Hope, Resonance, and Work that Matters: Reflecting on Love’s Braided Dance

This post offers three reflections on this year’s selection for NetVUE’s Big Read program, Norman Wirzba’s Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis. Each writer provides their own response and reflection on the issues they found most significant with the intent to spark further discussion across the network.

In the first chapter of Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis, Norman Wirzba observes that to harness the powerful joy of authentic embodiment for our shared work, “people need the support of a loving community that affirms and encourages them.” One of the purposes of NetVUE’s Big Read program is to foster this kind of support at its member institutions and to do so by reading a book like Love’s Braided Dance together in community. Such communal meaning-making has the potential not only to help us all deepen our practices of vocational exploration, but also to affirm and encourage us in the process.

Book cover for 'Love's Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis' by Norman Wirzba, featuring artistic lettering and braided wheat illustrations.

To that end, Vocation Matters has invited three colleagues—Tara Russey, Craig Mattson, and Anna Stewart—from across the network to reflect on this year’s Big Read. In their reflections, they share powerful glimpses into what moved them and striking insights into what they found significant. In this way, they illustrate another key point from Wirzba’s opening chapter: “The most important thing” to do, he writes, “is to act on the conviction that your community needs you and is calling you to contribute in some way.”

As you reflect on their contributions, please consider them as points of departure as you and colleagues explore what significance this book might have at your institution. I think you’ll agree that we all need, and will be enriched by, the loving, resonate insights that each writer offers us.

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Assessing Community-Engaged Learning to Deepen Vocational Reflection

The final post in this series discusses the impact of community-engaged learning on students’ vocational exploration. It emphasizes the importance of reflective practice in fostering deeper learning. By revising assessment strategies and prompts, the authors enhanced students’ understanding of teamwork and intercultural competency, leading to meaningful civic engagement and a greater sense of personal responsibility within their communities.

The final post in a series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.

As educators, we want to know that our efforts impact our students, but assessment is difficult, especially when we seek to measure learning about vocation. It requires that we—alongside our students—engage in “continuous, connected, challenging and contextual” reflective practice, as recommended by one practitioner’s guide. Our last post illustrated how teamwork can be a kind of vocational praxis, offering students the opportunity to discover common ground in community with others. In our final post, we describe the outcomes of Heather and her colleague Erin Olsen-Telles’s learning, paying particular attention to the impact of embedding reflection in community-engaged learning on students’ vocational discoveries. By redesigning assessment strategies, we came to understand that reflection grounded in community contexts empowers students to engage in the deeper learning that opens the door to vocational discernment.

serious african american male with planner on city riverbank
Photo by Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels.com
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Vocational Ambiguities: Confronting Contradictions in The Merchant of Venice

The second post in a series on Shakespeare, pedagogy, and the power of literature to help us navigate ambiguity in our callings.

woman in historic costume with poetry book
Photo by JJ Jordan on Pexels.com

By most estimations, reading Shakespeare carries little value as career preparation. No one—not even English majors—will be asked in a job interview to prove what they know about Shakespeare. But while knowing the content of his plays may not mean much, I’m convinced that the process of reading them may very well shape our vocational trajectories.

It did, at least, for my student MR.

Aspiring to attend law school, MR was gregarious and relational, always willing to engage and converse and dressing with a zany flair. But underneath this whimsy was a penchant for precision. They liked things crystal clear and were uncomfortable when they were in shades of gray, especially when it came to assignments and grades. In their eyes, a black-and-white answer could always be deciphered if we just took enough time to find it. This love for exactitude was both an asset and a liability for an aspiring attorney.

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Thriving in Academia: The Power of Friendship and Community

Faculty members at small liberal arts colleges often experience isolation despite a focus on community. This post emphasizes the importance of developing friendships and academic partnerships for personal and professional growth. Connections with peers, mentors, and colleagues from other institutions foster resilience and collaboration, ultimately enhancing scholarly productivity and overall well-being.

A co-authored series on what faculty members need to thrive vocationally.

One of the seeming paradoxes of faculty life at a small liberal arts college is that although these institutions often champion community, faculty members frequently work in isolation. And despite the fact that research and publication have become increasingly collaborative, higher education has a tendency to view the “life of the mind” largely as an individual pursuit. University tenure and promotion criteria often reinforce this view, rewarding individual work over more collaborative projects—particularly in the humanities. Within this context, collaboration may be further inhibited by the fact that faculty are frequently hired as one of a few experts—and sometimes as the only one—in their discipline or sub-specialty. A recent article from Inside Higher Ed suggests that the key to scholarly productivity for faculty members working at teaching-intensive schools is to just be more efficient, side-stepping these other very real constraints.

