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.

[Editor's note: This is a new weekly feature from your blog contributors. Each week, we'll be posting articles, books, news, etc., that Tom, Mike, and the ESN community have been pondering. If you have a book or article you'd like us to add to next week's Review, add it in the comments or send it to either Mike or Tom. Thanks!]

The Harvard disadvantage – The Boston Globe takes a very personal look at students from poor backgrounds at Harvard and their struggles to fit in with the children of privilege.

In the Chronicle, Audrey Williams June provides two looks at the changing world of tenure: a report on the rapid decrease of tenure-track instructors (73% of instructors, including graduate assistants, are now off the tenure track) and a profile of St. John’s 2008 decision to move 20 contingent writing instructors to tenure-track positions.

A few weeks ago, Inside Higher Ed published this advice on managing large writing projects from John Gastil. I (Mike) am working on a large writing project myself at the moment, and plan to take Gastil’s advice about outlining, scheduling, and setting deadlines.

A fine tuned universe? At Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog, RJS (a science professor) reviews some high profile opinions on the Anthropic Principle.

From the community

Dave Snoke submitted this very interesting article from the UK, about an Oxford researcher, Justin Barrett, who claims that belief in God (or at least, a god) is ” built into the natural development of children’s minds,” not something learned from the culture around them.

Books

N.T. Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision (InterVarsity Press, 2009). Here’s a quote to ponder:

“Knowing God for oneself, as opposed to knowing or thinking about him, is at the heart of Christian living. Discovering that God is gracious, rather than a distant bureaucrat or a dangerous tyrant, is the good news that constantly surprises and refreshes us. But we are not the center of the universe. God is not circling around us. We are circling around him. It may look, from our view, as though “me and my salvation” are the be-all and end-all of Christianity. Sadly, many people — many devout Christians! — have preached that way and lived that way. This problem is not peculiar to the churches of the Reformation. It goes back to the high Middle Ages in the Western church, and infects and affects Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative, high and low church alike. But a full reading of Scripture itself tells a different story. God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world.” — pp.23-24.