The Emerging Scholars Blog

Last week, I wrote about Advent, so, in true American fashion, I’m skipping straight ahead to Christmas. :) (Don’t worry – I believe Tom is taking a more spiritual approach this week.)

Yesterday was my three four-year-old daughter’s birthday, and she has this “wish list” thing nailed down. She was very clear about what she wanted: a Frisch’s Big Boy bank, a snow globe, and a gingerbread house. (Her name is Ginger, so gingerbread is very near and dear to her heart.) I’m not nearly so good at knowing what I want or expressing it, so I get a lot of gift cards. Still, a few standard wishes include board games (Ticket to Ride has been wished for several years, and Carcassonne expansions are always welcome) and books of assorted varieties, mostly theology and references. It looks like IVP has put together a Christmas gift guide, and I couldn’t say “no” to any of those.

But enough about me. What’s on your wish list?

P.S. If you creating a wish list, check out Lifehacker’s five best wish list tools.

P.P.S. If you are going to Urbana, don’t miss out on the November discount code!

What are you reading, watching, thinking about over Thanksgiving break? Anything special with some time off or is there too much going on with the holiday?

As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them.  In addition, if you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1.  Tom’s supervisor passed along a helpful slide show on how slide shows work.  Time for some upgrades?  Do you agree with the psychologist?

2.  Take a moment to consider Adopted Objects: The Art of Kenneth Steinbach (James Romaine, Comment, November 20, 2009). Below’s a picture and quote to get you started.

#38 (lost glove 2)

Steinbach’s art is not immediately or evidently “Christian.” His drawings, such as Tape recorder, Paper bags, Lost Glove and Pistol, do not depict religious iconography, and he does not illustrate Bible stories. Steinbach’s art is a practice of faith realized in forms that materialize a transformed vision. His drawings are created by an unorthodox process of adoption and revision that parallels a life of faith.

3. Academic pledges to give away £1m – Toby Ord, a researcher with the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics (as opposed to impractical ethics?) has pledged to give away 10% of his income, plus any income over £20,000 (about $33,000) for the remainder of his academic career.

“I was living very happily as a student and worked out what I’d need to continue living like that through my life – or a little bit better, to allow some room for improvement – and then I worked out how much I could do with that amount of money.

“I could save thousands of people’s lives, and saving one person’s life is often thought to be an amazing kind of thing you can do over your whole career,” he said.

4. The APA and Christian Colleges – The American Philosophical Association is said to have decided on a new policy that will flag job listings from any college or university that doesn’t follow APA’s non-discrimination policy, which includes sexual orientation alongside race, religion, and gender. The Council for Christian Colleges & Universities objects to the policy, while Peter van Inwagen of Notre Dame has said that flagging job listings is preferable to the APA’s other desired course – banning those listings altogether.

5. There is no number five! Tom and Mike are heading out for Black Friday, so we encourage you to get shopping, too. Actually, that’s not true. Instead, take a look at this short film from Nathan Clarke about the prosperity gospel in Africa. I guess that is number five after all, isn’t it?

Yesterday, a physician challenged the PSU-Hershey Christian Medical Society to intentionally engage family during the selfish time of Medical School.  Although not currently a full time student, I too can become easily entangled in and distracted by perfecting must finish tasks, thereby taking away quality and quantity time with family and friends.  Father forgive me.

During the physician’s presentation, I was reminded how I often vie for the driver seat of my life and ministry instead of remaining in constant conversation with God.  Father forgive me.  Let me never forget to turn to you for my first and last thought of the day. As the physician reminded the PSU-Hershey Christian Medical Society, it takes intentionality to offer one’s whole life to the kingdom of God and to love/serve those He’s blessed us with the opportunity to be close to in family, local congregation, neighborhood, and vocation.  Father, may it be so for Emerging Scholars.

So as another year end approaches, join me in taking Thanksgiving to rejoice in God’s blessings.  And offer up distractions/difficult circumstances to God’s care instead of holding them close, potentially leading to waywardness and/or bitterness in 2010. I’d encourage you to take these next steps with me. …

1. Find a place of silence to pray through the deluge of concerns which so easily entangle and distract us in worship and time with family/friends.  Maybe this can occur for you during travel, shortly after you arrive to your destination, or near campus (if you’re not traveling).
2. Seek opportunities with family or friends over a Thanksgiving meal/conversation, a tea/meal during Thanksgiving break, and the Sunday meal before the term starts up again to share joys, distractions, and struggles. Have a family member or a friend hold you accountable to #3.
3. Dedicate the remainder of the year to God first and return to campus prepared to walk through the busy-ness of academic, cultural, familial, and social year end with a focus upon the Light of Christ as part of the Body of Christ (visit Bobby Gross: Living the Christian Year).

