The Emerging Scholars Blog

Update: The membership survey is now closed. Thanks for your feedback!

If you’re an ESN member, you should have gotten our annual membership survey in your inbox this morning.  Your feedback is important to us – it helps know how we’re doing, and shapes our future plans. For example, our gathering earlier this year in Southern California was inspired by ESN members who said they wanted more chances to meet face-to-face in last year’s survey. To say thanks for taking the time to give us your thoughts, we’re going to conduct a random drawing from all survey respondents to give away 3 InterVarsity Press book packages with a retail value up to $150. (Sorry, the drawing is for US addresses only.)

If you didn’t get the survey in your inbox, it’s probably because we have an old email address for you or because you haven’t officially joined ESN. Fear not: if you want to take the survey and enter the drawing, use this special link just for our blog readers:

ESN Membership Survey [Closed]

Be sure to complete the survey only once from whatever source. Entering the drawing multiple times won’t increase your odds of winning, anyway.

Thanks!

The ESN blog is taking a break for Memorial Day. If you’re in the US, may I recommend going to a small-town parade (or two, in out case) and getting together for a cookout with friends? I also hope that you’ll take some time to visit a cemetery or other special place to remember loved ones and meditate on Christ’s victory over the grave.

It is my pleasure to introduce Janine Giordano, who will be joining the Emerging Scholars Blog for a special series this month. Janine is an advanced graduate student in the University of Illinois Department of History, working on a PhD dissertation titled Between Religion and Politics: The Working Class Religious Left, 1886-1936. Janine has been a member of ESN for several years, as well as a leader in the UofI Graduate Christian Fellowship. Her review of the recent book Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion by Sharon Davies has also just appeared online at the Religion in American History blog.

Each Thursday in May, Janine will post part of a 4-part series exploring the struggle of younger scholars to cultivate both an authoritative voice and an audience. This series sprang from a Facebook note that Janine wrote recently, which raised some good questions about one’s life and work as a Christian in the academy and as an academic in the (evangelical) church. She described this series to me as “semi-scholarly and semi-personal,” which I think will be an excellent mix for this format.

Thanks for joining us, Janine! I’m looking forward to reading your posts and interacting with you on these issues.

Normally, we here at the Emerging Scholars Blog like to get our posts up first thing the morning, so that you (our loyal reader) can enjoy some reading while you have your morning coffee and delay checking your email. Well, the best laid plans etc. etc. This week’s ESN Book Club post on Chapter Four, “What Difference Could It Possibly Make?”, will be up later this afternoon. Thanks for your patience! (Assuming, of course, that you are being patient. If not, I’ve got some Bible studies you could read….)

I hope your summer has gone well, and that the new school year is an exciting time for you.

Starting next week, we are changing our post schedule slightly. For a while now, we’ve been posting on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. That has bothered the symmetrical side of our natures, so starting next week, new Emerging Scholars Blog posts will come your way on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Our usual schedule will be for me to post on Monday, Tom on Wednesday, and our new-and-improved Week-in-Review will go up on Fridays. Check in on those days for new posts, or you can subscribe to the blog by RSS or by email to be notified whenever there’s a new post.

Photo: I’m no Red Sox fan (I cheer for the ORIGINAL Red Stockings), but this Fenway perpetual calendar from joyosity (via Flickr) seemed an appropriate early September graphic.

The Week-in-Review will have a new format, too. In the past, we’ve struggled with sharing all of the good things that we’ve come across with you, and we know that you have limited time for reading. So the Week-in-Review will now be a “top five” feature – the top five articles or books that we’ve read, thought about, or been reminded of during the past week. We want to include your top five picks, as well. If you have a link or title you want us to include, send it to Tom or Mike for consideration.

Next week, look for my post on Monday (Labor Day – but I’ll be writing it on Thursday night to spend the weekend with my family) in which our 2nd ESN Online Book Club will be announced. I won’t ruin the surprise, except to say that, if you’re a Christian in the academy and you haven’t read this book, you need to do so. Specifically, you need to do so in October, along with Tom and me.

Have a great weekend!

When Tom Grosh and I launched the Emerging Scholars Blog last August, we had some ideas about what we wanted to write about, but very few ideas about what others would want to read or discuss. After 9 months and over 150 posts, we have a much better idea about what topics resonate with the community that is gathering around this blog. We’ve also learned the importance of consistency in blogging. We know how frustrating it can be to visit one of your favorite websites for new content and not finding any. So, today we are announcing a new editorial schedule and refined focus for the Emerging Scholars Blog. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I added a new feature to the blog that will generate a list of possibly related posts for the post you’re reading.  I think it might be a nice way to find other blog posts that you’re interested in, but it could also be distracting.  (After all, you probably have other important things to do than just reading this blog!) Let me know what you think in the poll below, and any other thoughts you might have in the comments.

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We’ve been getting some strange new user registrations, so I’ve just added reCAPTCHA to the blog’s commenting and registration features. reCAPTCHA is more than just an annoying little set of letters to type, though – it was developed at Carnegie Mellon to assist with the digitization of scanned books. Each time you complete one of these little forms, you’re helping make archival materials from the Internet Archive (a great source for public domain books and Grateful Dead shows, among other things) more accessible. How cool is that? Isn’t that worth a (small) inconvenience?

If you want to register with the blog, click here.  Then you won’t have to enter the reCAPTCHA letters next time you want to leave a comment.