For Love or Money? Vocational Wayfinding

The January 2020 IS conference will continue our explorations of money by thinking more deeply about questions of identity and vocation. What is the process by which we take the gifts and passions placed in us by our Creator and shape them into a job? How does what we love relate to how we earn money? And how do we understand work as one way that we live out our human calling “to bring renewal and reconciliation” to all walks of life”?

Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Gideon Strauss from the Institute of Christian Studies, where he has taught a course in Vocational Wayfinding. He articulates the connection between work and identity this way:

Poet David Whyte has suggested that work is for all of us a “pilgrimage of identity.” It is not, however, a pilgrimage for which any of us are provided with a GPS, allowing us to navigate in straight lines with comfortable  certainty toward clear objectives that cohere in obvious ways with an immutable sense of our identity. Instead, this pilgrimage is more like the experience of Polynesian sailors, who traversed the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean with the help of the stars, memory, and close attention to the patterns of the waves on the surface of the ocean. Polynesian wayfinding was a way of navigating that required alert improvisation and frequent reorientation from within a perpetually shifting context.

Dr. Strauss will give a public lecture on Wednesday, January 22 at 7 p.m. in N102 on the topic “For Love & Money: Life Design Maladies & Methods.”

Keynote Speaker

Dr. Gideon Strauss, PhD, is Academic Dean and Associate Professor of Worldview Studies at the Institute for Christian Studies, a graduate school of philosophy in Toronto, and a senior fellow with the Center for Public Justice in Washington DC. Gideon also facilitates vocational discipleship in churches in his native South Africa. He was the editor of Comment magazine from 2000 to 2010.