MS: The answers to those two questions are interrelated. The primary motive was the desire to meet some of the more urgent intellectual, practical, and spiritual needs of today’s college students. More and more of them have become deeply interested in the kinds of questions that these texts address, but they are not always well-supplied with resources for thinking through them. For years American higher education has been divided into two separate domains of discourse: liberal learning and professional studies or job preparation, and seldom do the two meet. Yet students, especially in the senior seminar that I taught for years, were keenly interested in thinking about what to do next and wondering about how the shape of their liberal education had any bearing on what they would do and what they might become over the course of the rest of their lives. Happily enough, the Western tradition features many texts that speak in very interesting ways to basic questions like, “What shall I do?” or “What kind of life is most worth living?” Texts that address these large questions by foregrounding the problem of work and its relationship to the whole of a human life had not been gathered together for study and reflection. And so the motivation was really a pedagogical one – to try to assemble resources to help people to think with some intellectual and spiritual depth and clarity about the practical questions that most preoccupy them.

DB: I would add that while Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation (PTEV) is highlighting theological perspectives, it’s clear that many people who may not initially be drawn to theology are nonetheless very interested in the basic human questions being addressed by PTEV. All the readings in Bill Placher’s wonderful book Callings are explicitly theological, and they are arranged chronologically to follow developments in Christian thought. In contrast, this book draws readings from the Western tradition more broadly and so provides a different point of entry into the conversation for students and other readers who are not already committed to exploring the Christian tradition. Leading Lives That Matter includes some theological texts and a brief section on Christian understandings of vocation, but it puts these in the context of other readings from literature, philosophy, obituaries, and other reflections on what makes a life meaningful and significant.

For example, the students who participated in focus groups on the book were very drawn to the selections taken from the screenplay of Good Will Hunting, a film about a young man who is intensely engaged in vocational discernment, though he does not use that Christian term. Sources such as this demonstrate that concern about issues at the heart of the PTEV initiative are also alive in the broader culture. This wider sweep for texts also allows us to include many sources of the kind that colleges and universities typically assign as part of general education in the liberal arts, such as The Iliad and works by authors like Willa Cather and James Baldwin.

MS: The question about what makes Leading Lives that Matter unique or distinctive is related to the question about motives. I think few anthologies have been so profoundly shaped from the beginning, in both form and content, by their intended audiences. I taught a course, part of which was to invite students themselves to find resources that had bearing upon these questions. So not only did potential readers provide materials, but also their questions and the questions of others whom we’ve taught at retreat centers for people of all ages dictated the way this book is organized; the whole second part is organized around questions. Also, Eerdmans was gracious enough to let us include an entire novella by Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych. This text was chosen not simply because it brings together all of the themes in the book, but also because as we looked at the PTEV website and at syllabi and at what teachers across the country were using in courses about vocation broadly understood, The Death of Ivan Ilych was maybe the most frequently assigned text. So readers get that text plus all the others in one volume. In short, the broad participation in shaping the actual content and in formulating its basic questions makes this anthology unusual.

DB: We should also mention the subtitle: “What We Should Do and Who We Should Be.” This also addresses the split between liberal education—such as general education in the humanities—and professional or pre-professional education, which as Mark said often take place in isolation from one another. One of the concerns that runs through this book is the relationship between what kind of work we do and who we are as human beings. Many of us like to think that first we are and then we do, but in fact, there’s a mutual influence between who we are and what we do that takes shape over time, especially in American culture. For good or for ill, the first thing we want to know about someone is, “What do you do?” In other cultures, people think this is a rude question. They would first ask, “What village you are from?” or “What is your faith? What do you love? What do you care about?” But in American culture, we ask, “What do you do?” So we hope that this book and the texts we’ve selected will help people think about what they do in a way that gets to the really important questions of who they are and who they may become.

MS: The primary audience is college and university students, but not simply 18-22 year-olds, even though they may be the dominant group. The book can be used in any number of contexts. Several courses come to mind. One ideal context would be the core courses in general education, which tend to favor the use of classic texts, Great Books, if you will, drawn from the Western Tradition, often around certain topics or themes. On our own campus, one of the dominant themes in our year-long general education course that all entering students have to take is work and vocation. Leading Lives that Matter would obviously work perfectly in that context. Senior seminars or “capstone courses” are also wonderful contexts because there people are getting very serious about what the next step will be in their lives. The book could also be used in courses on the subject of work and its meaning and place in a human life; the number of these has been growing because work has become such a lively subject among not only sociologists and economists but also among philosophers lately. This book would work well in a philosophy course because a lot of philosophy professors, and theology professors for that matter, are using more and more literary materials in addition to technical philosophical or theological works. Leading Lives that Matter strives to bring those different kinds of works into conversation with one another. There are some classic philosophical works from Aristotle all the way up to the contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor, and these are brought constantly into conversation with works of lyric and epic poetry, short fiction, obituaries, eulogies, and sociological studies. In addition, workshops and retreats having to do with vocation would certainly be ideal contexts for this book, since a leader could choose from a variety of texts those that he or she thinks would be most useful for that particular group.

