The Emerging Scholars Blog

This is the last of four interviews I conducted at February’s Jubilee conference. Alissa Wilkinson has a professional life that probably looks like a lot of ESN members: in addition to editing The Curator for International Arts Movement, she also teaches writing at The King’s College and serves as Associate Editor for Comment, not to mention her various columns and articles in other publications. I spoke with Alissa about vocation, balance, and life as a writer, editor, and teacher.

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Micheal Hickerson: One of the reasons I wanted to interview you because of all the different things that you are doing that relate to the same general vocation and calling. I think that’s a pretty common thing among ESN members and among people in academic or cultural fields, and it’s becoming more common. First of all, I wanted to ask you about the publications that you are connected with. You were the founding editor for the Curator, which is published by International Arts Movement. There is also Comment, where you are the —

Alissa Wilkinson: I am the associate editor.

MH: Let’s talk about the Curator. Why did you decide to start that magazine and what was the origin story for it?

AW: I’ve been connected with the International Arts Movement in different capacities pretty much since I’ve moved to the city, which was about four and half years ago. I had been going to their head morning meetings in Tribeca, and we had a discussion group. Several of my good friends who are now on staff with me were also going to that group, and we got to talking about how good it would be for IAM to be putting something out there into the cultural sphere that was an example of promoting good work, which was where the idea of the Curator came in.

One morning over breakfast we just had this idea, “Hey, we should do an online magazine. I mean how hard can that be?” We decided the point of it should be to curate culture in such a way that we are looking to promote good culture that might otherwise be overlooked, because magazines like, on one hand, The New Yorker and The Atlantic tend to be very good at writing good cultural criticism and then on the other hand, there are Christian publications that do the same thing. They mainly focus on what’s broader in culture — either pop culture or high culture — but things that people are already talking about. The idea was let’s also write about things that people might not be talking about.

Photo credit: Anna L Conti via Flickr

In that way, it fit with the idea of IAM as a local movement more than just something that was from New York. I have writers all over the country — actually all over the world — and I encourage them to seek out what is interesting in their area, like a small band that they love, or their friends’ work, or something like that. Maybe they find a book in the library that was published 25 years ago and think, “I can’t believe nobody has read this book.” The concept was to publish culture essays that had a personal bend that would help uncover good culture.

I started recruiting some writers, and Kevin Gosa who works here at IAM with me started recruiting some writers he knew, and between the two of us we got up quite a list. We launched on August 29, 2008. Since then we’ve published three essays continually every week, and we’ve added a lot of writers. We are hatching plans of maybe some blogs, I am not sure yet, but it’s been a good experience. I’ve been handling most of the work on that end. I am trying to get some coworkers to come on and help with some of the scheduling and I have an assisting editor who helps me proofread.

Everyone volunteered their time up until about this time last year and now we get to pay them a little. It’s been good and we’ve gotten a lot of buzz. Actually, I was surprised we’ve gotten links from Book Forum and from Kottke, which is pretty well known. People seem to be resonating with the idea. Read the rest of this entry »

David Naugle is professor of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University and the author, most recently, of Reordered Love, Reordered Lives: Learning the Deep Meaning of Happiness (website, Amazon link). I had a chance to meet David at Jubilee 2010 and ask him a few questions about the nature of happiness, his life as a faculty member, and advice for students considering academic vocations.

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Mike Hickerson: I don’t want to give too much away from the book, but what would be your capsule definition of happiness?

David Naugle: I think it’s the genuine fulfillment of human nature rooted in a relationship with God, whose mercy and grace demonstrated in the person and work of Jesus Christ enables us to love God and the creation well, in a rightly-ordered manner. That’s the definition in short. It has to do with the love of God and the love of one’s neighbor, rightly-ordered.

MH: This morning, I was thinking about how that would apply with my work with emerging scholars and Christian faculty. Academics often complain about the stress, the low pay and long hours and the high entry requirements of their profession. Yet at the same time, they sacrifice quite a bit of time, energy, and money in order to become an academic. Academic professions are typically ranked near the top as one of the most fulfilling jobs. Maybe this is too big of a question, but what do you see as the state of happiness in the academy, among faculty?

DN: Well I think that is maybe an impossible question to answer, actually. Obviously it would depend on each individual faculty member and where they’re coming from. My guess is that the happiness quotient among university faculty, broadly speaking, is probably roughly about the same as the happiness quotient of American society generally, if we’re thinking in terms of North American society, the U.S. and Canada. I don’t know if there’s anything that’s uniquely happiness-giving to being a university professor.

As a matter of fact, depending on the discipline, there are some cases in which professors would probably be tempted toward cynicism, skepticism, and despair unless there is a foundation of faith underneath all that. It’s pretty easy to get lost in the labyrinth of knowledge and to see no way out. An,d more or less, you pursue your job as anyone would pursue their job, as a source of livelihood, perhaps as a way to make a name for oneself, to scale the career heights in the academy, that kind of thing. Faculty are looking for something that fulfills and brings meaning, but perhaps struggling to find it, just like anybody else would. So I don’t necessarily put faculty members in any kind of particular special happiness category, by any stretch of the imagination.

As far as the profession itself is concerned, I think it’s the best job on the planet. I think that for a number of reasons. [Number] one, especially as a Christian professor, that if you’ve learned through the grace of God to love God and to love your neighbor as you love yourself, and to love all things in creation and culture, in a rightly or re-ordered way, in light of your love for God and love for neighbor, and that’s the framework or context within which you’re pursuing your academic discipline, then that is happiness giving.

Number two, it makes the academic enterprise seem to me profoundly meaningful. There’s a way of contributing to the academy, to the discipline, to the guild of your discipline, in a unique way, from a Christian perspective. And you get to have a ministry, which I think is really what the classroom actually is: a place of ministry in the lives of young, impressionable students. It’s a ministry that has a lasting impact. In that sense, if you put all of that together, I think that’s why it’s the greatest job on the planet. Read the rest of this entry »

I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving. Mine was a bit abbreviated, as our two-year-old came down with a stomach virus and I had to stay home with her instead of joining the rest of the family. The worst part: not getting to debate the merits of the movie Once with my wife’s cousin’s husband. (For my take on the movie, see here.)

But today is going better. I just received via UPS the camcorders
that Tom Trevethan and I will be using at Following Christ 2008. We’ll be interviewing faculty and students about following Christ in the academy, for use next year on the ESN and Faculty Ministry websites.

Any suggestions about questions, topics, or interview subjects? If you had five minutes with an accomplished Christian faculty member, what would you ask them?