The Emerging Scholars Blog

It’s for me!  Hard to believe that the feast of Books & Culture* enters 15 years of production.  The new issue has a time line on the cover and an accompanying podcast which I commend to you.

Out of curiosity …

Whether or not you regularly follow Books & Culture, which of the articles in the September/October 2010 sparks the greatest interest in reading, possibly discussing … Read the rest of this entry »

As I read Stanley Fish’s Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal (NY Times Opinionator, 8/9/2010), two responses immediately came to mind.  What do you think?

(1)  I disagree that every sin is learned.  My own experience and that of raising my kids (and my own responses to raising them), indicate that there is something not quite right inside which influences our behavior unless grace is given to go an “unnatural direction.”  Note:  the Biblical story provides helpful perspective on this frustrating condition.  Below’s a quote representing Fish’s position:

Whenever it comes up plagiarism is a hot button topic and essays about it  tend to be philosophically and morally inflated. But there are really only two points to make. (1) Plagiarism is a learned sin. (2) Plagiarism is not a philosophical issue.

Of course every sin is learned. Very young children do not distinguish between themselves and the world; they assume that everything belongs to them; only in time and through the conditioning of experience do they learn the distinction between mine and thine and so come to acquire the concept of stealing. The concept of plagiarism, however,  is learned in  more specialized contexts of practice entered into only by a  few; it’s hard to get from the notion that you shouldn’t appropriate your neighbor’s car to the notion that you should not repeat his words without citing him. — Stanley Fish. Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal.  NY Times Opinionator. 8/9/2010.

(2) Not practicing plagiarism may be an one of the responses to How do we practice a faithful presence?

How do you define science?  What are its boundaries?  Does the scientific mind have any space for miracles?

Came across a BioLogos Forum series on Miracles and Science by the physicist Ard Louis.*  Below’s a quote on defining science, from the end of Miracles and Science, Part 1.

The problem of deciding where to draw the lines around science has vexed generations of philosophers. Like many unsolved issues, it has been given its own name — “the demarcation problem.” Although one can determine with some degree of consensus what the extremes of the science/non-science continuum are, exactly where the boundary lies is fuzzy. This doesn’t mean, however, that we cannot recognize science when we see it, but rather that a watertight definition is difficult to create. The old fashioned idea (still taught in many schools) that scientific practice follows a well-defined linear process — first make an observation, then state a hypothesis, and then test that hypothesis — is certainly far too simple –  Miracles and Science, Part 1 (Ard Louis. BioLogos Forum. 06/25/2010).

In the Miracles and Science Part 2 (7/3/2010), Louis weaves together the tapestry of science (experimental results, interpretations, explanations, etc.) and points out some of the limits of science.  At least one more post in the series, but you can jump directly to more of the material as it’s drawn from a recently-posted scholarly essay.**

So how do you define science?  What are its boundaries?  Does the practice of science (or a scientifically informed perspective) have any space for miracles? Do you frame these questions along similar lines to Louis?  If  you’re uncomfortable with Louis’ perspective, do you have an alternative to offer?

Read the rest of this entry »

What a blessing to have heard from Nathan Foster, Assistant Professor of Social Work, Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI, over the the past several weeks.  To wrap up the series I leave you with

• Belated “Happy Fathers Day!”
• Few quotes for inspiration
• Encouragement to pick up a copy of Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet (Nathan Foster. InterVarsity Press. 2010) for your summer vacation or reading group.

Much Loved Nothing

The implications of being loved just as I am are staggering.  It was becoming clear that if I really understood that I was loved by God, I would have no need for pride or the crushing desire for others approval.  Knowing I was loved was liberation from myself and from my silly ambitions.  I was becoming a little child, free to explore the world with zero to prove (p.58). …

I would not rise from this experience to fight another battle the same way.  The memory of this defeat would squelch my pride.  Instead of retreating to the old lies about myself, however, I opted to let the ideas I learned on Longs sink deep into by consciousness. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I began reading the new book from IVP publisher Bob Fryling, The Leadership Ellipse: Shaping How We Lead By Who We Are. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the question “Who am I?” (and reading other IVP books on the subject of being yourself). Bob seeks to connect two popular genres that don’t often interact with one another: spiritual formation books that focus on the contemplative, internal life, and leadership books that focus on the active, external life. In truth, our internal and external lives cannot be separated — in the foreword, Eugene Peterson calls them the “right foot and left foot of our Christian life” — but they are rarely brought together in an explicit way.

