By Mary Pezzulo; reprinted from Steel Magnificat. My teacher was a Dominican, and I wanted to be a Dominican just like her. I wanted to teach second graders, wear a frumpy pantsuit with a little Dominican shield pin, and live in a convent. I was sure I had a vocation. By the time I got to college, it was clear that…
As a book reviewer, I have the privilege of learning about a large number of books, usually before they are published. In light of this stream of books, it is oftentimes easy to think that we do not need any more books on a particular subject. We have been blessed and inundated with a quantity of faith & work books…
This blog is meant to be a space for faith and work leaders to think about the faith and work movement. We are generally not political (though we ask people to think about encouraging the ethical practice of politics for the common good of the polis) and we try not to post too frequently, because we know you’re busy people. We…
Green Room blogger Jon Malesic has a provocative post at The New Republic where he argues that we use the metaphor of job or work for anything that requires effort, including school and the human relationships of marriage and parenting: Americans struggle to describe worthwhile, long-term activities without turning them into jobs. We can’t imagine a good life that’s free…
Alistair Mackenzie is a Teaching Fellow at Laidlaw College – Christchurch, New Zealand and has also worked part-time with the Theology of Work Project. He is the author of Where’s God on Monday?, SoulPurpose: Making a Difference in Life and Work and Just Decisions: Christians Ethics Go to Work, and the founding director of Faith at Work (NZ). As part…
The faith and work movement can tend to celebrate the entrepreneurial, which by extension often means celebrating the young (because, after all, they’re usually the ones with the energy to start new things.) The Christian Century ran an excellent article a little while ago about what vocation looks like in older adults: If vocation is about God’s call to persons (and…
Gordon Preece is an Anglican minister, the director of Ethos: Evangelical Alliance Centre for Christianity & Society, and the founding director of RASP, the research Centre for Religion and Social Policy of the University of Divinity, all in Victoria, Australia. We talked to him as part of an ongoing series of interviews with leaders of faith and work ministries. TGR:…
These questions and answers have been used in discussing vocation with college students as part of the Opus: The Art of Work program at Wheaton, and are presented here as a resource for others involved in similar work in colleges or churches. See the first post in the series here. Is My Vocation Mysterious to Me? Must I Wait &…
Story and metaphor are a powerful means for education on a variety of subjects, including faith & work. StoryCorps has published a book titled Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work whose purpose is to tell the story of individuals at work. Callings is written by Dave Isay. Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and the recipient of numerous broadcasting…
In my previous post, I introduced a new framework for thinking about how people maintain and overcome boundaries between faith and work. I proposed we consider two simple categories: overlap and separation—states that may obtain in spite of our intentions to integrate or segment faith and work. In this post, I consider the first category of overlap: fusion. By fusion,…
The Green Room 