The Emerging Scholars Blog

Amish Grace Cover

Film depicting Nickel Mines shootings questioned (Cindy Stauffer, Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, 03/01/2010) ran on frontpage in south central PA the day after Donald Kraybill, one of the authors of Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy, spoke for the Emerging Scholars Network in partnership with Elizabethtown Brethren in Christ. If you’re interested in learning more about the Amish, I’d encourage you to

• listen to Kraybill’s 2/28/2010 presentation on The Riddle of the Amish (the audio begins with my brief introduction of Kraybill).
• pick-up a copy of Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy — coming out in paperback later this month.  Note:  the Amish Grace web site is a rich resource and All author royalties are going to Mennonite Central Committee for their ministries to children.
• visit the Amish Studies web site — maintained by the Young Center for Anabaptist & Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College

How should followers of Christ respond to this popular culture depiction of the Gospel, academic research, and a minority group which desires as a people of God to be separate from popular culture.

Should we

• contend that certain forms of media can never do justice to events/material such as what is found in Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy
• post comments on the film’s website and other locations which encourage dialogue
• stand up against what appears to be a misuse of film rights to the title of a well researched book, it’s content, and those whom it represents
• turn the other cheek by neither entering the public fray nor watching the film
• watch/discuss the film
• watch/discuss the film only after we’ve read up on the Amish or are led in consideration of the film by someone who can provide insights regarding the Amish
• seek to produce more films/documentaries closer to the facts/truth, e.g.,
  The Amish: Back Roads to Heaven (which ends with a brief summary on the Nickel Mines tragedy), The Amish: How They Survive, The Amish: A People of Preservation
• other?

Note: Lifetime’s website for the upcoming film is here and the trailer can be found here.

PS.  ESN’s Week-in-Review will hit the web on Saturday morning.

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. 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. Alan Jacobs’ Grad School Thoughts: Should you go to grad school? “Probably not,” writes Alan Jacobs, Wheaton English professor and author of Original Sin, The Narnian, A Theology of Reading, and many other excellent things.  But if you insist, he’s got some good advice. (Also check out Alan’s contribution to our ESN article, “Why Get a PhD in the Humanities?”)

2.  James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom ties for OUR MOST AUDACIOUS CLAIM: THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK OF THE YEAR with Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft:  An Inquiry Into the Value of Work in Best Books of 2009 Part I by Byron Borger of Hearts and Minds Bookstore.  Take a few minutes to review the list, keep an eye out for two more parts going up next week, and let us know what books you’re interested in discussing this year.

3.  In The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (W.W. Norton, 2010), Louis “Menand asks four questions: Why is it so hard to create a general-education curriculum? Why have the humanities undergone a crisis of legitimacy? Why has ‘interdisciplinarity’ been seen—and ultimately failed—as a magic wand? Why do professors share the same politics?” — Oxygenating Academe: The Unpublic Intellectual (By Karen J. Winkler, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 10, 2010)

4.  ‘Baby Einstein’ Founder Goes to Court (By Tamar Lewin, NY Times, January 12, 2010):  Raises the question of access to and reproducibility of research in relationship to marketing and consumer concerns.  Do you know anyone who watched or advocated Baby Einstein?

5. Proof (or at least Evidence) That Mentoring Matters (by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed): A study presented the American Economic Association’s annual meeting found that mentoring had a significant impact on the number of grants and publications for female economists.

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.

Our Week-in-Review feature has a new format. We know there’s way too much to read out there already, so we’re going to be highlighting the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week. 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.

Academic Nobel News – The Nobel Prizes are being handed out this week, and, as usual, academic researchers did quite well. The prize for Medicine went to Elizabeth H. Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco; Carol W. Greider of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and Jack W. Szostak of Massachusetts General Hospital for research on telomeres. Physics was awarded to Charles Kao (who did his prize-winning work at Britain’s Standard Telephones and Cables) and Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith of Bell Labs. Chemistry went to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England; Thomas A. Steitz of Yale University; and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, for their work on the information structure of ribosomes. The two most famous Nobels – Literature and Peace – went to German poet Herta Müller and Barack Obama respectively. Economics will be awarded on Monday.

