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 »

Michael Ruse’s Do We Need Philosophy? (Chronicle of Higher Education. 8/15/2010) masterfully weaves together reflections on the death of his colleague David Hull*, transitions in philosophy, the increasing costs of higher education, and lamplighting in philosophy.  A significant part of the piece focuses upon Mark Taylor’s** NY Times Op-Ed recommendation to consolidate philosophy departments at Columbia and NYU (Academic Bankruptcy. 8/14/2010).*** Ruse eloquently concludes:

I think that David’s life was truly worthwhile. But was he a bit like a lamplighter, someone who had a good career in his day but for which we no longer have need? Are we getting to the point where philosophy, if it is to be taught at all, could just be a subgroup within an English department? (Wouldn’t they just love that, with their obsession about Heidegger!) ****  And if philosophy goes, what about classics and more? What about departments of religion?!

Quite apart from the economic worries I expressed above, I cannot but feel that something will be lost if universities do just become glorified technical institutions, or business schools. Personally, I don’t think you can claim to be an educated person if you have never done any philosophy. With Socrates I agree that the unexamined life is not worth living, and unlike the average scientist or engineer in my experience (Richard Dawkins being at the top of my list), I don’t think you can do philosophy on your own after work in the pub. I think that knowing something of the great thinkers of the past is vital.

But then don’t forget that I am only five years younger than was David Hull, and, like him, I have had a full-time career as a philosopher. Maybe you are just hearing the sad lament of another lamplighter.

So, what do you think, “Do we need philosophy?”  Is the economic downturn (and/or shifts in our culture) leading toward the end of various specializations in philosophy?  Should the focus of philosophy be upon ensuring each student has a class (or 2) in living the examined life and/or informing the faculty of each class in how to incorporate reflections/musings upon living the examined life? Reflecting upon my studies at Grove City College, the core curriculum provided a glimpse of philosophers and worldviews in the context of following Christ.  I took logic as an elective.  All of these classes, and the others in the core curriculum, have been foundational in providing perspective for my daily work on campus and the blog.  In addition, the material in these classes (and my other classes in general) have been a “para-academy” gift to offer in many ministry contexts.  So, “yes, we need philosophy.”  Of course maybe, I’m actually arguing for a certain stream of philosophy founded upon Building a Christian Worldview (developed further in Revolutions in Worldview: Understanding the Flow of Western Thought. What do you think?

*For more by Ruse visit Philosophy of Science Association.

**Mark Taylor is the chairman of the religion department at Columbia University.  In addition, he’s the author of the forthcoming Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities, click here to check out a Chronicle of Higher Ed Commentary (8/8/2010) adapted from the book.

***Related article of interest: Stop Admitting Ph.D. Students (Inside Higher Ed. 8/18/2010) by Monica J. Harris, professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky.

****Update (8/18/2010, 8:50 am): I just finished reading Okla Elliott’s Guest Review: Logic: The Question of Truth (Translated by Thomas Sheehan. Indiana University Press, 2010) for Inside Higher Ed (8/17/2010). Anyone have insights to share regarding the question of truth?

How public are you about your private life in tweets, Facebook, blogs, wikis, email, phone, snail mail, articles, books, presentations, interviews?  Very few of us will have our life and vocation examined by Congress, but none-the-less have you considered …

• What your wider circle of acquaintances (or even the larger public) know about your daily life?
• How they came to know what they know?  Note:  maybe you’ve chosen to avoid social media, post anonymously, or post under a pseudonym.
• Whether the communication about your life reflects Christ-likeness in  mood, word, action?

These questions came to mind when reading The Mood Is the Message (Scott McLemee. Inside Higher Ed. 6/30/2010), a Intellectual Affairs piece on the Library of Congress’ archiving of Twitter files.  Yes, that means the emerging discipline of Twitter Studies ;-)

Before giving a thumbnail account of some of this work – which, as the bibliography I’ve consulted suggests, seems intrinsically interdisciplinary – it may be worth pointing out something mildly paradoxical: the very qualities that make Twitter seem unworthy of study are precisely what render it potentially quite interesting. The spontaneity and impulsiveness of expression it encourages, and the fact that millions of people use it to communicate in ways that often blur the distinction between public and private space, mean that Twitter has generated an almost real-time documentary record of ordinary existence over the past four years — Scott McLemee. The Mood Is the Message. Inside Higher Ed. 6/30/2010.

Out of curiosity, let us know what you think …

PS.  Please pass the poll along to all your friends on Twitter ;-)

PPS.  I must confess that I still have not joined the ranks of Twitter.  Some conversation from over a year ago at Who Do You Follow on Twitter?

