The Emerging Scholars Blog

Last week I began a Chasing Wisdom series based up my Skype interview with Nathan Foster, Assistant Professor of Social Work, Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI.  In the first post, I focused upon how a private person, such as Nathan, wrote such an open book about his life, struggles, family, and vocation.

Nathan Foster and Tom Grosh IV Chat

Today, we’ll explore

1. becoming a wisdom chaser in higher education
2. discerning the call to higher education
3. being present to one’s family

Next week we’ll consider

1. power in the classroom from the perspective of the teacher
2. taking the first steps in teaching
3. how InterVarsity Christian Fellowship can journey with academics

And in case you were wondering, Nathan’s keeping an eye on the series and would love to respond to your comments. So please, take advantage of the opportunity!

Thomas B. Grosh IV:   What do academics chase? Is it wisdom?  Based on insights from your journey and that of your father’s, what would you say to encourage Emerging Scholars to become wisdom chasers?

Nathan Foster: Your question about education and wisdom is great. I worked at a place once and they didn’t like to hire people with advanced degrees.  And I said, “That’s crazy.  Why not?”  They thought [those with advanced degrees] become very arrogant and lost their ability to be teachable.  Don’t get me wrong education’s great and I’m a huge fan of it.  Personally I love to learn.  But it’s good for me to remember that there are potentially negative consequences from education.  We can get a little stuck up and we can lose some of our humility.  My wife calls it professoritis.  We tend to think that we’re right about things.  Now part of that comes from certain expectations.  When you’re teaching, people expect you to have the answers and they look to you to have the answers.  And so we get used to being right.  I’ve found it very seldom that students really challenge us on some of what we spout off.

I got a couple of good disciplines I try to practice to fight my professoritis. … Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned in Wisdom Chaser: Insights on Parent-Child Relationships, I found reading Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet (Nathan Foster. InterVarsity Press. 2010) to be a great blessing.  In follow-up, I contacted Nathan Foster (Assistant Professor of Social Work, Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI) to chat about some topics which I thought would be particularly applicable to members of the Emerging Scholars Network.

Nathan Foster and Tom Grosh IV Chat

First we’ll explore how a private person, such as Nathan, wrote such an open book about his life, struggles, family, and vocation.  In coming weeks we’ll explore …

1. becoming a wisdom chaser in higher education
2. discerning the call to higher education
3. being present to one’s family
4. power in the classroom from the perspective of the teacher
5. taking the first steps in teaching
6. how InterVarsity Christian Fellowship can journey with academics

And in case you were wondering, Nathan is following the series and would love to respond to your comments. So please, take advantage of the opportunity!

Thomas B. Grosh IV:  How do you come to write something so personal?  Did you have a sense from the start that you’d be writing something like that or were you just keeping a journal and it became a book?  How does that happen?  How did writing a book about your journey up mountains with your father come to your mind?

Nathan Foster:  I always knew I wanted to write.  I was just waiting for the right project to come along.  It is probably no coincidence that when I write it tends to be very honest, somewhat raw.  That just personally fits me. Most things that I do, I try to have that flavor.  So that’s how my relationships go.  Some of that just stems back to

1. growing up and just wanting things to be honest and real.
2. being a counselor and therapist, where you’re dealing with real life stuff and you lose interest in playing games. Read the rest of this entry »

When I returned from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Graduate & Faculty Team Meetings, I found my family wanting me 24/7, at least for a few days ;-)  In my brief moments of spare time, I picked up Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet (Nathan Foster. InterVarsity Press. 2010).   In Wisdom Chaser, Nathan relates the story of his strained relationship with his famous father, i.e., Richard Foster, academic/teacher and author of several spiritual formation books including Celebration of Discipline.  The below excerpt kept me turning the pages to find out how father-son reconciliation occurred through mountain top experiences.

Wisdom Chaser Cover

As the years went by, it seemed I [Nathan] saw less and less of my father [Richard] and cared less and less about his absence.  At some point I shifted from wanting him to be home, counting down the days to when he would return, and eagerly greeting him at the airport, to not knowing when he was gone or home and caring even less.  As a child, I was proud of my dad.  Hearing him speak to crowds filled me with excitement; perhaps he would mention my name, or tell a story about me, or in some way acknowledge his home life.  At first I think I accepted that God was using my dad to help people.  Later I felt mildly ambivalent about the fact that God seemed to need my dad.  Somewhere along the way, my feelings shifted to embarrassment and anger that Dad had “holier work” to do.  By thirteen I was filled with rage, and I shut down. — Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet (Nathan Foster. InterVarsity Press. 2010, p.29).

