various approaches to Christian ecological ethics alongside the vexing moral ambiguities of the Anthropocene, Ecology of Vocation offers an integrative approach to responsible living vis à vis one of Protestantism’s key theological resources— the doctrine of vocation. Drawing on H. Richard Niebuhr’s germinal ethical framework with a decidedly ecofeminist perspective, Kiara A. Jorgenson demonstrates how vocation’s emphasis on right relationship practically speaks to the embodied realities of planetary interrelatedness. By excavating the ecological promise of the early Reformers’ democratized renderings of calling and linking their concerns to the contemporary context, she argues that vocation cannot be reduced to the particular aim of monetized work, nor to an elitist escape from it. Rather, vocation must be recast as the dynamic and vibrant space among the myriad roles any of us inhabits at any given time in a particular place. When understood in this light, vocation signals much more than a job, a passion, or a quest for self-discovery. An alternative understanding of vocation’s very ecology can extend Christian conceptions of the neighbor beyond the human and lead the church to more faithfully pursue lives characterized by humility, restraint, wisdom, justice, and love.