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. In the last Week in Review we kicked off with highlighting Seth Godin’s take on the coming melt-down in higher education. Since then, the Chronicle of Higher Education thought Godin’s piece was worth posting. That action, along with the material from the article, has created conversation worth consideration, visit here. I [Tom] think it is helpful to note that the meltdown is “as seen by a marketer” and the “facts” are told the way a marketer tells the “facts.” Bigger questions: What is the End of Education? How are followers of Christ salt and light in higher education, even advocating, developing, and maintaining structures (not just in the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities) which truly educate to the glory of God, making the small list of redemptive outliers instead of the mass of marketers selling their wares?

2. A School Pushing Back Against Facebook (Mark Bauerlein, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/2010) brings to mind the question of How should educators interact with Social Media and teach students to handle Social Media? I [Tom] think that phenomena such as Soical Media, e.g., Facebook and Twitter, are too much of a larger cultural issue for educators to address alone. Educators should be finding ways to dialogue with children, parents, community leaders, and Social Media advocates/leaders to wisely discern it’s proper place, use, parameters. Those in the nonprofit and ministry sector have much to offer. Note: Jon Boyd has an excellent handout on Mistakes You Can Avoid on Facebook and Twitter for people in the nonprofit and ministry sector. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Mike will write a longer post about this on Monday, but Bruce Waltke’s departure from Reformed Theological Seminary – following his appearance in a video posted on the Biologos Foundation’s website – has been making big news.  (In case you don’t follow Biblical studies, Waltke has been a leading OT scholar for decades.) More links to come on Monday, but Scot McKnight tipped me off to Michael Bird’s discussion, not just of Waltke’s situation, but other OT scholars who have left institutions because of conflicts over historicity.

2. Wired Campus: Lehigh Professor Advertises Course on YouTube (Mary Helen Miller, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/15/2010).  What do you think about this idea, click here to see the video.  Is it transferable to classes beyond journalism and social media?  Do you envision competition for students?  How does this mix with posting other YouTube material, i.e., should one choose to a solid line between public and private identity when providing posts?  Is it helpful/appropriate to have family or religious video under the same identity/name?

3.  Join us in prayer for the Ohio State University (OSU) Price of Life which begins on Sunday, April 18.  Click here for The Three Events which will Change History.  Note: More activities are listed under the schedule under the header About the Price of Life. For Emerging Scholars at OSU and in the area, don’t miss Price of Life Seminar on Human Trafficking: What Difference can a Fledgling Scholar Make? by Dr. Wayne Barnard, International Justice Mission.  For Emerging Scholars on other campuses, consider exploring this topic and other materials found in the website.

4. The Chronicle recently devoted an entire issue of the Chronicle Review to the problems facing graduate education in the humanities. Most of it is behind a paywall, but check out Katherine Polak’s “Letter from a Graduate Student in the Humanities.”(And, of course, you can compare the Chronicle‘s coverage with our own series, “Why Get a PhD in the Humanities.”)

5. German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas has written a new book, An Awareness of What’s Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, in which he tempers his previous judgment of religion and admits that religion isn’t going away any time soon. Stanley Fish reviews the book, and Chelsea Carlson reviews Fish’s review at the Harvard Ichthus’s Fish Tank blog, and both find Habermas’ treatment of religion as ultimately lacking. From Fish:

As Norbert Brieskorn, one of Habermas’s interlocutors, points out, in Habermas’s bargain “reason addresses demands to the religious communities” but “there is no mention of demands from the opposite direction.” Religion must give up the spheres of law, government, morality and knowledge; reason is asked only to be nice and not dismiss religion as irrational, retrograde and irrelevant.

Once again, a discussion of the relationship between “faith” and “reason” fails to bring up Douglas Sloan’s Faith and Knowledge. Sloan’s book analyzes the (failed) student and faculty ministries of mainline Protestantism between the 1930′s and 1970′s, and identifies a key factor in their collapse as the rejection of religion as a true area of knowledge fit for inclusion in the university.

Do you agree with the below quotes from News Sites Rethink Anonymous Online Comments (Richard Perez-Pena. NY Times. 4/11/2010)?

