Certainly, Macalester is not a school known for rampant careerism. For the past several decades our dedication to the liberal arts, to learning for its own sake, has been predominant. Getting a job or developing a career after one’s four-year stint has not been uppermost in many students’ minds. This was not always true, however. In the mid-20th century, Macalester courses were as likely to teach secretarial or nursing skills as philosophy or mathematics.

Clearly, a focus on the liberal arts is admirable. But it should not prevent us from thinking about the fact that work-labor-constitutes the predominant human activity throughout the globe. Given that none of us will escape work, what makes work meaningful?

Macalester’s Lilly Project for Work, Ethics, and Vocation asks this question. Its goal is to aid and encourage the Macalester community in exploring how moral, ethical, and religious concerns shape our personal, national, and global understandings of our working lives. The terms “ethics” and “vocation” in the project title draw attention to the fact that our understandings of work are ideological. They grow out of our worldviews and belief systems. Work is a culturally-based activity.

The cultural and ideological nature of our understandings of work are readily apparent when we compare our contemporary views to those of the past. In Western, Christian society the term “vocation” originally indicated a call from God to fulfill a religious office and was once considered available only on a gendered basis: only a man could be called to the full service of God, to the priesthood.

By the Reformation, “vocation” took on broader meanings, as reformers like Martin Luther argued that one could be called to many occupations, from secular professions to domestic work. Those occupations, too, were frequently gendered-e.g., women had a special call to household labor-and those meanings held sway for centuries. The ideological nature of work and vocation is also readily apparent in the painful history of slavery in America which stemmed in part, from a view of manual labor as the special province of races of people whites deemed inferior.

But what does work mean now? What values do we, should we, invest in the work that we do? “Vocation” has lost much of its religious or mystical meaning. In the 20th century it suggested almost any work and was something that could be taught in vocational schools. Vocational courses at Macalester in the 1950s included offerings in social work, medical technology, business administration, and home economics.

Nevertheless, belief in the special, individualized nature of ideal work remains appealing. One may still be said to have a “calling” or vocation, but now it is less often seen as a call from a divine being than a call from one’s own heart-a personal desire to find an occupation uniquely suited to the self.

Globally-considered, however, the opportunity to achieve this type of work is available to relatively few. Moreover, in some cultures, the idea of seeking an occupation, or working to advance the self, is meaningless within or even antithetical to dominant belief systems.

These brief examples are meant to raise just a few of the issues that surround the meanings we associate with work. As a co-director of the Lilly Project, my aim is encourage the entire Macalester community-students, faculty, staff, and alumni-to think critically about work and its meanings, to explore the ethical values, whether religiously or philosophically derived, that have informed work in the past or that do so now.

What better place for this task than a college devoted to the liberal arts? And what better college than Macalester, where commitments to internationalism, diversity and service open up an abundance of ways to think about work?

In the next several weeks, the Lilly Project will open this column as a forum on issues related to work, ethics, and vocation. We invite faculty, students, staff and alumni alike to participate in this forum by guest-writing a column-length essay. Topics can range from the cultural, religious, or philosophical meanings ascribed to work to one’s own personal work experiences that illuminate ethical or vocational questions.

I invite you, then, to not only think about these questions, but to share your thoughts in this column. For work and the values that we bring to it shape all of our lives whether we mean them to or not.