The Emerging Scholars Blog

In The Other Education (NY Times Opinion, November 26, 2009), David Brooks comments:

For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.

Bruce Springsteen serves as one of Brooks’ professors of second education and he enjoyed passing along this mentor to his 15 year old daughter via a Baltimore, MD, concert experience with 10,000 other disciples. He reflects on the process:

In fact, we all gather our own emotional faculty — artists, friends, family and teams. Each refines and develops the inner instrument with a million strings.

Who are your emotional faculty? How do they intersect with your educational faculty?  Do they inhabit two different spheres and/or stories?  Would you equate emotional faculty with spiritual faculty?

As we’re a few days into Advent, let us remember that the Father sent His Son, the very Word of God, to be one of us, among us in birth, life, and death.  He alone brings true Life, Meaning, and Truth through example, Word, new Life, Spirit, and union with His Body the Church. Now matter how great our heroes on the artistic, athletic, familial, lecture, or research platform, let us first turn to Christ Jesus for our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual education.

Note 1:  Additional Springsteen-U2 performances can be found on-line, including I still haven’t found what I’m looking for (Live at Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame) and Stand By Me [Bono seems to have broken his arm and needs a good friend to play his guitar (Live In Philadelphia 9.25.1987)].

Note 2:  Scot McKnight has come conversation regarding this article at Did you get educated by Bruce Springsteen?

Some of the Sesame Street cast members

In How We Got to Sesame Street; Art on Screen (The Chronicle of Higher Education. January 16, 2009), Evan R. Goldstein treats us to some of the history of Sesame Street, which celebrated 40 years on November 10.

In 1966 a group of friends gathered for a dinner party in Manhattan. As the evening was winding down, one of the guests, Lloyd N. Morrisett, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, turned to his host, a television executive named Joan Ganz Cooney, and asked a seemingly innocuous question: Can television educate young children? …

Almost four years after the Cooney dinner party, on November 10, 1969, Sesame Street showed up on public television across the country. The series was greeted with a torrent of gushing reviews. “The show moves, seduces, diverts, dazzles, amuses, and infects,” raved a writer at Variety. “Learning seems almost a byproduct of fun,” noted another critic. Children’s television would never be the same.”

It’s hard not to concede that education begins in the context of where one grows up and TV viewing is almost universal among the kids in our culture.  As such, would you credit Sesame Street or similar TV shows for your early childhood education (or at least some of it)?  Does Sesame Street Turns 40, But It Doesn’t Look a Day Over 25 resonate with you?

In the last 40 years, Sesame Street taught us to celebrate our differences, to bask in our own individuality and has continuously redefined “normal” to fit us all. Sesame Street taught us to read, to write, and yes, to count. It opened our eyes to cultures beyond our cul-de-sac and taught us global thinking. Sesame Street made us believe that we could be anything and that anything was possible. Sesame Street taught us to love music and laughter and learning.

A couple more questions to ponder/discuss:

Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street

1. How much emphasis should parents or the educational system as a whole place on educational TV for kids, youth, young adults, adults?
2. What has the educational experiment shown us about what kids can/do learn from TV?  Do they learn/absorb more than the basics, e.g., values, perspective on the real world?
3. Would you agree with the Robert Smith’s 40 Years Of Lessons On ‘Sesame Street’, which ran on NPR yesterday (11/10/2009)?  E.g., Children Are Adaptable. Keep It Simple.  The Children are always right (Note: Bonus on audio).
4. As one involved in higher education, do you have any recommendations for the next decade of Sesame Street as it seeks to educate kids across the spectrum or for parents as they seek to evaluate it’s role in the overall educational toolkit?  Note:  Sesame Street provides a peek of it’s future direction at It’s all new and better than ever as Sesame Street turns 40!

P.S.  Street Gang:  The Complete History of Sesame Street (Michael Davis. Viking. 2008) looks like a good read.  I found an excerpt posted here.

"Called Out of Darkness" Cover

As I mentioned in Week in Review: Connections Edition, Anne Rice’s Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) offers a number of comments on education.  The tension which Rice wrestled with in her call as a writer speaks to a reality encountered by many in the higher education, i.e., a confusing mixture of encouragement/discouragement offered by human beings in the role of shaping/teaching youth transitioning to their respective vocational roles in the larger culture.

