Callings

Annual Trash Day: Darby Ray

December 14, 2020 Season 1 Episode 3
Callings
Annual Trash Day: Darby Ray
Show Notes

Can a person’s calling be shaped by driving into a new town on Annual Trash Day? Find out in this episode, which features Darby Ray, Professor of Civic Engagement at Bates College and co-director of the NetVUE faculty seminar. Darby encourages us to undertake what she describes as “necessary homework”—attending to ourselves and to our communities—and thereby emphasizes the importance of cultural humility and awareness. Vocation can offer us an experience of beauty and joy in a dark and harrowing world, prompting the serious work of engaging with others in intentional and mutual partnerships. We also learn about Darby’s mid-career call that took her from Mississippi to Maine, and how feminist and liberation theologies inform her work. 

Darby’s essay, “Self, World, and the Space Between: Community Engagement as Vocational Discernment” appeared in the NetVUE volume At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education (Oxford UP, 2016). She is the author of Working (2011), Incarnation and Imagination: A Christian Ethic of Ingenuity (2008), and Theology That Matters: Ecology, Economy, and God (2006).