Looking for material to provide some direction for Thanksgiving?  This year I’ve found two selections from Christianity Today’s Holiday section particularly helpful, may they be a blessing to you.  Note:  If you have resources/testimonies to share, please do such.

1. Reflections: Thanksgiving, Classic and contemporary excerpts (one below):

Gratitude is the praise we offer
God: for teachers kind,
benefactors never to be forgotten,
for all who have advantaged me,
by writings, sermons, converse,
prayers, examples, for all these
and all others
which I know, which I know
not, open, hidden, remembered, and forgotten.

—Lancelot Andrewes in Heirlooms

2. Thanksgiving in the Midst of Fear: Seriously ill in the days of the Black Plague, poet John Donne still celebrated God’s goodness (Updated by Philip Yancey and introduced by Chris Armstrong | posted 8/08/2008 12:33PM).  Excerpt below. …

O most gracious God, on this sickbed I feel under your correction, and I taste of humiliation, but let me taste of consolation, too. Once this scourge has persuaded us that we are nothing of ourselves, may it also persuade us that you are all things unto us.

In a brief few hours you have shown me I am thrown beyond the help of man, so much so that the physician himself had to send for assistants. By that same light, let me see that no vehemence of sickness, no temptation of Satan, no guiltiness of sin, no prison of death—not this first, this sickbed, nor the other prison, the close and dark grave—can remove me from the determined and good purpose that you have sealed concerning me.

First Sunday in Advent in November 29

Here at the ESN blog, one of our main topics is spiritual formation in the academy: Christian practices like prayer and Bible study that shape us more and more into the image of Christ. The stress of Christmas may seem to be an unlikely time for spiritual growth, but for centuries, Christians have set aside the season of Advent as a time of spiritual preparation.

Last week, I interviewed Bobby Gross, recently appointed director of InterVarsity Graduate and Faculty Ministries about his new book, Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God, to learn more about the meaning of Advent and how Christians in the academy could benefit from its observance. Bobby has served InterVarsity in many capacities: as a campus staff worker at the University of Florida, a staff supervisor in Florida, the Southeast, and New York/New Jersey, and, most recently, as a national field director based in Atlanta. You can download the introduction by Lauren Winner and the first chapter from IVP’s website.

Photo by Per Ola Wiberg via Flickr

Bobby Gross: I grew up in a Southern Baptist church and then worshipped in a variety of evangelical churches, but was never part of a church that was particularly liturgical or did anything with the Christian year. In my second year of marriage, my wife Charlene and I moved to Miami and we looked for a church together. She grew up Catholic, and we were wide open to any number of churches – we wanted our church to be smaller rather than larger, multiethnic, spiritually alive, Bible-centered. The church that caught our attention, from an ad in the paper, was a small Episcopal church. We went to visit, and it met all our criteria.

Bobby Gross, Director of InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministries

Charlene was immediately at home and more or less knew what to do in the service. I was lost for some months, really, but I stuck it out and slowly began to appreciate the beauty and the power of the liturgy as framing our weekly worship. Then, in the course of being in the Episcopal tradition, I learned about the Christian calendar and the way that liturgical rhythm, over the whole year, can give shape and meaning to our spiritual lives and reflections.

Working for a broadly evangelical organization, I found myself many times frustrated and saddened by the lack of awareness, even interest, of many churches and many Christians in this tradition and practice that goes back to within a few hundred years of Christ’s life. So I was motivated to write a book that could bridge from the liturgical world over to those who are not part of those kinds of churches. I wanted to make the bridge easy for evangelicals to walk across so that it would feel inviting and helpful to them.

MH: We have similar backgrounds. I grew up Southern Baptist as well and then worshipped at an Anglican church while I was in Canada for my master’s degree. Many people from Baptist or other non-liturgical backgrounds are often suspicious of adopting practices for which we don’t see direct Biblical connections. What are the benefits of observing the Christian year?

