[.article__paragraph--cap] A [.small-caps] sanitation worker? [.small-caps] There have got to be hundreds of more significant jobs we could have showcased: farming, nursing, relief work, teaching … At any rate, collecting the garbage can’t possibly be this guy’s vocation , can it?[.article__paragraph--cap]

Exactly. When designing this issue’s cover, we narrowed down our options to this one precisely because the work portrayed is not, in the eyes of our society, considered spiritual, highly-skilled, or particularly laudable. But the point is just that: career and vocation are not interchangeable terms.

As Peter Mommsen writes in his Editor’s Letter: “When the New Testament writers use the words translated in English as vocation or calling, they are never referring to work, much less to a particular trade or profession….  the New Testament knows only one form of vocation: discipleship.”

Artist Dean Mitchell hails from Pittsburgh. “I’m drawn to the humane,” he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1993. “But there is something more there. ... I do believe in God, and I do believe that when you create, something else can take over…. If that intention [in a work of art] is pure – to say something to humanity or to stir something in people – then you are tapping into another source beyond your control.”