The Emerging Scholars Blog

In my post last week about advice for undergraduates, Katie Weakland shared a comment that I thought was particularly apt:

I suggest meeting your major professors early in your career – your first semester – and asking them to mentor you and/or let you do research with them. The early you can get your feet wet with research the better. I also suggest reading the primary literature in your field as soon as possible.

Meeting your professors and starting research early are both very important (I have stories I could share for each), but for the moment, I’m going to focus on primary literature. Read the rest of this entry »

[Editor's note: This is a new weekly feature from your blog contributors. Each week, we'll be posting articles, books, news, etc., that Tom, Mike, and the ESN community have been pondering. If you have a book or article you'd like us to add to next week's Review, add it in the comments or send it to either Mike or Tom. Thanks!]

The Harvard disadvantage – The Boston Globe takes a very personal look at students from poor backgrounds at Harvard and their struggles to fit in with the children of privilege.

In the Chronicle, Audrey Williams June provides two looks at the changing world of tenure: a report on the rapid decrease of tenure-track instructors (73% of instructors, including graduate assistants, are now off the tenure track) and a profile of St. John’s 2008 decision to move 20 contingent writing instructors to tenure-track positions.

A few weeks ago, Inside Higher Ed published this advice on managing large writing projects from John Gastil. I (Mike) am working on a large writing project myself at the moment, and plan to take Gastil’s advice about outlining, scheduling, and setting deadlines.

A fine tuned universe? At Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog, RJS (a science professor) reviews some high profile opinions on the Anthropic Principle.

From the community

Dave Snoke submitted this very interesting article from the UK, about an Oxford researcher, Justin Barrett, who claims that belief in God (or at least, a god) is ” built into the natural development of children’s minds,” not something learned from the culture around them.

Books

N.T. Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision (InterVarsity Press, 2009). Here’s a quote to ponder:

“Knowing God for oneself, as opposed to knowing or thinking about him, is at the heart of Christian living. Discovering that God is gracious, rather than a distant bureaucrat or a dangerous tyrant, is the good news that constantly surprises and refreshes us. But we are not the center of the universe. God is not circling around us. We are circling around him. It may look, from our view, as though “me and my salvation” are the be-all and end-all of Christianity. Sadly, many people — many devout Christians! — have preached that way and lived that way. This problem is not peculiar to the churches of the Reformation. It goes back to the high Middle Ages in the Western church, and infects and affects Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative, high and low church alike. But a full reading of Scripture itself tells a different story. God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world.” — pp.23-24.

This week, I’m in northern Georgia for InterVarsity’s Southeast Chapter Camp for undergraduates. I don’t have an official role – I’m just here to help out, talk to undergraduates about the Emerging Scholars Network, and find out ways that ESN can help prepare undergrads for grad school.

So, I’m interested in your thoughts. If you were once an undergrad, what do you wish someone had said or asked you at that stage of your academic career? If you are an undergrad, what kinds of questions do you have about grad school and the life of an academic? What kinds of resources would be most helpful for ESN to produce or distribute?

ESN scholarships are now available for undergraduates who are attending Following Christ 2008 and the ESN Day Ahead. There are a limited number available, but this is a great opportunity for undergraduate ESN members looking for ways to attend Following Christ. Even if you are not an undergrad, I bet you know a few who are considering an academic vocation, and who could benefit from these scholarships.

Full details can be found here.