Yet one more that connects with Franklin, but not only to him. We put Franklin in a section titled "The Good Life in America" that is our run up to the Declaration of Independence and all of this is part of our larger, semester long attention to freedom. So, we could say that the whole term is about "getting a life." But, the question, always remains, which one is the life one wants to get? [Here I should go find a Billy Collins poem. When I get it, I'll link it.] What is that dream that America offers and Americans long for?
At. St. Olaf we've come to talk about this a lot in terms of vocation. Why? Well, you can point to the money the Lilly Endowment gave out to a bunch of schools for "theological reflection on vocation." We got some of that, so we were obligated to think about vocation. But, before there was money in it, and after the money is gone, we also have the treasure of Lutheran teaching on the topic of vocation. This is not what Paul Dovre has called vocation-lite. Rather this is vocation that comes from outside the hearer; a calling that calls one out of the easy places to significant, response-ability, consist with God's gracious intentions for the world: justice, mercy, abundant life for all. Perhaps the voice will be directly God's, but it may as often be the voice of the neighbor that calls. This is a calling that anticipates response, even obedience.
Here David Brooks, a political observer, gives us another take on such a life,using different vocabulary: the summoned self. Link I'm reminded of Annie Dillard's essay, Living Like a Weasel, in which she write about the "perfect freedom of a single necessity." Perhaps this a more generalized expression of what the Puritans and Anne Hutchinson were looking for. They anticipated the "perfect freedom" of obedience to God. This is a sort of autonomy, unconstrained moral freedom, even when the barriers are many and strong.
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This comment came to me via e-mail from an alum. I hope that I'm not out of line in posting it here since it seems quite relevant to the original posting:
"[I] have had great fun cruising through some of them. Among other things, it's very exciting to see
undergraduates figuring out who they are and who they want to be, and also working through the implications of who they are told they are (and ought to be) by the various communities to which they belong. Richard Brodhead (now
President of Duke University) once described college as "the opportunity to cultivate and fortify your mature self," or something close to that (I may be
paraphrasing a bit). Very fitting I think.
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