DJ asks:
Why and when should we start mentoring and investing in those younger or at a less advanced place than we are academically?
[Read more…] about Science Corner: “Fear is the path to the dark side.”
InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network
DJ asks:
Why and when should we start mentoring and investing in those younger or at a less advanced place than we are academically?
We’re getting a new Star Wars film in a few weeks. The series has a strong focus on legacies and the training of future generations, which I’m sure will continue in Episode VII. (I have no inside information; I just get a strong ‘passing the torch’ vibe from trailer.) In the original trilogy, everyone wants a chance to train the last of the Jedi. Yet in The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda complains that Luke is too old to begin training. At the time, it seemed like a bit of reverse psychology to help Luke discover for himself just how strongly he wants to become a Jedi. It wasn’t until the prequels that we learned Jedi training starts around 3 or 4. [Read more…] about Science Corner: But Which Are You–the Master or the Apprentice?
ESN continues its series of interviews with authors of Faithful Is Successful.You can read Bethany Bowen-Wefuan’s post on David’s Faithful Is Successful essay here. David E. Lewis is the William R. Kenan, Jr. professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. His research interests include the presidency, executive branch politics and public administration. He is the author of two books, Presidents and the Politics of Agency Design (Stanford University Press, 2003) and The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance (Princeton University Press, 2008), and numerous articles on American politics, public administration and management. David and his family attend the Village Chapel in historic Hillsboro Village in Nashville, Tennessee.
1. ESN: You mention at the beginning of your essay that when you started down the path to becoming a professor at a research university, you didn’t know any Christian professors. How did you find role models/mentors over time, and what advice would you give to Christian scholars looking for mentoring? [Read more…] about Faithful Is Successful Interview: David E. Lewis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is one of the books that higher ed professionals have mentioned to me over and over again with regard to the interest in “spirituality†among college students. So, when a friend offered to lend me a copy, I accepted. For me, there were two significant areas of “takeaway†from this book.
The first was Parks exploration of the developmental stage of “emerging adulthood.†I think many of us assume adolescents just move from adolescence to adulthood and we don’t adequately understand this period in between. Even more, we don’t consider how this developmental stage relates to faith development. We often just worry about keeping people in the faith, rather than understand the changes in thinking processes and perception of the world that are occurring and how these must be constructively engaged. Parks proposes that we go through changes in knowing, in forms of dependence, and in forms of community. In knowing, we move from authority based knowing to sometimes unqualified relativism to probing commitments to tested commitments to convictional commitments. In forms of dependence, we move from dependent or counterdependent, to fragile inner dependence to confident inner dependence to interdependence. In forms of community we move from conventional to diffuse to mentoring community to self-selected groups to an openness to the other. A challenge for many religious communities is that they often don’t move beyond the first or adolescent/conventional form in each of these categories. And if our emerging adults do, no wonder we lose them!
[Read more…] about Book Review: Big Questions, Worthy Dreams
Hannah, Thank-you for offering this letter of encouragement! The faculty with whom I shared your words at Mentoring over the Long Term: Crafting Conversations, a seminar co-led with Terry Gustafson (OSU, Chemistry Professor) at the 2014 MidWest Faculty Conference on The Ends and Goals of Higher Education in Twenty-First-Century America: Change and the Calling of the Christian Educator, were very appreciative. I look forward to posting material from the seminar in order to create a toolkit for those seeking to dig more deeply into mentoring. ~ Thomas B. Grosh IV, Associate Director, Emerging Scholars Network
Dear Friends in Higher Ed,
I remember kneeling in the woods one fall day during graduate school, afraid. The reds and oranges around me were stunning, but I was more aware of my knees on the ground and of the growing disquiet I felt. I was afraid not because my secular department was hostile to my faith (it had turned out to be quite supportive of my interest in theology), and not because I was surrounded by the flashier sort of temptation (I lived in a small college town at the time). I was afraid because things like the resurrection of Christ seemed hazier and hazier to me as I got busier and busier. I had committed to a workload that semester that I really couldn’t sustain, and life came to seem a blur of classes, papers, and four-hour nights. I read Scripture each morning, but found it hard to concentrate because there was always another deadline pressing.
As I adjusted to the pressures of grad student life, I longed for a mentor who could advise me on living faithfully in the rush of competing deadlines, someone who could also guide me in integrating faith well with my subject. My department was very strong in mentoring and provided me with great professional and personal advisors. But it wasn’t really their job to ask how my spiritual life was going or supply direct advice on integrating faith and learning, and I hadn’t been there long enough to figure out who might be interested in that kind of mentoring. [Read more…] about ESN Mentoring Letter — MidWest Faculty Conference