The Emerging Scholars Blog

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. 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.

1.  All-Nighters: Failing to Fall (Siri Hustvedt, NY Times Opinionator, March 3, 2010):  Do you find your imagination flourishing as you fall asleep, so much so that you fail to fall asleep?  How do you address not being able to fall asleep when you have a lot of work?

2.  Learning From the Sin of Sodom (Nicholas Kristof, NY Times Op-Ed, 2/27/2010): A liberal columnist looks as the influence of evangelicals on U.S. support  for international health, development, and humanitarian activities. It is an interesting comment on the changing tone of many secular commentators toward faith-based organizations. — Link/comment passed along by a post doc at whose Graduate Christian Fellowship (GCF) a Political Theory PhD student shared (among other things) that he didn’t think human rights were possible without a theistic, i.e, Christian framework.

3. Religion Among the Millennials: The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently a report in February detailing the religious beliefs and practices of “Millennials” (people ages 18 to 29). Here’s how Pew introduces their report:

By some key measures, Americans ages 18 to 29 are considerably less religious than older Americans. Fewer young adults belong to any particular faith than older people do today. They also are less likely to be affiliated than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations were when they were young.

4. InterVarsity’s History on Campus: Two recents events brought InterVarsity’s history on college campuses into the present.  First, one of our earliest campus planters, Grace Koch Belden, passed on to glory at the age of 93. Grace’s story was told on IV’s website in 2007 – she organized Swarthmore’s InterVarsity chapter as a student, then traveled throughout the East Coast as a staff member, touching other campuses you might have heard of – Harvard, Johns Hopkins, places like that.

Second, InterVarsity held its Asian American Ministries Staff Conference this past week. Check out this post on the event from Kathy Khang. Kathy notes that InterVarsity hired Gwen Wong in 1948 . Like Grace, Gwen was a true pioneer, launching student work in Hawaii before moving to the Philippines in 1953 to found the IFES campus ministry there. Praise God for these two faithful women who laid the groundwork for our ministry today.

Books

Tom’s been digging into Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Church Fathers (Donald Fairbairn, InterVarsity Press, 2009) and finding it to be an engaging combination of Scripture, quotes from the Church Fathers, and author commentary.  Tom will be sharing some quotes in the coming weeks, but if you can’t wait, swing by Google Preview.  HT: Dan and Miller.

Mike is pretty excited about the new book from Gerald McDermott, The Great Theologians. McDermott profiles 11 key theologians in the history of the church, such as Augustine, Origen, Aquinas, Luther, and more recent thinkers like Hans Urs von Balthasar. If it’s as good as his 2007 book, God’s Rivals, it will be a great introduction for anyone who wants to be introduced to these important thinkers and pastors.

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. 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.

1. Peace is Patriotic: Anabaptists and the National Anthem (By Duane Shank, Sojourners, 3/3/2010): Did you attend a college sporting event where the national anthem of the host country was not played? Goshen College, a residential Christian liberal arts college rooted in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition, has just started to play an instrumental version and it’s caused quite a stir. For Goshen’s perspective visit National anthem dialogue and implementation to continue at Goshen College (Press Release by President Jim Brenneman, 2/17/2010). Are they becoming conservative Christian or enculturated/liberal as they seek to be hospitable to guest teams?  HT:  Fred.

2.  Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature & Culture by ESN member Madelaine Hron (assistant professor in the Department of English and Film at Wilfrid Lauriern University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) has just been has been shortlisted for the prestigious The Raymond Klibansky Prize, for Best Book in the Humanities published in Canada. For more on the nomination click here.  For ESN’s 1/22/2009 pre-release author interview visit here.

3. What do younger faculty want? According to Harvard’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), they don’t want long hours, constant mobility, or career success at the expense of a good family and personal life (Chronicle, March 4). This is based on interviews with 16 “Generation X” faculty members at a variety of schools.  The full report can be downloaded from COACHE’s website as a PDF.

