The Big Read program offers faculty members, staff, and administrators the opportunity to read and learn together about vocation. Each year, NetVUE chooses a recent book on vocation for participating institutions to explore; the books are provided at no cost to the institution. The Big Read is designed to complement other NetVUE programming and can support a member institution’s participation in NetVUE events and grant initiatives. Guiding questions and supporting resources are provided to help integrate a discussion of the text into an institution’s ongoing vocational reflection and planning.
2025-2026 Big Read
Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling
For the 2025–2026 academic year, the featured Big Read will be Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling by Bonnie Miller-McLemore. This book challenges the popularized notion of “following your bliss” and reminds readers that callings can often be conflicting, postponed, or blocked by circumstances beyond our control. Drawing on personal experience and theological insight, Miller-McLemore invites readers to create space for the challenging, unexpected, and difficult aspects of calling. Even as readers realize the myriad ways that they may be called in ways that they had not planned, they may still find ways to consider them worthy of pursuit.
During the fall or spring semester or over the summer, institutions are invited to read Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling together. The book is likely to foster conversations about the complexities of calling that may include loss, regret, failure, impediments, frustration, overload, conflict, and challenges. These conversations invite participants to consider all aspects of their lives and experience as they explore their understanding of what it means to live vocationally. The book can be used for a wide range of conversations, from nuancing an understanding or definition of vocation, to an opportunity to explore participants own vocations, to discussions about mentoring and teaching students for vocational exploration.
If your institutions would like to participate in the Big Read, but believe that this book is not the right fit for your current circumstances, you can also engage with one of the previous Big Read texts. In particular, if there is limited shared language or understanding of vocation on campus, institutions may want to consider starting with Living Vocationally: The Journey of a Called Life (see past Big Read selections for more information).
How to Participate
NetVUE will directly support member institutions that develop local campus projects related to this year’s Big Read. Toward that end, up to 20 free copies of the book will be supplied to a limited number of institutions that design a compelling program for faculty members, administrators, and staff to read the book in group settings (which may be hybrid ones). Member institutions are invited to apply by completing the application included here.
Each member institution may offer one proposal, which should be submitted by that institution’s NetVUE Campus Contact. To apply, the Campus Contact should send the application as an email attachment to Rachael Baker, associate director of NetVUE, at rbaker@cic.edu. Questions regarding your campus’s NetVUE contact can be directed to Ashley Woodbeck, NetVUE office manager, at awoodbeck@cic.edu.
Proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis. Proposals should be submitted at least four weeks before the campus project is expected to begin, in order to allow adequate time for project approval and shipping. Books will be awarded (and shipped directly in bulk to the Campus Contact) based on the proposal.
Planning Your Big Read Event or Program
The Big Read can be a standalone event for an institution, or it can be completed in support of other current vocational projects on the campus. The following questions may help as you plan your Big Read and consider how it aligns with your other goals and activities related to vocation.
Purpose and Framing
- Institutional Alignment: How does this book study connect with your institution’s specific needs, strategic plan, and overarching mission, particularly as it relates to vocation?
- Professional Development: How can this study contribute to the professional growth and development of your faculty, staff, administration, or board of trustees?
- Engagement with other Network Opportunities: How does this text connect to other NetVUE events in which you might participate this year? How could this text support applying for or implementing a NetVUE grant?
Planning and Implementation
- Who will help to plan or lead this event? Who on campus should be involved?
- What is the best structure to host a Big Read book study at your institution? How will participants be divided into appropriately sized and composed groups?
- What is the size and depth of your book study? Will it include institution-wide events, or will it be at a division or department level?
- When, where, and how will you launch the book study?
- What NetVUE resources will you incorporate into the book study plan?
Resources to Support Your Big Read
Starting Your Big Read Conversation
This book study guide offers some things to consider and possible discussion questions for your reading group. Please consider using it as a resource as you plan your on-campus conversations.
You may also find this reflection exercise helpful as you think about how to open your conversation with your reading group.
If you develop your own questions or activities around Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling, please consider sharing them with Rachael Baker (rbaker@cic.edu) to be featured on this site for use by other institutions.
Live Events
Three NetVUE webinars throughout the academic year will be themed around the Big Read and designed to support on-campus discussions. Consider having your reading groups watch the webinars together, whether they do it as a live event or watch a recording of the webinar. Each webinar will be recorded and available to access shortly after the live event.
