The Emerging Scholars Blog

Last week I began a Chasing Wisdom series based up my Skype interview with Nathan Foster, Assistant Professor of Social Work, Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI.  In the first post, I focused upon how a private person, such as Nathan, wrote such an open book about his life, struggles, family, and vocation.

Nathan Foster and Tom Grosh IV Chat

Today, we’ll explore

1. becoming a wisdom chaser in higher education
2. discerning the call to higher education
3. being present to one’s family

Next week we’ll consider

1. power in the classroom from the perspective of the teacher
2. taking the first steps in teaching
3. how InterVarsity Christian Fellowship can journey with academics

And in case you were wondering, Nathan’s keeping an eye on the series and would love to respond to your comments. So please, take advantage of the opportunity!

Thomas B. Grosh IV:   What do academics chase? Is it wisdom?  Based on insights from your journey and that of your father’s, what would you say to encourage Emerging Scholars to become wisdom chasers?

Nathan Foster: Your question about education and wisdom is great. I worked at a place once and they didn’t like to hire people with advanced degrees.  And I said, “That’s crazy.  Why not?”  They thought [those with advanced degrees] become very arrogant and lost their ability to be teachable.  Don’t get me wrong education’s great and I’m a huge fan of it.  Personally I love to learn.  But it’s good for me to remember that there are potentially negative consequences from education.  We can get a little stuck up and we can lose some of our humility.  My wife calls it professoritis.  We tend to think that we’re right about things.  Now part of that comes from certain expectations.  When you’re teaching, people expect you to have the answers and they look to you to have the answers.  And so we get used to being right.  I’ve found it very seldom that students really challenge us on some of what we spout off.

I got a couple of good disciplines I try to practice to fight my professoritis. … Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned in Wisdom Chaser: Insights on Parent-Child Relationships, I found reading Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet (Nathan Foster. InterVarsity Press. 2010) to be a great blessing.  In follow-up, I contacted Nathan Foster (Assistant Professor of Social Work, Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI) to chat about some topics which I thought would be particularly applicable to members of the Emerging Scholars Network.

Nathan Foster and Tom Grosh IV Chat

First we’ll explore how a private person, such as Nathan, wrote such an open book about his life, struggles, family, and vocation.  In coming weeks we’ll explore …

1. becoming a wisdom chaser in higher education
2. discerning the call to higher education
3. being present to one’s family
4. power in the classroom from the perspective of the teacher
5. taking the first steps in teaching
6. how InterVarsity Christian Fellowship can journey with academics

And in case you were wondering, Nathan is following the series and would love to respond to your comments. So please, take advantage of the opportunity!

Thomas B. Grosh IV:  How do you come to write something so personal?  Did you have a sense from the start that you’d be writing something like that or were you just keeping a journal and it became a book?  How does that happen?  How did writing a book about your journey up mountains with your father come to your mind?

Nathan Foster:  I always knew I wanted to write.  I was just waiting for the right project to come along.  It is probably no coincidence that when I write it tends to be very honest, somewhat raw.  That just personally fits me. Most things that I do, I try to have that flavor.  So that’s how my relationships go.  Some of that just stems back to

1. growing up and just wanting things to be honest and real.
2. being a counselor and therapist, where you’re dealing with real life stuff and you lose interest in playing games. 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. In the last Week in Review we kicked off with highlighting Seth Godin’s take on the coming melt-down in higher education. Since then, the Chronicle of Higher Education thought Godin’s piece was worth posting. That action, along with the material from the article, has created conversation worth consideration, visit here. I [Tom] think it is helpful to note that the meltdown is “as seen by a marketer” and the “facts” are told the way a marketer tells the “facts.” Bigger questions: What is the End of Education? How are followers of Christ salt and light in higher education, even advocating, developing, and maintaining structures (not just in the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities) which truly educate to the glory of God, making the small list of redemptive outliers instead of the mass of marketers selling their wares?

2. A School Pushing Back Against Facebook (Mark Bauerlein, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/2010) brings to mind the question of How should educators interact with Social Media and teach students to handle Social Media? I [Tom] think that phenomena such as Soical Media, e.g., Facebook and Twitter, are too much of a larger cultural issue for educators to address alone. Educators should be finding ways to dialogue with children, parents, community leaders, and Social Media advocates/leaders to wisely discern it’s proper place, use, parameters. Those in the nonprofit and ministry sector have much to offer. Note: Jon Boyd has an excellent handout on Mistakes You Can Avoid on Facebook and Twitter for people in the nonprofit and ministry sector. Read the rest of this entry »

When I returned from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Graduate & Faculty Team Meetings, I found my family wanting me 24/7, at least for a few days ;-)  In my brief moments of spare time, I picked up Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet (Nathan Foster. InterVarsity Press. 2010).   In Wisdom Chaser, Nathan relates the story of his strained relationship with his famous father, i.e., Richard Foster, academic/teacher and author of several spiritual formation books including Celebration of Discipline.  The below excerpt kept me turning the pages to find out how father-son reconciliation occurred through mountain top experiences.