“Anonymity is just the way things are done. It’s an accepted part of the Internet, but there’s no question that people hide behind anonymity to make vile or controversial comments,” said Arianna Huffington, a founder of The Huffington Post. “I feel that this is almost like an education process. As the rules of the road are changing and the Internet is growing up, the trend is away from anonymity.”  … “There is a younger generation that doesn’t feel the same need for privacy,” Ms. Huffington said. “Many people, when you give them other choices, they choose not to be anonymous.” — News Sites Rethink Anonymous Online Comments (Richard Perez-Pena. NY Times. 4/12/2010)

Two more questions:  Any thoughts regarding what is a helpful on-line presence for a member of the campus/university culture?  Does it vary with position/responsibility/life stage, e.g., undergraduate student, graduate student, staff, pre-tenure faculty, tenure faculty, administrator, counselor, campus minister?

Antonio Ciseri's Ecce Homo

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. Christine Sine posted Godspace’s Complete Lenten Series for 2010, including material for Good Friday and Easter.  Thank-you to Christine for organizing this great resource for followers of Christ on their Lenten journey.

Photo: “Ecce Homo” (“Behold the Man”) by Antonio Ciseri (1821 – 1891), one of Mike’s favorite depictions of Good Friday. Click for a larger image.

2. Why So Few? (RJS, Jesus Creed, 4/1/2010):  “There are many reasons why women are underrepresented in a variety of fields – from ministry, theology, and evangelicals and the early church,, to science and engineering. While men and women often have different goals, values and abilities, these factors alone are not enough to account for the differences, or for the hurdles perceived by women who aspire to positions in these fields.” … Join the conversation.

3. For the other gender, check out “What Men Need” (Inside Higher Ed, March 31), a conversation with the presidents of the 4 remaining men-only four-year colleges: Wabash College, Hampden-Sydney College, St. John’s University (MN), and the historically black college, Morehouse. Rev. Richard Koopman, president of St. John’s, a Catholic university, addressed the need for spiritual development among men:

Father Koopmann described two groups he has led. One was largely of “unchurched” students, whom he found all needing to find ways to talk about difficulties they had faced in the past — such as childhood injuries or parental divorce. The other was of Catholic students, and Father Koopman said that there was more ritual with this group, such as his leading mass for these students. But in both groups, he said, “there was a need to build trust” so that the students could talk about the issues that troubled them — something they had difficulty doing.

Interestingly, Patrick White, president of Wabash and former president of Saint Mary’s, a women’s college, observed that both men and women seem more likely to engage deep intellectual topics when the opposite sex is absent.

4.  In the sciences?  Mark your calendar for the 65^th Annual Meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, July 30 – August 2, 2010. The topic will be Science, Faith, and Public Policy.  Check out the slide show here.

5. It’s Friday, But Sunday’s Coming: Need some Good Friday inspiration? Tony Campolo’s signature sermon about surrendering to Christ – and changing the world – can be streamed or downloaded from Campolo’s website. (HT: Susan Isaacs via Twitter – Isaacs is also the author of the “snarky but authentic” spiritual memoir, Angry Conversations with God)

Books:

Tom currently can’t put down Brian Godawa’s Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story & Imagination (InterVarsity Press, 2009).  What’s the main point of Word Pictures?

The Bible is not a systematic theology of abstract propositions or a treatise on doctrinal correctness. It is a collection of narratives, poetry, images and metaphors that convey God equally through rationality and imagination. If we want to know God more biblically, as well as be more persuasive to a postmodern world, we must embrace the power and mystery of imagination in our approach to and understanding of God. — Brian, Q&A Author Interview

Note:  Posts with material from Word Pictures coming … Let Tom know if you’re interested in discussing material from the book.

What tips/ideas do you have for InterVarsity’s National Graduate & Faculty Ministry Staff Team Members in Using Social Media Appropriately and Effectively to Grow Communities?  Now’s your opportunity to give input.  I’m leading a seminar on the topic at our April Team Meetings.  Here’s some material I’m seeking to address:

1. How do we use social media appropriately to
   1. build community?  Note:  How does social media influence our/your definition of community or the various forms of community in which we find ourselves?  The seminar will take the direction of building local, face-to-face campus communities, but I’m also interested in the other forms of community, such one finds in the Emerging Scholars Network.
   2. invite others to engage with our community?
   3. engage others with ideas we are discussing in our communities?
2. What are some do’s and don’ts for healthy, appropriate and effective use of technology?
3. What’s available? What’s changing? How do we make decisions?
4. How do we make decisions about the use of technology when engaging with audiences of different generations in our ministry?  Note:  Please don’t skip.  Due to the overall conference theme, it has particular relevance.  :-)  Feel free to also share How you make decisions about the use of technology when engaging with audiences of different generations in higher education?

