The Emerging Scholars Blog

Michelangelo's Jeremiah, from the Sistine Chapel, shown in his traditional pose of lament

I’ve been working through some thoughts left over from my reading of James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. This is probably my last post on this book, unless, of course, I think of something else.

In searching for a new paradigm for Christian engagement with the world, Hunter suggests Jeremiah 29, God’s word to Israel as they were about to go into exile among the Babylonians. Jeremiah 29:11 is the most often quoted verse from this chapter (“For I know the plans I have for you…”), but Hunter focuses more on God’s instructions to Israel in Jer. 29:4-7:

This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

Hunter sees this passage – in which God urges Israel to work and pray for the prosperity of Babylon – as paradigmatic for our times. He draws on 1 Peter and other New Testament passages that also carry the theme of exile.

Though it is quite possible that this portrayal from Jeremiah is not applicable to Christians in all times and all places, I do believe this is a word for our time. The story of Jeremiah comports well with what we learn from St. Peter, who with so many others speaks of Christians as “exiles in the world” (1:1, 2:11) encouraging us to “live [our] lives as strangers here in reverent fear” (1:17). God is at work in our place of exile, and the welfare of those with whom we share a world is tied to our own welfare. (Hunter, 278)

Hunter further cites 2 Thessalonians 3:13, Philippians 2:4 and 4:5, and 1 Corinthians 12:7 for Paul’s directions to work for the good of people around us. Hunter uses these Biblical models to suggest the idea of the “new city commons”:

In short, commitment to the new city commons is a commitment of the community of faith to the highest ideals and practices of human flourishing in a pluralistic world. (279)

Hmm…”human flourishing” — where have I heard that before?

So, here’s my question: Is exile the best paradigm for Christians in the university?

There’s much to applaud in exilic model of Jeremiah — living faithfully in a pluralistic society, working for the common good, being a “faithful presence” while acknowledging the tensions that pull us away from faithfulness. On the other hand, I saw a recent blog post (which, overall, was so bad that I’m not going to link to it) raised a good question: considering how influential Christians have been in shaping and building American culture, how accurate or even helpful is it to call ourselves “exiles”? Isn’t it a way of denying the vast power that we hold in various cultural institutions?

What do you think? Is exile the best paradigm for considering the state of Christians in academia?

Photo credit: Missional Volunteer via Flickr

As part of my role with ESN, I sit on the InterVarsity Faculty Ministry Leadership Team (FMLT), made up of, well, these people. Each year, we read a book together that (we hope) gets at some aspect of our ministry to the university. Our book for this year was James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World.

If you’ve not read it yet, you should. Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, has produced a seminal book on cultural formation and change, particularly insightful on how Christians (primarily evangelical) have understood and misunderstood culture change over the past 40 years or so.

There’s much to discuss in this book — at times, it seemed like I was highlighting nearly every sentence — so I won’t try to summarize it or give a detailed review. For that, I encourage you strongly encourage you to read:

• Andy Crouch’s review of the book
• Christianity Today’s interview with Hunter
• Responses to Hunter by Crouch and Charles Colson on points where they feel Hunter errs (and Ray Pennings’ perspective on their debate)
• Byron Borger’s reflections at the Hearts & Minds Books blog
• An ongoing conversation about the book at FaithfulPresence.com

For my own remarks, I’ll limit them to two: the argument which I feel is Hunter’s most important, and what I think is the greatest weakness of the book. My observations come after the jump.

Have you read Hunter’s book? Do you agree or disagree with my points? What are your favorite parts of his argument? Read the rest of this entry »

An example of the intersection between Christianity and culture

I just ordered my copy of James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World, which our Faculty Ministry team will be discussing later this summer. (Full disclosure: I wasn’t impressed with Hunter’s Christianity Today interview, so i’m hoping the book will change my mind.) But ordering the book made me wonder:

What’s your favorite book about Christ and culture?

Maybe it’s a classic like H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (one of the first books I read after becoming a Christian in college). Or something more recent like Andy Crouch’s Culture Making. Or a book connected to your discipline, or to the culture of the Bible.

What’s mine? Probably Dorothy Sayers’ Mind of the Maker. As a writer, her analysis of writers’ strengths and weaknesses helped me make sense of the craft during my college years, and I love the idea of using the Trinity itself as the explaining metaphor, rather than trying to find a metaphor to explain the Trinity.

So – what’s your favorite?

Photo Credit: The Playmobil Nativity Set, by The Spacebase via Flickr – is it cheesy commercialism…or a great way to help kids proclaim the narrative of the Incarnation?