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 »

Returning to our series with Nathan Foster, Assistant Professor of Social Work, Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI.  As you may remember, the first post focused upon how a private person, such as Nathan, wrote such an open book about his life, struggles, family, and vocation.  In the second post, we explored becoming a wisdom chaser in higher education, strained family relationships, and discerning the call to higher education.

Today, we’ll consider

1. power in the classroom from the perspective of the teacher
2. taking the first steps in teaching
3. how InterVarsity Christian Fellowship can journey with academics

And in case you were wondering, Nathan’s keeping an eye on the series and would love to respond to your comments. So please, take advantage of the opportunity!

Thomas B. Grosh IV:  I heard Andy Crouch speak at Biblical Seminary on Playing God: Christian Reflections on the Use and Misuse of Power.  He spent a fair amount of time talking about the power he had being on stage behind a podium, with a microphone in a crowded room giving a presentation.  How do you deal with power in the classroom situation, as you refer to earlier, the students desire to come and learn from someone with the “answers?”  How do you use power creatively, “rightly”?

What a great topic for a presentation. That’s great that Andy acknowledged his power.  Sometimes I think we ignore the idea of us having power because it makes us uncomfortable, so we say we’re not powerful. But we’re extremely powerful in teaching, also in writing and speaking.  Not to mention the other social privileges our society rewards people based on gender, race, age, income and sexuality.  I’m a straight white male, the world is controlled by people similar to me, that gives me power.  So I would say acknowledge it’s there, acknowledge we have power.  Don’t deny it.  Power can be used for good, but we can’t use it for good if we’re denying it.  The way I use that in the classroom is realizing that I have the power to bless people, but I also have the power to destroy people. You remember this don’t you?  When we have a professor who criticizes us, it stings.  But, it’s also thought provoking.  Whether we realize it or not, comments that professors make hold a lot of power.  Here’s how I use it in social work.  I try and see students most of the time as better than they see themselves and intentionally call out their strengths.  If I see a student who has a lot of gifts and they’re unaware of it, I call that out.  “You have an incredible ability to do this or that.  Here are some things that you can work on.”  I wrote about this in the chapter on expectations [Chapter 13: “Rising and Falling to Assumptions”]. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I began a Chasing Wisdom series based up my Skype interview with Nathan Foster, Assistant Professor of Social Work, Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI.  In the first post, I focused upon how a private person, such as Nathan, wrote such an open book about his life, struggles, family, and vocation.

Today, we’ll explore

1. becoming a wisdom chaser in higher education
2. discerning the call to higher education
3. being present to one’s family

Next week we’ll consider

1. power in the classroom from the perspective of the teacher
2. taking the first steps in teaching
3. how InterVarsity Christian Fellowship can journey with academics

And in case you were wondering, Nathan’s keeping an eye on the series and would love to respond to your comments. So please, take advantage of the opportunity!

Thomas B. Grosh IV:   What do academics chase? Is it wisdom?  Based on insights from your journey and that of your father’s, what would you say to encourage Emerging Scholars to become wisdom chasers?

Nathan Foster: Your question about education and wisdom is great. I worked at a place once and they didn’t like to hire people with advanced degrees.  And I said, “That’s crazy.  Why not?”  They thought [those with advanced degrees] become very arrogant and lost their ability to be teachable.  Don’t get me wrong education’s great and I’m a huge fan of it.  Personally I love to learn.  But it’s good for me to remember that there are potentially negative consequences from education.  We can get a little stuck up and we can lose some of our humility.  My wife calls it professoritis.  We tend to think that we’re right about things.  Now part of that comes from certain expectations.  When you’re teaching, people expect you to have the answers and they look to you to have the answers.  And so we get used to being right.  I’ve found it very seldom that students really challenge us on some of what we spout off.

I got a couple of good disciplines I try to practice to fight my professoritis. … Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned in Wisdom Chaser: Insights on Parent-Child Relationships, I found reading Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet (Nathan Foster. InterVarsity Press. 2010) to be a great blessing.  In follow-up, I contacted Nathan Foster (Assistant Professor of Social Work, Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI) to chat about some topics which I thought would be particularly applicable to members of the Emerging Scholars Network.

First we’ll explore how a private person, such as Nathan, wrote such an open book about his life, struggles, family, and vocation.  In coming weeks we’ll explore …

1. becoming a wisdom chaser in higher education
2. discerning the call to higher education
3. being present to one’s family
4. power in the classroom from the perspective of the teacher
5. taking the first steps in teaching
6. how InterVarsity Christian Fellowship can journey with academics

And in case you were wondering, Nathan is following the series and would love to respond to your comments. So please, take advantage of the opportunity!

