The Emerging Scholars Blog

Wouldn't Kuyper have dressed like this for the World Cup?

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. Christian Philosophy, Anyone?

I spent a week in May with about fifteen other people, reading and discussing key sections of a four-volume tome with the forbidding title A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Most of those present confessed that they had great difficulty understanding the assigned passages, yet everyone agreed at the end that the week was a great success, and perhaps worth doing again. … What kind of philosophy could attract the interest of such a varied collection of intellectuals [? The answer is that it was the philosophy of the Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977), whose disciplinary specialty was actually not philosophy at all, but jurisprudence. He taught for many years at the Free University of Amsterdam, the Christian university founded by Abraham Kuyper, the leader of the great revival of culturally engaged Calvinism known as neocalvinism. … — Christian Philosophy, Anyone? (Al Wolters. Comment. 6/11/2010)

2.  Free speech in a public, academic forum.  What can we learn from the on-going discussion at UC-Irvine with regard to how voices are to be heard and how they are to interact?  Any suggestions with regard to how such situations are to be addressed, in advance, during, afterward?  Comment from Tom:  The international world is on many U.S. campuses and most campuses lack the framework to engage in real, gritty cross-cultural conversation, let alone reshape perspective  on the issues, the idealism is fading.  Will shouting replace it on campus (including the administration/faculty) and the responses to incidents such as UC-Irvine?

The University of California at Irvine has suspended the campus’s Muslim Student Union for one year and placed the group on disciplinary probation after members of the group repeatedly interrupted a campus speech in February by Israel’s ambassador to the United States, according to a letter released on Monday.

The hecklers shouted down the ambassador, Michael Oren, at times calling him a “killer” and scuttling parts of the speech. Video of the event drew international attention and sparked a debate about the tactics of the protesters, who said they were angry about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. — UC-Irvine Suspends Muslim Student Group for Disrupting Speech (Josh Keller.  Chronicle of Higher Education. 14/2010)

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. 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.

Heaven - I mean, a used book shop

We’ve previously asked for your recommendations for the best books for undergraduates (which had a tremendous response) and best books for graduate students (who must be harder to shop for). Thus, it only makes sense for me to ask:

What are the best books for new faculty?

If you need help getting started, here are a few categories:

• Practical advice books
• Books to take your theology and spiritual life to the next level
• Books on “culture making” (there’s a leading category!), education, or other aspects of faculty life
• Comfort or counsel for those who are facing disappointment with their career
• Books about building relationships

Any suggestions?

Photo: Parnassus Book Services, Cape Cod, MA, by Lochaven via Flickr. Click for a larger image.

A while back, I asked for your recommendations for the best books for undergrads, and you came through with a pretty impressive list. Let’s advance a few years.

What books do you recommend to graduate students, on God, on academia, or just about life in general?

There will probably be some overlap, but here are some common graduate school situations that might affect the list:

• Deeper exploration of a specific discipline or profession
• New life experiences (e.g. marriage, children, death of family and friends)
• Coping with failure and success
• The “quarterlife crisis“
• Growth and change in one’s spiritual life

What are your suggestions?

Here’s the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week. 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.  Have you experienced, participated in, or witnessed

Tweckle (twek’ul) vt. to abuse a speaker only to Twitter followers in the audience while he/she is speaking”?

Any thoughts on how Tweckle (or the possibility of it) affect conference (and classroom) dynamics?  Any practices which you’ve found (or  think could address) to decrease its influence?  — Conference Humiliation: They’re Tweeting Behind Your Back (Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17, 2009).  Note:  on the other side, I’ve seen plenty of positive commenting on conferencing/events.

2.  A number of Chronicle of Higher Education articles on news/journalism including:

• Academe and the Decline of News Media (Forum, November 15, 2009)
• I’ve Read the News Today, Oh Boy (Ben Yagoda, November 15, 2009)
• Journalism Schools Can Push Coverage Beyond Breaking News (Nicholas Lemann, November 15, 2009)
• University-Based Reporting Could Keep Journalism Alive (Michael Schudson and Leonard Downie Jr., November 15, 2009)
• We Need ‘Philosophy of Journalism’ (Carlin Romano, November 15, 2009).

