What are we doing?

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. -- Genesis 2:15

The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people. -- Tolstoy

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe. -- Thomas Carlyle

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence. -- Balzac

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it. -- Victor Frankl

Well, it's certainly very appropriate for any Christian to ask, to struggle with a calling, a vocation. I do it. Every Christian does. -- Jim Wallis


It is not more vacation we need - it is more vocation. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

Vocation is the spine of life. -- Nietzsche

There is no easy formula for determining right and wrong livelihood, but it is essential to keep the question alive. To return the sense of dignity and honor to manhood, we have to stop pretending that we can make a living at something that is trivial or destructive and still have sense of legitimate self-worth. A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls. -- Sam Keen

Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation. -- Aristotle

A total economy is one in which everything - "life forms," for instance, or the "right to pollute" - is "private property" and has a price and is for sale. In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations. A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state and national governments, not only because those governments have signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also because political processes - and especially democratic processes - are too slow to react to unrestrained economic and technological development on a global scale. And when state and national governments begin to act in effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and their people's products for low prices, then the rights and liberties of citizenship must necessarily shrink. A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations, communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to "grow" by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world.

Among the many costs of the total economy, the loss of the principle of vocation is probably the most symptomatic and, from a cultural standpoint, the most critical. It is by the replacement of vocation with economic determinism that the exterior workings of a total economy destroy the character and culture also from the inside. -- Wendell Berry