Reclaiming Conversations?

“Reclaiming conversations, that’s the next frontier.” — Sherry Turkle‘s  ^[1] concluding line to her TEDxUIUC 2011 presentation  Alone Together.

This morning David O’Hara’s Can I Ask Questions In Church?  ^[2] spurred me to read Jaweed Kaleem’s Keeping Alive The Big Questions  ^[3]. In Kaleem’s resource rich article I once again came across Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. As you may remember from the Emerging Scholars Network Facebook Wall, I posted her TED2012 presentation  Connected, but alone?  and the below video (Innovation of Loneliness) inspired by her book Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other (2012).

In response to the moving story from the academy which begins Keeping Alive The Big Questions,  Turkle comments:

“We have stripped away so many of the conditions that make conversations like these flourish. And the condition that makes it flourish, in many cases, is the uninterrupted full attention to each other,” said Turkle, who has spent the three years interviewing dozens of people from various walks of life about what they talk about with friends and how they do it for an upcoming book called  Reclaiming Conversation. “These conversations are what college students are missing, they’re what people at work are missing, they’re what we’re all missing.”

As we explore the relationship of on-line, local, and periodic (local, conferencing, and on-line) interactions,  several of members of InterVarsity’s Graduate & Faculty Ministry have been considering  Transformative Conversations  ^[4]. Note: Click here for a brief review of  Transformative Conversations, by  Bob Trube on his blog, i.e., Bob on Books: Thoughts on Books, Reading, and Life.

Yesterday before a lunch conversation with several faculty on a section of  The Bible, The Verdict of History: A Journey In The British Museum & The British Library, I had a long conversation with a retired pastor. What a privilege to hear how he continues to rejoice in the blessing InterVarsity has been to him across the decades: from becoming a Christ follower while a student at Drexel to his reading of InterVarsity Press publications to his current interactions with authors/speakers such as Claremont Graduate University Professor of Education Mary Poplin through the Christian Scholars Series at Elizabethtown Brethren in Christ Church. During our exploration of the relationship of conversation and mentoring, we went back and forth on how one understands, practices, and receives mentoring. The interwoven dynamic of overlapping relationships and conversations in the local Christian community of scholars (including a number of Emerging Scholars) was rich and encouraging — bringing to mind the importance of  Spiritual Friendship. In the end, he preferred the lens/term (and the art/practice) of conversation to that of mentoring. He likewise longs for the reclaiming of conversation, no doubt the establishing of transformative conversation and what I might term “mentoring relationships.”

As the fall term begins, I encourage you to dig into and reclaim contexts for significant, transformative conversations (even  Dialogical Campus Ministry) which do not lose the value of  relationships with an engagement of head, heart, and hands. On the blog we have a number of pieces with the mentoring tag, but I particularly commend to you Hannah Eagleson’s series on The Art of Mentoring  and the  Resource for Grad Mentoring Undergrads  shared by Johns Hopkins graduate student.

Although we are rebuilding the Emerging Scholars Network’s “mentoring” model — hoping for our conversation, research, and resource mobilization to enable us for a strong relaunch in 2014 — our website has several mentoring articles in the resource section, including a  Christian Theology of Mentoring  (Tom Trevethan and  Nan Thomas, 9/24/2005), AND links to  Christian Professional and Academic Societies. Note: If you are a women in the academy and the professions, don’t miss The Well’s Dear Mentor column. Furthermore, if you are a woman in science, Christian Women in Science  is a newly launched network worth your prayerful consideration.

Whew! What an important, complex topic to explore. And we’re only scratching the surface. If you have updates or additional material to add to Christian Professional and Academic Societies  and/or  thoughts/stories of reclaiming transformative conversations and mentoring relationships, please share below or drop me a line 🙂  

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