Economic Justice and the Spirit of Innovation (Edmund Phelps, First Things, October 2009) discussed by a campus group this past week.

The issue of morality in economics is neither the fairness of income distribution nor the stability of financial systems. It is how human institutions can be shaped to correspond to human nature — to man’s nature as an innovator. … Capitalism is the only economic system thus far discovered that allows human beings to realize their nature to innovate, discover, and take risks. Because human freedom is a good thing, capitalism is in this respect a good system. It is good apart from its instrumental function of presenting opportunities for income and consumption.

America Falling: Longtime Dominance in Education Erodes (Karin Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 5, 2009)

“China, Korea, Singapore—they’re going for broke because they’re hungry. They know they have to do it,” says Mr. Vest, who served on a national panel that produced a widely cited report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” which warned that America was slipping behind other countries in science and technology. …

Are you hungry to learn how the world works and share that knowledge with others?  What provides the basis for such a passion when competition and survival no longer inspire it?

Numbers on Nones – The excellent blog GetReligion, which covers how the mainstream covers religion, has been looking at the recent American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS). ARIS has found that the number of Americans who report “no religion” has been rising steadily and now includes 34 million Americans. ARIS calls these people “Nones,” which the atheist biologist P. Z. Myers mistakenly equates with the “godless” (his term for atheists). ARIS finds that less than 10% of Nones are truly atheists; 35% are agnostics of one sort or another, while 51% believe in some sort of god.

New Book: Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults by Christian Smith and Patricia Snell – Smith’s previous book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (with Melina Lundquist Denton) has greatly influenced Tom and Mike’s thinking about religious education and the role of ministries like InterVarsity. In this sociological study of American teens, sponsored by the National Study of Youth and Religion, Smith and Denton found that almost all American teens believe in a kind of “civil religion” that Smith & Denton called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Now, Smith and his fellow researchers have continued to follow these teens into their 20’s, the time of life that Smith identifies as “emerging adulthood,” and their findings continue to challenge long-held assumptions about religious development. For example, they found that college no longer has a corrosive effect on religious faith. In a webinar with Christianity Today (not yet available for review), Smith explicitly credited campus ministries like InterVarsity and growing numbers of evangelical professors for this striking change. Praise God! [Note: this is an important new book, so I expect we'll be reviewing it soon.]

Naomi Schaefer Riley of the WSJ has reviewed Souls in Transition, and the WSJ has also published an excerpt from Chapter One.

Cover of "The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship"

George Marsden, Notre Dame’s Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History Emeritus, wrote The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1997) to take a step toward clarifying what the ancient enterprise of relating faith and learning might mean in the academy today (preface).  How can this be accomplished in a time when the university has lost the ability to have substantive conversation regarding not only religion, but also anything that goes beyond the practical to the larger issues of life?  Marsden boldly asserts that the assumptions of our hollow contemporary university culture must be re-examined, in particular our rejection of ancient religious learning and its bearing on what one thinks about (p.4).  Over the course of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Marsden delineates guidelines for religiously informed scholarship; guidelines that he believes will lead to scholarship that can be accepted as legitimate in the mainstream academy.

Is that outrageous?  What do you think?  Note:  If you haven’t already done such, time to pick-up the book and begin reading ;-)

The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship emerged from Marsden’s responses to the critiques and questions raised by his provocative Concluding Unscientific Postscript to The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1994).  His Concluding Unscientific Postscript digs into

1. higher education’s a priori rejection of all religiously based claims as unscientific
2. pluralism as a basis for imposing uniformity
3. academic freedom
4. relationship between church and state.

Marsden wraps up with this challenging summary:

In many of the American colonies all the citizens were taxed for the support of the established religious group, regardless of the citizen’s religious affiliations.  In the nineteenth century the Protestant establishment became informal and declared itself nonsectarian.  Today nonsectarianism has come to mean the exclusion of all religious concerns.  In effect, only purely naturalistic viewpoints are allowed a serious academic hearing.  As in earlier establishments, groups who do not match the current national ideological norms are forced to fend for themselves outside of the major spheres of cultural influence.  Today, almost all religious groups, no matter what their academic credentials, are on the outside of this educational establishment, or soon will be, if present trends continue.  Americans who are concerned for justice ought to be open to considering alternatives (440).

