Monthly Archives: September 2024


Calling from a Sense of Place

I would like to invite you into a journaling activity this week.  We at the Institute for Leadership and Service like to promote reflection.  We think of it as a muscle we can exercise.  You know, how strong muscles are just kind of “nice to have” until one day when you need to move a couch or pick up a child, and then those muscles become absolutely necessary.  Similarly, reflection may seem superfluous, until the day we kind of just need to know what we think about a subject. OK, the reflection activity.  Get out a writing instrument and your journal, or a piece of paper, or the back of a napkin. First, write down where you are from.  You decide if that means, city, state, country, etc, but I mean a geographical place. Next, think of something about that place that is meaningful to you.  Spend a little time […]


Calling in Community (with Traffic Signals)

The longer I’m at Valpo, the more I’ve come to appreciate the rituals that bookend our academic year. (Twenty year-old me would not have predicted this.)  I enjoy donning those odd, medieval robes, hood, and tam to line up and process down the magnificently long aisle of the Chapel in August, organ music swelling the usually thick, humid air as we welcome new students and the return of the academic calendar’s cycle. This year the cool weather granted us all a reprieve at Convocation–merciful when you’re attired in a polyester and velvet concoction.   As much as I appreciate the Convocation’s music, addresses, and honors of scholarship and service, though, my favorite part of the ceremony is its closing–when we file out singing to form two multi-colored lines curving out from the Chapel and campanile toward the West Lawn. As Valpo’s new students emerge from the narthex, faculty and staff […]