Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Vocation

August 02, 2023

God’s Cricketer

You’re facing the Cy Young Award–winning pitcher Justin Verlander from a distance of 22 yards, armed only with a three-foot long, paddle-shaped club and your own nerve. To enliven the proceedings, Verlander interacts with you not from the traditional essentially static crouch, but after a headlong sprint from the outfield to the pitcher’s mound, at the climax of which he hurls a cherry-red leather ball in the general direction of your ankles. Continue Reading...
June 22, 2022

Your job is not your vocation

It is sometimes claimed—wrongly—that until the Reformation, the only vocations known to Christian teaching were monastic and/or clerical. One might be called to a monastery or called to the priesthood, but ordinary work, family life, secular singleness—these are the things of the world one may be called out from, not something God called one to. Continue Reading...
October 09, 2021

Rising to the challenges of ‘so-so automation’

Fears about job loss and human obsolescence continue to consume the cultural imagination, compounded by ongoing strides in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The job-killing robots are almost at the door, we are told, mere moments away from replacing the last traces of human inefficiency and heralding the dawn of a world without work. Continue Reading...
September 29, 2021

God doesn’t need your good works (but your neighbor does)

In modern America, our view of vocation has become increasingly narrow and individualistic, focused only on economic action and our own preferred paths to self-actualization. As David Brooks explains in his book The Road to Character, vocation is now mostly imagined as a journey of self-discovery and wish fulfillment, a way to satisfy inner longings so we can put up with the broken world around us. Continue Reading...