BG: First of all, let me point out the Biblical underpinnings for this practice. What’s striking in the Old Testament is that God himself, for his people, instituted a calendar with regular festivals, including pilgrimage. The Jewish year was oriented around certain festivals and certain points of remembrance. The most important, of course, was the remembering of the Exodus by celebrating the Passover. For Jesus, this was part of his life – the festivals, the pilgrimages, the Passover meal, as well as worship in the synagogue. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them.  In addition, if you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1.  Have you experienced, participated in, or witnessed

Tweckle (twek’ul) vt. to abuse a speaker only to Twitter followers in the audience while he/she is speaking”?

Any thoughts on how Tweckle (or the possibility of it) affect conference (and classroom) dynamics?  Any practices which you’ve found (or  think could address) to decrease its influence?  — Conference Humiliation: They’re Tweeting Behind Your Back (Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17, 2009).  Note:  on the other side, I’ve seen plenty of positive commenting on conferencing/events.

2.  A number of Chronicle of Higher Education articles on news/journalism including:

• Academe and the Decline of News Media (Forum, November 15, 2009)
• I’ve Read the News Today, Oh Boy (Ben Yagoda, November 15, 2009)
• Journalism Schools Can Push Coverage Beyond Breaking News (Nicholas Lemann, November 15, 2009)
• University-Based Reporting Could Keep Journalism Alive (Michael Schudson and Leonard Downie Jr., November 15, 2009)
• We Need ‘Philosophy of Journalism’ (Carlin Romano, November 15, 2009).

3. Belle de Jour reveals herself…as a research scientist.  The anonymous blog and television show Secret Diary of a Call Girl – written from the perspective of a high-end prostitute – were much bigger in the UK than on this side of the pond. The mystery of “who is Belle de Jour?” ended this week, when Dr. Brooke Magnanti confessed that she had turned to prostitution as a way to pay for her PhD. Magnanti now works for The Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. Magnanti says it was good work:

Dr Magnanti told the Sunday Times she worked as a prostitute from 2003 to late 2004, and found it “so much more enjoyable” than her shifts in another job as a computer programmer.

How ironic that Magnanti studies child health. Tanya Gold of the Guardian says don’t be misled: most prostitutes in the UK live pretty awful lives.

The report found that 70%–95% of the interviewees were physically assaulted while working as prostitutes. 60%–75% were raped while working as prostitutes; of these, more than half were repeatedly raped. 65%–95% meanwhile were sexually abused as children; the line of continuity between being used as a child and being used as an adult is clear.

Around the world, prostitution is often a form of slavery, as CNN reported this week. Urbana’s Advocacy and Poverty track is going to focus on the issue of modern day slavery and sex trafficking, and the work of Christian organizations against this evil.

4. Big Man on Campus – Time profiled Gordon Gee, president of The Ohio State University, anointing him as the best college president in the nation. (Here is the rest of their top 10 list.) Earlier this year, Gee told universities they face “reinvention or extinction” at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting.

To avoid “slouching into irrelevance,” he said, universities must structure themselves horizontally, rather than vertically, change the way they reward faculty and staff members, and learn to better collaborate with each other. While partnerships with business, elementary and secondary schools, and governments are crucial, he said, perhaps the most important links are between universities.

You can download Gee’s full lecture at the ACE website.

Books

Introverts in the Church cover

5. Tom’s been recommending  Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture (Adam McHugh, InterVarsity Press, November 2009) to a number of people, including members of the academic community.  Below’s a quote from Chapter 1, available on-line through InterVarsity Press.  An excellent author interview can be found at Adam McHugh on ‘Introverts in the Church’.

The pragmatism that we have inherited fosters an action oriented culture. Evangelicalism values the doer over the thinker.  The evangelical God has a big agenda. It’s as if the moment we surrender our lives to Christ we are issued a flashing neon sign that says “GO!” There is a restless energy to evangelicalism that leads to a full schedule and a fast pace. Some have said that, in Christian culture, busyness is next to godliness. We are always in motion, constantly growing, ever expanding. …“American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarrassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.” [Eugene Peterson]

Exploring Campus Ministry

1.  Do you remember the mention of Benson Hines in the May 8 Week in Review? Yesterday, I had the opportunity to chat with Benson during Road Trip 13 and bring him along to a gathering of the PSU-Hershey Christian Medical Society.  If you haven’t already read Reaching the Campus Tribes, I’d encourage you add to your Thanksgiving Break To-Do List

• swinging by Reaching the Campus Tribes to download, skim, and enjoy the pics in Benson’s free on-line book exploring campus ministry in the USA.
• sharing your thoughts on/reactions to the piece from your role in higher education.  As you may remember, I posted some initial reflections here and more here.
• suggesting blogs to add to my big list of college ministry blogs (so far).  In particular, are there followers of Christ from the academic sphere which have particularly insightful blogs on higher education?