“I took to the freedom of college, and navigating amid interesting classes and lecturers; and I responded strongly to complete lectures which enabled me to learn without the necessity of cumbersome and difficult books.   The classes in sociology and in journalism and in music appreciation were particularly illuminating.  The classes in English were discouraging.  I made less-than-perfect grades because I wasn’t considered an effective writer.  And the atmosphere of the English classes was disciplinary and confining.

‘We may assume,’ said the teacher, ‘that there are no Hemingways or Faulkners in this classroom.  Therefore we expect you to write in decent sentences.’  I loathed the very idea of assuming mediocrity.  I barely got by.

The one story I submitted to the college literary magazine was rejected.  I was told it wasn’t a story” (p.76).

So how did Anne Rice emerge as a creative writer without the support of her professors?  Peer encouragement, with memories extending back to 5th grade, and I would add the grace of God fused with the determined, educational vision nurtured by her parents.  Have you faced similar challenges to your sense of vocation/call?  If so, how have you overcome?  For those who are currently in the role of educators, what recommendations do you have regarding how to encourage creative students?

Note:  I find it of interest that Rice later

wrote novels about people who are shut out of life for various reasons.  In fact, this became a great theme of my novels — how one suffers as an outcast, how one is shut out of various levels of meaning and, ultimately out of human life itself (p.78).

In Friday’s Week in Review, we’ll have some links to articles highlighting the role/value of monsters.  At present, Rice’s books on Jesus are on my too read shelf. Can anyone comment as to how/whether these books highlight the theme of being an outcast?

Note:  Updated 10/28/2009, 8:45 am.

Did you catch last week’s New York Times article on Francis Collins?  Here’s how it begins:

He drives a Harley-Davidson, wears a black leather jacket on his back and his religion on his sleeve, and plays a custom guitar with big-name rock stars.  All that would seem to have nothing to do with Dr. Francis S. Collins’s day job as the new director of the National Institutes of Health. Except that at the institutes, such things do matter. …

First, there is the God issue. Dr. Collins believes in him. Passionately. And he preaches about his belief in churches and a best-selling book. For some presidential appointees, that might not be a problem, but many scientists view such outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia. … (Gardiner Harris, For N.I.H. Chief, Issues of Identity and Culture, NY Times, October 6, 2009)

As I’ve posted in other places, I find this charge of dementia of particular interest.  Why? I recently participated in a discussion regarding how a physician might diagnosis Jesus’ mental condition based upon Mark 3 and dementia had been raised. What is dementia?

Deterioration of intellectual faculties, such as memory, concentration, and judgment, resulting from an organic disease or a disorder of the brain, and often accompanied by emotional disturbance and personality changes. — “dementia.” The American Heritage® Stedman’s Medical Dictionary. Houghton Mifflin Company. 13 Oct. 2009. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dementia>.

In this case, it appears to be an off-handed manner of name calling, i.e., declaring Collins mentally ill, even insane for his outspoken religious commitment in order to discredit his leadership.  What do you think?  Part of our exploration of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship involves wrestling with how one responds to such comments, note:  this case highlights the war between science and religion/faith.

Have you ever faced such challenges?  If so, how have you responded?  How should Collins respond?  Should he stop wearing religion on his sleeve and just get his job done at the N.I.H., should he cut back on public declarations of faith, or should he keep on keeping on the way he is?

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.

Do schools fail democracy, as argued by E.D. Hirsch Jr., in How Schools Fail Democracy (The Chronicle Review, 9/28/2009)?  Personally, I have been frustrated by public education’s emphasis on skill development for check-lists, competitions, and test-taking with low reference to exposing students to common culture, core values, and must reads (i.e., classics).  As a parent, I have slowly come to own the counter-cultural responsibility of intentionally teaching our common knowledge, but ironically it demands a lot of effort to share who we are (and our roots) while still maintaining ties to the larger culture!

Stepping back to look at the big picture, how do educators come to agreement upon the truths/reality which are to be imparted by schools in the United States of America, e.g., what books are to be read over the course of one’s fifteen minutes of reading per day at home?*  Do Education degree programs have a shared culture on which they can agree and impart to their students as the foundation from which our future direction emerges?  Can they, along with concerned parents/communities, challenge the common cultural definition of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness before the consequences run over us (if they already have not done such)?