4. The State of the Humanities: Inside Higher Ed reports the latest results of the Humanities Departmental Survey.  The full report warrants closer reading, but IHE’s summary echoes earlier articles from ESN about the state of the humanities:

At a time when many humanities professors are worried about the future of the tenure track, the data in the report will only add to those concerns — especially because it predates the freezes on tenure-track hiring that have been instituted at so many colleges. Generally, the fields that have the highest percentages of tenured faculty members are among the smallest disciplines. And while the percentages vary, use of non-tenure-track faculty members is significant throughout. Further, the data back up a point made increasingly by activists for adjuncts: that significant numbers of academics are working full time, off the tenure track.

5. Alan Jacobs Makes Mike Jealous: Maybe it’s a bad idea to get a PhD in the humanities, but Alan Jacobs (English, Wheaton) recently reminded me [Mike] why I have always loved the scholarly study of literature.  On his New Atlantis blog Text Patterns, Jacobs recently reported the completion of his latest book project, a new critical edition of W. H. Auden’s important long poem The Age of Anxiety. Jacobs writes:

I have worked as hard on this project as I have ever worked on anything, and at the moment I am pleased and proud. There’s something especially rewarding about doing all this work — visiting libraries and archives, working through vast tracts of mostly useless materials, trying to decipher Auden’s terrible handwriting, comparing multiple editions of the poem, reading much of what Auden read as he wrote the poem, carefully marking up the typescript in order to preserve the poem’s intricate formatting — not for the sake of my own critical reputation, but in order to make the work of a poet I love more useful and accessible and comprehensible. I can truly call this a labor of love. But boy, am I tired.

If my GRE were up-to-date, I would have sent off three applications by the end of that paragraph. The book will be published later this year by Princeton UP, I assume as part of their Auden critical editions series.

Bonus:

Donald Kraybill, PhD, (highlighted in Amish Grace & Pop Culture) teaches on The Upside Down Kingdom.

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. 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.

1.  Stand Up While You Read This! (Olivia Judson, NY Times Opinionator, 2/23/2010):  an evolutionary biologist warns her reader:

Your chair is your enemy.  It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you. …

Probably much easier to address by those who work in labs, go into the field, pace as we think/present.  Some tips in the article for those who sit a lot.  Any to add?

2.   Academic Bait-and-Switch, Part 6 (Henry Adams, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/25/2010).

… Today I wince at my naïveté. Studying literature doesn’t guarantee moral improvement any more than studying chemistry, economics, or plumbing does. I should have accepted that in my first year of graduate work at Elite National University, because the evidence was all around me, but I clung to my childish belief in the power of literature. In my second year, when my fellow teaching assistants elected me their representative to the first-year-composition committee, I even had a notion that I could help change the program for the better. …

The foundation of one’s vision for daily life, let alone culture making, when entering the messy milieu of any profession is vital.  What is yours?  Note: keep in mind that Henry Adams, the pseudonym for a professor of English at a liberal-arts college in the Midwest, shares his perspective in the Bait-and-Switch series.

3. Before you follow the link, take a guess on What They’re Reading on College Campuses (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/25/2010) or maybe I should make the question What  bestsellers did Barnes & Noble and the Follett Higher Education Group sell in January 2010?  Where do you draw your up and coming must reads, someplace like the Weekly Book List (Compiled by Nina C. Ayoub, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/22/2010)?

4. Do you practice the Examen? From our colleagues at The Well, Ann Boyd has written an excellent introduction to the Examen. This classical spiritual exercise was created by Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and it has served Christians from many traditions well over the centuries. If you journal already, or you are looking for a new way to reflect on your life and God’s work, check out Ann’s article.

5. New website for Books & Culture: ESN partner Books & Culture has launched a new website. If you like what you see, why not head over the ESN Subscription Discounts page and subscribe to B&C for only $5 a year?

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. 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.