Photo credit: pictoscribe via Flickr

Chapter two — “A Growing Strength: The Practice of Pruning” — contained some advice that I found challenging, which I bet many of you will also find challenging. Bob writes that, for spiritual and personal growth, we often need pruning, especially three kinds:

• Pruning of reputation and self-righteousness
• Pruning of the passion to maximize life
• Pruning of soliciting praise

Much could be said of all three, but I found the middle pruning — of the passion to maximize life — the most challenging. Bob recognizes that we must be responsible stewards of the talents that God has given us, and that we must work for “night is coming” (John 9:4), yet there is danger in pursuing efficiency, just as there is danger in too much food or drink.

As leaders we can also become addicted to efficiencies that at first help our bottom line or our workload, but can become an obsession that leaves out important relationships…

Choosing not to be consumed with efficiency is a great freedom that allows greater flexibility and spontaneity. As Jesus taught, it is not efficient to go after the one lost sheep at the expense of the other ninety-nine, but it is the right choice.

Personally, I struggle with a desire for “efficient mornings,” which usually means that I try to read the newspaper while getting my children ready for the day, and then skip directly to my email, calendar, and task list instead of taking time for Bible study and prayer. Of course, the results are that my children try to model my efficiency by wanting to watch TV while they eat their breakfast, and that I quickly fall out of the discipline of spending time with God.

How do you respond to Bob’s statement about efficiency? Do you struggle with making efficiency an idol at the expense of relationships or other important areas of life? How do you guard against the idolatry of efficiency?

If you want to order The Leadership Ellipse, don’t forget about your ESN member discount! Also, see a Google Preview of the book after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, as part of Biblical Seminary’s Conversations on Christianity & Culture lecture series, Andy Crouch speaks on Playing God: Christian Reflections on the Use and Misuse of Power. What are your thoughts on the topic? Any questions I should ask the author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (InterVarsity Press, 2008), winner of Christianity Today’s 2009 Book Award for Christianity and Culture?  I’ll take some notes and share what he presents.

PS.  Culture Making is one of my Favorite book[s] on Christ and culture … Crouch provides an excellent springboard for conversation by the larger Evangelical community in his writing (book, blog, Christianity Today) and speaking.  Due to the variety of contexts for the conversation, it’s very hard to respond to Mike’s question inquiry for a favorite book.  In my life, some combination of the writing of Richard Mouw [He Shines in All That's Fair: Culture and Common Grace (Eerdmans, 2002), When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem (Eerdmans, 2002 revised edition)] and Abraham Kuyper [Lectures on Calvinism (Princeton Theological Seminary, 1898) supplemented by Peter Heslam's Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism (Eerdmans, 1998)] stimulated a larger perspective shaped by my education at Grove City College [See Must Reads for an American College Education?].  I’m feeling another post coming on and the PS being longer the original post.  Better stop now.  More later ;-)

I just ordered my copy of James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World, which our Faculty Ministry team will be discussing later this summer. (Full disclosure: I wasn’t impressed with Hunter’s Christianity Today interview, so i’m hoping the book will change my mind.) But ordering the book made me wonder:

What’s your favorite book about Christ and culture?

Maybe it’s a classic like H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (one of the first books I read after becoming a Christian in college). Or something more recent like Andy Crouch’s Culture Making. Or a book connected to your discipline, or to the culture of the Bible.

What’s mine? Probably Dorothy Sayers’ Mind of the Maker. As a writer, her analysis of writers’ strengths and weaknesses helped me make sense of the craft during my college years, and I love the idea of using the Trinity itself as the explaining metaphor, rather than trying to find a metaphor to explain the Trinity.

So – what’s your favorite?

Photo Credit: The Playmobil Nativity Set, by The Spacebase via Flickr – is it cheesy commercialism…or a great way to help kids proclaim the narrative of the Incarnation?

Janine Giordano

Read part 1 of the series, “Where Did You Find Your Megaphone?”

