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. Continuing conflict over Creation: At the recent Ligonier Ministries national conference, Tough Questions Christians Face,Southen Baptist Seminary president Albert Mohler addressed the question, “Why does the Earth look so old?” (video) He challenged the position of Francis Collins, Karl Giberson, and the BioLogos Foundation that the Earth is billions of years old, which generated a series of responses from BioLogos, Glberson, and Peter Enns.

2. Looking for advise regarding the year after you’ve wrapped up your dissertation?  Here’s some tips/reflections on My First Year (Stephanie M. Foote. Inside Higher Ed. 7/2/2010). Foote is now the director of the Academic Success Center and First-Year Experience at the University of South Carolina at Aiken.

3. Undergraduates are WEIRD: Are we getting closer to our understanding of human nature or further away from it when behavioral-science research focus upon undergraduates?  That is the topic of Chronicle of Higher Education Perculator piece Why We’re All WEIRD ( 7/2/2010).  Anyone willing to make an assertion?

4. In his personal blog Corner Interactions, physics professor W. Brian Lane asks a good question: what should a church leader believe about your discipline? What are the applications of those beliefs, and what should remain open issues?

5. PhDs and Myers-Briggs: Tim Keel shares a great quote from NT Wright about the effect of your Myer-Briggs type on the ease/difficulty of getting a PhD:

In Myers-Briggs terms, it’s much, much easier to get a PhD in biblical studies if you’re a ISTJ. You’ll never do it if you’re an ENFP because you’ll never finish it. You’ll be having too much fun. But we need, we need, we need “N”s in this business as well as “S”s because we need big-picture hypotheses. It’s very difficult to do that at PhD level because your supervisors and examiners will want you to nail down all the details (and you have to do that) but we need these big hypotheses.

It’s a very interesting post, so be sure to read the whole thing.

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. Inhabiting God’s story? Over the past several days Tom hosted Bobby Gross, National Director of InterVarsity’s Graduate & Faculty Ministry.  They had a number of conversations with faculty, pastors, and friends of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.  As part of the visit, Bobby participated in an Ascension Day service at First Presbyterian Church, York, PA.  The gathering was in partnership with Hearts and Minds Bookstore.  One of Byron Borger’s recent blog posts related to the event, Living the Christian Year author Bobby Gross to speak here on Ascension Day (5/10/2010) commends several books on the topic. In another post Byron shares that the beginning of Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God is worth the price of the book.   Here’s an excerpt he highlights:

“Most of us think of ourselves as ordinary people living quiet lives in unremarkable places. We are merely hobbits in our shires. But listen! We may not be caught up in dangerous drama like Frodo and his loyal companion, Sam, but we nonetheless live inside a big story, one that started long before our birth and that will go on long after our death, one that’s as wide as the universe and as old as eternity: the Story of God as centered in Jesus the Christ.

Our personal narratives take their fullest shape and deepest meaning in relation to God’s purposes for us and for the world. As Eugene Peterson puts it, “God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.” A very large context and very long plot indeed. — Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God (5/11/2010)

2. Want to know Why Amish businesses don’t fail (Geoff Williams, CNN Money, 5/4/2010), then read Erik Wesner’s new book Success Made Simple: An Inside Look at Why Amish Businesses Thrive.  By-the-way, the 95% success rate Wesner uses is based upon a 2009 report by Elizabethtown College sociology professor Donald Kraybill, who has spoken for two Central PA Emerging Scholars Network events. HT:  Scot McKnight,  Business folks, what do you see here? (5/13/2010).

“studying several Amish settlements, Kraybill found failure rates ranging from 2.6% and 4.2%; interviews with loan officers, accountants and industry professions in other Amish regions yielded additional anecdotal evidence of closure rates significantly south of 10%.Compare that to the average five-year survival rate for new businesses across the United States, which hovers just under 50%. So what’s the secret?” — Why Amish businesses don’t fail (Geoff Williams, CNN Money, 5/4/2010)

3.  The New War Between Science and Religion (Mano Singham, The Chronicle Review, 5/9/2010) opens
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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.

Claude Levi-Strauss

1.  The Big Questions: Have our colleges and universities lost sight of their purpose? (Jerry Pattengale, Books & Culture, November/December 2009) critiques Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Anthony Kronman, Yale University Press, 2008) and recommends The American University in a Postsecular Age (Co-edited by Douglas & Rhonda Jacobsen, Oxford University Press, 2008).

2. Can a biologist trust an evangelical Christian? – InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministry at Indiana University will be hosting this event next Thursday, Nov. 12.

This panel discussion features three evangelical scholars on the topic of Christianity, science and evolution. Our primary audience for this event will be scholars who are skeptical or even hostile about the idea of integrating religion and science. We have chosen the topic as part of the Indiana University “themester” on “Evolution, Diversity, and Change.” Our goals, at this point, are to provide a model of what it might look like to integrate belief in God with scientific inquiry; to put names and faces behind what can often be the demonized other (evangelical Christians); to foster a discussion about the integration of religion and science; to work at eroding the destructive binary that is assumed to exist between science and religion; and to work at building trust between the scientific community and evangelical Christianity.

For more information, check out their website, www.iugfm.blogspot.com.

3. Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 – One of the most important intellectual figures of the 20th Century died last Friday. From the NY Times’ obituary:

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

Other reflections on his life and work: WSJ’s obituary and an elegy, NPR’s story about his 100th birthday, Eric Banks’ post at the Chronicle of Higher Ed about Lévi-Strauss’ importance.

Photo: Claude Levi-Strauss in 1992, from sagabardon via Flickr

4.  In a NY Times Op-Ed entitled Teach Your Teachers Well, Susan Engel (a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College) builds upon Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Urging for ‘Revolutionary Change’ in Nation’s Teacher-Training Programs.  How about this angle on the problem?

Our best universities have, paradoxically, typically looked down their noses at education, as if it were intellectually inferior. The result is that the strongest students are often in colleges that have no interest in education, while the most inspiring professors aren’t working with students who want to teach. This means that comparatively weaker students in less intellectually rigorous programs are the ones preparing to become teachers.

So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray. If education was a good enough topic for Plato, John Dewey and William James, it should be good enough for 21st-century college professors. — Susan Engel, Teach Your Teachers Well, NY Times, 11/02/2009

5. Online Education, Growing Fast, Eyes the Truly ‘Big Time’ (Marc Perry, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 30, 2009) as The $50K Club: 58 Private Colleges Pass a Pricing Milestone (Reported by Scott Carlson, Kathryn Masterson, and Jeffrey Brainard, and written by Mr. Carlson. Chronicle of Higher Education. November 1, 2009).  Looking for some thoughts on how liberal arts colleges and their ideals will survive the current economic crisis?

Traditional reasoning about the enrichment of the “student as future citizen” can only go so far when parents who pay the tuition or students taking the courses can’t see a bottom line in the form of a lucrative job after graduation. — Katharine S. Brooks, Close the Gap Between the Liberal Arts and Career Services, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2009

In Close the Gap Between the Liberal Arts and Career Services, Katharine S. Brooks, director of liberal-arts career services, University of Texas at Austin, offers some good ideas regarding career services.  For parents, students, and educators she has a new book,  You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path From Chaos to Career (Viking, 2009), which might be worth exploring.  If you’ve read it, let us know what you think.