As you may guess there is much more to the story, such as Richard’s experience as a youth with his family, writing habits, founding of Renovare’, slow pace of life/climb … and Nathan’s travels/thoughts through his teens & twenties.  Now I’m no Richard or Nathan Foster, but with regard to my own travels and intense focus upon various tasks for ministry in higher education, I found the book convicting.

First responses which I made in my house …

1. Included in our family’s dinner devotions the discipline of asking each member of the family the best/worst part of the day
2. Began reading Gary Schmidt’s retelling of Pilgrims Progress (Eerdmans Press, 2008) chapter by chapter with the twins before bedtime … seeking to reinstate our sporadic bedtime readings.
3. Declined a ministry invitation to preserve a time with family during a stretched summer.
4. Cleared time to celebrate my wife Theresa’s birthday (May 6) and fully attend to the family while she runs Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure (Pittsburgh, PA) with her mom.

First response with the Emerging Scholars Network …

Writing this post, which took much longer than I thought it would.  Why?  Much to talk about with regard to parent-child relationships and higher education (topic of some future posts).  And because I  took the time to soak in the great video of a recent conversation between Nathan and his father at Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI. Why was the conversation at Spring Arbor?  Because Nathan’s on faculty as an Assistant Professor of Social Work!  Refreshing material.  I’d encourage you to check out the clips, maybe show them as part of a campus discussion group and pass them along to others whom you think would find them of interest.

PS.  Not only has Nathan not given up on following Christ, getting to know his father, serving in higher education, but also he’s not given up on becoming a father himself.  Nathan’s married and has two children of his own.

PPS.  InterVarsity Press has an excellent Question-Answer author interview (text) posted here.

Here’s the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them.  In addition, 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.  Week in Review: Big Questions Edition touched on if Universities have lost sight of their purpose and the potential value of increased career services.  The Chronicle of Higher Education opened this week with Are Too Many Students Going to College? (November 8, 2009) and What Do Parents Think? (November 9, 2009).  Both articles wrestle with whether the whole population can afford or should pursue this American dream.  In the survey of 1000 parents of pre-college students:

Nine of 10 parents told us that, despite the toughest economic climate in decades, they still view sending their kids to college as an essential part of the American dream … Almost eight in 10 Americans agreed that it’s very important to obtain a degree, while only a little more than half said their parents had felt it was very important for them to attend college (William F. Glavin Jr. What Do Parents Think? Chronicle of Higher Education. November 8, 2009).

2.  In Why College Professors Don’t Envy the Young (Chronicle of Higher Education.  November 08, 2009), Gina Barreca, professor of English/Feminist Theroy at UConn, delivers a unique perspective on midlife crisis as an older member of the academic community observing the younger members (and reflecting upon her own past).

While friends in other professions are waking up to their midlives (or what we choose to call midlife but how many people do you know who live past 100 — not counting Lévi-Strauss?) and frantically wishing they could return to their twenties or thirties, those of us who have been dealing with undergraduate and graduate students don’t want to time-travel back to those years. … To be adorable and energetic would be great, but to feel that perpetual trepidation that I’ll never find a job, a partner, a place in the world, or an apartment that I don’t have to share with six other people? No deal. To feel as if the whole world is open to me would be lovely, but to live with the anxiety that I’ll end up on the outskirts or end up an outcast? No thanks.  To wonder whether I’ll ever do work meaningful to me, let alone anyone else? Not a chance. …

3.  Reduce the Technology, Rescue Your Job (Chronicle of Higher Education. November 09, 2009) by Michael J. Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University and author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford University Press, 2004) provides a number of practical recommendations.

4. Getting Started with Zotero – Zotero is a free citation and research manager that you can add on to Firefox. Amy Cavender at ProfHacker.com started a series this week to introduce new users to Zotero, which I (Mike) have never really used but have heard great things about.

5. Someone’s Trying to Find You – In a good way. IVP Editor Dan Reid, writing on IVP’s Addenda & Errata blog, expresses his frustration, and bafflement, at how hard it is to find faculty information on some universities’ websites. Dan uses the information to look for potential new authors, but the benefit of easy-to-find, easy-to-read faculty pages goes beyond that:

This is important not just for the sake of publishers and others finding your faculty. Good academic websites also contribute to a faculty member’s platform. And it is a good thing for academic institutions to have faculty with a platform that extends beyond the classroom. This doesn’t really need to be argued, does it?