Meaning and Calling
Items on the purpose and meaning of life
Do Business Programs Produce Slaves to the Market?
Mon 21 Aug 2006 • Responses: 5 • by Vigen Guroian
“Are we in many if not most of our colleges and universities training young men and women to be mules of the marketplace, deprived of a moral imagination?”
American society is business oriented and has been so for some time, with obvious benefits. The vast majority of American citizens enjoy material comforts unimagined even by the very wealthiest in former ages. While some people lament the hedonism of American life—no one expects the basic structure or influence of the American economy to change any time soon. How does education fit into this scenario?
In the not-so-distant past, we founded and built land-grant and agricultural colleges to service the needs of an agricultural economy, and some of our great state colleges and universities carry that legacy. For the past fifty years, however, and especially over the last quarter century, colleges and universities have responded to the manpower needs of America’s businesses by establishing or expanding business schools and programs. Are such programs threatening the business culture and enslaving business leaders?
Calling and Commitments
Thu 25 May 2006 • Responses: 3 • by Peter Edman
We often think of calling or vocation as something we either choose or discern from our talents. This is how I approached the issue when I was younger and my friends and I were asking what we should be doing with our lives. But maybe there’s a different way to look at it, another dimension we need to consider.
I’ve recently been conversing via e-mail with Dr. Gilbert Meilaender at Valparaiso University, and he called to my attention the “letters to Derek” that he published in the Christian Century in the summer of 2003. I was able to find one on the web and found that, as often happens when I read something from Dr. Meilaender, I was presented with a new approach to a topic—in this case, calling. The quote below is from “Living into Commitments,” the second of these open letters to his adopted son.
Edgar on Entertainment and Calling
Thu 16 Feb 2006 by TTF Staff
Senior Fellow Bill Edgar has a great and important piece on entertainment in ByFaith Online, the online magazine of the PCA.
In an (apparently) undated but recent piece, “Good Company, Good Art, and a Good Laugh,” Bill discusses a Christian perspective on entertainment, suggesting that the real problem with our coarsening culture is related to a failure to fully understand calling and thus work.
These days work is either looked at as pure duty, or, the opposite, a messianic hope. Our modern culture has often turned work into drudgery, a necessary evil. Again, ironically, we reinforce this notion by fast foods and labor-saving devices which claim to make work easier. The more we see how work can be avoided, the more we complain when it has to be done. An equal but opposite error is to exaggerate the value of work. On the left, Karl Marx believed industriousness would yield utopia. On the right, the National Socialists dared to blaspheme: Arbeit macht frei (work makes free), emblazoned over the entrance to Auschwitz. Thus, both the left and the right destroyed the biblical balance—noble-but-flawed.
As a result, something had to be done to bring relief. Leisure! . . . [W]e need more time. But time without a purpose soon yields boredom.
The key, he suggests, is a recovery of true entertainment. Work isn’t all there is. “Life is not utilitarian. It is about the grace of God.”
Worth your time!
On Calling
Mon 28 Nov 2005 by TTF Staff
Resources on calling and discovering your calling.
From Os Guinness and the Trinity Forum
The Trinity Forum Study Series: Entrepreneurs
of Life- Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life
- Os Guinness, Rising to the Call: Discover the Ultimate Purpose of Your Life (similar to The Call; packaged for teens and college-aged people)
From other writers:
- Designed for Life by Arthur F. Miller, Jr.
The
Power of Uniqueness: How to Become Who You Really Are, by Arthur
F. Miller, Jr. (formerly titled Why You Can't Be Anything You Want
to Be)- Finding a Job You Can Love, by Ralph T. Mattson and Arthur F. Miller, Jr.
- Now, Discover Your Strengths, by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton
- Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life, by Michael Novak
- Creed or Chaos? by Dorothy L. Sayers (particularly the essay, "Why Work?")
The Confidence Man
Wed 27 Jul 2005 by Peter Edman
Books & Culture for August 2005 features a review essay from Dr. Eugene McCarraher (hat tip: ALD).
McCarraher, in “The Confidence Man,” a pleasantly acerbic article, discusses Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption, a new book by Mark C. Taylor, who is essentially an evangelical Nietzschean.
One often wonders why some atheists feel the need to evangelize their lack of faith. At any rate, Dr. McCarraher raises some good questions about an assortment of subjects, most notably the danger that academics and others face who are too isolated (in this case by tenure) from the joys and sorrows of the material world.
What does it take to write with such insouciance about failure, suffering, and death? I don’t think it’s flippant to respond: tenure, medical insurance, and a pension, the oblivious possession of which provides the Bobo set with security to neglect some intractable material and social realities.
McCarraher also makes trenchant comments (while appreciating Taylor’s spirited defense of capitalism) on the now common techno-gnostic utopianism that Taylor falls into, which is certainly born out by my recent readings on technology.
The Future of Tradition
Fri 22 Jul 2005 by Peter Edman
The Wall Street Journal has published a long but extremely thoughtful essay on “The Future of Tradition” by novelist and essayist Lee Harris (22 July 2005).
In this article, originally published in Policy Review, Harris discusses how tradition has been defended and attacked by the Enlightenment and its elites and suggests some different ways of talking about tradition that are well worth pondering—particularly for those of us in Western societies who are having difficulty maintaining our population and tradition—Italians and other Europeans, pay attention! Actually, everybody should probably pay attention to this one. The second parts of the essay are much more concrete, so skim the first section if you must, but do not miss the later discussion. Moral abstraction, he says, is not enough. Good historical context for the culture wars. Interesting discussion of the unintended consequences of Maimonides trying to defend Jewish dietary laws as if they were a health code. Fascinating discussion of language and the repsponsibilities of the elites. Read toward the end for some unexpected personal revelations by the author. Take that, Andrew Sullivan.
Basically, take the time to read this.
. . . in the view outlined here, a tradition is viable if it effectively keeps future generations from backsliding to a lower ethical or civilizational state. The track record of a tradition is irrelevant here; it may have been supremely useful in the past, but if its continuing embodiment in the rising generation begins to lower the society’s civilizational standards, the tradition must be discarded and replaced, and it makes no difference how many evolutionary challenges it may have successfully overcome in the past.
The Essence of Christian Humanism
Tue 05 Jul 2005 by Peter Edman
While updating things for our Online Store this morning, I had to mark a Reading as out-of-print (Amazing Grace) and was reminded of the other Readings that have sold out and that we’ve decided for various reasons not to reprint.
One of those is “You Are the Man,” the second Reading we ever did, an excerpt from sociologist Peter Berger’s book The Precarious Vision: A Sociologist Looks at Social Fictions and Christian Faith (Doubleday 1961) with a foreword by Os Guinness. Os wrote:
Unquestionably, our greatest challenge is not the fictions of totalitarian tyrannies or of Western consumer fantasies. It comes from the rationalizations of our own minds, the fictions of our own imaginations, and the deceptions of our own hearts. “Living in truth” is a prerequisite of personal integrity before it is one of public life. All of us who do not wish to be exposed some day should live by submitting ourselves to truth every day. The way of faith turns the way of the world upside down. Instead of concealing our worst and revealing our best, we are called to do the reverse. After all, as Jesus taught and modern psychology underscores, we are our secrets, not our PR. It is truth in the hidden life that counts. The story of David is worth pondering.
