William Placher on College Students Discerning Their Calling By Tracy Schier William C. Placher is editor of Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation (Eerdmans, 2005). The book is a companion volume to Leading Lives that Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be (Eerdmans, 2006), edited by Dorothy Bass and Mark Schwehn. These compilations complement the work of the Lilly Endowment-funded Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation (PTEV) in over 80 church-related colleges and universities. Placher is the Charles D. and Elizabeth S. LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Wabash College, in Crawfordsville, IN. Placher is a summa cum laude graduate of Wabash and holds his M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. A member of the Wabash faculty since 1972, he has also been a visiting scholar at Stanford University and Haverford College, a member of the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton, and a senior fellow at the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago. Placher s books include A History of Christian Theology; Unapologetic Theology; Narratives of a Vulnerable God; The Domestication of Transcendence: Where Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong; Jesus the Savior: The Meaning of Jesus Christ for Christian Faith and The Triune God: An Essay in Postliberal Theology. He has also authored some 50 essays and articles as well as numerous reviews and presentations for scholarly meetings. He is an Editor-at- Large of Christian Century and member of the Editorial Board of Pro Ecclesia. Placher received the American Academy of Religion s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2002. 1
This conversation is one of a series of three on vocation on the web site www.resourcingchristianity.org during 2008. The first was with Mark Edwards and the second with Dorothy Bass and Mark Schwehn. The conversation is edited. Q. In the introduction to Callings, you talk about vocation/calling in these words: something that fits how we were made, so that doing it will enable us to glorify God, serve others, and be most richly ourselves I m not asking you necessarily to prioritize those three things, but can you talk about the challenge of achieving all three at once? A. I suppose the assumption of faith is that if you burrow deeply enough in any one of those three you will arrive at the other two. To know our own most fundamental selves, or to serve others should ultimately take us to God so that there is not a need to make a choice among the three. Q. Please talk about the importance of community in discerning one s vocation. A. Community, belonging to a community, is important in several ways. First of all, a community is a place where you get advice and wisdom. In Horace Bushnell s piece, Every Man s Life a Plan of God (in Callings) we read that people constantly need to go and ask their friends if they are making sense. Bushnell reminds us that friends often know our talents and personal qualifications better than we ourselves do. Also, unless we are living life as hermits, we act our vocation out within community and in cooperation with others. A contemporary problem that I see, especially with a lot of students, is that they are only tangentially part of communities. They are, famously, bowling alone, as are many people today who move about and cannot receive the help from a community that we would wish for them. Q. What is the definition of vocation that you are most comfortable with? A. As I think about this I believe I would choose what Frederick Buechner has written. That is, that God calls us to the kind of work that we most need to do and 2
that the world most needs to have done. He tells us, too, that the place God calls us to is the place where your deep gladness and the world s deep hunger meet. I think that is the most elegant definition I have seen, and it is short. It is as good as any I know. Q. What do you see as the greatest challenges for today s college students when it comes to discerning vocation? A. First of all, I think that the sheer range of possibilities for life s work makes choosing one really hard. And also, there is great pressure from society, and most probably the biggest pressure can be from parents, to be successful in society s terms that is, to make a lot of money and hold a prestigious job. But I would say that a lot of students today are attracted to ways of doing good as they perceive it, through such means as the Peace Corps or Teach America. It is disappointing that professions such as law and medicine are not presented to young people as ways of doing good. I think years ago, people became doctors because they saw that helping the sick was something noble. And really, law, medicine, business can be ways to perform works that are of value to others. Another issue that students face today is something that young people of my generation did not deal with as much. In my day, people married and one person, typically the husband, pursued a vocation and the other trailed along. Today both men and women very often have vocations and careers and so that makes things more complicated when it comes to locating, moving, and so on. Q. What aspects of contemporary times do you see being helpful to students as they discern vocation? A. I think there is going to be support from their own age peer group. For example, if they are going to do something that helps people, their parents may be horrified but their friends will think it s cool. Also, there are a lot of institutional structures set up if people want to do public service in my youth, the Peace Corps existed but it did not fit everyone s interest. And at that time, it was just about the only option out there. Of course, really imaginative young people can do things by themselves and on their own, but it is easier when there are structures in place for them to join into to help others. Q. Ours is often called the post-christian era. Can you look back some 2,000 years at why people became Christians then, and can you say that some of their rationale might hold promise today? And what, of that rationale, is relevant to vocation/calling? 3
A. It is clear that the early church was very counter-cultural. It was risky. It made you into an outsider. When we read examples of saints in the early church take someone like Saint Perpetua for example we see that they followed a different path. In North America that kind of risk isn t there, but it is in some parts of the world. Christians in our society can feel that they are outsiders when it comes to some of the values materialism, consumerism, a government that tortures people are examples. People who see themselves as true Christians simply cannot fit in with those attitudes. But I am a bit ambivalent about the idea that post-christian identifies our times. I think some of that is regional. Frankly, in the South and the Midwest that makes no sense. Q. What do you say to college/university faculty who are ambivalent or even hostile to the goals of PTEV? A. I think if you find faculty like that you would want to have them articulate what they think the goals are. Often they don t understand what the PTEV programs are really all about. They should talk to students who are involved also, because they will get a good idea of the realities of the program from them. We do have a problem in our country. It seems that the loudest Christian voices can sometimes represent intolerance and narrow mindedness and some of our secular colleagues on campuses hear only those who are loud. Part of the challenge is to show the intellectual part of Christianity to those who have prejudice against religion. There is a lot of that today look at the writings of Dawkins and Hitchens. So we need to tell these people that we are not what they think we are. Q. Is the ability to reflect and discern one s vocation a luxury that first world/educated people enjoy? When I have been in African countries, or even in Mexico or inner-city America and seen some of what lives are like for the world s poorest of the poor, it would seem that these people don t have the luxury of doing anything but struggling on a day-to-day basis for survival. Do these people have the luxury of deciding or answering a call? Or even consider working class Americans who are locked into dead-end jobs. Can you talk about this? A. In the way that the PTEV program involves certain groups of students, it can be seen as a luxury in terms of time, class and geography. But what does that mean? In the early church people understood their vocation as to be 4