Thomas B. Grosh IV:  How do you come to write something so personal?  Did you have a sense from the start that you’d be writing something like that or were you just keeping a journal and it became a book?  How does that happen?  How did writing a book about your journey up mountains with your father come to your mind?

Nathan Foster:  I always knew I wanted to write.  I was just waiting for the right project to come along.  It is probably no coincidence that when I write it tends to be very honest, somewhat raw.  That just personally fits me. Most things that I do, I try to have that flavor.  So that’s how my relationships go.  Some of that just stems back to

1. growing up and just wanting things to be honest and real.
2. being a counselor and therapist, where you’re dealing with real life stuff and you lose interest in playing games. Read the rest of this entry »

Janine Giordano

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

I have tried to use this blog series to draw attention to the long train of pivotal, often harrowing decisions that wannabe-scholars must make on their way from interested college student to professor. In every choice we make along the rocky road of graduate education—not just in our choice of advisor, dissertation topic and research community, but in the all communities and cultural movements we join outside of our workspace—we are ultimately making decisions that construct the design, reach and pitch of our megaphone. Long before we ever become professors, we have already made quite a few decisions about whom we want to identify with, whom we want to hear us, and where we are going to plant ourselves for ongoing dialogue.

Some of us will build an academic megaphone that can be tuned to engage with local church communities. Others will be content to be heard by a small community of colleagues at their speaking voice, but build a megaphone outside of their research fields that speaks to other concerns they find important. I have tried to argue that as much as the shape of our megaphone depends on the communities that allow us entry (be those Church Sunday School classes or academic research groups), they are also dependent on the communities we choose to dig in and ultimately plant ourselves. At various points in graduate school we might be given “the microphone” to speak and be heard, but it is the megaphone we build that earns us the name of scholar.

As I have said before, a lot of the material on spiritual and intellectual formation as a “Christian Scholar” that I have encountered in graduate school is really tailored to people who already have pretty well-defined research interests, posts of academic authority, and long term job contracts with some degree of academic freedom. Our examples in the “Integration of Faith and Learning” are so often either well-regarded scholars who are using their megaphones prudently, or professors at sectarian universities whose job description already encourages, if not requires, such work. Rarely, I find, do we make room for discussion among graduate students in big, secular universities about the many, cost-laden choices that go into how we build our communities.

We must admit that there are costs to spending so much time in fellowship with other Christians during graduate school. In choosing to mold ourselves around the personalities and dynamics of one group of people, we are choosing to not to do the same with another group of people. We need to be praying throughout this process that God would give us the boldness and courage to take on the voice that He is calling us to take. For some of us, this voice is provocative and controversial; for others it is understated and humble. The megaphone that some of us build will be specially tuned for the community of “Christian Scholars,” but the megaphone that others build will be specially tuned for communities that only enhance our anonymity in the social networks of Christian believers.

And that, I want to encourage other Christian graduate students, is okay. You are not more of a Christian if the megaphone that God helps you build is specially tuned to audiences that identify as “believers.” Some of us, like me, have spent years banging our heads against the wall to little avail, trying to get communities of self-identifying Christians to listen to us. I hardly thought then about the possibility that the megaphone God was building for me was not calibrated to that audience, but now it seems so clear. God plants us in all kinds of communities for all kinds of purposes. Our job is to dig, plant and bear fruit, right there where He planted us. When we wonder whom our megaphone is calibrated for and where we stand, we ought to pray that God would give us eyes to see ourselves as He sees us. None of us ought to bury our talents because we fear the risks involved in using them.

When Mike first offered me the opportunity to post here, about a month ago, I was thrilled that I would finally have “an audience.” I imagined that I might finally take the opportunity to vent through my myriad frustrations with graduate education and Christian community, but God led me differently. As soon as I realized that I already had an audience assembled before me, I not only stopped feeling suffocated, but I realized that it was I who had allowed myself, because of my expectations about my megaphone, to ever be placed in such a suffocating bubble! In some ways we find our voice, and in other ways we build our megaphone, but all of this needs to be done with a great deal of prayer and discernment.

My encouragement to Christian graduate students and scholars is twofold: a) Praise God for the voice that He has given you, and get to know the communities to which you are called, for which your voice is calibrated. Beware that the communities God calls you to may not be communities you would have chosen for yourself. And b) You are finite and your community will be finite. Embrace this as a blessing that encourages humility and reminds you of your humanity, not a thorn in your side.