1. Why Harvard Students Should Study More Religion (Lisa Miller, Newsweek): A look at Harvard’s (lack of) religion in its undergraduate curriculum, with special attention to Louis Menand’s attempt to include a course called “Reason and Faith” in Harvard’s revised education requirements. The article quotes a couple of very interesting, and very different, points of view;

“My colleagues fear that taking religion seriously would undermine everything a great university stands for,” the Rev. Peter Gomes, Harvard’s chaplain and a professor of Christian history, told me. “I think that’s ungrounded, but there it is.”Steven Pinker says his main objection to the 2006 proposal that students be required to take a course in a Reason and Faith category was that it seemed to make reason and faith equal paths to truth. “I very, very, very much do not want to go on the record as suggesting that people should not know about religion,” he told me. “But reason and faith are not yin and yang. Faith is a phenomenon. Reason is what the university should be in the business of fostering.”

2. More religion in higher education: Inside Higher Ed featured two opinion articles about the role of religion and theology in academic disciplines – “On Teaching Christianity” by Adam Kosko, who argues that religion classes need to spend more time studying the actual theology of religious figures and movements; and “Everywhere and Nowhere” by Kevin Schultz and Paul Harvey, which takes another look at the place of religion within historical studies.

More links after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. 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.

Photo Credit: Philadelphia’s Swann Memorial Fountain, blizzard-style, from Walking Philly via Flickr. Click for a larger image.

1. Is there a place in the academy for the Christian worldview? (Jesus Creed) RJS, a regular guest blogger at Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog and a science professor at a major research university, shares a recent conversation with a friend about the role of the Christian worldview in the university. A brief except:

If one accepts methodological naturalism consistently as the basis for academic inquiry and rational thought,  it follows that Christianity and religious belief have no place in the university, or in rational discussions, except to do autopsy on them.   We must concede that a scientific-historical understanding of Christianity must be built with no reference to the possibility that He rose from the dead.  We must accept that our own beliefs must be explained in evolutionary and neurological terms, without reference to the possibility that they are true.

The whole thing (and the ensuing conversation) is worth reading. Read the rest of this entry »

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. 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.

1. New online journal for student research: The Chronicle reports on Student Pulse, a new online journal for student research. Some good points from the Chronicle’s commenters about copyright and usage issues, but still an interesting and inspiring idea for sharing early academic work.

2.  Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally (Natalie Angier, NY Times, February 1, 2010).  Leaning forward with anticipation regarding what we might learn from the immensely popular field called embodied cognition or reclining (even if only a little bit) and giving it a quizzical look?

3.   Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching (David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 24, 2010). Any suggestions or encouraging case studies to share?

4.  Teaching Matters: Rethinking the Hybrid Course (Steve Fox, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31, 2010).  What do you think of Fox’s suggestions regarding Hybrid courses?  Have you taken or taught any Hybrid courses?  What recommendations would you add, in particular with regard to the management of a classroom blog?  Any encouraging case studies to share?

Books

5. “The most important person in the world”: I (Mike) was not familiar with the HeLa cell line until I read Dwight Garner’s NYTimes review of the new book by Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Ms. Lacks, an uneducated, African American Virginia tobacco farmer who died of cervical cancer at the age of 31, contributed the famously immortal cells that have

helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization,” Ms. Skloot writes. HeLa cells were used to learn how nuclear bombs affect humans, and to study herpes, leukemia, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS. They were sent up in the first space missions, to see what becomes of human cells in zero gravity.

The problem? Ms. Lacks never gave permission for her cells to be used for scientific experiments, and researchers continued to draw samples from her descendants without explaining why, one part of the tragic legacy of American medical treatment of African Americans. From Garner’s review:

As one of Mrs. Lacks’s sons says: “She’s the most important person in the world, and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”

This looks like an important – and discussion-provoking – book.

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? Anything special with some time off or is there too much going on with the holiday?

As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. 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.

