Episodes

Welcome to the new year! As we prepare for Season 4 of Higher Callings, we are pleased to offer this sampler of highlights from the five episodes of Season 3. We will be back soon with the new season, featuring more great guests from the world of law and other backgrounds who have dedicated their time and talents to the common good. Please enjoy this bonus episode and stay tuned for more to come in 2023!

As Higher Callings begins planning its next season, we’ve decided to post an excerpt from our very first episode. Don's guest was David Hoffman, founder of the mediation firm, the Boston Law Collaborative. After clerking for Justice Stephen Breyer when Justice Breyer was still a judge on the First Circuit Court of Appeals, David joined the venerable Boston law firm, Hill & Barlow. This month marks the 20th anniversary of that firm’s decision to dissolve, a decision that sent shock waves through the Boston legal community and epitomized the seismic shift in private law practice from being thought of primarily as a profession to fundamentally a business.   When Don interviewed David in 2021, he and David spent a few minutes talking about the legacy of Hill & Barlow and some of the great lawyers who began their careers there. The following is a brief excerpt from that part of their conversation.

Solomon Oliver is a United States District Judge based in Cleveland, Ohio. Born and raised in the segregated South, he moved north to attend college and, after years of working as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and teaching at both the college and law school levels, was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the federal bench in 1994.   In this episode of Higher Callings, I talk with Judge Oliver about his childhood in Alabama during the early years of the civil rights era, his experience in the late 1960s as a minority student at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, his decision while there to become a lawyer and later to become a judge, the values he looks for and hopes to instill in the law clerks who work for him, and his lifelong commitment to the principle of equal rights and opportunity for all enshrined in America’s founding documents.

What does it take to find our callings? Some people know their callings at an early age, some discover their callings as they progress through school and career, and others may find their true callings much later in life. Whether in search of a job that fulfills us or an opportunity to advance in the job we have, many of us need help to find our callings. That help often takes the form of a career coach who can listen, observe, and help shine a light on our own unique paths. My long-time friend, Joe Miller of Leadership Inklings, is a leadership and career coach who does exactly that. In this episode of Higher Callings, I talk with Joe about the role of career coach – what they do, how they do it, and how they can help people who feel stuck in their current jobs yet are afraid to make a change. We also talk about Joe’s podcast, Titans of Transition, in which he interviews accomplished business leaders who have taken those risks and can serve as role models for those who are grappl…

The clinical education offered in law schools can play an important role in preparing future lawyers to pursue their callings, while also empowering students and faculty in real time to provide critical legal services to clients who would otherwise have no access to them. In this episode, I speak with Jens Ohlin, the Dean of Cornell Law School, and Beth Lyon, the law school's Associate Dean for Experiential Education and Director of its Clinical Program, about the impressive array of clinical opportunities Cornell offers its law students, and how that clinical education contributes to the law school's vision of producing, in the words of its founder, "lawyers in the best sense."

Bob and Diane Frankle are an interfaith couple who have developed and launched a program to bring together Christians, Jews, and Muslims for meaningful dialogue about their faith traditions and to build enriching friendships among them. In this episode of Higher Callings, they discuss their interfaith marriage and family life, and the work of their nonprofit organization, Building Bridges Together.

What compels someone who has had a successful career in the private sector to suddenly leave it for a completely different foray into public service, and more specifically into serving their country? How does the child of immigrants raised in a small working-class city rise to become the representative of the President of the United States in an important European country? And while we hear about ambassadors all the time, what do we really know about what it's like to be a United States am...