3. Belle de Jour reveals herself…as a research scientist.  The anonymous blog and television show Secret Diary of a Call Girl – written from the perspective of a high-end prostitute – were much bigger in the UK than on this side of the pond. The mystery of “who is Belle de Jour?” ended this week, when Dr. Brooke Magnanti confessed that she had turned to prostitution as a way to pay for her PhD. Magnanti now works for The Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. Magnanti says it was good work:

Dr Magnanti told the Sunday Times she worked as a prostitute from 2003 to late 2004, and found it “so much more enjoyable” than her shifts in another job as a computer programmer.

How ironic that Magnanti studies child health. Tanya Gold of the Guardian says don’t be misled: most prostitutes in the UK live pretty awful lives.

The report found that 70%–95% of the interviewees were physically assaulted while working as prostitutes. 60%–75% were raped while working as prostitutes; of these, more than half were repeatedly raped. 65%–95% meanwhile were sexually abused as children; the line of continuity between being used as a child and being used as an adult is clear.

Around the world, prostitution is often a form of slavery, as CNN reported this week. Urbana’s Advocacy and Poverty track is going to focus on the issue of modern day slavery and sex trafficking, and the work of Christian organizations against this evil.

4. Big Man on Campus – Time profiled Gordon Gee, president of The Ohio State University, anointing him as the best college president in the nation. (Here is the rest of their top 10 list.) Earlier this year, Gee told universities they face “reinvention or extinction” at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting.

To avoid “slouching into irrelevance,” he said, universities must structure themselves horizontally, rather than vertically, change the way they reward faculty and staff members, and learn to better collaborate with each other. While partnerships with business, elementary and secondary schools, and governments are crucial, he said, perhaps the most important links are between universities.

You can download Gee’s full lecture at the ACE website.

Books

Introverts in the Church cover

5. Tom’s been recommending  Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture (Adam McHugh, InterVarsity Press, November 2009) to a number of people, including members of the academic community.  Below’s a quote from Chapter 1, available on-line through InterVarsity Press.  An excellent author interview can be found at Adam McHugh on ‘Introverts in the Church’.

The pragmatism that we have inherited fosters an action oriented culture. Evangelicalism values the doer over the thinker.  The evangelical God has a big agenda. It’s as if the moment we surrender our lives to Christ we are issued a flashing neon sign that says “GO!” There is a restless energy to evangelicalism that leads to a full schedule and a fast pace. Some have said that, in Christian culture, busyness is next to godliness. We are always in motion, constantly growing, ever expanding. …“American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarrassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.” [Eugene Peterson]

Francis Collins

What do you think about Francis Collins Picked To Head NIH?  The NPR piece lays his credentials, faith, and embracing of the two out in the open.  I wonder how many hits there will be to BioLogos (which the NPR article links to) over the course of the next several days?  See BioLoguration for my earlier comments on the blog aspect of this amazing resource. And if you haven’t read Collins’ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, it’s time to pick up a copy (or at least catch the NPR interview) so you can talk about it with your family, neighbors, and colleagues ;-)

How have you come to know, understand, feel, and define hospitality?  Do you consider hospitality a necessary part of the fabric of Higher Education (e.g., community, discussion of ideas, relationships with the other) or not?  How have you experienced and/or extended hospitality on campus as individual or as part of a community of believers?  Looking forward to reading your thoughts/experiences.  Please share them with grace, truth, and charity.

What brings this topic to my mind at this time?  On Monday and Tuesday, I attended Hospitality, Critical Thinking and Truth: Living the Tensions, hosted by Messiah College, Grantham, PA.  At the conference, faculty, staff, and administrators from Christian colleges and universities wrestled with their shared goal of nurturing students into practices of gracious faith and intelligent reflection that fit[s] the needs of the 21st century.  The conversations reminded me not only of my education at Christian colleges, but also long conversations with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship staff regarding how to create/nurture hospitable places for followers of Christ and ‘the other’ on campus. Read the rest of this entry »