As we begin our on-line conversation of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, please share your thoughts on some/all of the below questions.

1. What’s so outrageous about Christian scholarship?  Why does the term Christian scholarship stimulate a negative knee-jerk reaction by some Christians and non-Christians?  Do nonreligious viewpoints receive special privilege in higher education (24)?
2. Has a negative knee-jerk reaction to Christian scholarship (or religiously informed scholarship in general) receded in higher education over the past decade?  Is Christian scholarship (or religiously informed scholarship in general) now accepted through the lens of pluralism?  If so, please share some examples to bless one-another.
3. In your experience, how do you find Christian faith and scholarship to helpfully (and possibly unhelpfully) relate?
4. Do you agree with Marsden that faith precedes and conditions understanding? (p. 9)
5. Any particular points/quotes in the introduction or first chapter which you desire to draw our attention to and possibly even discuss?

Note:  as mentioned in a previous post, if you’d like to host a face-to-face book club coinciding with our online discussion, we recommend that you download the ESN discussion guide.

Over the weekend, I started reading Stephen Carter’s The Emperor of Ocean Park. Carter, a law professor at Yale, made his name with nonfiction books like The Culture of Disbelief, and he also wrote a column for Christianity Today for several years. He’s now successfully transitioned into a career as a bestselling novelist. The novel’s narrator, Talcott Garland, is an African American law professor at a fictional Ivy League-type university (like they say – write what you know!), and a number of scenes are set within the academic world: departmental politics, classroom teaching, even pick-up basketball with fellow professors.

Reading this novel got me to thinking: What are the best novels about the academic life? To qualify, the novels would have to be good novels themselves, but they would also need to represent the academic world truthfully. I start with one that I’m certain should be on the list, and a few others that I enjoyed reading, though I’m not sure how truthfully they represent the academic world. Do you agree with my choices? What are your suggestions? Read the rest of this entry »

Do you have Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion on your reading list (personal and/or group discussion)?  The book’s edited by one of the names in the study of science-religion in America, i.e., Ronald L. Numbers, University Wisconsin-Madison, Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine.  If you’re interested in hearing Numbers reflect on the new publication, swing by the author interview on Harvard Press’ promotional site.

As for the title of this entry, I’m referring to last week’s Science and Sacred post by Ted Davis, Messiah College, History of Science.  Here’s an excerpt.

The twenty-five authors in Numbers’ book – one for each of the short, pithy chapters – serve writ on the conflict thesis and its legacy. (To view the contents, go to here.) Many contributors, including Numbers and Lindberg, are major players in the history of science, and at least two will be known to many readers who rarely venture into the field: Edward Larson, whose book on the Scopes trial won the Pulitzer Prize in History, and Michael Ruse, a distinguished philosopher and historian who often writes for general audiences. (Full disclosure: I wrote the chapter on Isaac Newton, but I do not mean to imply that I am a major player and my enthusiasm for the book would be undiminished if I had not contributed to it.) Twelve contributors are agnostics or atheists (by their own statements) and eight are Christians, so charges of advancing a clear ideological agenda will not stick. All of us wrote with ordinary readers, not specialists, in mind, making this a truly rare book: where else can you find such authoritative scholarship delivered so accessibly and fairly on such an important subject?

In effect, this book delivers a public obituary for the warfare view, which has been dead among historians for decades – though many scientists, journalists, and others who know far less about the topic apparently missed the funeral. In fact, the real history of religion and science is too complex, with too many important subtleties and significant mutual interactions, to be captured by any simple metaphor – not conflict, not harmony, nor any other single word that comes to mind. The people who actually lived through the events – those we historians call the “actors” themselves – very often saw things quite differently from the ways in which we’ve usually been told they saw them, or must have seen them. — Ted Davis, An Obituary for the “Warfare” View of Science and Religion, Friday August 28, 2009

Any thoughts on to what degree the warfare view has gone to the grave in academic and/or popular circles?  You’ll hear more from me over the course of the next several months as I participate in the Central Pennsylvania Forum for Religion and Science’s discussion of Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, but I thought I’d stir the pot.

