The Common Ground of Wonder: Tom Landy

Our guest, Tom Landy, is director of the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. A longtime leader in higher education and vocation-related initiatives, Tom is founder of Collegium, a summer colloquy on faith and intellectual life. He is also co-editor of Becoming Beholders: Cultivating Sacramental Imagination and Action in College Classrooms, which includes various essays on how we can encourage students to develop imagination and reflection in their learning. Our conversation highlights the steady patience that vocational discernment entails, as well as the space vocation programming can provide to consider important questions, such as “what do we need to leave behind in order to become the people we are called to be?” Tom talks about pilgrimages, Max Weber, and how a “hermeneutic of wonder” can prompt imaginative acts that help us better experiment with our callings.