The Emerging Scholars Blog

And if so, with whom did you watch it?

My family and I joined the rest of our Adult Bible Fellowship for our annual Souper Bowl Party. This has become a central tradition among our group of church friends: a Super Bowl watching party combined with a soup & chili cook-off. We have a few families in our group with houses large enough to host everyone comfortably, along with finished basements where the many, many kids can gather. We’re still waiting for Cincinnati’s turn, but our group includes a couple of Purdue grads who were very happy with this year’s outcome. At least it wasn’t the Steelers. :)

The Super Bowl is a powerful cultural liturgy in the United States, part of the “military-entertainment complex” that James K. A. Smith describes in Desiring the Kingdom. Here, he explicates the National Anthem ritual: Read the rest of this entry »

Have you been following the  inauguration?  Why or why not?  Does your campus have a special event?   Has any campus canceled classes all day or over the lunch hour?

With regard to the oath of office, my friend Andy Crouch had some questions regarding oath-taking which I found of interest.  What do you think about the taking of oaths?  What do they provide?  Do you take an oath in your profession, discipline, or institution?

As for praying for the President elect, our family used the framework of the one posted by Scot McKnight.  What have others prayed?  Does anyone have classic inaugural prayers which they find of great value?

OK, so this doesn’t have anything to do with academia – in fact, I once nearly lost a summer scholarship to Oxford because a professor thought that my interest in quick recall/College Bowl-type competitions would distract me from legitimate academic work. But hey, it’s still fun. Register online for the Jeopardy contestant quiz, which will be held January 27, 28, and 29. And, if you win, don’t forget who told you about it. :)

In case you haven’t already, I’d encourage you to read, practice, and share material from the brief CT article Eat, Drink, and Relax* with colleagues, family, friends, and house parties. 

Bonus:  how about this life vision?  More on it after Thanksgiving, unless you’d like to make a comment before then ;-)

Puritanism was impelled by the insight that all of life is God’s. The Puritans lived simultaneously in two worlds — the invisible spiritual world and the physical world of earthly existence. For the Puritans, both worlds were equally real, and there was no cleavage of life into sacred and secular. All of life was sacred. —  Leland Ryken. Worldly Saints: The Puritans As They Really Were.  Zondervan, 1986.

*Note:  Written by Elesha Coffman who was managing editor of Christian History & Biography. She is now working on a Ph.D in church history from Duke University.

InterVarsity’s Undergraduate Ministry at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) sponsored an Election Day panel on Religious and Secular Authority at Election Times.  What an excellent idea!  Why?  Because the panel, which included myself and a CMU History faculty, provided an opportunity to publicly present and wrestle with difficult culture-making concerns in real time.  I came away with the impression that some students, who wouldn’t let us go, couldn’t wait to field test some of the material in the midst of election coverage conversations. …

In my opening remarks, I briefly explored whether government would exist even without the fall, see below.  Have you given consideration to this topic?  If so, please comment.  If you have resource recommendations, please pass them along.  Seems like an important question for political scientists in particular, but of interest to many others as it informs our regular interaction with the state.

Would government exist even without the brokenness caused by Adam and Eve’s choice of willful disobedience? Now this is controversial, but my answer is Yes. Why? Government provides structure for the creative and healthy interaction of the various spheres of the Creation, e.g., creation care (remember naming of the animals in Genesis 2:19), marriage, family, school, business, guilds, arts parties. … But without the fall? As we live in the reality of the fall, it is difficult to envision how this would look except to say that God would rule over the structures as they serve Him to the blessing of all of creation. In addition, no use of force to suppress evil in the process of culture formation would not be necessary, except in restraining or resisting external evil influences/beings. So I’m asserting that government is not optional, even in the Garden of Eden at the beginning and the end of time. The various Utopian visions, both within and outside of the Church, fail to take into account the deep brokenness caused by the fall and the presence of evil across the layers of being, identity, and reality. My development of this perspective has been encouraged by The Basic Ideas of Calvinism (H. Henry Meeter, revised by Paul A. Marshall. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1990, pp. 77-90) and C.S. Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy, referred to some as The Space Trilogy. This requires more thought. …

Messiah College Historian of Science Ted Davis just passed along the below announcement. As one who has had the opportunity to read some of Robin Collins’ work and to hear some of his thoughts in the context of the Central Pennsylvania Forum for Religion and Science, I commend his work for your consideration.

I apologize for the late notice, but I only just learned about this.

Messiah College philosopher Robin Collins will appear in an interview on the PBS program “Closer to the Truth,” hosted by Robert Kuhn. This program will play throughout the United States and in some places oversees. It plays locally at 1:00 pm this Thursday, October 23, on WITF-HD, PBS channel 33.3. The program’s title and description are “Why a Fine-Tuned Universe? (HD, TVG) The many seemingly random occurrences that led to human existence are discussed.”

The “Closer to the Truth: Science, Meaning and the Future” website is at:
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/closertotruth/

A blogspot for “Closer to the Truth” is at:
http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.blogspot.com/

I apologize for not posting for quite some time.  But I have a good excuse as our family’s experiencing the explosive growth of a willful three year old who not only tirelessly explores but also agressively competes with a newborn and 8 year old twins for attention.  

Although my wife and I rejoice in our three year old’s overcoming of a number of developmental delays, we weren’t ready for so much to happen at the same time.  Further reflection offers that trying to do a fair amount of work at home in our kitchen area, which became a habit with the birth of our fourth child in June, creates a difficult atmosphere to accomplish tasks requiring longer periods of concentration.  Does anyone else live/work in a similar scenerio?  If so, how do you find the time and the ability focus to keep up with higher education’s continual demand for writing, presentations, and lectures? 

I’ll bet a few of you who don’t have families or kids face issues in finding the time and the ability to focus upon the materials required from you.  Please share a little about your context and how you try to address the obstacles which you face. 

BTW, I’ve been encouraged to set aside a time to write/prepare materials and not let anything violate it.  In addition, I’ve retired to the basement office with my hot chocolate for a lock down of sorts until lunch, which I’ll inevitably eat quite late as I get into extended periods of thought and composition.  So here I am getting the task done.  At least this one time ;-)

On Friday, I led an International Discussion Forum on Randy’s Last Lecture at U. of Pennsylvania, sponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the Penn Graduate Christian Fellowship, and Intercultural Friends.  Note:  Discussion questions posted here in PDF.

Afterward, there was an opportunity for participants to offer suggestions for future topics.  The international students in my discussion group desired an introduction to the practical elements of navigating American culture, one significant area being the management of money while studying in the U.S.

If you have suggestions of web resources/links on this topic or some helpful tips, please post them here.  To get us started below are some pieces from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s International Student Ministry Website:

Read the rest of this entry »

We apologize if you have tried to comment on any posts.  We weren’t just pretending to be open to dialogue while secretly preferring a monologue: there was a bug in the blog software preventing comments from posting.  But it’s all fixed now! Amen!