I was surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t be, at the nature of responses to my last post. I expected to hear a variety of answers about where each of us of first found our voice and discovered our efficacy. Was it in your favorite class in college, or in your relationship with a younger sibling? Was it on a Church board, in a Parent-Teacher organization, or on a missions trip? Where did you first feel heard and validated, and see your work invested as time well spent? I was concerned with some kind of defining moment in your path from regular person to learned academic. Ultimately, I wanted to know why you chose the academy—if you chose the academy—as the place for you to pursue your work? I was surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t be, that the piece I shared of my own quest to find my academic voice was taken instead as a complaint about the glass ceilings for women in ministry. It indeed hurts me deeply to see how much women have been hampered from Christian ministry for generations, but I was trying to stress the positive: many of us have found other ways to compensate for this challenge. How did you, male or female, arrive at your perch of authority? What microphone do you use as you make your way to the megaphone?

Our discussions of the integration of faith and learning these days so often assume that we are already creatures of authority in our academic field. We assume that all of us, by virtue of our association with the academy and our dabbling in even a bit of higher education, are already knowledgeable within a particular terrain of thought or culture, and have some degree of authority within a particular body of knowledge. We are encouraged that we need to be careful how we use our perch of authority, for our stewardship of our gifts has more of an impact on the world than what we might expect. I imagine that many of us found the Emerging Scholars Network because we wanted to further discuss this encouraging message. I certainly did.

However, I wanted to complicate the way we frame this calling, especially with regard to graduate students who are still trying to find our voices within a particular field. What can seem like an exciting challenge to academics who already have perches of authority (read- some kind of teaching or research gig where you feel visible), can be equally discouraging to those of us who are still yearning, searching and struggling to find an audience to hear us. So much of graduate school is about building an audience: an advisor you trust; a cohort of other graduate students and faculty you trust, and ultimately an intellectual community who believe that the final results of your research matter to them and the larger community they fit into. Therefore, even if your research challenges particular assumptions within your field, you are not actually supposed to challenge anyone to the point that they wonder if you fit into their intellectual community. At least not that significantly, or anyone you know, personally. Qualifying exams, preliminary exams and oral defenses, the landmarks in time of your graduate school experience, are all moments specially designed to make sure that you fit into the intellectual community that you are already supposed to be participating in. Your life is not about using a perch of authority wisely; it’s about continually defending how and why you belong. It’s about making others comfortable with you. Like any other hazing experience, it’s about doing what it takes, within reason, to prove that you deserve that perch of membership. Otherwise, you know you will never win that perch of authority.

I have wondered frequently why Christians interested in discussing the “integration of faith and learning” have not spent more time discussing what, and who, is lost this hazing process. Sure, have discussed the loss of our humility, the loss of our identity as a regular person, and sometimes even the loss of our childbearing years. However, many do not see enough wrong with the graduate school hazing process–a process that culminates in the roulette of finding a job–to see a need for it to be redeemed. Many see sets of testable knowledge as virtually objective, and see themselves as authority figures in their own areas of expertise simply by virtue of their successful passing through the hazing process. And perhaps sometimes this is true. However, my own experiences in graduate school have made quite obvious the fact that sets of testable knowledge are really just as subjective as any set of book reviews given by two professors. Preliminary exam questions upon this set of testable knowledge again do nothing but express what the examiners find important. And, as I have learned the hard way, if you don’t tell professors what they want to hear the first time they ask, they will ask you again, expecting that next time your answer will be different.

What do you think is gained and lost in this academic hazing process?

Read part 3 of the series, “Dig Where You Stand.”

Last week Ed Brown, director of Care of Creation, Inc. posted How Do You Pray About an Oil Spill? Below is an excerpt which my wife and I, found particularly helpful for the direction of our prayers.  Note: in the context of Daniel’s prayer of confession as recorded in Daniel 9.

From today’s New York Times:

“In the furor over the Gulf disaster, a hard-to-overlook fact: America needs the oil.”

As an individual, I do my part to feed our oil- and coal-driven economy by pumping gas into my car, by burning electric lights and using all kinds of oil-derived plastics to sustain my “lifestyle”.  As do you.  (You are reading this on a computer screen… enough said).  Collectively, we have created an economic and political system that cannot run without these fossil fuels, and we bear collective guilt for this.  Yes, guilt.  We could have designed an economic system that would have functioned in harmony with God’s creation rather than in opposition to it.  We did not.  We are guilty. [See my article on this topic here.]

