Menu
Virtues & Vocations is a national forum for scholars and practitioners across disciplines to consider how best to cultivate character in pre-professional and professional education. Virtues & Vocations hosts faculty workshops and monthly webinars, and engages issues of character, professional identity and moral purpose through our publications.
UPCOMING
A Conversation on Purpose
with Greg Jones and Clayton Spencer
Monday, May 13, 2024, noon – 1 pm, webinar
Greg Jones, President of Belmont University, and Clayton Spencer, former President of Bates College will discuss the ways higher education can promote purpose. Jones and Spencer each wrote articles on purpose for the Spring 2024 issue of Virtues & Vocations: Higher Education for Human Flourishing. They will reflect on their own roles and articles as well as other pieces from this issue.
We will host a conference on Higher Education & Human Flourishing June 3-5, 2024 at the University of Notre Dame.
Cover artwork: “Over the Rainbow” by Stephen Conroy © 2021
Reimagining Purpose
L. Gregory Jones
Higher education as an industry needs to be re-imagined. The challenges we face are too numerous to think we are just dealing with a series of complicated problems that can be attacked one at a time. Rather, they are complex problems that require creative solutions.
Howard Gardner
As I enter my ninth decade and reflect back, I am reminded of several years ago when my friends Bill Damon and Anne Colby asked me about my sense of purpose. . . As I look back now, I can see many ways that my curiosity, though internally motivated, blossomed through collaborative relationships and still seems generative in new and sometimes surprising ways.
A Case for the Liberal Arts
Clayton Spencer
If motivating and equipping our students to live lives of meaning and contribution is a core purpose of the liberal arts, then work is central to the project. Whatever a person’s particular interests, choices, or constraints, most people wish to figure out a way to stay healthy and happy, to nourish human connection, and to leave the world—or at least their corner of it—better than they found it.
Carolyn Woo
The search for purpose inevitably turns our sight outward to the needs of the world and how we can make life better for others near and far. Yet, ironically, the journey must start with a focus on the self. To figure out our calling, we must first probe what we wish to offer and why. Before attention to others, purpose is first and foremost the giving of self: of our talents, training and education, efforts and persistence, attention and discernments, imagination, aspiration, and passion.
Carolyn Woo explores purpose and love through her own story in her recent essay for Virtues & Vocations. She writes, "It is not beyond us to know whom we love, what we love, and how we will love in return. It is our story—evolving, gripping, empowering, and sanctifying." Read more.
David Brooks is on a mission. Growing up, he was solitary and emotionally reserved. His family, though they had a deep love for one another, rarely expressed it, leading Brooks to retreat into his own private world of books and ideas. He has now set out, not only to change how he relates to others, but to help his readers know and be known.
Ryan Antiel, MD is currently spearheading The Project on the Good Surgeon, a program for surgery residents at the Duke University School of Medicine that helps them consider both their ethical and technical formation as surgeons. The Project’s vision “is focused on helping residents rediscover meaning and purpose in their work, develop the character traits necessary to sustain their calling, and ultimately promote flourishing in their surgical practice.”
Erin Collazo Miller
Project Director
emille28@nd.edu
Wes Siscoe
Postdoctoral Fellow
rsiscoe@nd.edu
