The Emerging Scholars Blog

Do Lenten practices or conversations regarding them give you the feeling that Big Brother is Watching, like this location system being used at Carnegie Mellon University?

OR does our Lenten journey point to and live in the reality of the preciousness of Christ’s blood: Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, so this is the complete opposite of people who are giving up Facebook for Lent. I have been playing around with Twitter for a while, and I’m starting to look at it more intentionally. (Here I am, in case you’re curious.) I have only occasionally sought out specific people on Twitter (such as Andy Crouch or Alan Jacobs, and I just now discovered that IVP is on Twitter), but I’m looking to follow additional people or organizations that are related to ESN, the academy, and religion in public life. Any suggestions? Are you on Twitter?

Today’s Fastnaught Day in PA Dutch Country (referred to by other traditions/regions, some with much more enthusiastic traditions, as Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday) and the celebration of it emphasizes stuffing our bodies with wants before entering the sacrificial lock down of the religious practice of Lent.   

By contrast I look at Lent from the radical, relational lens of seeking God the Father – one shared by the people of God throughout the Biblical story — finding its fulfillment in Jesus the Christ through His inauguration of the Kingdom of God, death, resurrection, ascension to Lordship, the gifting of the daily redemptive Presence of God through the Holy Spirit (which dwells within the Body of Christ by the grace of God the Father and the Son). … and the New Heavens and the New Earth.  To God be the glory!  Forgive me, I’ve gotten a little carried away.  Lent ends in Holy Week where we focus upon the final days of Jesus the Christ’s earthly ministry and his death/resurrection.

Christine Sine in What Is Lent Anyway? defines Lent as

a time for “confrontation with the false self” (Thomas Keating) when we reflect on the responses and behaviours we exhibit that are least Christ like and seek God’s help in rededicating ourselves to God and God’s purposes. This is a time for self-denial and fasting when we give up some of the comforts of our lives in order to make ourselves more available to God.

If you practice Lent, please take a few minutes to share some reflections regarding the Lenten journey, how the lessons learned (and life lived) apply to campus life/vocation, and recommended resources (on-line and/or in print) for the blog’s readership.  Read the rest of this entry »

Though it is for journalists, and not academics per se, this is still a very cool opportunity. The Religion Newswriters Association is offering scholarships up to $5,000 for journalists and editors to study religion at any accredited college, university, or seminary. Here are the full details. If you are eligible, I encourage you to apply, and if you are not eligible, I encourage you to pass along the information to your favorite neighborhood journalist or editor.

(HT: Getreligion.org, which is an excellent site about the media’s coverage of religion.)

How do you properly respect and frame the work of one who has courageously pressed on with his life despite the diagnosis of ALS (1962 at the age of 21), discovered black-hole evaporation (1974), contributed the most to our understanding of gravity since Einstein, and achieved world-wide fame while searching for a complete theory of everything which he claims will reveal the mind of God?*  I ask that question quite literally as I’ve been thinking about what to write regarding Stephen Hawking for several weeks. Quite frankly, I don’t have anything to add to John Horgan’s quote, taken from Karl Giberson and Fr. Mariano Artigas’ conclusion to Chapter 3 of Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion:

I suspect that Hawking — who may be less a truth seeker than an artist, an illusionist, a cosmic joker — knew all along that finding and empirically validating a unified theory would be extremely difficult, even impossible.  His declaration that physics was on the verge of finding The Answer may well have been an ironic statement, less an assertion than a provocation.  In 1994, he admitted as much when he told an interviewer that physics might never achieve a final theory after all.  Hawking is a master practitioner of ironic physics and cosmology. — The End of Science:  Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (New York:  Broadway, 1997), p. 93.

What are your thoughts regarding Hawking and his work?  Do you agree with the above quote?  Any thoughts from physicists regarding whether Hawking’s work approach Einstein or Newton?  I turn the question over to larger community of Emerging Scholars. … Read the rest of this entry »

If you are completing your PhD, part of the process is completing forms to copyright your dissertation. danah boyd, a researcher who studies online social networks and recent PhD recipient herself, has written an interesting post about licensing her dissertation under Creative Commons, instead of the standard “all rights reserved” copyright. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that provides free licenses for creative works, generally to make it easier to share those works. (I use CC’s search tool frequently to find CC-licensed artwork for the ESN and Faculty Ministry websites.) The post provides a couple of reasons why you might want a CC license (e.g. it will make it easier for someone to use your dissertation as a classroom text), but also potential hurdles you might face from your school administration. It’s an intriguing idea, and I’m now considering following danah’s example with my master’s thesis.

Here’s Wendell Berry’s answer:

The thing being made in a university is humanity. given the current influence of universities, this is merely inevitable. But what universities, at least the public-supported ones, are mandated to make or to help to make is human beings in the fullest sense of those words — not just trained workers or knowledgeable citizens but responsible heirs and members of human culture. If the proper work of the university is only to equip people to fulfill private ambitions, then how do we justify public support? If it is only to prepare citizens to fulfill public responsibilities, then how do we justify the teaching of arts and sciences? The common denominator has to be larger than either career preparation or preparation for citizenship. Underlying the idea of a university — the bringing together, the combining into one, of all the disciplines — is the idea that good work and good citizenship are the inevitable by-products of the making of a good — that is, a fully developed — human being. This, as I understand it, is the definition of the name university.

From “The Loss of the University,” in Home Economics. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chronicle reports that the Walt Disney Company has endowed two graduate fellowships at Carnegie Mellon U. in memory of the late Randy Pausch, the CMU computer science professor and author of The Last Lecture. My fellow blogger Tom Grosh wrote about Randy in one of the first posts on this blog. If you have watched or read
the Last Lecture (which I highly recommend), you’ll remember that one of the childhood dreams Randy fulfilled was working for Disney as an imagineer.

During the summer after my sophomore year in high school, I read Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.  My wonder regarding fossils received some content.  And paleontology seemed right around the corner, i.e., if Indiana Jones-like archeology dried up ;-)

That story did not come to pass, but I returned to a consideration of Gould’s work as part of an Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion book discussion.*  Not surprisingly the concept of NonOverlapping Magisteria (NOMA) became a focal point of the conversation.   Here’s a quote from Gould:
Read the rest of this entry »

You might remember various Technology in Higher Education posts exploring:

“Creepy Treehouse”? Friending Your Professors or Students

New Technology and Academic Research
 
Who do you trust? Google and information gathering

What Tools Do You Use?

Should we not leave Twitter out as a tool for a new generation of academic conversation? A brief piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on how Ed Techie, an education blogger, finds On Twitter, Academic Debates Fall Short.  Note:  Comments on the The Chronicle of Higher Education post, include suggestions for sharpening the use of Twitter for such excercises. Read all about it (and more) on Ed Techie’s blog.

What do you think of Twitter as a tool for educational conversation AND creating virality in education?  Something you’d be interested in trying w/ESN?