1. Expanding Your Reach: Want to spread your ideas beyond the sound of your voice? The higher ed website ProfHacker.com shares some tips and tricks for effective “lecturecasting.” Here’s a sample, on the importance of having a script:

If you are going formal, make sure you have a script.  Even if you aren’t going formal, its always good to have some talking points.  If you are going to record your talking head (as opposed to talking over some slides or video material), put the script at eye level somewhere.  There is nothing worse than having to look down at a sheet of paper to figure out what you need to talk about next.  I put my script up on one of my other monitors (which I’ve got positioned just behind my laptop – the machine on which I do the actual recording).  This way, I can scroll through the script without looking away at all.

2. Keeping Up with Journals: Another practical article from ProfHacker.com, offering a number of ways that you can keep up with the latest journals in your specialty, whether online or in print.

3. Academic Bait and Switch: The pseudonymous “Henry Adams” has been writing in the Chronicle about his experiences as a English PhD candidate at “Elite National University.” His title – Academic Bait and Switch – refers both to his students’ expectations of attending an “elite” institution with world-renowned faculty, only to be taught in reality by graduate students just a few years older than themselves, and also to his own expectations of graduate school running aground with reality. In this installment, Adams describes a recent lecture series given to the grad students by the tenure-track faculty. He learns much more than intended about the “real world” of academia. In the selection below, one of the faculty, “Dr. Ethos,” has just recommended a seemingly impossible rate of work.

When she implied that a human being could grade six essays an hour—and do a good job of it—Dr. Ethos was lying. Even a novice knew that. I also knew that performing as a grad student meant not challenging my superiors, but I gave in to the desire that Edgar Allan Poe labels the imp of the perverse, the urge to do something just because I shouldn’t. I raised my hand and said politely, “It’s good to know that I need to grade six papers per hour, but right now I can handle only four. Could you and the other professors give us tips on how you reach the six-per-hour rate?”

Dr. Ethos stared in my general direction without making eye contact. Silence. I looked around the room. Dr. Dreedle and Dr. Cathcart, the only tenured persons in the room, glared right at me, but the junior professors all stared at the tops of their desks, just like my freshmen did when they couldn’t answer a question.

4.Billy Graham, Evangelist to…TED? I (Mike) had no idea that Billy Graham spoke at TED in 1998. (HT: Don’t Eat the Fruit.) His topic, before this cutting-edge crowd of tech prophets and design gurus: Technology and Faith. As John Dyer summarizes,

His basic message is simple: technology brings amazing benefits to humanity, but it’s failure to alleviate the brokenness of the human heart ultimately point us to our need for a Savior.

5. Article about Wheaton Canceled by Books & Culture: Andrew Chignell’s article, exploring the present condition and possible future for Wheaton College, was almost published by Books & Culture (Inside Higher Ed), but was pulled at the last minute. Instead, it has been published by the SoMA Review. Chignell, an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell and a Wheaton alumnus, provides his side of the back story on his website, WhitherWheaton.org. (Note: the comments on the IHE article say much about the current state of academia; Jerry Pattengale, Douglas Groothius, Louis Gallien, and others of note weigh in.)

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. 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.

1. The research says Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left (Patricia Cohen, NY Times, January 17, 2010). What do you think? HT: Miller. Note:  The article references Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, mentioned in Week in Review: The Valiant Return Edition and the subject of an upcoming ESN quote series.
2. Annual Poll of Freshmen Shows Effect of Recession (By Kate Zernike, NY Times, January 21, 2010):  “The recession hit this year’s college freshmen hard, affecting how they chose a school as well as their ability to pay for it, according to an annual nationwide survey released Thursday. …”  Related:  The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2009 (pdf)
3. Can Religion Coexist with…Medicine? Faculty at the (independent) Baylor College of Medicine protest a planned merger with (Baptist-affiliated)

Baylor University (Chronicle, Katherine Mangan). Their petition states, in part,

The religious ideologies that permeate throughout BU’s academic policies may adversely affect both scientific progress and the culture at BCM, particularly in relation to issues such as evolution, embryonic stem cells, and sexual orientation.