In this post, we encourage faculty members to cultivate a kind of scholarly resilience that doesn’t expect you to do more with the same number of resources; instead, we should build resilience by generating “wealth in people” that we gain through belonging to a community, as Christine Jeske describes in her essay in the volume we edited, Purpose and Joy: Pursuing a Meaningful Career in Christian Higher Education. Friendship within academic communities can take many forms, but we focus here on generative friendships—what we term “academic partnerships”—that encourage personal and professional growth, and thriving. As Paul Wadell writes, “One of the great unpayable debts of friendship is to realize that our friends helped us become better than we ever could be by ourselves.”

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“To Be Idle and Blessed”: A Wandering Path for Vocational Discernment

This post emphasizes the therapeutic benefits of nature walks for vocational exploration. It highlights how being “idle and blessed” fosters self-reflection, creativity, and deeper understanding of one’s calling. Citing historical and scientific evidence, it encourages incorporating mindful walks into daily life to promote clarity and personal insight in a busy world.

A series drawing on a therapist’s insights into play, wandering, and presence in relation to vocational exploration and discernment.

I first came upon the tantalizing phrase, “idle and blessed,” in Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day”:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

It is in such unhurried states—with an open heart and peaceful mind—that callings often stir. I have found that nature walks offer a practice of intentional “idleness,” which allow the mind to wander and reflect, to stir rich self-understanding “blessedly” and to deepen vocational discernment.

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A Victory for Humanity: Vocation, AI, and Magnifica Humanitas

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, emphasizes that discussions around artificial intelligence should focus on human dignity and community values. It asserts that genuine human experiences—rooted in relationships, compassion, and moral growth—cannot be replicated by technology. The text advocates for educational approaches that prioritize human flourishing amidst technological advancement.

Pope Leo XIV

Here’s a confession: my interest in generative AI isn’t really about AI, it’s about our humanity, because vocation work is deeply human work. It requires our individual ability to reflect and to learn, to discern and to decide; it also depends on our collective ability to be human together: to communicate clearly, to hold together some form of civil society, and to pay attention to our neighbors’ needs.

Similarly, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, published in May 2026, is widely seen as being “about AI” when in fact, it’s about our humanity. In the third chapter of Magnifica Humanitas, when the pontiff turns his attention to AI, he’s actually focusing on what it means to be human.

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Vocation and Intentional Communities

This post discusses how intentional communities, particularly in college settings, foster a sense of purpose and belonging for young adults, influencing their vocational paths. Alumni profiles highlight transformative experiences, as seen with Katerina Sasieta from Knox College, who credits her communal living at Green Oaks for her career as an arborist.

A series on the impact of intentional living communities on young adults as they explore and discern their vocations.

In the spring of her sophomore year, Katerina Sasieta lived in the woods of the upper Midwest. Halfway across the country, Gina Ciliberto spent her sophomore and junior years off campus in the Bronx. Neither were alone; they’d joined intentional communities sponsored by their colleges. Years later, Katerina and Gina are both clear: if they hadn’t found purpose and belonging in those communities, they might have transferred or dropped out of college altogether.

On the lake at the Green Oaks campus.

An intentional community is a group of people who live together and share values, goals, and a lifestyle. From pilgrim colonies and convents to hippie communes, intentional communities are a unique part of American history. The distinctly American blend of religious freedom, freedom of expression, colonialism, and entrepreneurship has produced many utopian experiments.

In this context, American colleges and universities have also experimented with intentional community as an alternative model for student housing. Intentional communities may increase student retention, belonging, and affinity. As a former ministry coordinator at DePaul University and a long-time resident of intentional communities, I’ve seen how communal living can transform young adults.

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The Attention Gym: Building Capacity for Attentiveness in the Classroom

This post discusses the importance of learning how to pay attention for undergraduate students, highlighting its decline in today’s digital age. It emphasizes fostering students’ attentiveness through classroom practices, framing the learning environment as an “attention gym” or a workout for the mind. Through various exercises, assignments, and reflections educators can help students reclaim focus and develop essential skills for vocational discernment.

