What we're about

The project's basic purpose is to improve the quality of student reflection on vocation-meaning and purpose-and make PLU a more intellectually rigorous, developmentally astute, theologically rich, and world-informed environment that will better help students to become the mature, thoughtful, contextually aware, committed, creative leaders the world needs.

Vocation in this sense is neither mere occupationalism nor pietism, arguably two prominent contemporary misunderstandings of the term.

In the first, the meaning and purpose of students' education is construed solely or primarily in terms of preparing for an occupation. Profession-aimed education is an important part of an intentionally vocation-nurturing university, but finding one's vocation is far more than finding an occupation, even one called a "profession." It is gaining a sense of one's purpose and role in life, both within one's career and outside it -"outside" it both in respect to the extra-professional aspects of one's life, and in respect to one's obligation to examine and understand critically the larger role a profession plays in human life.

Concern for vocation is not "pietistic," either. Thinking and speaking of "God's calling for my life," for example, may be a typical and powerful way of phrasing the search for vocation in the context of certain theological beliefs. In an educational institution like PLU, however, any process of coming to recognize such a calling needs to be far more than simply personally or directly "getting straight with God" about what that calling might be. One has to encounter big intellectual and social questions and bump up against the messy, complex world people have made for themselves down through the ages, before one can find well-grounded meaning and purpose in life.

Ultimately the project focuses on nurturing an inquisitive and passionate sense of vocation in students; they are a primary part of the direct focus of the project. But faculty and staff are also, for it is their enhanced understanding of their vocation at PLU, of vocation more generally, and of how to nurture its search most effectively in students that is key to the long-term success of the project for students.