Fractured Callings: I Do Not Do the Good I Want

Abstract

Abstract This chapter considers one of the more difficult “undersides” of callings—when they fall apart and people are partly to blame. Fractured callings are morally ambiguous matters whose causes are multiple and whose consequences are ambiguous. Talking about human culpability is a delicate matter, touching on questions of evil, sin, and human responsibility that people have debated for centuries. The chapter searches for ways to broach the common experience of brokenness, moving from fractured callings in work to the even more painful fractures in callings to love. It concludes by exploring how people have mended the fissures, touching on subjects such as truth-telling, humility, confession, forgiveness, self-forgiveness, affirmation, the need to refrain from judgment, and even the complicated good that can emerge out of failure.