Positing that education is a movement from one way of being to another, more desirable one, An Intense Calling argues that ethics should be the prime focus for the field of education. The book locates ethics, education, and justice in human subjectivity and describes education as a necessary practice for ethical reflexivity, change, and becoming (ethically) different. It also situates ethics as something that exceeds subjectivity, thereby engaging ethics as a material phenomenon through topics such as aesthetics and solidarity with non-humans.

Jesse Bazzul explores various concepts in the book including power, biopolitics, the commons, subjectivity, and materiality, and draws from over twenty years of experience teaching in different countries including Canada, Ireland, the United States, China, and Ukraine. Taking a wide-ranging philosophical approach, the book entangles ethics, urgent political issues, and pressing educational contexts of the twenty-first century. In doing so, An Intense Calling maintains that ethics is the core of education because education involves finding better ways of living and being in the world.