DB: One of the things that became evident to us as we worked on this was how long young adults today live with these questions. A great many have not resolved the issues the book addresses when they graduate from college. In fact, developmental psychologists now say that a new phase in the human life cycle has emerged in the contemporary context: young adulthood, a phase between adolescence and adulthood that can last into one’s early thirties. Many decisions get postponed: where to live, what kind of work to do, what primary commitments to make to other human beings. We see signs of this among our own students, who often go off to do volunteer work or other short-term work for a few years after college as they try to figure out what to do. We partly had them in mind as we worked on the book. But we also believe that the book will be helpful to older readers, because the vocational uncertainty young adults are experiencing can now reappear at many points in the life cycle. Americans increasingly understand that we will have to—or may choose to—make several changes of employment across the years. In fact, questions about what we do and who we are remain alive for people even into the period when they ask “What shall I do in retirement?”

In this time of change in how people think about work and identity, it’s interesting to us that many people in our culture are gathering around texts to discuss these kinds of things. Many people now belong to book groups—in their congregations, in their neighborhoods, with their friends, sometimes with a religious focus, sometimes not. These people get together and read a novel or go to a play and discuss it. The readings in Leading Lives That Matter are just the kind of texts that can focus and enliven discussion groups like these. In introducing each reading, Mark and I have asked one or two prompting questions, and soon there will be a study guide on the PTEV website as well with further ideas for discussion. But readers could also just pick up the book and start conversing about a short story or a poem or an essay that’s included.

MS: Literary texts have a power to draw people vividly and concretely into dilemmas that seem otherwise terribly abstract. And I think students of all ages tend to respond more readily to philosophical questions when they actually are being lived out and lived through by real-life human beings in real-life situations. So texts that engage their emotions as well as their minds seem almost always more successful in getting people to engage the kinds of theological and philosophical questions you want set before them. And someone like Martha Nussbaum, who’s included in our anthology, even goes so far as to argue, and I think she’s right, that there are some philosophical ideas that we can only explore when our emotions are engaged, that there is a kind of emotional wisdom that literary texts can evoke that more abstract philosophical treatises can’t always. And of course some of the oldest philosophers in the tradition, like Plato, understood this and wrote dialogues with real characters in conversation as a way of doing philosophy.

DB: We studied the syllabi on the PTEV website and consulted our colleagues at Valparaiso and elsewhere – and we are very grateful to all the people at various PTEV schools who suggested texts, directly or indirectly. We also asked our other friends and acquaintances for suggestions, among them many young people. (We are the parents of a 27-year-old graduate student and two 20-year-old college sophomores, all of whom gave us input and were fun to talk with about this along the way.) Some texts that needed to be included were immediately evident to us; others we found after lots of digging, undertaken in order to include a diverse array of voices or to address a specific issue adequately.

MS: To speak of a method is to make our work seem a lot more systematic than it was. It was quite deliberate and thoughtful, but there was a movement back and forth between saying, “These are books or articles or essays that have worked well and we want to include them,” and then as the book began to take shape and the topics began to get organized and the questions formulated, we did have to go out and actively look for texts to fill out a given section and to be sure we included the right diversity and mix of different voices. This is not a self-help book; rather, this anthology seeks to draw its readers more deeply into an ongoing conversation that is multi-vocal. We therefore wanted each section to have a number of voices that were very different from one another because we ourselves, just as an aside, weren’t always of common mind in either text selection or in formulating some of the introductions to the different sections. So in other words, the book grows out of many voices and I think that’s what gives it part of its energy and dynamism.

