Exploring Vocation: Early Career Perspectives on Vocation in Action

As tenure-track professors at a Catholic liberal arts college, we began our academic careers four years ago with a strong desire to excel in our research and teaching. Most importantly, however, we hoped to come to a deeper understanding of how we might imbue our work in a Christian higher education context with a strong sense of purpose and connection to our beliefs. This reflection details our experience of co-developing a sense of vocation and sacramentality in ourselves and our students during the busy pre-tenure years. We discuss how religious and scholarly texts, workshop and retreat experiences, and course design focused on experiential learning have deepened our ability to live out vocation and sacramentality through our work

On the K-theory of elliptic curves

Let A be the coordinate ring of an affine elliptic curve (over an infinite field k) of the form X-{p}, where X is projective and p is a closed point on X. Denote by F the function field of X. We show that the image of H_*(GL_2(A),Z) in H_*(GL_2(F),Z) coincides with the image of H_*(GL_2(k),Z). As a consequence, we obtain numerous results about the K-theory of A and X. For example, if k is a number field, we show that r_2(K_2> (A) x Q)=0, where r_m denotes the m-th level of the rank filtration.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, to appear in J. reine angew. Mat