By Jasmine Obeyesekere Fernando

An Interview with Dr. Steven Garber

On November 15, 2017, Women in the Academy and Professions was privileged to host a Q & A with Dr. Steven Garber, author of Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good, as the finale of our inaugural book club. Dr. Garber was the Principal of the Washington Institute of Faith, Vocation and Culture in Washington, DC for several years and is now Professor of Marketplace Theology and Leadership at Regent College Vancouver.

How do you have a deeply formed Christian way of fundamentally understanding the paradigms of your discipline? Dr. Garber engages in a warm and though-provoking discussion on how we can keep our hopes alive over a lifetime:

  • encouraging us to truly know the world in all its messiness and still love it deeply.

     
  • exhorting us to live in the reality of the "now but not yet" of God’s Kingdom.
  • urging us to live a more coherent life (with personal stories from Dr. Garber's own life and relationships).
  • challenging us to live more seamless lives rather than giving in to compartmentalization.
  • reminding us that "the stuff of our work" matters to God and that our work is integral to God’s purposes in the world. 
  • inspiring us to be translators. “Can you sing songs shaped by the truest truths of the universe that the whole world can understand?"

Photo source: InterVarsity Press

 

If you are interested in leading a discussion on this book, please see the book discussion notes prepared by our book club leader, Jasmine Obeyeskere Fernando.

Tags:
About the Author

Jasmine is WSAP’s book club host and vocation specialist. She hails from Sri Lanka and has a thirty-year relationship with its national university ministry, the Fellowship of Christian University Students (FOCUS). She has also been involved with InterVarsity for twenty years. She has a BA (Hons.) in English from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and a MA in International Relations from Syracuse University. She loves writing about theology impacting real life and enjoys British, Korean, and Chinese drama. Jasmine lives in upstate New York with her professor husband and two teenage children.

Comment via Facebook