David Kinnaman

Melinda Lundquist Denton

2.  On January 28, Messiah College (Grantham, PA) will be hosting the Next Generation:  understanding its faith practices and impact upon faith communities.  The conference speakers will be David Kinnaman and Melinda Denton Lundquist.  Can’t wait to have the opportunity to interact with both the author of unChristian and the co-author of Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers on the below questions. …

- How are teens and young adults approaching matters of faith today?
- What impact is this emerging generation having upon churches and other faith-related institutions?
- How can Christian leaders better engage this generation?

If you’re available/interested, please join me for the conference.  If you’d like to come, but can’t, please let me what questions you’d like explored and I’ll try to bring back some “responses.” Note: I’m exploring the possibility of some interviews to go along with my early February conference summary.

…that you wanted to be an academic?

Urbana 09 – InterVarsity’s triennial student missions conference – is coming up next month, December 27 to 31. This year features a special “In the Workplace and In the Academy” set of seminars to introduce students to a robust theology of calling. I’ll be leading a seminar called “Serving Christ as a Professor: 10 Things You Need to Know.” It will include some “missional” ideas of why the university matters to God and some pragmatic advice on graduate school and career prep, but I also hope to give students some resources for discerning whether they ought to pursue an academic vocation.

So, how did you know that you wanted to be an academic? What do you tell students who are thinking about a faculty career? I’d love to share your stories and advice with the students at Urbana. Feel free to email me if you’d rather not leave a comment.

Two more Urbana-related notes:

Get credit: Trinity Evangelical Divinity School is offering credit for Urbana, through a wrap-around course on Global Christianity. Register for Urbana first, then register for the course.

Save money: Register before December 1 and save $50 by using the code novu09 when you register.

Here’s the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them.  In addition, if you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1.  Week in Review: Big Questions Edition touched on if Universities have lost sight of their purpose and the potential value of increased career services.  The Chronicle of Higher Education opened this week with Are Too Many Students Going to College? (November 8, 2009) and What Do Parents Think? (November 9, 2009).  Both articles wrestle with whether the whole population can afford or should pursue this American dream.  In the survey of 1000 parents of pre-college students:

Nine of 10 parents told us that, despite the toughest economic climate in decades, they still view sending their kids to college as an essential part of the American dream … Almost eight in 10 Americans agreed that it’s very important to obtain a degree, while only a little more than half said their parents had felt it was very important for them to attend college (William F. Glavin Jr. What Do Parents Think? Chronicle of Higher Education. November 8, 2009).

2.  In Why College Professors Don’t Envy the Young (Chronicle of Higher Education.  November 08, 2009), Gina Barreca, professor of English/Feminist Theroy at UConn, delivers a unique perspective on midlife crisis as an older member of the academic community observing the younger members (and reflecting upon her own past).

While friends in other professions are waking up to their midlives (or what we choose to call midlife but how many people do you know who live past 100 — not counting Lévi-Strauss?) and frantically wishing they could return to their twenties or thirties, those of us who have been dealing with undergraduate and graduate students don’t want to time-travel back to those years. … To be adorable and energetic would be great, but to feel that perpetual trepidation that I’ll never find a job, a partner, a place in the world, or an apartment that I don’t have to share with six other people? No deal. To feel as if the whole world is open to me would be lovely, but to live with the anxiety that I’ll end up on the outskirts or end up an outcast? No thanks.  To wonder whether I’ll ever do work meaningful to me, let alone anyone else? Not a chance. …

3.  Reduce the Technology, Rescue Your Job (Chronicle of Higher Education. November 09, 2009) by Michael J. Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University and author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford University Press, 2004) provides a number of practical recommendations.

4. Getting Started with Zotero – Zotero is a free citation and research manager that you can add on to Firefox. Amy Cavender at ProfHacker.com started a series this week to introduce new users to Zotero, which I (Mike) have never really used but have heard great things about.

