The Emerging Scholars Blog

Last night our family discussed the shared practice of Lent.

By the grace of God the Father, our family will pick up the Spirit’s patience, keeping before us Galatians 5:22-26 as we grow in Christ-likeness in word and deed:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.  Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.

We resolved by the power of the Spirit to give up human impatience, which became all too noticeable while being cooped up during the recent Northeast blizzard.  At the end of our discussion, one of my daughters suggested we really give up something earthly such as the internet.  My response was that we could consider the possibility, but first we’ll see how well we do with growing in and confessing when we fall short of incarnating God’s patience (and other fruits of the Spirit) in our life together over the course of the next week.

What are you picking up during Lent to fill the vacuum of what you’re giving up?  Is there a fruit of the Spirit which you yearn for and find difficult to nurture in the context of the academy? How can we pray for you and for the people of God in higher education as we journey toward becoming new creations through the resurrection power of Christ Jesus?

PS.  Looking for some prayers to guide your conversation with God today and through Lent?  Join me at Godspace.  Have some Lenten resources to share with ESN?  Please let us know by email or comment.

In The Other Education (NY Times Opinion, November 26, 2009), David Brooks comments:

For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.

Bruce Springsteen serves as one of Brooks’ professors of second education and he enjoyed passing along this mentor to his 15 year old daughter via a Baltimore, MD, concert experience with 10,000 other disciples. He reflects on the process:

In fact, we all gather our own emotional faculty — artists, friends, family and teams. Each refines and develops the inner instrument with a million strings.

Who are your emotional faculty? How do they intersect with your educational faculty?  Do they inhabit two different spheres and/or stories?  Would you equate emotional faculty with spiritual faculty?

As we’re a few days into Advent, let us remember that the Father sent His Son, the very Word of God, to be one of us, among us in birth, life, and death.  He alone brings true Life, Meaning, and Truth through example, Word, new Life, Spirit, and union with His Body the Church. Now matter how great our heroes on the artistic, athletic, familial, lecture, or research platform, let us first turn to Christ Jesus for our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual education.

Note 1:  Additional Springsteen-U2 performances can be found on-line, including I still haven’t found what I’m looking for (Live at Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame) and Stand By Me [Bono seems to have broken his arm and needs a good friend to play his guitar (Live In Philadelphia 9.25.1987)].

Note 2:  Scot McKnight has come conversation regarding this article at Did you get educated by Bruce Springsteen?

A Faith and Culture Devotional

If you don’t already have a copy of A Faith & Culture Devotional, click here to learn how to enter a drawing for a free copy.  The first drawing is on August 31st and the second on September 7th. Whether or not you win a copy, consider starting off the new term with a copy in hand.

Thank-you to Kelly Monroe Kullberg for her work on this project and the gift of this week’s devo from John Stott, see excerpt below.  Note:  You may remember our June study Stott’s classic Your Mind Matters.

I believe that anti‐intellectualism and fullness of the Holy Spirit are mutually incompatible. And I dare to say it because the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth. Jesus our Lord himself referred to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth, and therefore, it is only logical to say that wherever the Holy Spirit has given his freedom, truth is bound to matter. So I have argued, and argue still, that a proper, conscientious use of our minds is an inevitable part and parcel of our Christian life. …

How have you come to know, understand, feel, and define hospitality?  Do you consider hospitality a necessary part of the fabric of Higher Education (e.g., community, discussion of ideas, relationships with the other) or not?  How have you experienced and/or extended hospitality on campus as individual or as part of a community of believers?  Looking forward to reading your thoughts/experiences.  Please share them with grace, truth, and charity.

