Finding Your Vocation

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Karen Swallow Prior is is the 2025-26 Karlson Scholar at Bethel Seminary. We’ll discuss her most recent book, which explores the difference between passion and calling, along with how to find meaning in your work.

Learn more at the Virtues & Vocations website.

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Meet the Speaker: Karen Swallow Prior

Karen Swallow Prior, Ph. D., is the 2025-26 Karlson Scholar at Bethel Seminary. She is a reader, writer, and speaker. She is the author of You Have a Calling: Finding your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful (Brazos 2025); The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos 2023); On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books (Brazos 2018); Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson 2014); and Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T. S. Poetry Press 2012). She is co-editor of Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues (Zondervan 2019) and has contributed to numerous other books. She has a monthly column for Religion News Service. Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Think Christian, The Gospel Coalition, and various other places. She hosted the podcast Jane and Jesus.

Karen gives frequent lectures and talks on her work. Among the places she has spoken are Wheaton College, University of Minnesota, Indiana Wesleyan University, Northwestern University, Grace College, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, The Gospel Coalition Conference, Redeemer University College, Toronto Baptist Seminary, United Theological Seminary, Calvin University’s Festival of Faith and Writing, Conference on Faith and History, Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma’s Women’s Conference, Roanoke Regional Writers Conference, The Row House Forum, Q Boston, the Glen Workshop, and the Humane Society of the United States.

She completed her Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo and her undergraduate studies at Daemen College in Amherst, New York. Her academic focus is British literature, with a specialty in the eighteenth century, a period she loves for its emphasis on philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and community, as well as its efforts at correcting the universal human impulse to gravitate toward extremes. Her scholarly work has appeared in Journal of American Culture, Christian Scholar’s Review, Academic Questions, 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era; The Shandean; The Scriblerian and various literary encyclopedias.

She is a contributing writer at The Dispatch, a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum, a research fellow at Comment, and is a former member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society of the United States. She and her husband live on a 100-year-old homestead in central Virginia with dogs, chickens, and lots of books.

You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful

What if your vocation doesn’t align with your passion?

Some people are lucky enough to get paid to do what they love. But many are not.

In You Have a Calling, award-winning author Karen Swallow Prior has encouraging news: If you pursue the good, true, and beautiful in all your work, you will find your greatest fulfillment. In this book, you’ll discover

· how knowing the crucial difference between passion and calling transforms how you view work;

· how to finding meaning in every role, regardless of your career; and

· how everyday work reflects the image of God through truth, goodness, and beauty.

In an age when passion and calling are often confused, Prior helps you understand that passions come from within, while your calling, or vocation, comes from without and is about being called by others to serve. That crucial distinction can help you understand how God can use both your passions and our work, even if for different purposes.

This book will appeal to everyone who wants to know that their daily work, ordinary though it may be, can fulfill a higher calling to God. You will gain a renewed sense of purpose, knowing you are created for virtue in all you do because you are created in the image of God.

For more information, please click here.

The Trinity Forum: Karen Swallow and You Have a Calling

What if your vocation doesn’t align with your passions? Trinity Forum Senior Fellow Karen Swallow Prior draws from her newest book, You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful to explore how our daily work can fulfill God’s calling for us and give us a renewed sense of purpose.

To view the full video, please click here.

The False Battle Between Justice and Mercy

Excerpt: 

“If you were to base your understanding of mercy and justice on reading recent headlines, you’d get the distinct impression that they are two teams competing in a cosmic Super Bowl and the rest of the world is just placing bets, with one winner taking all. 

But the countervailing demands of the virtues of justice and mercy do not present a zero-sum game. Justice without mercy is not just. Mercy apart from justice is not merciful. If we understand the nature of virtue in general—particularly by considering the long tradition of virtue ethics set out by Aristotle, Aquinas, and modern philosophers such as Josef Pieper and Alasdair MacIntyre—we can better understand how these particular virtues are mutually dependent, and how we can achieve one only when we achieve the other.”

To read the full article, please click here.

Regent College Podcast: Dr. Karen Swallow Prior and You Have a Calling

In this conversation, Karen dismantles some contemporary thoughts around calling (in the Instagram world) to present a vision of a good, true and beautiful life – even when we are not paid to do what we love. She brings years of mentoring and advising college students to her book, while drawing on her own recent experience with unexpected direction changes. Her extensive knowledge of literary characters who grapple with questions of work and vocation is also carefully woven in, giving helpful examples. Karen’s main premise is that in order to have a calling, you need to be called. She also identifies ways in which the culture around us is skewing our understanding of passion and purpose. Listen in and consider: who is calling you, and who are you calling into a true, good and beautiful life with God?

To listen to the podcast, please click here.