Karen Swallow Prior invites Bethel community to rethink calling
By Heather Schnese S’12
March 26, 2026 | 11:30 a.m.
As part of her visit to Bethel, author and scholar Karen Swallow Prior spoke at a seminary symposium, engaging faculty and students from across the university.
As Bethel’s 2025-2026 Karlson Scholar, Karen Swallow Prior spent several days on campus engaging students, faculty, and staff across the university. Through Chapel, undergraduate class visits, a faculty symposium, and campus gatherings, she invited the Bethel community to reflect more deeply on vocation, literature, and faithful Christian presence in the world.
Swallow Prior is a contributing writer at The Dispatch and a columnist for Religion News Service. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vox, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, and many other places. While visiting Bethel, she drew from her book You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful and challenged the common assumption that calling is primarily about choosing a profession or landing a paycheck.
“Passion comes from inside, and calling comes from outside,” she said in Chapel. “When we confuse those two things, it’s easy to become disappointed or disillusioned about the work we’ve been given.” Swallow Prior encouraged listeners to think about calling in broader terms. For Christians, she said, the first calling is the invitation to follow Christ. From there, calling extends into the roles and relationships that shape everyday life.
— Karen Swallow Prior, Karlson Scholar
“Our calling includes the roles and relationships we’re in. We’re called to be sons or daughters, brothers or sisters, friends, neighbors, and citizens,” she said. “We don’t choose our calling, but we choose whether or not to answer the call.”
Engaging big ideas across campus
Prior’s visit reflected the purpose of the Karlson Scholar program—to connect the Bethel community with influential evangelical thinkers who engage students and faculty in meaningful dialogue about faith, leadership, and ministry.
“Having Karen Swallow Prior on campus was a tremendously valuable experience,” says Bethel Seminary Dean Peter Vogt S’97. “My sense is that the entire Bethel community benefited from her time here."
Karlson Scholar Karen Swallow Prior spoke to undergraduate psychology students in the Studio for Vocation and Calling.
Karen Swallow Prior engaged with undergraduate and seminary students, challenging their assumptions about what “calling” means.
In conversations with seminary students, Swallow Prior encouraged future pastors to engage literature and cultural ideas thoughtfully. “She challenged them to consider how intentional and thoughtful engagement with literature and the big ideas in it can helpfully shape a pastor's understanding of how biblical and theological truths are relevant to our contemporary world,” Vogt says. “This is vital to ministry effectiveness in an increasingly divided, anxious, digital world.”
Throughout all of her interactions on campus, Swallow Prior helped the Bethel community see how theological ideas about calling take shape in the ordinary work and responsibilities of daily life. “Do what you do well, be Christian in your virtues and personality, have an attitude of helpfulness and serving, which is the entire purpose of vocation—to serve our neighbors,” she said. “Whether you’re a math teacher, a grocery store clerk, or a truck driver, you can bring light to the world.”
Join the conversation
Swallow Prior will teach a Seminary for Everyone course in June. “The Evangelical Imagination” is based on her book The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. She’ll lead discussions on how social imaginaries and metaphors have shaped evangelicalism over the past 300 years. This course is currently open for registration.