Calling out to the community/network for input. …

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.  Have you experienced, participated in, or witnessed

Tweckle (twek’ul) vt. to abuse a speaker only to Twitter followers in the audience while he/she is speaking”?

Any thoughts on how Tweckle (or the possibility of it) affect conference (and classroom) dynamics?  Any practices which you’ve found (or  think could address) to decrease its influence?  — Conference Humiliation: They’re Tweeting Behind Your Back (Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17, 2009).  Note:  on the other side, I’ve seen plenty of positive commenting on conferencing/events.

2.  A number of Chronicle of Higher Education articles on news/journalism including:

• Academe and the Decline of News Media (Forum, November 15, 2009)
• I’ve Read the News Today, Oh Boy (Ben Yagoda, November 15, 2009)
• Journalism Schools Can Push Coverage Beyond Breaking News (Nicholas Lemann, November 15, 2009)
• University-Based Reporting Could Keep Journalism Alive (Michael Schudson and Leonard Downie Jr., November 15, 2009)
• We Need ‘Philosophy of Journalism’ (Carlin Romano, November 15, 2009).

3. Belle de Jour reveals herself…as a research scientist.  The anonymous blog and television show Secret Diary of a Call Girl – written from the perspective of a high-end prostitute – were much bigger in the UK than on this side of the pond. The mystery of “who is Belle de Jour?” ended this week, when Dr. Brooke Magnanti confessed that she had turned to prostitution as a way to pay for her PhD. Magnanti now works for The Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. Magnanti says it was good work:

Dr Magnanti told the Sunday Times she worked as a prostitute from 2003 to late 2004, and found it “so much more enjoyable” than her shifts in another job as a computer programmer.

How ironic that Magnanti studies child health. Tanya Gold of the Guardian says don’t be misled: most prostitutes in the UK live pretty awful lives.

The report found that 70%–95% of the interviewees were physically assaulted while working as prostitutes. 60%–75% were raped while working as prostitutes; of these, more than half were repeatedly raped. 65%–95% meanwhile were sexually abused as children; the line of continuity between being used as a child and being used as an adult is clear.

Around the world, prostitution is often a form of slavery, as CNN reported this week. Urbana’s Advocacy and Poverty track is going to focus on the issue of modern day slavery and sex trafficking, and the work of Christian organizations against this evil.

4. Big Man on Campus – Time profiled Gordon Gee, president of The Ohio State University, anointing him as the best college president in the nation. (Here is the rest of their top 10 list.) Earlier this year, Gee told universities they face “reinvention or extinction” at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting.

To avoid “slouching into irrelevance,” he said, universities must structure themselves horizontally, rather than vertically, change the way they reward faculty and staff members, and learn to better collaborate with each other. While partnerships with business, elementary and secondary schools, and governments are crucial, he said, perhaps the most important links are between universities.

You can download Gee’s full lecture at the ACE website.

Books

Introverts in the Church cover

5. Tom’s been recommending  Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture (Adam McHugh, InterVarsity Press, November 2009) to a number of people, including members of the academic community.  Below’s a quote from Chapter 1, available on-line through InterVarsity Press.  An excellent author interview can be found at Adam McHugh on ‘Introverts in the Church’.

The pragmatism that we have inherited fosters an action oriented culture. Evangelicalism values the doer over the thinker.  The evangelical God has a big agenda. It’s as if the moment we surrender our lives to Christ we are issued a flashing neon sign that says “GO!” There is a restless energy to evangelicalism that leads to a full schedule and a fast pace. Some have said that, in Christian culture, busyness is next to godliness. We are always in motion, constantly growing, ever expanding. …“American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarrassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.” [Eugene Peterson]

Some of the Sesame Street cast members

In How We Got to Sesame Street; Art on Screen (The Chronicle of Higher Education. January 16, 2009), Evan R. Goldstein treats us to some of the history of Sesame Street, which celebrated 40 years on November 10.

In 1966 a group of friends gathered for a dinner party in Manhattan. As the evening was winding down, one of the guests, Lloyd N. Morrisett, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, turned to his host, a television executive named Joan Ganz Cooney, and asked a seemingly innocuous question: Can television educate young children? …

Almost four years after the Cooney dinner party, on November 10, 1969, Sesame Street showed up on public television across the country. The series was greeted with a torrent of gushing reviews. “The show moves, seduces, diverts, dazzles, amuses, and infects,” raved a writer at Variety. “Learning seems almost a byproduct of fun,” noted another critic. Children’s television would never be the same.”