A series on how to help our students strengthen their abilities to pay attention to their lives, the world, and their vocations.

Fred Rogers

In a 2022 Atlantic article about Fred Rogers, Adelia Moore recounts her experience in the 1970s as a one-time guest on an episode of his television show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and her subsequent friendship with him. In addition to his “gentleness, kindness, and empathy,” she describes the most magnetic and distinctive part of Mr. Rogers’ persona as his attentiveness, claiming that the character trait that made him such a powerful figure was “his capacity to pay attention.” This capacity, she laments, has become increasingly rare in today’s world.

Attention as a necessary and threatened resource has been on the minds of many (if not all) of us in higher education for a long time, especially those of us who think about undergraduate education in vocational terms. For obvious reasons, that concern intensified during and after the pandemic: on this blog in 2021, Jason Stevens argued that attention may be the resource most under threat in our current moment. In the last decade, several books—by authors like Tim Wu, Jenny Odell, and Chris Hayes—attest to this ongoing and worsening threat. Jonathan Haidt, author of the widely read The Anxious Generation, has recently said that he increasingly sees the assault on children’s attention as on par with the mental health consequences he attributes to children’s smartphone use.

My contention is that, in order to help students develop their attentive faculties, we must not only help them see the problem clearly (which so many of them are already acutely aware of); we also need to give them active ways of reclaiming and strengthening their capacity for sustained focus. One way to do that is to name the classroom an attention gym—a space where a key goal is to develop the muscles we need to become more attentive people.

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Building Connections and Community through NetVUE’s Big Read

NetVUE’s Big Read program promotes connections among educators, students, and communities in higher education by focusing on vocational exploration. This year features Norman Wirzba’s “Love’s Braided Dance” as a catalyst for meaningful discussions on hope and community building. The program includes webinars and resources to enhance campus engagement.

One of the greatest gifts of working in higher education is the opportunity to connect: with students, with colleagues, and with community. Educators focus on such connection throughout the academic year—as students learn and grow through all aspects of their undergraduate experience. The Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) hosts an annual Big Read program, which offers member institutions a significant way to deepen connection around our common purpose of helping students discern their callings and lead meaningful lives, while helping us connect with each other on our campuses.

The Big Read is a way for campus leaders to invite others into conversations about vocation and to cultivate expertise in vocational exploration across campus and within different parts of the undergraduate experience. The program provides an opportunity to engage with NetVUE resources, including this blog, the podcast Callings, the scholarship of vocation, and Studies in Vocation and Calling, NetVUE’s new journal. It can bring fresh and challenging ideas to the ways you might be thinking about vocation. It also can build meaningful connections and community, helping seasoned and new colleagues—faculty members, staff, and administrators—forge a common purpose. Reading can be, as I’ve written elsewhere, a “catalyst for considering and contributing to collective well-being.”

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Teaching Shakespeare as Vocational Formation

The writer reflects on her complex relationship with teaching Shakespeare, acknowledging a history of not fully understanding his work. However, through teaching, she’s realized Shakespeare’s plays prompt essential vocational reflections and discussions about life’s ambiguities. These challenges evoke meaningful insights for students, shaping their perspectives on personal struggles and societal issues.

The Cobbe Portrait of William Shakespeare (circa 1610), public domain.

The first post in a series on Shakespeare, pedagogy, and the power of literature to help us navigate ambiguity in our callings.

I am a teacher of Shakespeare with a fraught relationship with the Bard. Every time I walk into my upper-level Shakespeare seminar, I hear notes of vocational dissonance, and my imposter syndrome surges.

This tension may have begun when I received a lower-than-expected grade on my Hamlet paper in the ninth grade. Or maybe because most of the performances of his work that I saw before adulthood (and after, if I’m honest) left me feeling like I didn’t quite understand what was going on. Even as I completed my dissertation on 16th-century British literature, my advisor had to nudge me: “You know, you should really let Shakespeare make an appearance.” I did, but reluctantly.

My resistance to Shakespeare wasn’t a response to his canonicity or to problematic depictions of sex, gender, or race—though these issues can be good reasons to evaluate when and how we teach his plays. Perhaps like others who feel pressured by our culture to like Shakespeare but don’t particularly enjoy or understand his work, I resisted him because his plays resisted my interpretive grasp.

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