The Emerging Scholars Blog

Amen!

A sincere and heartfelt thank-you to our sister in Christ Christine Sine for this Advent meditation. Inspired/thirsting to take more time away from the busy-ness of the holiday season and focus upon the Christ of Christmas?  I’d encourage you to take a few minutes to visit these three sites:

1. Christine Sine’s Godspace
2. Following the Star (HT Arlene).
3. Susan Boyle, Handel’s Messiah, Silent Monks & God’s Good Intentions for Our Redemption (By Lael Arrington, bible.org, December 4th, 2009)

If you have particular Advent meditations/reflections which you’d desire to bless others with (books, weblinks, one’s you’ve written), please share them with us as together we celebrate The Coming of the Lord.

Updated 12/23/2009, 6:30 am.

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. In Star-Studded Wise Men: Rethinking the Christmas Story (December 7, 2009), Ben Witherington delivers a strong corrective regarding some popular renderings of Christmas.  Ben has a similar post focused upon Luke 2:1-7, No Inn in the Room (December 09, 2007).  (HT:  Arlene)

2.  More stocking stuffers?  Stan Guthrie and John Wilson, Christmas Books, Part 3 (Podcast, posted 12/08/09).  Forward the link to Buster Keaton’s College (1927) and have a laugh. Any additional suggestions you have for our Christmas Wish List?

3. Even more stocking stuffers! Don’t forget about the discounts you receive with your ESN membership from IVP, Eerdmans, Zondervan, and great periodicals. Books and subscriptions make great gifts (hint, hint).

4. This is a time of year when many interviews and job searches are conducted, so take a few minutes to read this good advice from David Perlmutter about “Avoiding a ‘Nuclear Veto’ in Hiring” from the Chronicle. Perhaps it will make next Christmas a bit merrier! (HT: Kim)

Books

5. From Mike: Laura Vanderkam in the WSJ recently wrote “Seen and Not Heard in Church,” about the tension between the ideals of intergenerational worship and the messy realities of crying babies, restless toddlers, and bored children of all ages. May I recommend a couple of that my wife (who teaches music to very young children) has found helpful?

Parenting in the Pew (IVP) by long time IV staff, current John Brown U. faculty member, and Dead Theologian’s Society founder Robbie Castleman – a very practical, and compact, book on training your children to worship

Teaching Kids Authentic Worship (Baker) by Kathleen Chapman – a guide with 52 ideas for “worship moments,” in and out of church

Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin) by Richard Louv – not about worship per se, but about children encounter reality around them – which, in a way, is what worship does, too

And there’s one more that I can’t find right now. You’ll just have to check back later today when I add it to the comments!

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. Sabbath? Who has time for a sabbath? – Regular reader Tobin sends us this from the always funny PhD (“Piled Higher and Deeper”) Comics.

2.  Are you desiring to become more familiar with the lectionary as we begin Advent?  If so, swing by Christine Sine’s post Daily Bible Readings For Advent, consider Living in the Christian Year, and/or visit the daily posts of Following the Star (HT Arlene).  Note:  If you have suggestions to throw in the mix, please comment or drop us a note for inclusion in next week’s post.

3. More on Living the Christian Year.  IVP has Lauren Winner’s foreword and the first chapter, “Discovering Sacred Time,” available for free download. Also, a Facebook group has been created for those who want to live the Christian year together.

4.  Looking for stocking stuffers? Listen to Christmas Books, Part 2 (Podcast, posted 11/30/09) in which Stan Guthrie and John Wilson discuss some good books to give and receive.  Any additional suggestions you have for our Christmas Wish List?

5. An early Christmas gift for science buffs: The Royal Society (the world’s oldest scientific society, founded 1660) has created Trailblazing, a timeline of landmark scientific papers and events, with links to the original Royal Society articles.  We’re talking important stuff here: Newton’s theory of color and light, Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microbes, Benjamin Franklin’s famous kite experiment, an examination of an 8-year-old Mozart…you’ll waste at least an hour looking at these.

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?

First Sunday in Advent in November 29

Here at the ESN blog, one of our main topics is spiritual formation in the academy: Christian practices like prayer and Bible study that shape us more and more into the image of Christ. The stress of Christmas may seem to be an unlikely time for spiritual growth, but for centuries, Christians have set aside the season of Advent as a time of spiritual preparation.

Last week, I interviewed Bobby Gross, recently appointed director of InterVarsity Graduate and Faculty Ministries about his new book, Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God, to learn more about the meaning of Advent and how Christians in the academy could benefit from its observance. Bobby has served InterVarsity in many capacities: as a campus staff worker at the University of Florida, a staff supervisor in Florida, the Southeast, and New York/New Jersey, and, most recently, as a national field director based in Atlanta. You can download the introduction by Lauren Winner and the first chapter from IVP’s website.

Photo by Per Ola Wiberg via Flickr

Bobby Gross: I grew up in a Southern Baptist church and then worshipped in a variety of evangelical churches, but was never part of a church that was particularly liturgical or did anything with the Christian year. In my second year of marriage, my wife Charlene and I moved to Miami and we looked for a church together. She grew up Catholic, and we were wide open to any number of churches – we wanted our church to be smaller rather than larger, multiethnic, spiritually alive, Bible-centered. The church that caught our attention, from an ad in the paper, was a small Episcopal church. We went to visit, and it met all our criteria.

Bobby Gross, Director of InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministries

Charlene was immediately at home and more or less knew what to do in the service. I was lost for some months, really, but I stuck it out and slowly began to appreciate the beauty and the power of the liturgy as framing our weekly worship. Then, in the course of being in the Episcopal tradition, I learned about the Christian calendar and the way that liturgical rhythm, over the whole year, can give shape and meaning to our spiritual lives and reflections.

Working for a broadly evangelical organization, I found myself many times frustrated and saddened by the lack of awareness, even interest, of many churches and many Christians in this tradition and practice that goes back to within a few hundred years of Christ’s life. So I was motivated to write a book that could bridge from the liturgical world over to those who are not part of those kinds of churches. I wanted to make the bridge easy for evangelicals to walk across so that it would feel inviting and helpful to them.

MH: We have similar backgrounds. I grew up Southern Baptist as well and then worshipped at an Anglican church while I was in Canada for my master’s degree. Many people from Baptist or other non-liturgical backgrounds are often suspicious of adopting practices for which we don’t see direct Biblical connections. What are the benefits of observing the Christian year?

BG: First of all, let me point out the Biblical underpinnings for this practice. What’s striking in the Old Testament is that God himself, for his people, instituted a calendar with regular festivals, including pilgrimage. The Jewish year was oriented around certain festivals and certain points of remembrance. The most important, of course, was the remembering of the Exodus by celebrating the Passover. For Jesus, this was part of his life – the festivals, the pilgrimages, the Passover meal, as well as worship in the synagogue. Read the rest of this entry »