The Emerging Scholars Blog

Where did you find your megaphone? Who gave it to you?

This is the first of four guest posts from Janine Giordano, a graduate student and ESN member from the University of Illinois, on the topic of cultivating your voice and finding your audience while in graduate school. When she is not teaching, she spends most of her time working on her dissertation, Between Religion and Politics: The Working Class Religious Left, 1886-1936.

I exchanged Facebook posts recently with a Christian friend who is an excellent scholar and an excellent union organizer. Her father is a prominent pastor, and she obviously has very similar gifts in shepherding and public speaking. She can move a crowd to cheer at a rally for higher education in a way that seasoned pastors usually only dream for, and she is always, quite naturally, bringing new leaders into the fold. It has always bemused me that her church, like mine, would never permit her a place in the pulpit. Kerry and I have had many discussions of gender and the Church; they usually climax in a fiery exchange of affirmations for the other’s frustration with American churches’ unwillingness to recognize women as fully gifted people.

We usually remind each other that we are not alone and we ought to keep up the fight, but it had been a long time since we spoke, and this time it was different. I began my jeremiad as usual, but she sighed—with understanding but an air of more hope than I expected, even craved—that she had pretty much found other megaphones these days. In the past several months, Kerry has successfully worked with our city government to make some changes in criminal justice protocols; she has led our graduate student union to a better contract—both as our rallying speechmaker and as our lead negotiator with the University of Illinois. She is even working now on getting the police in town to get a better work contract of their own. This time, her affirmation to me was not to keep on fighting my church but to find another. She even pointed out a suggestion.

I looked at this last message in disbelief. “Join another church?” I wondered as I brushed my teeth. Last year I finally left my church of four years after fighting a long, losing battle for the opportunity to teach adult Sunday School. I wanted to engage the adults in my church with the history of the Christianity in the United States so very badly, and kept thinking that if I exposed more and more of the hypocrisy of their rules (for example, that I could teach Religious History at the local seminary, or the local university, that I could sing my message at church, that I could teach the same content to ANY of them if they were under thirteen, by their own rules!) then they would change their convictions about me, even if not about all womankind. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Marie Curie, winner of two Nobel Prizes and 1st female professor at the University of Paris

Last week, the New York Times reported that women are making gains at Harvard, five years after former Harvard President Lawrence Summers made some ill-advised remarks about women that eventually led to his resignation. NYTimes reporter Tamar Lewin describes some of the changes that Harvard has made to recruit more women faculty members, such as:

• A task force on women in science
• Improved childcare facilities
• Grants to help junior faculty pay for childcare on research trips

Lewin also notes that Harvard replaced Summers with its first female president — Drew Gilpin Faust — but that it’s not clear what effect, if any, Faust’s presidency, has had on the gender balance at Harvard. The percentage of women on the Harvard faculty is up past 25% now, an all-time high, though it varies dramatically across disciplines. In addition, Harvard’s academic culture is running into conflicts with a generational culture of younger faculty who want to spend more time with their families.

“Our biggest challenge is this misperception that Harvard doesn’t tenure its own junior faculty,” Dr. [Elena A.] Kramer [biology professor] said. “And because many of our wonderful senior faculty women came up in the ’70s and ’80s and don’t have families, some young women who know they want families might look at them and say, ‘I don’t want that kind of life’ and take themselves out of the pipeline.”

While I’m not sure about her “misperception” point (see this Crimson article), I agree that there is a change of faculty assumptions about career choices taking place.

My question: What can universities — as well as groups like ESN — do to encourage women who pursuing academic vocations?

Before leaving the comments to you, let me recommend our partner ministry, The Well, published by InterVarsity’s Women in the Academy and Professions. They consistently great articles about women, vocation, family, and related topics (which I often borrow for publication in the Emerging Scholars Review).

Tomorrow, I’m leaving for our Midwest Faculty Conference, featuring John Sommerville as our plenary speaker. (Check out my quick review of his book, The Decline of the Secular University, as well as his latest essay in the Chronicle, “Universities Are Corporatized Because They Are Secularized”.) Since starting these summer faculty conferences a few years ago, we’ve tried to make them times of refreshment – for both faculty and their entire family. Our planning team even coined a new word for these events – confamication:

This event encompasses much more than the word conference can possibly contain, so a new word has been added to the lexicon. “Confamication” captures the fact of it being a stimulating conference, a restful vacation, which can both include and be a delight to the whole family. And it is a welcoming place for singles, couples and children as well.

Unfortunately, not all of academia shares this attitude that the “good life” includes rest, spiritual refreshment, and time with families and children. Lisa Belkin, who writes the Motherlode blog for the New York Times, recently published a heart-breaking letter from a young graduate student who, faced with an unexpected, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, has decided to have an abortion so that she can complete her degree. The decision was far from easy – you can hear her agony in her letter to Belkin. Explicit and implicit pressures from her graduate program were a major factor in her decision. Here’s how she described her sitaution: Read the rest of this entry »