In this essay, Michelle Weise, Chief Impact Officer of The Kern Family Foundation and co-host of “A Life Worth Working,” muses on a new "understanding of calling: one that embraces the messiness, imperfection, and circuitous routes through which people forge meaningful lives." These are the spaghetti pathways, and they appear to define our working lives today. Read more about finding purpose in these circuitous and slippery journeys.

In her welcome letter to the latest issue of Virtues & Vocations: Higher Education for Human Flourishing, Suzanne Shanahan invites us into a conversation about the meanings of work.

In this essay, Cristy Guleserian, Executive Director of Principled Innovation at Arizona State University, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, reflects on how we can foster campus cultures that individuals and communities. She asks, "How can we hold strong convictions and practice genuine civility and civic grace? As educators, are we modeling and encouraging humility and openness to ideas, or are we fostering generations more inclined to seek being understood than to understand?"

In this essay, Erhardt Graeff, Associate Professor of Social and Computer Science at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and a faculty associate at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, considers how to sustain hope and a desire to impact the common good among his engineering students. He begins, "My undergraduates at Olin College of Engineering want to make a positive impact. They see engineering as a career path to building a better world. Their initial theories of change are often naive. But I want them to hold onto the hope of positive impact through four years of equations, prototypes, and internships, and feel like they can live their values wherever their careers take them."

In this essay, James Arthur, the former Director of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, reflects on civic virtues and higher education. He writes, "The value of higher education should surely be seen in the lives of university students—not only in what they do or which professions they go into, but in what they contribute to society and who they become."