This week, the Chronicle also reported that the Baylor College of Medicine faces NIH sanctions over conflicts of interest (Chronicle, Paul Basken).

4. Twitter at the MLA: ProfHacker.com offers a variety of perspectives on the use of Twitter at the recent MLA convention. They range from the scary (a job-seeker whose interview was derailed after a member of the interview committee found a tweet of his to be “spurious”) to the very cool (several twitterers who made important face-to-face connections after “meeting” fellow MLA members on Twitter).
5. The Book of the Decade: Byron Borger of Hearts and Minds Books named Steven Garber’s Fabric of Faithfulness (affiliate link) as its “Book of the Decade”. We’ve had it on our ESN Core Bibliography for several years, so we think Byron has great taste!

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. 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.

1. Alan Jacobs’ Grad School Thoughts: Should you go to grad school? “Probably not,” writes Alan Jacobs, Wheaton English professor and author of Original Sin, The Narnian, A Theology of Reading, and many other excellent things.  But if you insist, he’s got some good advice. (Also check out Alan’s contribution to our ESN article, “Why Get a PhD in the Humanities?”)

2.  James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom ties for OUR MOST AUDACIOUS CLAIM: THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK OF THE YEAR with Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft:  An Inquiry Into the Value of Work in Best Books of 2009 Part I by Byron Borger of Hearts and Minds Bookstore.  Take a few minutes to review the list, keep an eye out for two more parts going up next week, and let us know what books you’re interested in discussing this year.

3.  In The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (W.W. Norton, 2010), Louis “Menand asks four questions: Why is it so hard to create a general-education curriculum? Why have the humanities undergone a crisis of legitimacy? Why has ‘interdisciplinarity’ been seen—and ultimately failed—as a magic wand? Why do professors share the same politics?” — Oxygenating Academe: The Unpublic Intellectual (By Karen J. Winkler, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 10, 2010)

4.  ‘Baby Einstein’ Founder Goes to Court (By Tamar Lewin, NY Times, January 12, 2010):  Raises the question of access to and reproducibility of research in relationship to marketing and consumer concerns.  Do you know anyone who watched or advocated Baby Einstein?

5. Proof (or at least Evidence) That Mentoring Matters (by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed): A study presented the American Economic Association’s annual meeting found that mentoring had a significant impact on the number of grants and publications for female economists.

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? Anything special with some time off or is there too much going on with the holiday?

As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them.  In addition, 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.

1.  What did the Oxford University Press select as its 2009 “word of the year”? — Part of the The Higher-Ed News Quiz (Chronicle of Higher Education, December 13, 2009).  What’s your best guess?  We’ll confirm the answer when it’s posted and have some thoughts on the “word of the year.” …  Please, no cheating ;-)

2.  Pittsburgh Sets Vote on Adding Tax on Tuition (Ian Urbina, NY Times, December 15, 2009):  “The tax would be the first of its kind in the nation, and other cities are watching closely as they try to find ways to close their own budget gaps.” — Exemplifies the changing relationship and rhetoric between town & gown during an economically difficult time.  Note: Council puts tuition tax proposal on hold (Rich Lord, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, December 17, 2009).

3. Need another reason to pursue an academic vocation? If you’re a linguist, you might just be called upon to invent a new language. Paul Frommer of USC did just that for James Cameron’s new movie Avatar, joining J. R. R. Tolkien and Marc Orkand (inventor of Klingon) as an inspiration to budding linguists everywhere.

4. From ProfHacker.com: an End of the Semester Checklist, a very practical list to keep your courses, files, and CV in shape.

Books

Tom’s started digging into Education for Human Flourishing:  A Christian Perspective (Paul D. Spears
and Steven R. Loomis, InterVarsity Press, 2009).  If the title catches your interest, then check out the Preface, Precis of Book and Chapters, and keep your eye out for quotes from the book in the coming year.