5. Someone’s Trying to Find You – In a good way. IVP Editor Dan Reid, writing on IVP’s Addenda & Errata blog, expresses his frustration, and bafflement, at how hard it is to find faculty information on some universities’ websites. Dan uses the information to look for potential new authors, but the benefit of easy-to-find, easy-to-read faculty pages goes beyond that:

This is important not just for the sake of publishers and others finding your faculty. Good academic websites also contribute to a faculty member’s platform. And it is a good thing for academic institutions to have faculty with a platform that extends beyond the classroom. This doesn’t really need to be argued, does it?

Some of the Sesame Street cast members

In How We Got to Sesame Street; Art on Screen (The Chronicle of Higher Education. January 16, 2009), Evan R. Goldstein treats us to some of the history of Sesame Street, which celebrated 40 years on November 10.

In 1966 a group of friends gathered for a dinner party in Manhattan. As the evening was winding down, one of the guests, Lloyd N. Morrisett, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, turned to his host, a television executive named Joan Ganz Cooney, and asked a seemingly innocuous question: Can television educate young children? …

Almost four years after the Cooney dinner party, on November 10, 1969, Sesame Street showed up on public television across the country. The series was greeted with a torrent of gushing reviews. “The show moves, seduces, diverts, dazzles, amuses, and infects,” raved a writer at Variety. “Learning seems almost a byproduct of fun,” noted another critic. Children’s television would never be the same.”

It’s hard not to concede that education begins in the context of where one grows up and TV viewing is almost universal among the kids in our culture.  As such, would you credit Sesame Street or similar TV shows for your early childhood education (or at least some of it)?  Does Sesame Street Turns 40, But It Doesn’t Look a Day Over 25 resonate with you?

In the last 40 years, Sesame Street taught us to celebrate our differences, to bask in our own individuality and has continuously redefined “normal” to fit us all. Sesame Street taught us to read, to write, and yes, to count. It opened our eyes to cultures beyond our cul-de-sac and taught us global thinking. Sesame Street made us believe that we could be anything and that anything was possible. Sesame Street taught us to love music and laughter and learning.

A couple more questions to ponder/discuss:

Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street

1. How much emphasis should parents or the educational system as a whole place on educational TV for kids, youth, young adults, adults?
2. What has the educational experiment shown us about what kids can/do learn from TV?  Do they learn/absorb more than the basics, e.g., values, perspective on the real world?
3. Would you agree with the Robert Smith’s 40 Years Of Lessons On ‘Sesame Street’, which ran on NPR yesterday (11/10/2009)?  E.g., Children Are Adaptable. Keep It Simple.  The Children are always right (Note: Bonus on audio).
4. As one involved in higher education, do you have any recommendations for the next decade of Sesame Street as it seeks to educate kids across the spectrum or for parents as they seek to evaluate it’s role in the overall educational toolkit?  Note:  Sesame Street provides a peek of it’s future direction at It’s all new and better than ever as Sesame Street turns 40!

P.S.  Street Gang:  The Complete History of Sesame Street (Michael Davis. Viking. 2008) looks like a good read.  I found an excerpt posted here.

Students and Faculty at 2008 Faculty Ministry Symposium

The final chapter in George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Academic Communities Christian Scholarship [Oops! - Ed.] proposes that even the most impressive work of individual Christian scholars is not enough; Christian scholarship needs “a strong institutional base.”

Scholars, like everyone else, depend on communities. If like-minded academics do not form their own sub-communities, then they will be dependent entirely on the communities that already exist. These, of course, have little place for inquiry concerning faith and learning. If such inquiry is to grow as a recognized part of contemporary academia, it must depend on institutions and networks which can sustain that enterprise. (101)

Before getting to Marsden’s ideas, let me throw out a few discussion question: Have you experienced or witnessed successful communities of Christian scholars? What have been the outcomes? On the hand, have you seen failed or stunted attempts to build communities among Christian scholars? What went wrong?

Recognizing that, for a variety of reasons, evangelical Christians have failed to create research universities that can compete with the best secular universities, and that, to put it mildly, “the obstacles are formidable” to creating such a university, Marsden suggests some other ideas for institutional support. Some of these are already established, while others are just beginning. Marsden’s ideas are after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »