Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts

Kaethe Schwehn and L. DeAne Lagerquist offer perspectives from fourteen professors at St. Olaf College on the value of vocation, showing how a focus on one's calling rather than on success or credentials paves the way for the civic good sought by defenders of liberal arts education. The essays in this volume exemplify the reflective practices at the heart of liberal arts, for faculty and students alike. Martin E. Marty once said that "The vocation of St. Olaf is vocation," and the contributors draw on their experiences teaching in a range of departments-from biology and economics to history and religion-to reflect on both their calling as professors and their practices for fostering students' ability to identify their own vocations. These scholars' varied notions of how vocation is best understood and cultivated reveal the differing religious commitments and pedagogical practices present within their college community. Together they demonstrate how the purposes of their own lives intersect creatively with the purposes of higher education and the needs of their students and the world.

Table of Contents:
Contributors Acknowledgments Foreword - Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen Introduction - Kaethe Schwehn 1. ''Getting a Vocation'': Variations on a Lutheran Theme - L. DeAne Lagerquist 2. Good Work and the Good Life: Vocation as What We Do - James J. Farrell 3. Work in Progress - Diane LeBlanc 4. On Teaching Politics as a Vocation - Douglas Casson 5. Vocation, Psychologically Speaking - Donna K. McMillan 6. Forty-Three and Out: On the Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Rewards of a Vocation - Mark Pernecky 7. Meaningful Lives, Religious Pluralism, and the Case of the Bodhisattva - Barbara E. Reed 8. Professing Vocation by Caring for the Land - Kathleen L. Shea 9. Vocation and Liberal Learning: The Case for the Exploration of Vocation across the Curriculum - Jo Michelle Beld 10. To Practice What We Teach: Action and Reflection - Mary S. Carlsen 11. The Power of Example: Anthropology and Vocation - Thomas Williamson 12. Coming Into Being: Buddhist Meditation and the Practice of Teaching - Carol Holly 13. Professing Religion - John D. Barbour Afterword - James J. Farrell and L. DeAne Lagerquist Index

About the Author :
Kaethe Schwehn received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She teaches writing at St. Olaf College. Her poetry and prose appear in anthologies and journals such as Pleiades, Crazyhorse, The Cresset, and Fiction on a Stick. L. DeAne Lagerquist holds a PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. She joined the St. Olaf College faculty in 1988. She has served on the national board of the Lilly Fellows Network of church-related colleges and universities and been a leader in Lutheran higher education.

Review :
"Claiming Our Callings is recommended reading for anyone interested in the future of American higher education, whether that education takes place at a church-related institution or a public university or somewhere else .[The book] does not tell colleges and universities what they should do; it does not pontificate about what ought to be. Instead, and much more valuably, it paints a picture of how one particular institution educates students in a manner that inspires reflection on what could be done or might be appropriate. There is no one model of learning and life that applies to all institutions of higher learning, but this record of St. Olaf's experiences opens an important doorway of imagination for what might be possible elsewhere." --From the Foreword by Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen