Archive for May, 2009
Week in Review
This is our weekly post of links, resources, and articles that would be helpful to ESN members. If you’d like to contribute something, please suggest it in the comments, or send it directly to either Tom or Mike.
Update on the ESN Book Club: We’ve moved the dates back for our discussions to give you more time to order and start reading John Stott’s Your Mind Matters. The discussions will now start June 9. Read all the details here.
From Tom
Psychology Grad Students Get Counseled on How to Teach: Below are a few suggestions, do they apply to all fields? Are there key truths missing? Read the rest of this entry »
ESN Book Club: Your Mind Matters (Updated)
Your Mind Matters
Update: To give you more time to order and start reading the book, we’ve moved back the dates of the book club by a week. The updated dates are all below. (And, if you’re worried you still won’t have time, chapter one is very short, and we’ll be posting passages to discuss.)
Starting next week June 9, we’re going to try something new here at the ESN blog: an online book club! We’ve chosen John Stott’s classic, Your Mind Matters, for our experiment, both because it is a must read for ESN members and because it is very short (4 chapters, 85 pages).
Here’s how it will work: each week in June, Tom or I will write a post about that week’s chapter, focusing on a particular selection, with discussion questions for the community. Feel free to respond to the questions, or start your own discussion about the week’s chapter. I’ve just installed a “Reply to Comment” feature that I hope will make it easier to carry on a conversation by creating discussion threads and emailing you when someone replies to you (an option that you can turn off, BTW). Read the rest of this entry »
Do You Get The Lamp Post?
Just a quick, unscheduled post today. ESN works very closely with InterVarsity’s Faculty Ministry, which publishes a quarterly email chronicle called The Lamp Post. The next issue is coming out this week. If you aren’t receiving it, you should be! Here’s a sneak peek at this week’s issue:
- David Thomas of Union University reviews Mark Noll’s new book, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History
- Andrew Lee of ISAAC (the Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity) writes about integrating spirituality with your classroom teaching
- A small group discussion guide for George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship
- A survey asking for your thoughts about sharing the gospel on campus
To subscribe to The Lamp Post, just follow this link.
The Decline of the Secular University
Decline of the Secular University
C. John Sommerville is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Florida. In 2006, Oxford University Press published a little book of his called The Decline of the Secular University
Sommerville summarizes his book as follows:
My thesis in what follows is, first, that the secular university is increasingly marginal to American society and, second, that this is a result of its secularism. In effect, I mean that questions that might be central to the university’s mission are too religious for it to deal with. (4)
In particular, he points to universities’ inability to shape public opinion on such issues as politics, science, and business, and the overall anti-intellectualism of American society.
Week in Review
From Tom
‘Angels & Demons’ May Help Physicists Explain What Matters. Question: Do you agree with Mr. Izen?
“Life presents just a couple of these opportunities when the public is paying attention, really paying attention to science, and in this case it’s a movie which talks about antimatter and is set at CERN,” Mr. Izen says. The film is “a chance to tell our story.”
A Marriage Made in History, a review of Eugene D. Genovese’s Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage (ISI Books) for the Chronicle of Higher education, places this story of academics who find love and faith on my too read shelf. Here’s a quote from Gene’s blind date with Elizabeth-Fox. Beautiful.
“When I arrived at five p.m., Betsey looked terrible. At six or so, she wasn’t all that bad. At seven she had become sort of nice-looking. By eight, sitting across a table at Restaurant le Maître Jacques, she had blossomed into lovely. When I left her at one a.m., she was radiantly beautiful. Almost 40 years later, she was in immeasurably worse shape than when I first laid eyes on her. Physically broken and fighting for life, she was unable to get out of bed by herself; barely able to walk; wracked by relentless, searing pain. Still radiantly beautiful.”
Slump Revives Town-Gown Divide Across U.S. Question: How have the campuses with which you are connected tried to address these concerns?
“As endowments everywhere sink with the economy, town-gown relationships, often carefully nurtured during the boom years as colleges and universities sought to expand, are fraying.”
The Two Sides of ‘Star Trek’ Question: Is this how we approach higher education or do we address the big questions through our work in higher education?
“On the Starship Enterprise, men and women, blacks and whites, Americans, Russians and Asians — with names like Uhura, Chekov and Sulu — worked side by side, reflecting Mr. Roddenberry’s belief that ‘when human beings get over the silly little problems of racism and war, then we can tackle the big problems of exploring the universe,’ said David Gerrold, a writer for the original ‘Star Trek’ series.”
When a Twittering College President Is Not Who He Seems. Question: How do we know what to trust in these new forms of communication? What mental and/or technological filters do you use? Note: I’m not going down the road of Terminator Salvation (2009) ;-)
From Mike
From Inside Higher Ed — Did appearances on The O’Reilly Factor cost a Syracuse professor tenure?
Gay in the Academy — Career advice from a gay faculty member at Inside Higher Ed. I found it instructive to hear from this perspective from another minority group (for example, good advice on being yourself during the interview process) and to remind myself that Christians have it easy in many ways (I don’t think I’ve ever been told that Christians on campus gather clandestinely in a secluded bathroom). [Please note: any comments about homosexuality that aren't on topic to this article will be deleted without exception.]