Over the past several days, I have been struck by how the oil spill is an example of research and development reaching its in the field limits.  The deep exploration tested boundaries with unexpected consequences.  Could more university research (before going to the field) modeled these potential consequences and adverted the current situation?  Do we really have a grasp on how to accurately track the spill (e.g.,  5/9 NPR Piece with Widget and comments)?

Will the oil spill be capped, if so how?*  Or will we have to wait until it runs dry? Who should be leaned upon for the best recommendations regarding next steps in addressing the spill (short and long term)?  Will the incident discourage similar exploration or encourage a chastened pursuit to get it right?

Is there a point at which our society should choose, even become satisfied with less?  In what ways do followers of  possess the beginning of a framework for saying No to our consumer orientation and harnessing our creative efforts in order fulfill the call to care for/steward God’s creation?  More on these topics coming, but would love to read your thoughts. …

Recommendations regarding next steps:

1. Read How Do You Pray About an Oil Spill?
2. Pray.
3. Gather some friends to pray on the National Day of Prayer for Creation Care (May 25).
4. 

   Our Father's World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation Cover

   Encourage further conversation on the oil spill and pick up a copy of Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation (InterVarsity Press) for summer reading as an individual or part of discussion group.  Note:  The new Our Father’s World is about 20% longer, with updated material, several new chapters and a discussion guide suitable for small groups or Sunday School classes.

5. Ask around to see if there is interest in hosting Our Father’s World: Why Christians Should Care about the Environmental Crisis to explore these questions further.  Note: Ed shared with me that the weekend seminar can be done with a student/campus focus.  I’ve desired to arrange a seminar for several years, if you’re in the Mid-Atlantic and have interest in partnering, let me know.   For more information, visit here and/or email ed [at] careofcreation.org.

*[BP deploys second containment box (CNN Wire Staff, 5/12). Picture linked from article.]

Great question.  Do you resonate with the response Rachel Toor received from a graduate class in physical education?

When we were wrapping up, I asked them a question: “What is your relationship to reading and writing?” At that moment, they morphed from T-shirt-clad physical specimens and became generic graduate students, indistinguishable from all-in-black, cigarette-smoking studiers of literary theory and bearded-and-geeky future scientists. It’s all we do, they wailed, and it’s hard. … The journal articles he makes us read (they said, directing accusing fingers at my colleague) are dense and boring. We’re getting good information, but it can be painful. And, they said, we have to learn to write like that. — Rachel Toor, Bad Writing and Bad Thinking, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/15/2010.

What do you think about Toor’s thoughts on the topic?

No, I said, you don’t. … In 1946 he [George Orwell] wrote “Politics and the English Language,” an essay that explains the connections between bad writing and bad thinking as well as the political consequences: “Modern [insert the word "academic" here] English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional [or scholarly] writers.”

By writing prose that is nearly unintelligible not just to the general public, but also to graduate students and fellow academics in your discipline, you are not doing the work of advancing knowledge. And, honestly, you don’t really sound smart. I understand that there are ideas that are so difficult that their expression must be complex and dense. But I can tell you, after years of rejecting manuscripts submitted to university presses, most people’s ideas aren’t that brilliant.

Call me simple-minded, call me anti-intellectual, but I believe that most poor scholarly writing is a result of bad habits, of learning tricks of the academic trade as a way to try to fit in. And it’s a result of lazy thinking. Most of us know that we may not be writing as well as we could, or should. Many academics have told me that they suspect they are bad writers but don’t know how to get better. They are often desperate for help. I tell them to reread Strunk and White, and to take a look at “Politics and the English Language.” Yeah, yeah, they say, and get buried working toward the next submission deadline, prepping for the next class. … — Rachel Toor, Bad Writing and Bad Thinking, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/15/2010.

Taking a step back to consider the bigger picture:

• How much attention do you give to reading and writing about your faith?
• What habits have you formed toward the end of good thinking and good writing?
• What encouragement/resources have you found a blessing in the development of these habits?
• How often and well do you articulate your faith among you colleagues?
• What resources/opportunities do you desire the Emerging Scholars Network to offer to assist you in the above areas?  Note:  If you have not already done such, please review Suggested ESN Readings from Urbana 09.