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
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. Registration is now closed.
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 his foundational article, Robert A. Emmons, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of California, Davis, provides a road map to understanding the psychology of joy. He writes, "joy offers a fuller and richer portrait of a person’s capacity to live a life of purpose, meaning, and value, or an experience of “elation of right relation” between ourselves and the world." Read more.
Charlotte McConaghy is a writer of rare atmospheric power, able to render landscape and grief as a single continuous thing, so that you cannot quite say where the weather ends and the mourning begins.
Each semester at Radford University, students from courses across the university gather in the Artis Center for a conference-style showcase unlike most academic events. They come not to receive grades or hear lectures, but to present original solutions to some of the world's hardest problems: climate change, food insecurity, homelessness, democratic erosion. Students, community partners, alumni judges, and faculty circulate, ask hard questions, and push back. The students are the authorities.