Two specific items, I’m interested in from you:

1. Let me know if you’re picking up the book as an individual or as part of a campus book discussion.
2. Whether or not you’re reading Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, if you have particular questions regarding the relationship of science-religion-faith which you’d like addressed on the blog, post them here.  As questions arise, I’ll see what insights Ted Davis, Messiah College, History of Science, might have to share with us.

A Faith and Culture Devotional

If you don’t already have a copy of A Faith & Culture Devotional, click here to learn how to enter a drawing for a free copy.  The first drawing is on August 31st and the second on September 7th. Whether or not you win a copy, consider starting off the new term with a copy in hand.

Thank-you to Kelly Monroe Kullberg for her work on this project and the gift of this week’s devo from John Stott, see excerpt below.  Note:  You may remember our June study Stott’s classic Your Mind Matters.

I believe that anti‐intellectualism and fullness of the Holy Spirit are mutually incompatible. And I dare to say it because the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth. Jesus our Lord himself referred to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth, and therefore, it is only logical to say that wherever the Holy Spirit has given his freedom, truth is bound to matter. So I have argued, and argue still, that a proper, conscientious use of our minds is an inevitable part and parcel of our Christian life. …

James Lang's Life on the Tenure Track

I have a terrible confession to make: I’ve been giving away copies of a book that I had never read. For the past two summers, we’ve surveyed ESN members about their past year, and members who had made a recent career transition – earned a degree, started a new job, received tenure – have been offered the free book of their selection. I included among our offerings a book, James Lang’s Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year, based on the high recommendations of others, and I promptly (18 months ago) ordered my own copy. I’ve even been known to carry extra copies in my bag to give away spontaneously, yet it’s been sitting on my own “to read” shelf for well over a year.

But my shame has been lifted. This afternoon, I finished reading the final chapter. Even better: I’m glad that I’ve been giving it out.

Lang’s book is not meant to replace the myriad other advice books that are available to young and aspiring faculty. While Lang has studied the art and science of teaching, his book is primarily a memoir of his first year as an assistant professor of English at Assumption College, a Catholic liberal arts college in Worcester, Mass. The book takes the reader through the entire first year, with each month matched up with a dominant theme of academic life from that time period: teaching, grading, writing, and so on. While Lang includes general advice to new professor, he mostly focuses on his own experiences of learning how to teach a full schedule while trying to fulfill service and writing commitments, balancing his work with the needs of his young family, navigating relationships with faculty colleagues, and learning his way around a small college in an unfamiliar city. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1994, Clark Kerr reflected on his movement from guarded optimism to guarded pessimism to guarded optimism (1997, 193) and his hopeful return to the unguarded utopianism of earlier years with respect to the importance/value of higher educaiton:

[a]s society goes, so goes the university; but, also, as the university goes so goes the society. The progress of knowledge remains so central to the progress of civilization (1997, 194, 196).*

As we enter a new academic term, what do you think about the relationship of the university to the larger society (in the United States, other countries, civilization)?  In Searching for Utopia: Higher Education as a Panacea?  (a paper which I wrote for my masters in higher education), I make the below comment about the solid foundations for higher education.  I would be interested in your comments/reactions as I prepare for conversations with academics over the course of the next couple of weeks.

How do Christians extend hope for our society while still acknowledging the reality of internal and systemic sin? First, we confess that God is in charge and we are not. As long as we seek to be agents of transformation on our own, we will forget that only God changes hearts and structures. Second, we acknowledge that individuals and institutions have the capacity to offer hope because God has ordered creation in such a way that the meaning, satisfaction, wholeness, which are found in Him alone, are dimly reflected all around us. Third, we affirm that good things can come from education, e.g., verbal skills, quantitative skills, personal self-discovery, cultural identity, appreciation of the arts, opportunity, upward mobility, new knowledge.

We may even go as far as saying that common grace is dispensed as the God invested capacities are played out through the proper uses of the university. But all of this must keep in mind that sin corrupts and God’s power alone transforms and sustains.  So although higher education has much to commend it, we are not to worship it. The blessings experienced by those within and without, past and present, individual and corporate are mixed.

*Kerr, C. (2001). The Uses of the University. (5th ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (Original work published in 1963).