This chapter focuses on the transition process, called the Expert Transition Cycle, which an individual goes through each time they make a transition. It reviews the more traditional models including vocational models, career anchors, psychometric models, work adjustment theories, and psychologically based models as well as ecologically and socially embedded models. It then reviews more contemporary transition process models, focusing on two models, working identity and identity status, which inform the study of identities in transition in the research. Finally, it presents the Expert Transition Cycle, which is the basis for determining how identity changes during a transition. This model includes five stages: Intention, Inquiry, Exploration, Commitment, and Integration.

Chapter 2 considers the story of the prophet Samuel, God’s relationship with his mother Hannah, the way God related to people at the shrine at Shiloh, Samuel’s family relationships and God’s relationship with his family, and the significance of the call of Samuel.

In Chapter 8, we provide frequencies of narrative identity themes concerning negative and positive consequences of mental illness as well as sources of well-being. We find that costs to relationships, self, and identity are widespread themes and that many participants story their illness as an obstacle to educational and vocational success. Furthermore, about half of our participants narrate negative aspects of treatment into their identity. Some participants evidence positive themes when they interpreted their mental illness as leading to helpful changes in terms of heightened insight, showing strength, and increased care for others. In terms of narrative identity as a source of well-being, relationship themes rank high as do themes concerning self and identity. In addition, participants narrate well-being into their identities through the themes revolving around education, vocation, and leisure activities. Finally, some experiences from psychiatric treatment and care were storied with well-being when constructing identity.

In Chapter 11, we elaborate on the meaning of education, vocation, and cognitive function from the perspective of narrative identity. Many participants voiced problems completing education and holding jobs, emphasizing identity conclusions of personal failure. Cognitive function was mentioned less often in the life stories, possibly because it is less identity defining than education and vocation. In parallel with the bleak stories of failure, participants storied well-being into their identities in the context of education, vocation, and leisure activities. These contexts scaffolded the agentic, growing, and valued selves and relationships characterized by togetherness, acceptance, worth, and giving. Many also mentioned friendships as a boon of participating in these activities. These subthemes may give rise to identity conclusions such as “I feel valued by my colleagues,” “I can make friends,” and “I can learn from studying,” illustrating the narrative identity underpinnings of empowerment and social connection that are crucial to personal recovery. Finally, our participants narrated living space as a source of well-being, emphasizing safety and control. This chapter underscores that how narrative identity is created in the context of broader socially and culturally structured activities is central to personal recovery.

Language is fundamental to success in many life domains, and children showing vulnerabilities in their language development may be at risk of poorer lifelong outcomes. This chapter synthesises evidence from longitudinal population-based and community samples to describe the long-term psychosocial outcomes associated with a history of language problems. Notably, this chapter centres on the outcomes of late talkers and children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The chapter begins by profiling the outcomes experienced when language difficulties are identified at a single point in the child’s development. Next, the influence of changes in language profiles over time on the long-term psychosocial outcomes is considered. Throughout the chapter, outcomes are explored across key areas including literacy and numeracy, educational and vocational attainment, emotional and behavioural functioning, social connections, and mental health and well-being. The studies presented show that while heterogeneity exists, children with language problems at one point in development are at increased risk of difficulties in other domains of life, and these adverse outcomes can persist into adulthood.

This chapter argues that the elegy as a genre and the elegiac as a mode are central to Seamus Heaney’s writing and his overall thinking about poetry. Across his career, a persistent lyric response to loss or death goes beyond set-piece or occasional poems of mourning and consolation. Heaney’s writing is dominated by an intrinsically elegiac poetics that at once presents and theorizes poetry’s engagement with grievous human experience, while offering the prospect of care and even healing. Reading Heaney as an elegist writing into a vast elegiac tradition and an actual world replete with suffering, this poet’s grand concern is health over comfort, hope over affect. Starting with Heaney’s childhood intimacy with death, this chapter considers how the ordering principle of “grief and metre” allows his poetry to engage death’s discomfiting, rupturing force through a sanguine equanimity about the human capacity for the endurance of grief.

The council’s teaching on professed religious life wished to preserve the distinctive role of professed religious men and women in the church while moving beyond a pre-conciliar emphasis on the “states of evangelical perfection.” This chapter will consider in particular the council’s treatment of this topic in Lumen Gentium and Perfectae Caritatis.

Modern Catholic social teaching, especially as articulated by the popes, the curia, and the bishops, has said little directly and formally about systems of finance. Where these voices have spoken, they have encouraged sound practices in broad outline and criticized obviously unsound and immoral behaviors. Unfortunately, their own financial management practices have not offered good models for what might be done. Nevertheless, key concepts like the logic of gift, the idea of solidarity and the common good, and the vision of integral human development, coupled with the competence and integrity of Catholics working in systems of finance, can imagine possibilities and generate inspiring models of professional conduct. The key to making this work well is to understand and embrace the possibility of pursuing work in the system of finance as a genuine Christian vocation that in its own way genuinely addresses human needs and helps to build the Kingdom of God. In service of this, the pastors of the Church at every level can and should affirm this profession as a vocation, encourage Catholics to bring their faith to their work, avoid unnecessary criticism of business practices, and assist business professionals to see more clearly the challenges and possibilities they face.

Polls and practical experience both point to a widespread ignorance of the principles of Catholic Social Teaching among Catholic lay people in the United States. A greater emphasis on education in social doctrine is evidently required. One component of this should be to call attention to the eight areas of lay apostolic activity identified by Pope John Paul II in Christifideles laici: promoting the dignity of the human person; fostering respect for the right to life; defending freedom of conscience and religious freedom; protecting and encouraging marriage and family life; participating in public life; placing the individual at the center of socioeconomic life; and the evangelization of culture. Of particular importance in motivating lay people to engage in apostolic activity is the inculcation of the idea of personal vocation. And highly relevant in a wealthy society like ours is the question of lifestyle. The chapter therefore concludes by calling for an updated understanding of the virtue of temperance as it relates to social teaching.

The common good (bonum commune) has, since antiquity, referred to the aim of social and political association, and was particularly prominent in medieval Christian political theology. Since St. John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical letter, Mater et magistra, ecclesiastical statements about social teaching have employed a formulation of the common good, usually in the version that appeared in the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Pastoral Constitution for the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, as “the sum of those conditions of social life that allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.” This chapter discusses the origins and development of this formulation as well as the ways that it has been used in subsequent Catholic Social Teaching. While it has sometimes been interpreted as an “instrumental” account of the common good, the sources and uses of the notion suggest that it is the particularly modern political component of a fuller notion of the common good continuous with the tradition. In particular, the recent formulation is concerned to limit the power of the modern state and protect the dignity of the human person in the challenging conditions of political modernity.