Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling. Wow! What a provocative book title. In this episode we welcome Dr. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, author of this 2024 Oxford University Press book about vocation. She goes deep on the many complex ways that vocation or calling is interwoven in our lives.
Bonnie Miller-McLemore is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture, Emerita at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. She was my advisor and dissertation director in my doctoral program at Vanderbilt. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books. Bonnie has been a major force in the re-birth and re-invigoration of practical theology as a field of study during her nearly four decades of teaching, writing, and speaking.
Bonnie’s 2024 book Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling is her most readily accessible book for a broad religious readership. Many of her books include her personal experiences of teaching, mothering, and living life. Most of them are addressed an academic audience. Follow Your Bliss includes even more stories from Bonnie’s life and also many other sources. As she often does, Bonnie takes on a big problem, and she wrests wisdom from it while she wages a struggle on the page.
Taking on Lies about Calling
One of the first myths or lies Bonnie takes on in our interview is the idea that God calls people just one time in their lives, and that’s it. She and some of her colleagues spent a long season exploring vocation. They concluded that vocation changes across the lifespan. And at different moments of life, vocation takes many different forms. Calling is certainly not just one thing. (And while we’re at it, let’s note, she also dismisses quickly in the book a related myth that vocation is only for ministers.)
In Part 1 of our interview we dive into Chapter 1 “Missed Callings.” I ask Bonnie if she can tell us about any callings she has missed. Watch to see what she says.
Vocational Grief
We also come around to the question of “Vocational Grief” as we talk.ย Watch or listen to our conversation to find out what Bonnie recommends as the first, most important step in processing grief over missed callings.
We have several more parts to this conversation coming in the weeks ahead. Earlier this month I wrote an essay for Baptist News Global. I think the shifting ground of democracy itself is raising the possibility that some of us, perhaps millions of us, may experience both changes to our vocation and our work. And with change comes grief.
Stay tuned in the next few weeks to learn more about what Bonnie has to say about vocation. Get your copy of the book today. And let’s find ways to keep showing up for each other through whatever comes.
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