Kathleen Cahalan: Calling All Years Good

"The particularity of our contexts shape both the way that we hear our callings and the way we respond to it.” — Kathleen Cahalan

Listen in on an exclusive peek into our book club as WAP associate Jasmine Obeyesekere conducts the final online discussion with author and professor Kathleen Cahalan. Together, they discuss the challenge of discerning one's calling throughout the various seasons of life and the good work God has for us to do in each of those time periods.

I’m privileged to introduce Dr. Kathleen Cahalan, co-author and co-editor of Calling All Years Good: Christian Vocation throughout Life’s Seasons (Eerdmans 2017). Dr. Cahalan offers a unique perspective on Vocation by suggesting Lifespan as the lens through which we can view our callings. Did you ever consider children including infants having a vocation? How about the very old? Or persons with dementia? How can we think about our multiple callings at any given season in our lives? How about transitions to different stages of life and finding the callings therein? How can we live these multiplicities of callings in an integrated way? And fear not, it is not about finding balance, because we are told it doesn’t exist — instead Dr. Cahalan invites us to consider the centered life.  

These were just some of the invigorating questions around which we had lively and life-giving conversations as we read Calling All Years Good at WAP’s Fall book club. It was a treat to have Dr. Cahalan at the finale in November sharing her perspective on our callings in all the stages of life. It was fun to even ask her a question that no one had asked her before! We hope you will enjoy listening to Dr. Cahalan’s wisdom as much as we did. 

— Jasmine Obeyesekere

Links mentioned in this interview:

• Calling All Years Good by Kathleen Cahalan (ed.) and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore
• Patrick Reyes: “My primary calling as a teen and as a young adult was to survive.”
• Leaving Home by Herbert Anderson and Kenneth Mitchell
• “God’s calling is in our particular place.” — Dr. Cahalan refers to this understanding of calling by both Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges
• The Holy Longing by Ronald Rolheiser
• The Centered Life by Jack Fortin
• The Stories We Live by Kathleen Cahalan
• Integrating Work in Theological Education ed. by Kathleen Cahalan, Edward Foley, and Gordon Mikoski