Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'vocation'

Storytelling Is Freedom

When I was four years old—and for many years later—my favorite pastime was frog hunting. There was no swamp pond or quagmire I was unwilling to traverse in the name of a robust, amphibious catch. Continue Reading...

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...

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...

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...

Abba Moses on the Christian vocation

Today in the Orthodox Church we commemorate St. Moses the Ethiopian, also simply known as St. Moses the Black. His life and teachings have enriched the Christian spiritual tradition for more than 1,600 years, and he has something to teach us about the concept of vocation. Continue Reading...