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. 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
Read the rest of this entry »

Janine Giordano

Read part 1 of the series, “Where Did You Find Your Megaphone?”

I was surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t be, at the nature of responses to my last post. I expected to hear a variety of answers about where each of us of first found our voice and discovered our efficacy. Was it in your favorite class in college, or in your relationship with a younger sibling? Was it on a Church board, in a Parent-Teacher organization, or on a missions trip? Where did you first feel heard and validated, and see your work invested as time well spent? I was concerned with some kind of defining moment in your path from regular person to learned academic. Ultimately, I wanted to know why you chose the academy—if you chose the academy—as the place for you to pursue your work? I was surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t be, that the piece I shared of my own quest to find my academic voice was taken instead as a complaint about the glass ceilings for women in ministry. It indeed hurts me deeply to see how much women have been hampered from Christian ministry for generations, but I was trying to stress the positive: many of us have found other ways to compensate for this challenge. How did you, male or female, arrive at your perch of authority? What microphone do you use as you make your way to the megaphone?

Our discussions of the integration of faith and learning these days so often assume that we are already creatures of authority in our academic field. We assume that all of us, by virtue of our association with the academy and our dabbling in even a bit of higher education, are already knowledgeable within a particular terrain of thought or culture, and have some degree of authority within a particular body of knowledge. We are encouraged that we need to be careful how we use our perch of authority, for our stewardship of our gifts has more of an impact on the world than what we might expect. I imagine that many of us found the Emerging Scholars Network because we wanted to further discuss this encouraging message. I certainly did.

However, I wanted to complicate the way we frame this calling, especially with regard to graduate students who are still trying to find our voices within a particular field. What can seem like an exciting challenge to academics who already have perches of authority (read- some kind of teaching or research gig where you feel visible), can be equally discouraging to those of us who are still yearning, searching and struggling to find an audience to hear us. So much of graduate school is about building an audience: an advisor you trust; a cohort of other graduate students and faculty you trust, and ultimately an intellectual community who believe that the final results of your research matter to them and the larger community they fit into. Therefore, even if your research challenges particular assumptions within your field, you are not actually supposed to challenge anyone to the point that they wonder if you fit into their intellectual community. At least not that significantly, or anyone you know, personally. Qualifying exams, preliminary exams and oral defenses, the landmarks in time of your graduate school experience, are all moments specially designed to make sure that you fit into the intellectual community that you are already supposed to be participating in. Your life is not about using a perch of authority wisely; it’s about continually defending how and why you belong. It’s about making others comfortable with you. Like any other hazing experience, it’s about doing what it takes, within reason, to prove that you deserve that perch of membership. Otherwise, you know you will never win that perch of authority.

I have wondered frequently why Christians interested in discussing the “integration of faith and learning” have not spent more time discussing what, and who, is lost this hazing process. Sure, have discussed the loss of our humility, the loss of our identity as a regular person, and sometimes even the loss of our childbearing years. However, many do not see enough wrong with the graduate school hazing process–a process that culminates in the roulette of finding a job–to see a need for it to be redeemed. Many see sets of testable knowledge as virtually objective, and see themselves as authority figures in their own areas of expertise simply by virtue of their successful passing through the hazing process. And perhaps sometimes this is true. However, my own experiences in graduate school have made quite obvious the fact that sets of testable knowledge are really just as subjective as any set of book reviews given by two professors. Preliminary exam questions upon this set of testable knowledge again do nothing but express what the examiners find important. And, as I have learned the hard way, if you don’t tell professors what they want to hear the first time they ask, they will ask you again, expecting that next time your answer will be different.

What do you think is gained and lost in this academic hazing process?

Read part 3 of the series, “Dig Where You Stand.”

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? Anything special with some time off or is there too much going on with the holiday?

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. Expanding Your Reach: Want to spread your ideas beyond the sound of your voice? The higher ed website ProfHacker.com shares some tips and tricks for effective “lecturecasting.” Here’s a sample, on the importance of having a script:

If you are going formal, make sure you have a script.  Even if you aren’t going formal, its always good to have some talking points.  If you are going to record your talking head (as opposed to talking over some slides or video material), put the script at eye level somewhere.  There is nothing worse than having to look down at a sheet of paper to figure out what you need to talk about next.  I put my script up on one of my other monitors (which I’ve got positioned just behind my laptop – the machine on which I do the actual recording).  This way, I can scroll through the script without looking away at all.