DB: So many come to mind! I suppose that the ones that are most important to me personally are those that deal with balancing the various vocations and obligations that we have – work, family, citizenship, friendship, parenting and so on. In fact, one entire chapter addresses the question “Is a Balanced Life Possible, and Preferable to One Focused Primarily on Work?” The text I’ll mention now actually shows up in another chapter, the one on “How Shall I Tell the Story of My Life?” This text is “Composing a Life Story,” by Mary Catherine Bateson. Here Bateson notes that being able to tell the story of your life in a coherent way is part of how we come to know who we are and how what we do fits into the longer narratives of our identity and of our family or culture. The image that we “compose” our life stories has a number of intriguing meanings. She talks about how artists compose a picture in such a way that the disparate elements fit together into something that’s pleasing. That was an image I liked. And she talks also about how musicians compose art and sound and rhythm across time; when we understand that we “compose” our life stories across time we can see that our story is still emerging and that we live into it as we go. If you look at someone’s life and say, “Is this a life that matters?” you don’t just look at what is happening today, you look over the whole of it. She also points out that each of us probably has several different ways we could tell our story. What are the ways that help us to understand ourselves most fruitfully? Bateson thus encourages us to think about how we would tell our life stories. I find this a good challenge. I hope that some readers might even tell their life stories to one another and think about the narrative forms that shape these stories (such as conversation narratives).

Another favorite—which actually comes at the end of this same chapter—is the obituary of the man who for many years was the chief obituary-writer for The New York Times. This is a charming piece that provokes many questions: What details in a life disclose its character and significance? What is the story you can tell about a person that really captures who he or she is? This obituary, as well as others that appear in the book, remind me of the finite character of our lives: we’re not going to do everything, we’re not going to be everyone, and our lives will end at some point. But at the same time, it is rewarding and somewhat awe-inspiring to notice and reflect on the shape of the actual lives people do live.

MS: I too find it very hard to pick just one. This anthology includes some texts that come to light only because they explore topics relevant to its central questions. They will be unfamiliar to most readers who will encounter them here for the first time. And on the other side, there are a lot of texts that are very familiar, but which take on new meaning – sometimes startling new meaning – when they’re interrogated with the kinds of questions that this anthology foregrounds. An example of a text very few people encounter except in the context of questions like these is the selection from Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. I like it especially because it shows that the whole notion of vocation can often become an instrument of cultural criticism. Instead of just understanding, as some Christians have, vocation as a way of sanctifying what you’re obliged to do in whatever walk of life you find yourself by the standards of the world, Bonhoeffer insists, because his account is deeply theological, that there are times when you have to step outside of or break through the narrow specifications of what your job requires you to do. He’s writing out of his context, of course, wherein a lot of his fellow pastors were taking a very restrictive definition of their vocation: “I’m just responsible for my flock; politics is not something I need to become involved with. I just need to look after the salvation of the souls of the people in my parish and turn a deaf ear to the growing Nazi menace.” And that’s informing his analysis of vocation because he wants to insist that there are times when we are called to go beyond the minimal understanding of what it means to be a doctor or a lawyer or a pastor, or a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, and do something more than what’s narrowly required of one by one’s society or culture. So I like that. An example of a text that almost everybody knows is “The Road Not Taken,” which is probably Robert Frost’s best-known poem. Everybody thinks this poem is about choice: “I took the one less traveled by”—but when you interrogate this poem with these questions in mind, it turns out to be a poem not about choice at all, rather it turns out to be a poem about what we make of our choices, not about what choices we make. My favorite, though, is The Death of Ivan Ilych, which I think touches on almost every one of the themes and questions in the anthology.

MS: By vocabulary we mean not merely a word, but really a whole way of speaking and thinking. Part I of the anthology tries to set forth and examine these three vocabularies. We chose “authenticity,” because that’s the first order of vocabulary of a lot of today’s young people. And beyond young people, a lot of Americans speak the vocabulary of authenticity. Those who think in these terms, when they want to know what they should do and who they should be, look within themselves. “To thine own self be true” is their motto. So that one was chosen because it’s the most widely current vocabulary people use to speak of themselves and what they should do.

“Vocation” clearly is something that has a much more ancient history and has changed its meaning many times over the course of the Christian tradition, as Bill Placher shows in his companion volume to this one. But now “vocation” has taken on a much broader public provenance, sometimes shorn of its religious meanings, because I think more and more people have some deep sense that they are happiest in their work when their work is not first and foremost about themselves. They just make this discovery, though they don’t necessarily have a vocabulary to describe it, but when they do begin to stutter out what it is they’ve discovered, they often speak in a loose way out of a vocabulary of vocation, feeling there’s something beyond themselves, feeling that their own lives, their own work in the world, has real substance and significance when it’s not primarily about them.

And then the third vocabulary, “virtue,” goes way back to the ancient Greeks. And it is still a vocabulary people use when they speak of matters having to do with character or excellence or the different qualities of a person they admire – honesty, trustworthiness, courage, etc. But as we say in the introduction to this section, these vocabularies are often cobbled together, making it difficult for people to articulate what it is they think and what it is they feel even about their own lives.

