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. More on Waltke: Christianity Today has published a summary of the story of Bruce Waltke’s resignation and reactions to it. If you remember, ESN posted a long summary of the situation with many links.

2. Putting Abortion on the Curriculum: In the Chronicle, Teresa J. Hornsby (a Biblical studies professor at Drury U.) writes about her experience leading an interdisciplinary working group exploring ways to deal with abortion in the classroom – not just as part of a planned curriculum, but also when it might arise unexpectedly because of the personal lives of students. As you might expect, the “culture gap” between academia and conservative Christians enters the conversation:

We tried to discuss our project with representatives of local and national pro-life organizations, which proved difficult. I wanted to gather as much information as possible, to hear all points of view, and, perhaps, identify some local representatives who could come into the classroom. But they were, in general, reluctant to speak to us; I suspect they mistrusted academics.

The article has some interesting suggestions on how to discuss controversial topics in a civil manner: finding language that everyone is comfortable with, using stories of real people, starting with more “distant” examples from other cultures or time periods before moving to contemporary issues. As a counter-example of how not to discuss abortion in the classroom, consider this 2006 incident, in which a Northern Kentucky U. faculty member used a British Lit class to encourage vandalism against an on-campus anti-abortion display.

3.  What is your identity and how do you share who you are on-line?  Is on-line reputation a greater concern for those in a public vocation such as higher education?

Reputation management has now become a defining feature of online life for many internet users, especially the young. While some internet users are careful to project themselves online in a way that suits specific audiences, other internet users embrace an open approach to sharing information about themselves and do not take steps to restrict what they share. Search engines and social media sites play a central role in building one’s reputation online, and many users are learning and refining their approach as they go — changing privacy settings on profiles, customizing who can see certain updates and deleting unwanted information about them that appears online. — Managing Your Online Profile:  How People Monitor Their Internet Identity and Search for Others Online (Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist and Aaron Smith, Research Specialist, Pew Internet & American Life Project, 5/26/2010).

4.  Transitions for tenure track professors.  What would you add to, clarify, or desire to learn about on these lists of recommendations (as a follower of Christ and/or academic)?

• Open Letter to 2010-11′s Newly-Tenured Professors (Nels P. Highberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/27/2010)
  • In a nutshell, I’d like to offer this final thought from a ProfHacker reader: “Remember how lucky we are, and be nice to the department’s secretary.” Good advice, indeed.
• Open Letter to 2010-11′s First-Time Tenure-Track Professors (Billie Hara, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/20/2010)
  • If you could offer one piece of advice to an incoming faculty member, what would it be?

Lamppost at dawn, Kings College, Cambridge (Photo: Nigel Cooke via Flickr)

5.  “What place is there for religion within the University? Is there a place for God on the Quad or should we have no God on the Quad? … What is the connection between religion, intellectual diversity, and scholarship?” — If you haven’t already done such, swing by God on the Quad? (RJS) – Jesus Creed for conversation on the typologies of interaction of faith and science from Elaine Ecklund’s new book Science vs Religion: What Scientists Really Think.  Note to faculty: InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s quarterly faculty newsletter The Lamp Post provides articles of theological reflection audio downloads of speakers like Dallas Willard and Cal DeWitt, practical resources for faculty communities, updates on events (local, regional, and national), and much, much more.  You can download a sampler of The Lamp Post by clicking here.

Statue of Justice at the St. Louis U. School of Law

I’m going to try to link two current stories involving Christianity and the academy, and I’ll be the first to admit that the attempt might not work. A big disclaimer: I am not an expert on either of these, so I’m going to provide some links at the bottom of the post.

Today, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case CLS v. Martinez, in which a university and a Christian student organization disagree about who — legally speaking — has the right to belong to a student organization as a public university. Last week, Bruce Waltke left Reformed Theological Seminary after appearing in a video saying positive things about (theistic) evolution.

In the interest of readers’ attention spans, I’m going to start with my conclusion, then provide some quick summaries of the two stories and links to news and opinions articles.

Both of these incidents represent the splintered world of higher education, in which I’m not even sure it’s possible to locate a “majority position” on big issues like truth, academic freedom, religion, or sexuality; and in which it may not even be possible to establish common criteria for deciding between different positions. To millions of Americans, the correct position is obvious and self-evident — the problem is, that “correct position” isn’t the same one. For example, to one group, Waltke’s statement about evolution (below) is as controversial as saying “one plus one equals two.” To another group, it’s a sure sign that he knows nothing about the Bible or science. To one group, Waltke’s departure from an institution over public statements related to his academic discipline is as close to the “unforgivable sin” as you can get in academia. Meanwhile, another group sees RTS as taking an important stand against bad theology.

Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules, I predict incidents like these will become more and more common. Christians working within academia will have to learn how to negotiate — not two worlds of academia and the church — but multiple worlds representing almost every possible difference of opinion on “the big questions.”

Photo Credit: Statue of Justice at St. Louis University School of Law by Ann Althouse via Flickr. I think this is a great photo: most statues of Justice are so dispassionate; this Justice reminds me of the powerful images of justice in the Prophets.

The details and outcomes of these cases are very, very important, but I’ll let others to know more than I discuss them. Here’s what I think I can contribute:

• Christians will need to work harder than ever — and need the Holy Spirit to work in us more than ever — to fulfill Jesus’ prayer in John 17:20-23. I’ll just quote the end of that section:
  

  May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and loved them even as you have loved me.

• In order to be redeeming influences, Christians in the academy (such as ESN members) will need to learn how to speak the language of our fellow academicians and to sympathize with differing views on these important issues. If we can’t communicate in a way that makes sense outside of our own community, and if we can’t put ourselves in the place of “the other,” then we’ll have a much harder go of persuading others to our position.
• As hard as it may be to accept losses, Christians must always define “success” in terms of faithfulness to Christ. This was a point made by Christian Smith in a webinar hosted by Christianity Today last year. I don’t have the transcript, but Smith noted that evangelical churches have to come to grips that faithfulness is more important than numerical growth, legal victories, or other forms of “success.” I think this is doubly true for Christians in the university.

OK, enough from me. What do you think theses incidents say — if anything — about the present and future of evangelical Christians in the university?

Summaries and 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.

1. Mike will write a longer post about this on Monday, but Bruce Waltke’s departure from Reformed Theological Seminary – following his appearance in a video posted on the Biologos Foundation’s website – has been making big news.  (In case you don’t follow Biblical studies, Waltke has been a leading OT scholar for decades.) More links to come on Monday, but Scot McKnight tipped me off to Michael Bird’s discussion, not just of Waltke’s situation, but other OT scholars who have left institutions because of conflicts over historicity.

2. Wired Campus: Lehigh Professor Advertises Course on YouTube (Mary Helen Miller, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/15/2010).  What do you think about this idea, click here to see the video.  Is it transferable to classes beyond journalism and social media?  Do you envision competition for students?  How does this mix with posting other YouTube material, i.e., should one choose to a solid line between public and private identity when providing posts?  Is it helpful/appropriate to have family or religious video under the same identity/name?

3.  Join us in prayer for the Ohio State University (OSU) Price of Life which begins on Sunday, April 18.  Click here for The Three Events which will Change History.  Note: More activities are listed under the schedule under the header About the Price of Life. For Emerging Scholars at OSU and in the area, don’t miss Price of Life Seminar on Human Trafficking: What Difference can a Fledgling Scholar Make? by Dr. Wayne Barnard, International Justice Mission.  For Emerging Scholars on other campuses, consider exploring this topic and other materials found in the website.

4. The Chronicle recently devoted an entire issue of the Chronicle Review to the problems facing graduate education in the humanities. Most of it is behind a paywall, but check out Katherine Polak’s “Letter from a Graduate Student in the Humanities.”(And, of course, you can compare the Chronicle‘s coverage with our own series, “Why Get a PhD in the Humanities.”)

5. German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas has written a new book, An Awareness of What’s Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, in which he tempers his previous judgment of religion and admits that religion isn’t going away any time soon. Stanley Fish reviews the book, and Chelsea Carlson reviews Fish’s review at the Harvard Ichthus’s Fish Tank blog, and both find Habermas’ treatment of religion as ultimately lacking. From Fish:

As Norbert Brieskorn, one of Habermas’s interlocutors, points out, in Habermas’s bargain “reason addresses demands to the religious communities” but “there is no mention of demands from the opposite direction.” Religion must give up the spheres of law, government, morality and knowledge; reason is asked only to be nice and not dismiss religion as irrational, retrograde and irrelevant.

Once again, a discussion of the relationship between “faith” and “reason” fails to bring up Douglas Sloan’s Faith and Knowledge. Sloan’s book analyzes the (failed) student and faculty ministries of mainline Protestantism between the 1930′s and 1970′s, and identifies a key factor in their collapse as the rejection of religion as a true area of knowledge fit for inclusion in the university.