Wisdom Chaser Cover

As the years went by, it seemed I [Nathan] saw less and less of my father [Richard] and cared less and less about his absence.  At some point I shifted from wanting him to be home, counting down the days to when he would return, and eagerly greeting him at the airport, to not knowing when he was gone or home and caring even less.  As a child, I was proud of my dad.  Hearing him speak to crowds filled me with excitement; perhaps he would mention my name, or tell a story about me, or in some way acknowledge his home life.  At first I think I accepted that God was using my dad to help people.  Later I felt mildly ambivalent about the fact that God seemed to need my dad.  Somewhere along the way, my feelings shifted to embarrassment and anger that Dad had “holier work” to do.  By thirteen I was filled with rage, and I shut down. — Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet (Nathan Foster. InterVarsity Press. 2010, p.29).

As you may guess there is much more to the story, such as Richard’s experience as a youth with his family, writing habits, founding of Renovare’, slow pace of life/climb … and Nathan’s travels/thoughts through his teens & twenties.  Now I’m no Richard or Nathan Foster, but with regard to my own travels and intense focus upon various tasks for ministry in higher education, I found the book convicting.

First responses which I made in my house …

1. Included in our family’s dinner devotions the discipline of asking each member of the family the best/worst part of the day
2. Began reading Gary Schmidt’s retelling of Pilgrims Progress (Eerdmans Press, 2008) chapter by chapter with the twins before bedtime … seeking to reinstate our sporadic bedtime readings.
3. Declined a ministry invitation to preserve a time with family during a stretched summer.
4. Cleared time to celebrate my wife Theresa’s birthday (May 6) and fully attend to the family while she runs Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure (Pittsburgh, PA) with her mom.

First response with the Emerging Scholars Network …

Writing this post, which took much longer than I thought it would.  Why?  Much to talk about with regard to parent-child relationships and higher education (topic of some future posts).  And because I  took the time to soak in the great video of a recent conversation between Nathan and his father at Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI. Why was the conversation at Spring Arbor?  Because Nathan’s on faculty as an Assistant Professor of Social Work!  Refreshing material.  I’d encourage you to check out the clips, maybe show them as part of a campus discussion group and pass them along to others whom you think would find them of interest.

PS.  Not only has Nathan not given up on following Christ, getting to know his father, serving in higher education, but also he’s not given up on becoming a father himself.  Nathan’s married and has two children of his own.

PPS.  InterVarsity Press has an excellent Question-Answer author interview (text) posted here.

Tomorrow, I’m leaving for our Midwest Faculty Conference, featuring John Sommerville as our plenary speaker. (Check out my quick review of his book, The Decline of the Secular University, as well as his latest essay in the Chronicle, “Universities Are Corporatized Because They Are Secularized”.) Since starting these summer faculty conferences a few years ago, we’ve tried to make them times of refreshment – for both faculty and their entire family. Our planning team even coined a new word for these events – confamication:

This event encompasses much more than the word conference can possibly contain, so a new word has been added to the lexicon. “Confamication” captures the fact of it being a stimulating conference, a restful vacation, which can both include and be a delight to the whole family. And it is a welcoming place for singles, couples and children as well.

Unfortunately, not all of academia shares this attitude that the “good life” includes rest, spiritual refreshment, and time with families and children. Lisa Belkin, who writes the Motherlode blog for the New York Times, recently published a heart-breaking letter from a young graduate student who, faced with an unexpected, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, has decided to have an abortion so that she can complete her degree. The decision was far from easy – you can hear her agony in her letter to Belkin. Explicit and implicit pressures from her graduate program were a major factor in her decision. Here’s how she described her sitaution: Read the rest of this entry »

Inside Higher Ed spoke with anthropologists at a “Mothering (in) the Field” panel discussion at the recent American Anthropological Association annual meeting. The topic: how do they conduct their fieldwork and be mothers at the same time? It’s an interesting article, with lots of great quotes.

So, how do you balance your research commitments with your commitments as a mother or father?

Anyone have observations, experience, or additional research to address the question raised by the Does Academe Hinder Parenthood?  The Inside Higher Ed piece begins:

Numerous reports and accounts suggest that balancing parenthood and academic careers can be difficult, particularly for women. Two new studies suggest that, possibly as a result, many female academics may be opting not to have kids. Read the rest of this entry »