It’s hard not to concede that education begins in the context of where one grows up and TV viewing is almost universal among the kids in our culture.  As such, would you credit Sesame Street or similar TV shows for your early childhood education (or at least some of it)?  Does Sesame Street Turns 40, But It Doesn’t Look a Day Over 25 resonate with you?

In the last 40 years, Sesame Street taught us to celebrate our differences, to bask in our own individuality and has continuously redefined “normal” to fit us all. Sesame Street taught us to read, to write, and yes, to count. It opened our eyes to cultures beyond our cul-de-sac and taught us global thinking. Sesame Street made us believe that we could be anything and that anything was possible. Sesame Street taught us to love music and laughter and learning.

A couple more questions to ponder/discuss:

Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street

1. How much emphasis should parents or the educational system as a whole place on educational TV for kids, youth, young adults, adults?
2. What has the educational experiment shown us about what kids can/do learn from TV?  Do they learn/absorb more than the basics, e.g., values, perspective on the real world?
3. Would you agree with the Robert Smith’s 40 Years Of Lessons On ‘Sesame Street’, which ran on NPR yesterday (11/10/2009)?  E.g., Children Are Adaptable. Keep It Simple.  The Children are always right (Note: Bonus on audio).
4. As one involved in higher education, do you have any recommendations for the next decade of Sesame Street as it seeks to educate kids across the spectrum or for parents as they seek to evaluate it’s role in the overall educational toolkit?  Note:  Sesame Street provides a peek of it’s future direction at It’s all new and better than ever as Sesame Street turns 40!

P.S.  Street Gang:  The Complete History of Sesame Street (Michael Davis. Viking. 2008) looks like a good read.  I found an excerpt 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.

Claude Levi-Strauss

1.  The Big Questions: Have our colleges and universities lost sight of their purpose? (Jerry Pattengale, Books & Culture, November/December 2009) critiques Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Anthony Kronman, Yale University Press, 2008) and recommends The American University in a Postsecular Age (Co-edited by Douglas & Rhonda Jacobsen, Oxford University Press, 2008).

2. Can a biologist trust an evangelical Christian? – InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministry at Indiana University will be hosting this event next Thursday, Nov. 12.

This panel discussion features three evangelical scholars on the topic of Christianity, science and evolution. Our primary audience for this event will be scholars who are skeptical or even hostile about the idea of integrating religion and science. We have chosen the topic as part of the Indiana University “themester” on “Evolution, Diversity, and Change.” Our goals, at this point, are to provide a model of what it might look like to integrate belief in God with scientific inquiry; to put names and faces behind what can often be the demonized other (evangelical Christians); to foster a discussion about the integration of religion and science; to work at eroding the destructive binary that is assumed to exist between science and religion; and to work at building trust between the scientific community and evangelical Christianity.

For more information, check out their website, www.iugfm.blogspot.com.

3. Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 – One of the most important intellectual figures of the 20th Century died last Friday. From the NY Times’ obituary:

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

Other reflections on his life and work: WSJ’s obituary and an elegy, NPR’s story about his 100th birthday, Eric Banks’ post at the Chronicle of Higher Ed about Lévi-Strauss’ importance.

Photo: Claude Levi-Strauss in 1992, from sagabardon via Flickr

4.  In a NY Times Op-Ed entitled Teach Your Teachers Well, Susan Engel (a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College) builds upon Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Urging for ‘Revolutionary Change’ in Nation’s Teacher-Training Programs.  How about this angle on the problem?

Our best universities have, paradoxically, typically looked down their noses at education, as if it were intellectually inferior. The result is that the strongest students are often in colleges that have no interest in education, while the most inspiring professors aren’t working with students who want to teach. This means that comparatively weaker students in less intellectually rigorous programs are the ones preparing to become teachers.

So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray. If education was a good enough topic for Plato, John Dewey and William James, it should be good enough for 21st-century college professors. — Susan Engel, Teach Your Teachers Well, NY Times, 11/02/2009

5. Online Education, Growing Fast, Eyes the Truly ‘Big Time’ (Marc Perry, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 30, 2009) as The $50K Club: 58 Private Colleges Pass a Pricing Milestone (Reported by Scott Carlson, Kathryn Masterson, and Jeffrey Brainard, and written by Mr. Carlson. Chronicle of Higher Education. November 1, 2009).  Looking for some thoughts on how liberal arts colleges and their ideals will survive the current economic crisis?