Exploring Our Callings to Higher Education
with Bonnie Miller-McLemore
September 16, 2025
Using Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling in the Classroom
with Brad Pardue, Rich Meagher, Jason Mahn, and Deirdre Egan-Ryan
November 13, 2025
Narrating Vocational Journeys
with Tara Brookes Watkin, C. Douglas Johnson, and Esteban Loustaunau
January 28, 2026
Supporting and Continuing the Conversation
Big Read book groups may want to supplement or extend their conversations with further reading. Additional NetVUE resources that engage the content or themes from Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling include:
Callings: The NetVUE Podcast
The Double Edge of Calling
with Bonnie Miller-McLemore
Season 5, Episode 3
Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s book, Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling, brings forward the nuance and complexities of vocational discernment. She explores the ways our callings can be fractured or blocked, relinquished or conflicted, missed or unexpected. By grounding calling in the realities of everyday life, she reminds us of the importance of being kind to ourselves and practicing forgiveness for self and others. As we realize the myriad ways our callings may be difficult, we continue to find that they are worthy of pursuit and consideration.
Callings We Don’t Choose
with Deanna Thompson
Season 3, Episode 6
How does experience with trauma inform, and transform, our vocations? Deanna Thompson explores how suffering shapes us and how our vocational frameworks might integrate sadness. Deanna’s journey with incurable cancer informs her role not only as a scholar and writer, but as a professor of religion at St. Olaf College, where she explores with students how vocation can be framed by unresolved questions and the paradoxes of despair and hope. Throughout this conversation, Deanna expands our views of the world—via digital platforms, interfaith friendships, and the communal experience of sadness alongside joy. Deanna poignantly captures what it means to be called to “this” rather than “that,” and how to accept the callings we didn’t expect or choose.
Vocation Matters: The NetVUE Blog
Follow Your Bliss? Bad Advice for Calling
by Bonnie Miller-McLemore
Drawing on research and personal reflection, in this blog post Miller-McLemore emphasizes that we might be well-served by considering what it might mean to instead “follow your blisters.”
“Voxistential” Crises and Grappling with the Dark Side of Vocation
by Jason Mahn
Mahn proposes the term voxistential to reconnect the concepts of vocation and existentialism, emphasizing the need for deeper, more honest reflection on purpose and calling—especially when things are uncertain or difficult.
Imagining Sisyphus Happy?
by Jason Mahn
In this blog post, Mahn reflects on the emotional toll and burnout experienced in education, especially when ideals of work clash with realities such as apathy and systemic injustices. The post suggests that naming one’s despair and imagining hope can offer a form of quiet resistance and renewed purpose.
Navigating Vocations with a Chronic Illness
by Deanna Thompson
Living with chronic illness can profoundly disrupt one’s vocational path and sense of identity. In her post, Thompson emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the grief of relinquished callings while also embracing new narrative threads that offer meaning and purpose.
Other readings with a similar theme
Calling All Years Good: Christian Vocation Through Life’s Seasons
edited by Kathleen Cahalan and Bonnie Miller-McLemore (Eerdmans, 2017)
“Actually, You Can’t Be Anything You Want (And It’s a Good Thing, Too)”
by William Cavanaugh, pp. 57–72 in At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education, edited by David Cunningham (Oxford, 2016)
“Beyond Deep Gladness: Lamenting Trauma, Injustice, and Suffering in Service to the Flourishing of All”
by Deanna Thompson, pp. 44–62 in Called Beyond Our Selves: Vocation and the Common Good, edited by Erin VanLaningham (Oxford, 2024)
To think more about marginal communities and vocation, consider The Purpose Gap: Empowering Communities of Color to Find Meaning and Thrive as a next Big Read event for your campus.
If you are interested in support for next steps on your campus, consider requesting a NetVUE Big Read workshop. This workshop offers further opportunities for participants to explore their own vocations together and to think about the ways their understanding of vocation shapes their work in higher education. For more information about this free member benefit visit the Vocation Workshop Page. When applying, request the NetVUE Big Read Workshop.
Contact Information
Questions about the NetVUE Big Read may be directed to Rachael Baker, associate director of NetVUE, at or (616) 632-1060.
To report a technical problem with the website, or to offer suggestions for navigation and content issues, please contact Alex Stephenson, NetVUE communications coordinator, at astephenson@cic.edu.