DB: I think it will be helpful for those within PTEV who have been exploring the term “vocation” to set it alongside alternative vocabularies for talking about work and identity that are also in common usage in our culture. I have often heard students and others use the word “vocation” in ways that are deeply shaped by the other two vocabularies. Being able to identify all three of these influential (and admittedly intermingled) ways of thinking about our lives can help us to be more clear and articulate about what we really think is important as we talk together about leading lives that matter.

MS: I think that’s exactly right. One thing that runs throughout the book is some questioning of some of the ways people commonly speak about these issues. We sometimes try to point out the oddities of the way people speak to tease them into deeper thought. How often do we say, for example, “I don’t like her; she’s too judgmental.” What we really mean is that we don’t like the judgments she makes, but we act as though making judgments is itself bad. And then we turn right around and after having condemned making judgments, we make three or four of them of our own. And of course the claim that she’s bad because she’s too judgmental is itself a judgment. That’s just one example of the kind of confusion we get into when we speak without thinking, and this book tries to break through those confusions and give people some resources to gain greater clarity about themselves and the way they actually think.

DB: That’s just one of the ways in which the book as a whole encourages reflection and conversation far more than it tells anyone what to do or think. It’s really a liberal arts, discussion-provoking book rather than an effort to answer all the questions at stake. We include a wide range of responses to each question, and often these responses conflict. The purpose was to prompt readers to reflect more deeply and more honestly and even to see through the layers of self-deception that many of us carry regarding these questions.

MS: I think my students over the years have been divided in their thinking about vocation into two camps, at least. One group comes from parts of the Christian tradition that teach that there is a kind of Divine Providence, which includes a particular blueprint for exactly what each and every individual is summoned to do – a particular kind of work – and that the major task then is one of discernment, one of discovering the will of God. This particular set of reflections does tend to reduce vocation to paid employment, which is itself a problem. Once the primary problem is one of discernment, the worry is that one will not have discovered aright the exact Divine Plan for one’s life. The second group is equally serious about being and becoming Christians, meaning sharing in Christ’s mission of service and self-giving love in the world. But they’re not at all convinced that that Divine concern extends all the way down into the details of what they do to earn a living. They think instead that in the many theaters of their life they need to show a certain pattern, but not do a certain particular thing. So those are the two main camps. Cutting across those two camps is the question I alluded to in talking about Bonhoeffer. Does having a vocation just add a kind of veneer of spiritual nobility to what you’re doing anyway or does it really make a difference that you regard your lawyering or your teaching or your candlestick-making as a vocation rather than simply as a job or a career?

DB: There are seven questions, and in our conversations with the students whom we gathered to discuss drafts of the book, three seemed to be particularly salient. One of these is “Must my job be the primary source of my identity?” In response, we included in this chapter an essay by the contemporary political scientist Russell Muirhead about the distinctively American tendency to conflate those two things, as well as texts that challenge this conflation and offer alternatives, including a selection from Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s book The Sabbath.

Another very pressing question—whenever we mention it, all the students start nodding, but then again, so do our contemporaries – is “Is a balanced life possible and preferable to a life focused primarily on work?” Clearly there are forces in the economy that put pressure on workers at every level of the economy that are relevant to this question, so this chapter includes two sociological accounts of recent trends, as well as a number of quite different proposals about whether and how to try to lead more balanced lives. A third very salient question, for students especially I think, has to do with whether one’s talents must necessarily direct one’s choice of work. We were a little surprised at how many students feel burdened by talents, say in music or math, when they are not attracted emotionally to the life they think they would have if they became musicians or mathematicians. “Do I have to do what I’m good at? Should I follow my talents as I decide what to do to earn a living?”

When we’ve talked about the book with the young people we know best, these are the three that seem to stand out for them. And yet in the long run of their lives it’s really important for them to think about the other questions as well, such as, “Whose advice should I heed?” And some topics can suddenly become far more relevant than one might initially have thought. Just as we were writing the introduction to the chapter on “Can I Control What I Shall Do and Become?” hurricane Katrina hit. I know that the lives of students, faculty, and staff members at several of our PTEV schools were completely disrupted as a result. Beyond this, the question of whether we really have control also appears in other ways, as for example when we ask how divine call or family legacy have influenced us. There’s a lovely short piece in this chapter by Thomas Lynch, who is a funeral director, about how his own father decided in one graced boyhood moment to take on the work that has now become Lynch’s own. The ways in which gifts of vocation are somehow given by grace is also relevant to this question of “control.”