Byron Borger at Jubilee 2009

I spent the weekend at Jubilee, the annual student conference of the Coalition for Christian Outreach. Jubilee has a great reputation for emphasizing the theology of vocation – a reputation which was confirmed, by the way – but I didn’t expect the high level of fun generated by the conference. Saturday evening featured a hilarious (and moving) monologue from actress and writing Susan Isaacs (author of Angry Conversations with God) and a can’t-possibly-be-true-except-he-brought-pictures talk from Bob Goff, president of Restore International and good friend of Don Miller.

Photo: Byron Borger at last year’s Jubilee, but he looked basically the same this year. From livingjubilee via Flickr. Click for a larger image.

Occasionally, these streams of fun and vocation combined, such as the first night. In quick succession, seven speakers presented pecha kucha, a speed-presentation format of 20 slides, changing automatically every 20 seconds, whether the speaker is ready or not. The pecha kucha presenters included:

• David Greusel, an architect speaking on the connection between architecture and faith, especially what he called “the lie” that “secular work” doesn’t matter in God’s kingdom on earth (Greusel was the lead designer of Pittsburgh’s PNC Park).
• Gideon Strauss, President of the Center for Public Justice, who testified to the application of Isaiah 58 in our current society.
• Leroy Barber, president of Mission Year, speaking about Green My Hood, a program which identifies the abuse of the environment in poor urban neighborhoods and looks for ways to bring good creation stewardship into the inner city.
• Good friend of ESN Byron Borger of Hearts & Minds Books, who said that “part of this conference is learning to read deeply,” and reminded us that the word “disciple” means “student.”

As Benson Hines (who was also there) said on Twitter,

Lord, let me be as passionate about my calling as Byron Borger is about his.

More about Jubilee and some upcoming articles after the jump Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to everyone who weighed in on my request for the best books for undergrads! Here are the recommendations that we received on the blog, from Facebook, and via email. Tom and I received an amazing variety of responses. Here were some interesting trends:

• C. S. Lewis was recommended more than any other author, but not a single book of his was mentioned more than once!
• Only three books were recommended more than once: Augustine’s Confessions, J. I. Packer’s Knowing God, and Tim Keller’s The Reason for God
• Other highly recommended authors included Henri Nouwen, N. T. Wright, and Os Guinness.

Photo credit: net_efekt via Flickr

I have tried to group the recommendations to make it easier to read and compare, but all such classifications fall short of the ideal. I have also given C. S. Lewis a category all to himself. Most of the links below are affiliate links to Amazon.com, but I’ve tried to note when the book is available for free online.

A final note: I have not edited the recommendations in any way! If we received a recommendation, I’ve included it below. Disagree with a choice? Think we left out something obvious? Let us know in the comments.

The full list appears after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

John Sommerville at the Midwest Faculty Conference

Two weeks ago, I was at InterVarsity’s Cedar Campus for our 2009 Midwest Faculty Conference. John Sommerville, professor emeritus of history at U. Florida and author of The Decline of the Secular University, was the featured speaker. He spoke about the influence of secularism on the ideas and structures of the university (as he has previously written in the Chronicle), but also discussed new opportunities for Christian scholars in a “postsecular” university.

The third of his four talks addressed a key question: How can Christians change our universities? We’ll be posting the complete talk in the near future, but I wanted to highlight one suggestion that Sommerville made, explicitly borrowing an idea from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: The only way to change culture is to create more of it.

Specfically, Sommerville thinks that Christian academics ought to be creating new symbols within their discipline and for the university as a whole. While he thinks that new concepts and new ideas are important and necessary, these are far more rare and, really, outside the realm of possibility for most of us.  Symbols, however, are powerful conveyors of ideas that frame the thinking of both academics and the general public. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to this week’s Week in Review! If you have your own link or suggestion, please add it to the comments, or email it to Tom or Mike.

From Tom

Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance (Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, 6/29/2009).  Do you agree with T. Mills Kelly, an associate professor of history and associate director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, who argues professors are shifting their on-line communication from e-mail lists to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social networks like Facebook?

No Smiting (Paul Bloom, NY Times, 6/24/2009). Has anyone read The Evolution of God by Robert Wright?  The NY Times has taken interest in it with interviews (Questions for Robert Wright: Evolutionary Theology and Book Review) and a NY Times Sunday Review cover article by Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale. Below’s a section I find of particular interest.  How do you respond to the assertion of an evolving God who may in a some vague way exist beyond us, but in the practical realm is shaped by the experience and the marketing of dedicated practitioners?

For Wright, the next evolutionary step is for practitioners of Abrahamic faiths to give up their claim to distinctiveness, and then renounce the specialness of monotheism altogether. In fact, when it comes to expanding the circle of moral consideration, he argues, religions like Buddhism have sometimes “outperformed the Abrahamics.” But this sounds like the death of God, not his evolution. And it clashes with Wright’s own proposal, drawn from work in evolutionary psychology, that we invented religion to satisfy certain intellectual and emotional needs, like the tendency to search for moral causes of natural events and the desire to conform with the people who surround us. These needs haven’t gone away, and the sort of depersonalized and disinterested God that Wright anticipates would satisfy none of them. He is betting that historical forces will trump our basic psychological makeup. I’m not so sure.