Too many Americans are in the linguistic shadows now—possibly close to a majority. Despite intense efforts driven by the No Child Left Behind Act, the language abilities of our 17-year-olds have remained stuck at the steeply declined levels of the 1970s, while the language gap between white students on one side and black and Hispanic students on the other remains distressingly and immovably large. Read the rest of this entry »

Norman Borlaug’s Nobel Prize Lecture – The death of Borlaug, one of the founders of the Green Revolution, sparked numerous tributes (NY Times, WSJ, Guardian). Gregg Easterbrook in the WSJ estimates that Borlaug’s agricultural work has saved more than 1 billion lives and counting. Leave it to GetReligion, however, to highlight the link between his Lutheran roots and his agricultural work. In his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, Borlaug cites Genesis 41, Isaiah 8 and Isa. 35, Joel 1, and Amos 4 as justification for both his work and his hope in its success. [It reminds me of Walter Bradley's work that won the Bosscher-Hammond Prize at Following Christ. ~ Mike]

The Game of Ghost Writing – Doug Lederman at Inside Higher Ed reviews a couple of new studies that examine the practice of scientific “ghost writing”: journal articles written by pharmaceutical companies or other corporate interests but published under the names of academics who had little to nothing to do with the research. (Mike’s note: I agree with the commenter who observes that “ghost writing” is hardly the term for this practice.)

Maimonides on Trustworthy Sources (Harper’s) – Reader David O’Hara sent us this great quote from Jewish medieval philosopher Maimonides.

More on the challenge of humility.  What does it mean “to serve” and “put the interest of others” ahead of one’s own in the context of higher education?  Bearing the Burden reviews some recent posts on how

the service burdens are unfairly distributed, falling mainly on academic do-gooders, “who work hardest for the institution” yet “reap the fewest material benefits because they publish at a slower pace.” … academic do-gooders need to learn to just say no. … “those of us who overwork are covering up for and enabling those who under perform. Most universities have no mechanism for forcing tenured people teach better, teach more, show up at office hours, give students responsible advice about their program of study, or do the committee work they have been assigned” – Gabriela Montell, Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/18/2009.

Lots of provoking material in Academic Bait-and-Switch, Part 2 (Henry Adams, Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/15/2009).

1. Freshman disinterested in reading, mastering the basics of writing sentences, and earning their grades as the “interesting distinctions between the worldviews of freshmen and graduate students at Elite National U.”
2. A summary of the graduate student’s encounter with a parent over the “F” he had awarded their son.
3. The final sentence of the essay reads, “If the Blunts didn’t want their son taught by a TA, I wondered why they sent him to Elite National U, but I thought it wise to keep that to myself.”

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. …

Do we enter the fall with the anticipation of colleagues coming to faith? Several years ago, InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministry Staff Christian Anible wrote The Conversion of a Scholar: A Reflection on Augustine’s Confessions.  Take a few minutes to read his essay and prayerfully consider who God has called you to be present with in the coming minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, even decades.  To God be the glory!

we must not succumb to the temptation to impose Augustine’s story as a kind of template for evangelism among today’s scholars. While some commonalities certainly exist, every individual is unique, and the business of making disciples cannot be reduced to technique. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Augustine’s conversion is that it took time — years of time! In this, Monica is our best model. Her patience and faithfulness in prayer reveals a confidence, not in her ability to persuade the one she loved, but in a greater Lover whose wooing would finally win out.

Here’s how Augustine relays his conversion and the response of his mother, taken from Book VIII, Chapter XII of Confessions: Read the rest of this entry »

How well does film convey material from classic literature? Can film be used to introduce a book and draw people into reading or does it stall the imagination, even inoculate against digging into the original text?  Any classroom or personal experience(s) to share?

What brings the question to mind? The recent release of the trailer for Tim Burton giving a stab at Alice in Wonderland (2010) with Johnny Depp (Mad Hatter), Anne Hathaway (White Queen), Helena Bonham Carter (Red Queen) and Mia Wasikowska (Alice). With my 9 year old twins, I’d be Mad as a Hatter to introduce Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland w/this rendering of the classic tale,* but if I was a college professor hoping to stir interest in literature?  Hmm. …

*I’m not text only, I confess to enjoying a conversation regarding the value of John Tenniel’s illustrations ;-)