Christians they didn t see it as their jobs. So, for the poor people in places like Africa and South America their call may be similar. And actually, a person s job may not be his or her vocation, even for those in the most privileged of situations. A vocation might involve being the person in a community that people can talk to about the things that are important to them. Or it can be the person in the village who thinks of new ways to dig a well. There are so many ways that lives can have meaning. Keeping a family fed is a real accomplishment. Because we have choices where others may not we always need to go back to the place where we started in this conversation, looking at Buechner s idea of vocation doing what gives deep joy and serves a need. With that definition in mind we can see that understanding vocation can very definitely be different for North American college students than it might be for African villagers. Q. You say at one point that you have long suspected that most young Christians are more willing to be challenged than their churches are to challenge them. Why do you think this is true, and what can be done about it? Might you be seeing any changes? A. I think our churches, and I am speaking about Protestant and Catholic, have fallen into a consumerist mentality. The churches see kids drifting away and so they immediately think that the way to get them back is by entertainment. But it very well may be that kids today have other needs than to be entertained. They want to be challenged and many feel a need to serve others. The churches need to have courage to challenge them. My impression is that mission trips and service projects sell better these days than bowling and pizza. Of course, when travel is involved, that can be very attractive and so the next stage for the churches is to challenge their youth to bring the work local. To challenge young people to look at their own community s needs. I think there is somewhat less of that happening than the projects that involve travel, but I think it will come. In general, I think the basic news is good. The young generation today really seems to want to help people and churches just need to pick up on that. Q. I loved Dorothy L Sayers comment (in Callings) that, after World War II, her hope would be that society enter into a period when we shall forget to think about money and think first and foremost about the true needs of man and the right handling of material things. Can you comment on that two-fold call to work to meet true needs of humans, and to engage in right handling of material things, something that we might interpret today as environmental stewardship? 5
A. I loved her whole essay and I m not sure I can say anything better than she said it. The worry she struggles with is this is it a luxury not to think about money, can only those of us who have enough money not worry about it? In the right kind of society these are things that everyone should be thinking about. People should not have to be worried about health care for example. But people who do not have a social safety net cannot be blamed for worrying about falling through the holes. What we need is to ask the following: how do we create a society that can help people get beyond worrying about their own needs so that they can concentrate, as Sayers says, on the true needs of others and on the right handling of material things? It is a very large challenge. Q. What do you hope graduates of PTEV schools will look like in 20 years? What should they look like? A. I really hope that some of them will be pastors. I think a lot of what we have talked about can happen outside of the churches, but the churches are so important to touch people s lives. So we need smart, energetic people leading them. That is an important goal, but not the only goal of the program. I hope that these graduates don t divide themselves into people who are professionally successful and people who try to do good. I hope they can do both at the same time. I do hope when they finish working in programs such as Teach for America that they will be shaped by those experiences. Interestingly, I think we don t serve society well by how hard we make young professionals work, young doctors for example. We see studies about how people in the so-called prestige professions are desperately unhappy. Our systems don t let them reflect enough on what they set out to do. Q. In what ways do you see the PTEV programs influencing institutional cultures? A. This is the positive side of what we were talking about earlier what to do when faculty are negative. The PTEV programs have provided a way for most faculty members to connect in some ways with the founding faith of the institution. Often, in some of the schools, there is only a vestigial connection to the founding mission and faith and some faculty have seen that faith connection as limiting their academic freedom. But on the other hand, this reconnection to the founding faith tradition allows faculty to talk to students about service, for example. The rhetoric has always been about the liberal arts as preparation for life but very often the faculty and career people were not in conversation with that idea. 6
I hope we don t sell out entirely to the values of training people for narrowly defined professional success. And this hope is partly because professional success as narrowly defined doesn t seem to be making people very happy. Recently I heard a baccalaureate address by a pastor of a church that is full of very rich people. He spoke of how he meets many people who are brilliantly successful and have money and great homes, but as their pastor he knows how unhappy they really are. They are looking for something other than the external markers of success. The type of institutional culture that I hope for is one where we talk about those things, so that over four years of college the students will learn how to ask the important questions. Q. Has anything about this renewed emphasis on vocation surprised or disappointed you? A. A surprise has been that student services and faculty people in some of the schools found that this gave them their first opportunity to have conversations about the really important questions. And I was not surprised but sad to know that in some places the religion department faculty were sometimes the most suspicious. In all it has been an exciting program and I think there are an amazing number of successes. The question now is what will survive ten years down the road? We don t know. I know there are schools where vocation language and programming are clearly embedded in institutional life and will thrive. In other places, it will depend on the leadership and how they make priorities when it comes to what will have to be cut from budgets. 7