The Emerging Scholars Blog

Archibishop Teofan Savu of the Romanian Orthodox Church in a moment of prayer

As I mentioned in Friday’s Week in Review, my InterVarsity colleague Tom Trevethan pointed me to a recent post by Fuller president Richard J. Mouw on Duke’s Call & Response blog.

Mouw asks:

What difference does it make to open class with prayer?

In Following Christ 2008′s Humanities track, Classics scholar Dora Rice Hawthorne, who was then at Baylor, shared a paper reflecting on Anselm’s practice of not merely opening his classes with prayer, but even stopping in the middle of his lectures to offer up prayers giving thanks for the subject matter, asking for the Spirit’s guidance in understanding Biblical texts, and so on. She remarked that, even at a Christian school like Baylor, stopping in the middle of class to pray about the subject matter seemed like a gross violation of academic propriety.

Mouw, borrowing from Mark Schwehn’s excellent Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America, wonders if there is something misguided with our common reluctance to pray in class:

The Western academy emerged out of worshipping communities, after all. And, as Schwehn boldly states his case, “the continued vitality [of academic life today] would seem to be in some jeopardy under wholly secular auspices.” Schwehn suggests much of the academy today is “living off a kind of borrowed fund of moral capital.” For example, to the degree that the virtues that are crucial for a sense of communal academic trust are still present in the broader academy, they are drawing on resources from past spiritual practices that are no longer seen as necessary to the intellectual quest.

Mouw’s blog post deals primarily with Christian universities, but Tom Trevethan wanted to begin a conversation about how faculty and students integrate prayer in their academic work at secular universities.

What are your thoughts about Mouw’s blog post? Do you include prayer as part of your academic work? If you’re at a public or secular private university, how do you define the boundaries between your private/public prayer life and the secular/pluralistic environment of the university?

Photo credit: iulian nistea via Flickr

Today's heat index: 104° F. Is it too soon to look forward to autumn?

Last week, I began reading the new book from IVP publisher Bob Fryling, The Leadership Ellipse: Shaping How We Lead By Who We Are. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the question “Who am I?” (and reading other IVP books on the subject of being yourself). Bob seeks to connect two popular genres that don’t often interact with one another: spiritual formation books that focus on the contemplative, internal life, and leadership books that focus on the active, external life. In truth, our internal and external lives cannot be separated — in the foreword, Eugene Peterson calls them the “right foot and left foot of our Christian life” — but they are rarely brought together in an explicit way.

Photo credit: pictoscribe via Flickr

Chapter two — “A Growing Strength: The Practice of Pruning” — contained some advice that I found challenging, which I bet many of you will also find challenging. Bob writes that, for spiritual and personal growth, we often need pruning, especially three kinds:

• Pruning of reputation and self-righteousness
• Pruning of the passion to maximize life
• Pruning of soliciting praise

Much could be said of all three, but I found the middle pruning — of the passion to maximize life — the most challenging. Bob recognizes that we must be responsible stewards of the talents that God has given us, and that we must work for “night is coming” (John 9:4), yet there is danger in pursuing efficiency, just as there is danger in too much food or drink.

As leaders we can also become addicted to efficiencies that at first help our bottom line or our workload, but can become an obsession that leaves out important relationships…

Choosing not to be consumed with efficiency is a great freedom that allows greater flexibility and spontaneity. As Jesus taught, it is not efficient to go after the one lost sheep at the expense of the other ninety-nine, but it is the right choice.

Personally, I struggle with a desire for “efficient mornings,” which usually means that I try to read the newspaper while getting my children ready for the day, and then skip directly to my email, calendar, and task list instead of taking time for Bible study and prayer. Of course, the results are that my children try to model my efficiency by wanting to watch TV while they eat their breakfast, and that I quickly fall out of the discipline of spending time with God.

How do you respond to Bob’s statement about efficiency? Do you struggle with making efficiency an idol at the expense of relationships or other important areas of life? How do you guard against the idolatry of efficiency?

If you want to order The Leadership Ellipse, don’t forget about your ESN member discount! Also, see a Google Preview of the book after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

Easter Eggs

Do you think of worship, hospitality, or celebration as spiritual disciplines? If you’re like me, you associate the idea of “discipline” with things that are hard, like fasting, daily prayer, intense Bible study, and so on. But if a discipline is something that trains us to live and think rightly, then what better response to the resurrection can there be than over-the-top celebration?

In fact, celebration holds a place of honor in both of my top two books on spiritual disciplines. Richard Foster, in Celebration of Discipline, places celebration at the conclusion of his classic work, while Adele Ahlberg Calhoun puts Celebration at the very front of her Spiritual Disciplines Handbook.

Here’s what Calhoun writes about Celebration:

The world is filled with reasons to be downcast. But deeper than sorrow thrums the unbroken pulse of God’s joy, a joy that will yet have its eternal day. To set our hearts on this joy reminds us that we can choose how we respond to any particular moment. We can search for God in all circumstances, or not. We can seek the pulse of hope and celebration because it is God’s reality. Heaven is celebrating. Right now the cherubim, seraphim, angels, archangels, prophets, apostles, martyrs and all the company of saints overflow with joy in the presence of their Creator. Every small experience of Jesus with us is a taste of the joy that is to come. We are not alone — and that in itself is reason to celebrate. (Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, 27)

The Hickerson Family, all dolled-up for Easter

Here are a few ways that my family and I celebrated the resurrection of Jesus:

• Dressing up in new clothes (including new shoes for me)
• Attending a packed church, taking communion, and hearing a powerful message on the hope of the resurrection
• Singing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” and the “Hallelujah Chorus” (and hearing perfect silence at that moment of tension before the final “Hallelujah”)
• Joining extended family and old friends for an Easter feast of lamb, ham, and too much sugar, all while being welcoming my principal role models of hospitality, my father- and mother-in-law
• Catching up – unexpectedly – with some good friends who have had a rough spring
• Puzzling over my 6-year-old’s sudden obsession over reading the Bible – and trying to decide whether it is sincere or not (and whether that matters)
• Delving into the study of God through conversation about justification and covenant
• For my wife, playing (and winning) some great board games with cousins and friends we don’t see nearly often enough

All in all, a great day of celebration. And I didn’t even mention the eggs.

How did you celebrate Easter?