On that note, I ought to close this as I began and practice what I preach. If you agree, disagree, or want to talk more about these things, then in addition to commenting below, feel free to friend me on facebook or send me an email (my full name at gmail.com). Virtual communities are a wonderful way to build real communities. And last, thanks so much to Mike and Tom for inviting me to write here this month. I really appreciate this blog, and it’s been quite an honor to take part in it. Stay cool this Memorial Day Weekendl!

When I returned from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Graduate & Faculty Team Meetings, I found my family wanting me 24/7, at least for a few days ;-)  In my brief moments of spare time, I picked up Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet (Nathan Foster. InterVarsity Press. 2010).   In Wisdom Chaser, Nathan relates the story of his strained relationship with his famous father, i.e., Richard Foster, academic/teacher and author of several spiritual formation books including Celebration of Discipline.  The below excerpt kept me turning the pages to find out how father-son reconciliation occurred through mountain top experiences.

Wisdom Chaser Cover

As the years went by, it seemed I [Nathan] saw less and less of my father [Richard] and cared less and less about his absence.  At some point I shifted from wanting him to be home, counting down the days to when he would return, and eagerly greeting him at the airport, to not knowing when he was gone or home and caring even less.  As a child, I was proud of my dad.  Hearing him speak to crowds filled me with excitement; perhaps he would mention my name, or tell a story about me, or in some way acknowledge his home life.  At first I think I accepted that God was using my dad to help people.  Later I felt mildly ambivalent about the fact that God seemed to need my dad.  Somewhere along the way, my feelings shifted to embarrassment and anger that Dad had “holier work” to do.  By thirteen I was filled with rage, and I shut down. — Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet (Nathan Foster. InterVarsity Press. 2010, p.29).

As you may guess there is much more to the story, such as Richard’s experience as a youth with his family, writing habits, founding of Renovare’, slow pace of life/climb … and Nathan’s travels/thoughts through his teens & twenties.  Now I’m no Richard or Nathan Foster, but with regard to my own travels and intense focus upon various tasks for ministry in higher education, I found the book convicting.

First responses which I made in my house …

1. Included in our family’s dinner devotions the discipline of asking each member of the family the best/worst part of the day
2. Began reading Gary Schmidt’s retelling of Pilgrims Progress (Eerdmans Press, 2008) chapter by chapter with the twins before bedtime … seeking to reinstate our sporadic bedtime readings.
3. Declined a ministry invitation to preserve a time with family during a stretched summer.
4. Cleared time to celebrate my wife Theresa’s birthday (May 6) and fully attend to the family while she runs Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure (Pittsburgh, PA) with her mom.

First response with the Emerging Scholars Network …

Writing this post, which took much longer than I thought it would.  Why?  Much to talk about with regard to parent-child relationships and higher education (topic of some future posts).  And because I  took the time to soak in the great video of a recent conversation between Nathan and his father at Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI. Why was the conversation at Spring Arbor?  Because Nathan’s on faculty as an Assistant Professor of Social Work!  Refreshing material.  I’d encourage you to check out the clips, maybe show them as part of a campus discussion group and pass them along to others whom you think would find them of interest.

PS.  Not only has Nathan not given up on following Christ, getting to know his father, serving in higher education, but also he’s not given up on becoming a father himself.  Nathan’s married and has two children of his own.

PPS.  InterVarsity Press has an excellent Question-Answer author interview (text) posted here.

HT to Christine Sine who posted Tom Sine is Blogging (April 13, 2010).  Looking forward to Tom’s entering of the blogosphere ;-)  His first question is with regard to what difference Easter/the resurrection is making in our troubled world, not just our personal lives.  To show that ESN’s thinking about this question, I shared some material from Amish Grace and Recognizing the Messiah.  What comments/thoughts do you have to share?

PS.  Wish I could point to a post on Desiring the Kingdom of God (James K. A. Smith. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. 2009).  But even with the requirement to have read parts of it by the end of the month for a faculty ministry discussion and  Byron Borger, Hearts & Minds Books, calling it one of the most important books of 2009, it still sits in queue.  Anyone who has read it is welcome to comment as to whether it helps address Tom Sine’s question.

“One of the truly significant books of the year. . . . In this deeply philosophical study, [Smith] invites us to ask how to relate worship, life, and a radically Christian way of life. . . . Can universities help us become Godly dreamers? A huge, huge question, and this is a book worth working on for a long school year. Highly recommended.” — Byron Borger, Hearts & Minds Books