Blog-Based Peer Review — Noah Wardrip-Fruin allowed his book to be part of an experiment comparing traditional peer review with chapter-by-chapter review on his blog, Grand Text Auto. Here, he shares his experience and findings. For example, traditional peer review was better at following the overall argument of the book and comparing one section with another, but the blog comments were much more detailed and collaborative (e.g. commenters would affirm, correct, and nuance criticisms from others).
Hospitality in Higher Education
How have you come to know, understand, feel, and define hospitality? Do you consider hospitality a necessary part of the fabric of Higher Education (e.g., community, discussion of ideas, relationships with the other) or not? How have you experienced and/or extended hospitality on campus as individual or as part of a community of believers? Looking forward to reading your thoughts/experiences. Please share them with grace, truth, and charity.
What brings this topic to my mind at this time? On Monday and Tuesday, I attended Hospitality, Critical Thinking and Truth: Living the Tensions, hosted by Messiah College, Grantham, PA. At the conference, faculty, staff, and administrators from Christian colleges and universities wrestled with their shared goal of nurturing students into practices of gracious faith and intelligent reflection that fit[s] the needs of the 21st century. The conversations reminded me not only of my education at Christian colleges, but also long conversations with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship staff regarding how to create/nurture hospitable places for followers of Christ and ‘the other’ on campus. Read the rest of this entry »
Reading Lists and Primary Literature
In my post last week about advice for undergraduates, Katie Weakland shared a comment that I thought was particularly apt:
I suggest meeting your major professors early in your career – your first semester – and asking them to mentor you and/or let you do research with them. The early you can get your feet wet with research the better. I also suggest reading the primary literature in your field as soon as possible.
Meeting your professors and starting research early are both very important (I have stories I could share for each), but for the moment, I’m going to focus on primary literature. Read the rest of this entry »
Week in Review (Updated)
[Editor's note: This is a new weekly feature from your blog contributors. Each week, we'll be posting articles, books, news, etc., that Tom, Mike, and the ESN community have been pondering. If you have a book or article you'd like us to add to next week's Review, add it in the comments or send it to either Mike or Tom. Thanks!]
The Harvard disadvantage – The Boston Globe takes a very personal look at students from poor backgrounds at Harvard and their struggles to fit in with the children of privilege.
In the Chronicle, Audrey Williams June provides two looks at the changing world of tenure: a report on the rapid decrease of tenure-track instructors (73% of instructors, including graduate assistants, are now off the tenure track) and a profile of St. John’s 2008 decision to move 20 contingent writing instructors to tenure-track positions.
A few weeks ago, Inside Higher Ed published this advice on managing large writing projects from John Gastil. I (Mike) am working on a large writing project myself at the moment, and plan to take Gastil’s advice about outlining, scheduling, and setting deadlines.
A fine tuned universe? At Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog, RJS (a science professor) reviews some high profile opinions on the Anthropic Principle.
From the community
Dave Snoke submitted this very interesting article from the UK, about an Oxford researcher, Justin Barrett, who claims that belief in God (or at least, a god) is ” built into the natural development of children’s minds,” not something learned from the culture around them.
Books
N.T. Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision (InterVarsity Press, 2009). Here’s a quote to ponder:
“Knowing God for oneself, as opposed to knowing or thinking about him, is at the heart of Christian living. Discovering that God is gracious, rather than a distant bureaucrat or a dangerous tyrant, is the good news that constantly surprises and refreshes us. But we are not the center of the universe. God is not circling around us. We are circling around him. It may look, from our view, as though “me and my salvation” are the be-all and end-all of Christianity. Sadly, many people — many devout Christians! — have preached that way and lived that way. This problem is not peculiar to the churches of the Reformation. It goes back to the high Middle Ages in the Western church, and infects and affects Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative, high and low church alike. But a full reading of Scripture itself tells a different story. God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world.” — pp.23-24.
Star Trek: The Right Stuff?
Note: Contains spoilers and has become more of a reflection than a review* …
Star Trek Movie Poster
Faith & Geekery claims Star Trek Will Rock the Summer. Yes, Star Trek features superb action, casting, soundtrack, and special effects. As a fan who only reached the theater on Monday (to distinguish myself from Trekkies who went to the early screening in uniform/costume on Thursday night), Star Trek not only fit in the 43 year history well enough, but also created the foundation for a future series which will boldly go where it hasn’t quite gone before.
With that on the table, I must confess that I spent much of the film reflecting upon how followers of Christ in the academic community should respond to Star Trek‘s portrayal of reality, courage, emotion, integrity, intellect, love, mentoring, and what is right. Why? Because J.J. Abrams set the destiny shaping, coming of age story of the crew of the Starship Enterprise (largely focused upon Spock and James T. Kirk) in the context of Kirk’s rise to Captain before early graduation from Starfleet Academy. Kirk was so much the right stuff that he received special recognition for his heroic emergency field service and completely avoided the traditional fast track to Captain as described by Captain Christopher Pike earlier in the film, i.e., four years at Starfleet Academy followed by four years in the field.
Advice for undergraduates
This week, I’m in northern Georgia for InterVarsity’s Southeast Chapter Camp for undergraduates. I don’t have an official role – I’m just here to help out, talk to undergraduates about the Emerging Scholars Network, and find out ways that ESN can help prepare undergrads for grad school.
So, I’m interested in your thoughts. If you were once an undergrad, what do you wish someone had said or asked you at that stage of your academic career? If you are an undergrad, what kinds of questions do you have about grad school and the life of an academic? What kinds of resources would be most helpful for ESN to produce or distribute?
