Below are suggested readings from my Urbana 12 seminar Serving Christ as a Professor. These are books or essays that Emerging Scholars Network staff and members have found especially helpful to their journey toward becoming a faculty member.
In each section, foundational or introductory selections are listed first, followed by books that are either more advanced or written for a specialized audience.
Be sure to also see our list of Best Books for Undergraduates from Urbana 09, as suggested by our blog readers. We know this is only a partial list of all the books we could have recommended. Did we omit one of your favorites? Recommend it in the comments!
The Life of the Mind
Greg Jao, Your Mind’s Mission
C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time,” published in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses
Charles Malik, “The Two Tasks of the Christian Scholar,” published in William Lane Craig and Paul Gould, ed. The Two Tasks of the Christian Scholar: Redeeming the Soul, Redeeming the Mind
James Sire, Habits of the Mind: Intellectual Life as a Christian Calling
John Stott, Your Mind Matters
Mark Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Our review)
James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation
James Davidson Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World
Spiritual Formation
Steven Garber, The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief And Behavior
Bobby Gross, Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God
Tim Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism
J. I. Packer, Knowing God
Augustine, Confessions
Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God
Adam McHugh, Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture
Vocation and Calling
Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose in Your Life
Mary Poplin, Finding Calcutta
Amy Sherman, Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good
Gordon Smith, Courage and Calling: Embracing Your God-Given Potential
Flourishing in the Academy
Paul Anderson, ed. Professors Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of Christian Faculty
Kelly Monroe Kullberg, ed. Finding God at Harvard
George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship
Nicola Hoggard Creegan and Christine D. Pohl, Living on the Boundaries: Evangelical Women, Feminism and the Theological Academy
Richard Hughes, The Vocation of the Christian Scholar
John Sommerville, The Decline of the Secular University
The Academic Career
James Lang, Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year
Robert L. Peters, Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student’s Guide to Earning an M.A. or a Ph.D.
Robert Boice, Advice for New Faculty Members
Gregory Colón Semenza, Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities
The former Associate Director for the Emerging Scholars Network, Micheal lives in Cincinnati with his wife and three children and works as a web manager for a national storage and organization company. He writes about work, vocation, and finding meaning in what you do at No Small Actors.
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