The Emerging Scholars Blog

This morning Russia Licenses Faith Healers topped my new mail. The one who forwarded it to me commented, They are soooo far ahead of us.  Read the rest of this entry »

As a member of the Central Pennsylvania Forum for Religion and Science, I’m participating in an Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion (Karl Gibersonand Fr. Mariano Artigas, Oxford University Press, 2006) reading group.  I thought some of you would have an interest in considering how the Oracles of Science(i.e., Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Edward O. Wilson), influence contemporary understandings of reality, origins, science, and religion.  So tighten your seat belt, bring your communication system on-line, and let me know what you think about the concept of the Oracles of Science. ... Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Inside Higher Ed reports today on National Science Foundation’s data on 2007 earned doctorates. Overall, 48,079 doctorates were awarded by U.S. institutions last year, an increase of 5.4% over 2006. This is the fifth straight year of increases.

Humanities Ph.D.s, however, declined 4.6%, led by “Letters” (English literature & language, classics, etc.), which declined by 6.9%. Wow. What this means for literature fields, I’m not sure. I’d be interested in seeing how the MLA or other associations interpret the data.

This week has been Nobel week, as the various Nobel Prizes have been announced. (I see this morning that Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has won the Nobel for Literature. I guess Americans really are insular - I had not heard of this author before.) The Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to Roger Tsien of UC - San Diego, Martin Chalfie of Columbia, and Osamu Shimomura, of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, for their work in using a glowing jellyfish gene to make proteins visible under UV light, greatly enhancing researchers’ ability to track them.

This morning, NPR ran a story about Douglas Prasher, the scientist who actually discovered the gene and provided it to Tsien and Chalfie. Since then, he lost his grant funding, then later was laid off by a NASA contractor, and now works for a car dealership, driving a courtesy shuttle, and barely making ends meet. Prasher calls himself a “hard luck story,” but sounds like he has as good an attitude as one might expect in the circumstances. Here’s hoping that the NPR story will lead to Prasher getting new work that better fits his qualifications.

Over at Books & Culture, Karl W. Giberson reviews The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, edited by (in Gilberson’s phrase) “that arch-villain Richard Dawkins.” Gilberson is being cheeky, and he notes that, in this volume, Dawkins’ love for science and skill as a writer and editor shines through. Gilberson notes that Dawkins “is exceptional in being a member of Britain’s most élite scientific and literary societies, the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature.”

The review is worth reading. I, for one, love a good piece of science writing. But Gilberson raises a good question:

Literature—plays, essays, screenplays for movies, novels, nonfiction—has to be about something. “Literature” has no natural content any more than sentences have natural meaning. So why isn’t there more “science” in literature? Science transforms both our world and our worldview, and yet a solid work of literature is more likely to be about an alcoholic than a scientist.

‘Twas not always so. I still remember vividly being introduced - really introduced - to John Donne and his great poem, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” which was written to his pregnant wife as he was about to leave for an overseas journey. The time being 1611, and both travel and childbirth being much more dangerous then than now, Donne and his wife had little assurance of seeing each other again. (Indeed, their child was born stillborn while Donne was gone.) Donne’s imagery to comfort his wife was taken directly from science and engineering: metallurgy, draftsmanship, geometry.

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,
    Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
    Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
    As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
    To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the center sit,
    Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
    And grows erect, as that comes home.