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
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 article about joy and engineering, Cameron Kim, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Biomedical Engineering and the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies at Duke University, reminds us that curiosity and joy are integral elements to learning. Read more.
I read my first Tana French novel almost 20 years ago. It was her debut, In the Woods, that would become part of a series of six murder mysteries—the Dublin murder squad. I picked it up off a table at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill as my children whirled about me, whining ever more loudly that the store was boring. I bought it so I wouldn’t leave the store empty-handed and defeated. I’m not generally a murder mystery person, but the Dublin connection intrigued me. Instantly, I was hooked.
When Anna McEwan arrived as dean of the Orlean Beeson School of Education at Samford University in January 2020, she inherited a vision statement promising to graduate students who were not only professionally competent but also people of excellent character. Her first question to faculty cut straight to the gap between aspiration and practice: "I know you measure competence—test scores, pass rates, licensure rates—but how are you addressing excellence in character? We all know that's difficult to measure, but what are you doing intentionally to address that side of the coin?"