2. Keeping Up with Journals: Another practical article from ProfHacker.com, offering a number of ways that you can keep up with the latest journals in your specialty, whether online or in print.

3. Academic Bait and Switch: The pseudonymous “Henry Adams” has been writing in the Chronicle about his experiences as a English PhD candidate at “Elite National University.” His title – Academic Bait and Switch – refers both to his students’ expectations of attending an “elite” institution with world-renowned faculty, only to be taught in reality by graduate students just a few years older than themselves, and also to his own expectations of graduate school running aground with reality. In this installment, Adams describes a recent lecture series given to the grad students by the tenure-track faculty. He learns much more than intended about the “real world” of academia. In the selection below, one of the faculty, “Dr. Ethos,” has just recommended a seemingly impossible rate of work.

When she implied that a human being could grade six essays an hour—and do a good job of it—Dr. Ethos was lying. Even a novice knew that. I also knew that performing as a grad student meant not challenging my superiors, but I gave in to the desire that Edgar Allan Poe labels the imp of the perverse, the urge to do something just because I shouldn’t. I raised my hand and said politely, “It’s good to know that I need to grade six papers per hour, but right now I can handle only four. Could you and the other professors give us tips on how you reach the six-per-hour rate?”

Dr. Ethos stared in my general direction without making eye contact. Silence. I looked around the room. Dr. Dreedle and Dr. Cathcart, the only tenured persons in the room, glared right at me, but the junior professors all stared at the tops of their desks, just like my freshmen did when they couldn’t answer a question.

4.Billy Graham, Evangelist to…TED? I (Mike) had no idea that Billy Graham spoke at TED in 1998. (HT: Don’t Eat the Fruit.) His topic, before this cutting-edge crowd of tech prophets and design gurus: Technology and Faith. As John Dyer summarizes,

His basic message is simple: technology brings amazing benefits to humanity, but it’s failure to alleviate the brokenness of the human heart ultimately point us to our need for a Savior.

5. Article about Wheaton Canceled by Books & Culture: Andrew Chignell’s article, exploring the present condition and possible future for Wheaton College, was almost published by Books & Culture (Inside Higher Ed), but was pulled at the last minute. Instead, it has been published by the SoMA Review. Chignell, an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell and a Wheaton alumnus, provides his side of the back story on his website, WhitherWheaton.org. (Note: the comments on the IHE article say much about the current state of academia; Jerry Pattengale, Douglas Groothius, Louis Gallien, and others of note weigh in.)

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. Alan Jacobs’ Grad School Thoughts: Should you go to grad school? “Probably not,” writes Alan Jacobs, Wheaton English professor and author of Original Sin, The Narnian, A Theology of Reading, and many other excellent things.  But if you insist, he’s got some good advice. (Also check out Alan’s contribution to our ESN article, “Why Get a PhD in the Humanities?”)

2.  James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom ties for OUR MOST AUDACIOUS CLAIM: THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK OF THE YEAR with Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft:  An Inquiry Into the Value of Work in Best Books of 2009 Part I by Byron Borger of Hearts and Minds Bookstore.  Take a few minutes to review the list, keep an eye out for two more parts going up next week, and let us know what books you’re interested in discussing this year.

3.  In The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (W.W. Norton, 2010), Louis “Menand asks four questions: Why is it so hard to create a general-education curriculum? Why have the humanities undergone a crisis of legitimacy? Why has ‘interdisciplinarity’ been seen—and ultimately failed—as a magic wand? Why do professors share the same politics?” — Oxygenating Academe: The Unpublic Intellectual (By Karen J. Winkler, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 10, 2010)

4.  ‘Baby Einstein’ Founder Goes to Court (By Tamar Lewin, NY Times, January 12, 2010):  Raises the question of access to and reproducibility of research in relationship to marketing and consumer concerns.  Do you know anyone who watched or advocated Baby Einstein?

5. Proof (or at least Evidence) That Mentoring Matters (by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed): A study presented the American Economic Association’s annual meeting found that mentoring had a significant impact on the number of grants and publications for female economists.

In my post last week about advice for undergraduates, Katie Weakland shared a comment that I thought was particularly apt:

I suggest meeting your major professors early in your career – your first semester – and asking them to mentor you and/or let you do research with them. The early you can get your feet wet with research the better. I also suggest reading the primary literature in your field as soon as possible.

Meeting your professors and starting research early are both very important (I have stories I could share for each), but for the moment, I’m going to focus on primary literature. Read the rest of this entry »