Virtues & Vocations is a national forum for scholars and practitioners across disciplines to consider how best to cultivate character in pre-professional and professional education. Virtues & Vocations hosts faculty workshops, an annual conference, and monthly webinars, and engages issues of character, professional identity, and moral purpose through our publications.
UPCOMING
Civic Virtue
Rajiv Vinnakota
president, Institute for Citizens & Scholars
Monday, April 27, 2026, noon – 1 pm
The Institute for Citizens & Scholars collaborates with leaders in higher education, business and philanthropy to cultivate civic virtue and promote productive conversations across differences. We will discuss this work and moment with Raj Vinnakota.
Mattering
Jennifer Wallace
journalist & author
Monday, May 11, 2026, noon – 1 pm
Award-winning journalist Jennifer Wallace will join us to discuss her recently released book, Mattering.
UPCOMING
Our third annual conference will be held June 1-3, 2026 at the University of Notre Dame. The conference is a cross-disciplinary, cross-professional convening on cultivating character in the classroom and on campus, with a particular focus on professional education. Sign up here to be notified when registration opens.
We hosted conferences on Higher Education & Human Flourishing in 2024 and 2025 at the University of Notre Dame. For those who were unable to attend or who would like to revisit the conversation, we are pleased to offer the following resources:
Cover artwork: “Arboreal Rhythm” by Patricia MacDonald
Joy as a Virtue
Francis Su
Joy is an inner way of being, and comes in many forms. It may sometimes present as happiness—like the unbridled delight of a toddler squealing in a swing—but, as many writers and thinkers have described, it runs deeper than happiness, which can be fleeting. Joy is more enduring, like the satisfaction of spending time with a lifelong friend.
Interlude
Suzanne Shanahan
Alain de Botton is the author of more than 17 books about life’s biggest questions: How should we live with pain and pleasure? What is meaningful work? What does it mean to be happy? From his first novel, On Love, published in 1993, to his latest productions with UK based School of Life, including the 2023, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from the School of Life, de Botton’s work is a philosophical balm for human souls.
Good Engineering
Cameron Kim
An engine runs through a rhythm of four strokes—intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust—each dependent on the others to sustain motion. Perhaps we can evoke more joy and flourishing in engineering education through similar cycles of reflection—intake, compression, ignition, release—each fueling the next moment of insight.
Joy as a Virtue
Jennifer Frey
In his Confessions, St. Augustine makes the striking claim that happiness is most properly described as finding our “joy in the truth.” This claim is difficult for contemporary readers to understand, because we tend to think of happiness in terms of pleasures or good moods, and it is challenging for us to imagine what distinctive pleasures, feelings, or moods we associate with searching for or possessing the truth.
In her welcome letter to the latest issue of Virtues & Vocations: Higher Education for Human Flourishing, Suzanne Shanahan invites us into a conversation about joy.
Hints of Hope is a series of 6 essays that cohere loosely as a whole but also have a standalone feel. Each asks a version of the same question: can we live honestly in a way that embraces both the sorrow and the joy of everyday life? This quest for honesty at the individual level or truth at the collective level frames each essay. The space between what we desire and where we eventually find ourselves, what we want our works and lives to be and what they become, what we hope for our society and the society that remains after all our efforts is experienced emotively, morally, ethically, and spiritually.
A common refrain in education at every level is simple: pay attention. Hidden within this practical command is a transcendent truth: that, as Simone Weil stated, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” and the precursor to love.
As advances in technology have monetized attention, there can be a temptation for the conversation to focus on distraction and devices, missing the deeper call to practices fundamental to human flourishing.
But there is also a movement within higher education to become a prophetic voice at this critical moment. For instance, the Franco Family Institute for the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame declared “attention” the research theme for the year, and is hosting a symposium in April with leading artists and thinkers on the theme “How Should We Hold Attention?”
Similarly, the Educating for the Virtues of Attention (EVA) initiative at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is asking what it would mean to educate not just with attention, but for attention itself. EVA is a three-year, campus-wide initiative led by philosopher Michael Vazquez that aims to respond to what he calls a widely recognized “crisis of attention” while refusing to frame the problem only in negative terms.
