

We invite friends and colleagues of the Wabash Center from across North America to contribute periodic blog posts for one of our several blog series.
Contact:
Donald Quist
[email protected]
Educational Design Manager, Wabash Center
Mark Chung Hearn is Dean of Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Contextual Education at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, CA. He teaches on vocation, ministerial identity, antiracism, and change. He is an ordained minister in the Pacific Northwest Conference of The United Methodist Church. Hearn is author of Religious Experience among Second-Generation Korean Americans (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), and other articles including “Transforming Religious Education through Storytelling, Compassion, and Discernment” (The Pulse of Life—Exploring the Power of Compassion in Transforming the World: Essays in Honor of Frank Rogers Jr., Claremont Press, 2023), “Religious Educators and Change” (Religious Education, 2023), “Learning through Seeing and Naming: Intersectionality and Theological Field Education” (Enlighten, Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), “Why You Do What You Do: The Power in Knowing and Naming Pedagogies” (Teaching Theology and Religion, 2019).
Thank you for this reflection on an important issue and set of circumstances. I am sharing this out with the members of NetVUE (Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education). One of my former colleagues at Monmouth College wrote about her experiences in grieving a job in this piece at Vocation Matters:
https://vocationmatters.org/2020/08/20/discontinued-our-fragile-vocations/
amazing thought
Thank you for raising these. It’s good to read what you’re doing and have been up to around the aspirational and probing teaching (and statements). Peace to you.
This is so real. I just had a long conversation with a former student whose job was suddenly eliminated. I grieve. I am bewildered. I don’t know what to say. Thanks for naming the “severe reality that collectively faces us.”