What brings this topic to my mind at this time?  On Monday and Tuesday, I attended Hospitality, Critical Thinking and Truth: Living the Tensions, hosted by Messiah College, Grantham, PA.  At the conference, faculty, staff, and administrators from Christian colleges and universities wrestled with their shared goal of nurturing students into practices of gracious faith and intelligent reflection that fit[s] the needs of the 21st century.  The conversations reminded me not only of my education at Christian colleges, but also long conversations with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship staff regarding how to create/nurture hospitable places for followers of Christ and ‘the other’ on campus. Read the rest of this entry »

Would you agree or disagree with me that Christianity* is unfashionable on campus?  If so, would you go further with me to argue that Christianity is even more unfashionable on campus than in our larger culture?  Whether you agree or disagree with me that Christianity is unfashionable on campus, does Christianity need to be unfashionable on campus?  And if so, why and how? Read the rest of this entry »

Response:  Truly, He is Risen!

First, as we read the Easter stories, we note the strange absence of Scripture in them. When you read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ last days — of his arrest, his trial, and his crucifixion — you find Old Testament echoes, quotations, and allusions all over the place. The Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel, Zechariah, and other books have provided material that has then been woven into the structure of the narrative. … Read the rest of this entry »

Take a moment sometime today to consider The Real St. Patrick and invite others to do likewise.  Looking for some resources?  I’d encourage you to start with The Real St. Patrick and St. Patrick’s Day.  If you have additional suggestions, including books to recommend, please share below.

St. Patrick

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Christ in the eye that sees me,
Christ in the ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through a belief in the Threeness,
Through a confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation.

– A Poem by St. Patrick, ca 377 AD

Read the rest of this entry »

Since the beginning of Lent, our family’s reflected upon the tension between sin and a pure heart as found in Psalm 51.  One morning, we walked through the Gospel message and explored the question of whether sin makes sense to our friends at school.  In Lancaster County, PA, there remains a significant cultural memory of sin.  But most campuses lack the memory/framework to discuss sin.

On Wednesday, I heard concerns regarding spiritual dullness shared by representatives from three campuses in the Mid-Atlantic. Part of this dullness comes from the lack of acknowledgment of sin, even among followers of Christ.  Rod Dreher shares in a USA Today Opinion piece:

It is what the late Philip Rieff, a non-believer, called “the triumph of the therapeutic” in his famous 1966 book of the same name. Rieff said our civilization has done away with its “thou shalt nots,” which were intended to tell us how to be good, and instead substituted a psychological pseudo-religion meant to help us feel better about the way we live. Read the rest of this entry »

Do Lenten practices or conversations regarding them give you the feeling that Big Brother is Watching, like this location system being used at Carnegie Mellon University?

OR does our Lenten journey point to and live in the reality of the preciousness of Christ’s blood: Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s Fastnaught Day in PA Dutch Country (referred to by other traditions/regions, some with much more enthusiastic traditions, as Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday) and the celebration of it emphasizes stuffing our bodies with wants before entering the sacrificial lock down of the religious practice of Lent.   

By contrast I look at Lent from the radical, relational lens of seeking God the Father – one shared by the people of God throughout the Biblical story — finding its fulfillment in Jesus the Christ through His inauguration of the Kingdom of God, death, resurrection, ascension to Lordship, the gifting of the daily redemptive Presence of God through the Holy Spirit (which dwells within the Body of Christ by the grace of God the Father and the Son). … and the New Heavens and the New Earth.  To God be the glory!  Forgive me, I’ve gotten a little carried away.  Lent ends in Holy Week where we focus upon the final days of Jesus the Christ’s earthly ministry and his death/resurrection.

Christine Sine in What Is Lent Anyway? defines Lent as

a time for “confrontation with the false self” (Thomas Keating) when we reflect on the responses and behaviours we exhibit that are least Christ like and seek God’s help in rededicating ourselves to God and God’s purposes. This is a time for self-denial and fasting when we give up some of the comforts of our lives in order to make ourselves more available to God.

If you practice Lent, please take a few minutes to share some reflections regarding the Lenten journey, how the lessons learned (and life lived) apply to campus life/vocation, and recommended resources (on-line and/or in print) for the blog’s readership.  Read the rest of this entry »