MS: I do think these questions vary, both in their urgency and in the way people think about them, according to race, class, gender, and so on. For example, the vast majority of the people in the world today are not disposed to think they have a lot of control over their own destiny or fate. Only a small segment, which includes many of our students living in Western industrialized democracies and coming from middle class homes, think they have a tremendous amount of freedom, so that the myth of the self-made man or woman is still very much governing their sense of expectations, bringing both the burden and the opportunity of choice. But the question “Am I really in control of my own destiny?” is going to be answered very differently by people depending on their social class, for instance. Take an example closer to home; when I was in college in the early ‘60’s, it would never have occurred to me even to ask the question, “Is a balanced life preferable to a life focused on work?” I came from a traditional family: my father was the wage-earner, the bread-winner; my mother was a stay-at-home mom. I was in college to get an education and later I would be going out to make a living in some way to provide for my family. The thought of a balanced life didn’t show up on my radar screen as an issue. Now, as a teacher, every year that question has taken on among students from my same class background more and more urgency. Of course, initially it was urgent more for women than for men, for all kinds of obvious reasons. Now everybody perks up their ears because they’ve come from homes in which they’ve often seen workaholism and its deleterious effects, even upon themselves. Moreover, given the rising cost of education, many students are already right now wondering whether they can lead a balanced life; how are they going to find enough time to do their schoolwork and to work to earn money for college and to manage their friendships and love affairs and so forth? Balance is not a question for later; it’s a question for now. And again, in my case it didn’t have that kind of urgency or intelligibility.

DB: I graduated from college in 1969, which was right at the beginning of the Women’s Movement. I went to a women’s college that strongly supported my academic aspirations, but the balance question was not on the table in the way it is now. At that time, beyond our supportive college, there were serious questions about whether women could even enter certain fields. I went off to seminary, where I was one of only five women in a class of about 100 in a school where most students are now women. After the first meeting of the newly formed women’s liberation group, we marched down to the seminary bookstore to demand that a book in the display case be removed. It was called How to Marry a Minister; the answer given was “go to seminary yourself”! Women today still face many structural and psychological barriers, but now the question is often not “Can you be X, Y, or Z?” but “How can you work out the difficulties involved? Do you really want to pursue this path? What support will you need?” The questions we need to ask today about gender, work, and identity are different and more complex than they were for me then, but we do still need to ask them. I think men are asking similar questions now as well, because they’re realizing that the pressures on women are also pressures on themselves too, and on their families.

In addition, a few texts that students have found very interesting address parental expectations and show the ways in which different authors have struggled and dealt with these. For example, there is an essay by the social reformer Jane Addams entitled “Filial Relations.” Her presenting concern was what you do when you’re an educated person – she was in the first generation of women to go to college, but she uses examples of young men as well – and you hear a summons to social service and reform that your parents don’t endorse or understand. What if your parents think you should be on a success track? For Addams as a woman of that time, this meant hosting parties and playing cards; that’s not what it would mean now, now it might mean getting a job at the bank and making lots of money. Addams (who was the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize) says we need to think about how families and society need to change in ways that allow and encourage young adults to respond to the needs of the world. The reading I already mentioned by Mary Catherine Bateson, whose parents were very famous and successful, also addresses this issue.

MS: The most controversial question may be, “Are some lives more significant than others?” which I think students tacitly ask all the time. Part of the way in which they choose one thing rather than another or seek to emulate one person rather than another or are drawn to one way of life rather than another does have to do with their sense of what’s choiceworthy and what isn’t. I think more and more students today – and Bill Placher mentions this in his interview, too – are interested in making a difference. I haven’t read the latest statistics, but for a while recently more people were volunteering, and there was a resurgence of interest in various religious volunteer groups and the Peace Corps and similar efforts. There is a huge burgeoning industry in service learning at all levels of education, and students tend to be drawn to this too. You’re never sure whether it’s just another resume builder, which it is for some, or whether it does reflect a deeper concern for what it means to lead a significant life, not simply a meaningful one.

DB: Of course, something that begins as a resume builder might become something else. The first text in the chapter Mark is discussing is a sermon preached by C.S. Lewis at Oxford in the fall of 1939. The British had just entered the Second World War, and it seemed to all that European civilization was on the line. And yet at Oxford, there were still all these healthy young men being students. How could what they were doing matter in the midst of this global crisis? The name of the sermon is “Learning in War-Time,” and it is a beautiful reflection on the importance of study even in times of crisis. Lewis’s arguments address something that is really on students’ minds, especially since 9/11, and the students with whom we have discussed this text have found it very challenging and inspiring. We hope that this reading will help them to see that vocation is not just something you prepare for when you are student. Being a student is itself a vocation. Lewis challenges students to claim and honor and make the most of that vocation by showing how it matters within the vast scheme of things, and also by placing it in the context of human mortality. I think this is something that every student and teacher should consider.