Archive for the ‘history’ tag
Week in Review: World Cup Edition
Sometimes, we all need help from the "hand of God."
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. Faith and Freedom (Inside Higher Ed, June 9): Our brothers and sisters to the north are facing an interesting debate. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (the largest Canadian faculty association) has begun a campaign to “investigate” colleges and universities that require faculty to sign statements of faith, claiming that statements of faith are inherently inconsistent with academic freedom. Christian Higher Education Canada, an association of 33 Christian institutions (including Mike’s graduate alma mater) has responded with a call to discuss exactly what is meant by “academic freedom.” CAUT’s position is clear:
“Nothing that calls itself a university should have a faith test. That’s just not acceptable.”
As we’ve seen in the CLS v. Martinez case, conflicts between secular and religious visions for education are here to stay for a while.
2. Faculty Burnout Has Both External and Internal Sources, Scholar Says (Audrey Williams June, Chronicle, 6/9/2010). Tom: I agree with the comment that more research is needed in this area. I’d like to see a copy of Janie Crosmer’s paper. A short quote from her interview:
Q. What are the key things that contribute to faculty burnout?
A. Lack of time, poorly prepared students, cumbersome bureaucratic rules, high self expectations, unclear institutional expectations, and low salary. Research shows that the sources of stress have remained unchanged for 25 years. We know about the problem, but we’re not doing anything about it.
Any thoughts on whether academic burnout is unique?
Photo: Lego recreation of Diego Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God” goal from the 1986 World Cup. From a series of Lego versions of famous photos by Balakov on Flickr. HT: Alan Jacobs.
Where did you find your megaphone?
Where did you find your megaphone? Who gave it to you?
This is the first of four guest posts from Janine Giordano, a graduate student and ESN member from the University of Illinois, on the topic of cultivating your voice and finding your audience while in graduate school. When she is not teaching, she spends most of her time working on her dissertation, Between Religion and Politics: The Working Class Religious Left, 1886-1936.
I exchanged Facebook posts recently with a Christian friend who is an excellent scholar and an excellent union organizer. Her father is a prominent pastor, and she obviously has very similar gifts in shepherding and public speaking. She can move a crowd to cheer at a rally for higher education in a way that seasoned pastors usually only dream for, and she is always, quite naturally, bringing new leaders into the fold. It has always bemused me that her church, like mine, would never permit her a place in the pulpit. Kerry and I have had many discussions of gender and the Church; they usually climax in a fiery exchange of affirmations for the other’s frustration with American churches’ unwillingness to recognize women as fully gifted people.
We usually remind each other that we are not alone and we ought to keep up the fight, but it had been a long time since we spoke, and this time it was different. I began my jeremiad as usual, but she sighed—with understanding but an air of more hope than I expected, even craved—that she had pretty much found other megaphones these days. In the past several months, Kerry has successfully worked with our city government to make some changes in criminal justice protocols; she has led our graduate student union to a better contract—both as our rallying speechmaker and as our lead negotiator with the University of Illinois. She is even working now on getting the police in town to get a better work contract of their own. This time, her affirmation to me was not to keep on fighting my church but to find another. She even pointed out a suggestion.
I looked at this last message in disbelief. “Join another church?” I wondered as I brushed my teeth. Last year I finally left my church of four years after fighting a long, losing battle for the opportunity to teach adult Sunday School. I wanted to engage the adults in my church with the history of the Christianity in the United States so very badly, and kept thinking that if I exposed more and more of the hypocrisy of their rules (for example, that I could teach Religious History at the local seminary, or the local university, that I could sing my message at church, that I could teach the same content to ANY of them if they were under thirteen, by their own rules!) then they would change their convictions about me, even if not about all womankind. Read the rest of this entry »
Week in Review: Christo et Ecclesiae Edition
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. Why Harvard Students Should Study More Religion (Lisa Miller, Newsweek): A look at Harvard’s (lack of) religion in its undergraduate curriculum, with special attention to Louis Menand’s attempt to include a course called “Reason and Faith” in Harvard’s revised education requirements. The article quotes a couple of very interesting, and very different, points of view;
“My colleagues fear that taking religion seriously would undermine everything a great university stands for,” the Rev. Peter Gomes, Harvard’s chaplain and a professor of Christian history, told me. “I think that’s ungrounded, but there it is.”Steven Pinker says his main objection to the 2006 proposal that students be required to take a course in a Reason and Faith category was that it seemed to make reason and faith equal paths to truth. “I very, very, very much do not want to go on the record as suggesting that people should not know about religion,” he told me. “But reason and faith are not yin and yang. Faith is a phenomenon. Reason is what the university should be in the business of fostering.”
2. More religion in higher education: Inside Higher Ed featured two opinion articles about the role of religion and theology in academic disciplines – “On Teaching Christianity” by Adam Kosko, who argues that religion classes need to spend more time studying the actual theology of religious figures and movements; and “Everywhere and Nowhere” by Kevin Schultz and Paul Harvey, which takes another look at the place of religion within historical studies.
More links after the jump.
A Faith and Culture Devotional
Faith and Culture Devotional
New from Zondervan, A Faith and Culture Devotional
seems custom-made for ESN members. Edited by Kelly Monroe Kullberg (of the Veritas Forum, Finding God at Harvard, Finding God Beyond Harvard, and, most recently, InterVarsity’s Women in the Academy and Professions) and Lael Arrington (host of the radio show “The Things That Matter Most”), the devotional is designed to be read daily for 15 weeks. Each week, there is one reading from seven different subject areas: theology, history, philosophy, science, literature, arts, and contemporary culture.
If that doesn’t interest you, here are some of the authors of those daily readings: Read the rest of this entry »