Traditional reasoning about the enrichment of the “student as future citizen” can only go so far when parents who pay the tuition or students taking the courses can’t see a bottom line in the form of a lucrative job after graduation. — Katharine S. Brooks, Close the Gap Between the Liberal Arts and Career Services, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2009

In Close the Gap Between the Liberal Arts and Career Services, Katharine S. Brooks, director of liberal-arts career services, University of Texas at Austin, offers some good ideas regarding career services.  For parents, students, and educators she has a new book,  You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path From Chaos to Career (Viking, 2009), which might be worth exploring.  If you’ve read it, let us know what you think.

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.  Duncan Urges ‘Revolutionary Change’ in Nation’s Teacher-Training Programs (Kelly Field, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 21, 2009):  Do you agree with the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who recently called attention to the nation’s colleges of education for

doing a “mediocre job” of preparing teachers for “the realities of the 21st-century classroom” and need “revolutionary change—not evolutionary tinkering” … [and being]  the “neglected stepchild” of higher education.

2. Beam Me to the Faculty Senate:  Videoconferencing proves useful on campuses (Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 18, 2009).  So we’re moving in the direction of less and less real presence, not just in the classroom (where increasing numbers of large lectures can be downloaded at some non-virtual campuses) but also among those who lead educational institutions.  Tom has observed a lot of road time from  campuses in the Penn State University educational system to State College.  Yes, he’s wondered about the necessities of these trips.  But what happens when people only get to know one-another or receive training/supervision through videoconferencing, even if it is virtual face-to-face?  Of course, it’s better than no communication or only older forms of communication such as written or teleconferencing, isn’t it?

3.  For Decades, Puzzling People With Mathematics (John Tierney, NY Times, October 19, 2009): How many of you have enjoyed the recreational mathematics of Martin Gardner, who turned 95 on October 21?  Did you know that in 1956, when Gardner at the age of 42 started a monthly column on recreational mathematics for Scientific American, he had never taken a math course beyond high school and that he’s made his trade by researching/re-publishing puzzles developed by others?

According to Ronald Graham, a mathematician at the University of California, San Diego,“Many have tried to emulate him; no one has succeeded. … Martin has turned thousands of children into mathematicians, and thousands of mathematicians into children.”

Where does Gardner believe the pleasure of recreational mathematics come from?  “Evolution has developed the brain’s ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems.”

4.  Remember the tossing around of mild dementia in relationship to Francis Collins? For those interested in learning more about dementia, take some to read/consider Treating Dementia, but Overlooking Its Physical Toll (Tara Parker-Pope, NY Times, October 20, 2009). The article begins:

Dementia is often viewed as a disease of the mind, an illness that erases treasured memories but leaves the body intact.

But dementia is a physical illness, too — a progressive, terminal disease that shuts down the body as it attacks the brain. Although the early stages can last for years, the life expectancy of a patient with advanced dementia is similar to that of a patient with advanced cancer. …

5.  On Wednesday night, I [Tom] started reading Anne Rice’s Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).  I have desired to learn about Rice’s spiritual journal, so the numerous comments regarding education come as an unexpected bonus feature.  Below’s an excerpt of Rice’s reflections on elementary education and learning how to read.  More of her comments on education in another post.  Anyone have a similar experience or fear of education?

"Called Out of Darkness" Cover

When I went to school and began to read, I lost an immense world of image, color, and intricate connections, but undoubtedly I retained more than I lost.I gained in school a poor understanding of things through written text.  School was when excruciating boredom and anger and frustration really began for me.  The mystery and calm of the early years were destroyed by school.  School was torture.  School was like being in jail.  It was captivity and torment and failure.

But what remained forever, what continued, was the sense of God and His Presence, of His embracing awareness of all we said and did and wanted and failed to do, and of His love.  School couldn’t destroy that faith.  And alongside it, I retained the sense that the world was an interesting creative place, especially if one could get out of school (p.30).

Welcome to this week’s Week in Review! If you have your own link or suggestion, please add it to the comments, or email it to Tom or Mike.

From Tom

1.  Another piece to throw into our technology conversation:  How about teaching naked, i.e., sans machines?  Do you agree with José A. Bowen, dean of Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts, in his comments regarding the quality of classroom powerpoint instruction and the rise of on-line classes to replace such offerings?  Note:  The video complents Jeffrey Young’s Chronicle of Higher Education article When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom (July 20, 2009).

Read the rest of this entry »