Under age binge drinking on campus:  You may remember last year’s Rethink the Drinking Age Campaign Taking on 21 and College Presidents Take On 21), in which more than 100 college presidents and chancellors called for reconsidering the legal drinking age, which since the 1980s has been set at 21 (by each and every state).  Why?  Is it a desire to move beyond in loco parentis entirely?  What will be their response to the new research and conversation regarding colleges being the only environment in which binge drinking has increased over the past several decades?  What is the situation on your campus?  Is it more prevalent among men?  Note:  A few articles on this topic include: Inside Higher Ed’s Failing Grade on Alcohol, NY Times Op-Ed Binge Drinking on Campus, and Science Daily’s Higher Drinking Age Linked To Less Binge Drinking — Except In College Students.

From Mike

An Academic in Afghanistan (Chronicle, $) – William Corley, who has been involved with ESN from the beginning and usually serves his country as an English professor at Cal Poly Pomona, has spent the past year stationed in Afghanistan as a military analyst.  His recent essay in the Chronicle starts memorably:

First light on Memorial Day, 2009. I’m awake without an alarm at 4:53 a.m. After a quick visit to the gym and a short run, I put on my uniform and go to work. Day 208 in Afghanistan begins.

It’s a great perspective on both the military and academia, and I hope that you have access to the Chronicle so that you can read the whole thing.  Here’s a paragraph I especially enjoyed, comparing his military writing to that of his “real” job:

If I wrote as much in the States as I do here, I would probably be tenured already. Scratch that — I’d be an academic superstar. Even more ironic for a professional writer, the papers I produce here, despite the inevitable sequestration due to classification levels, circulate more broadly and are read more closely than anything I’ve ever published as an academic, notwithstanding the aforementioned Cassandra caveat. Would I produce more popular work if I limited myself to two pages when writing on an academic topic? Perhaps the MLA should look into this.

More on justification – As if N.T. Wright and John Piper weren’t big enough guns to weigh in on the doctrine of justification, now the Pope is offering his (new? old?) perspective, too. Scot McKnight helpfully summarizes Pope Benedict XVI’s view of justification, from the Pope’s new book, Saint Paul. (BTW, in case you don’t already know, before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had long been an important theologian and scholar – check out both the number and variety of his writings and be suitable humbled.)

Academic Bait-and-Switch – I enjoyed and was challenged by this pseudonymous essay in the Chronicle by “Henry Adams” (as in, “The Education of…” I assume), which describes the author’s rude introduction to the graduate school TA system by teaching freshman comp at “Elite National University.” He describes the system as “bait and switch” because the “Elite” students came to campus expecting to be educated by the top scholars in the country, and instead find themselves taught by greenhorn TAs just a few years older than themselves.

From the Community

In response to last week’s week-in-review about Galileo, Hannah referred us to Peter Harrison’s The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, which Ted Davis also recommended (though be sure to read Ted’s comments about the book).

In response to Tom’s April post about End the University as We Know It, reader Clint shared a link to his own blog post about the topic, “Restructuring the Humanities.”

Books

This is Mike here.  I spent last week at the 2009 Midwest Faculty Conference with John Sommerville, and I’ll write more about that experience next week.  In the mean time, I’ll mention two books that came very highly recommended at the conference, both of which weigh in at under 200 pages, which relate to topics we’ve discussed here online.

At the conference, Sommerville led a seminar discussing Culture Matters by T.M Moore. I bought a copy but have not yet read it. Subtitled “A Call for Consensus on Christian Cultural Engagement,” Moore

sketches the ways in which Christians engage, resist, escape from and try to change the culture in which they live (Richard John Neuhaus, from the Foreword).

Moore examines these ways through the cultural activities of specific Christians, comparing both classic and contemporary exemplars: Augustine, Celtic Christians, John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, Charles Colson, Phil Keaggy, and Czeslaw Milosz. I’m looking forward to Moore’s chapter on Milosz, the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, whom I had the fortune to hear read a few years before his death.

The second book, which was highly recommend by InterVarsity’s own Tom Trevethan, was Naturalism by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. The book quickly sold out at the conference (OK – there was only one copy for sale), but here’s what John Milbank thinks of this book:

“Demonstrates with succinctness, brilliance, and precision that modern Anglo-Saxon naturalists are not rationalists but . . . are, in fact, the enemies of reason, which can only have any reality if the physical world has a spiritual, rational source.”