Welcome Hannah to ESN!

As our family heads to InterVarsity’s Cedar Campus for a MidWest Faculty dialogue on  The Ends and Goals of Higher Education in Twenty-First-Century America: Change and the Calling of the Christian Educator, it is my privilege to announce that  Hannah Eagleson has joined the InterVarsity  Emerging Scholars Network  (ESN) staff writing team.

Hannah  holds a M.A. in liberal arts from St. John’s College in Annapolis and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Delaware. As you may remember, she is the author of several ESN blog series including  What I Wish I’d Known About Graduate School  and  Mentoring. Her post  What I Wish I’d Known About Graduate School: Surviving the Workload  is in the top five of most visited ESN blog posts.

Why did Hannah join the Emerging Scholars Network staff writing team? In addition to writing for the blog, she looks forward to spearheading two significant projects. Allow me to let her share about these endeavors:

Academic Devotional

As a writer and editor with a PhD in literature, I am deeply excited about  supporting ESN in the creation of an academic devotional website. For busy  academics, it can be hard to carve out the time to meditate on God, and it can feel as  though many devotional works don’t address your specific pressures and callings.  I’m delighted to collaborate in putting together devotional works that address the  concerns of believers trying to understand how best to integrate faith and learning.  I feel that the process of gathering these works into a book, one of the goals of  the project, will also allow many opportunities to encourage community among  believers who are working to foster deep and thoughtful devotional lives within the  academy. [To learn more (even offer contributions), please email the Emerging Scholars Network].

Theology of Higher Ed

As a graduate student early on in an intense program, I often longed for  another believer in my field who could serve as a mentor. My program had great  mentoring which I deeply appreciated, but I hadn’t yet found someone who could  advise me from the standpoint of Christian belief. ESN has the potential to build a  great network of mentoring and academic community among Christian students and  scholars. One way to build that community is to involve Christian scholars in a  conversation about the theology of higher education, learning from those who are  working on it already and reaching out to those who need a community with which  to study.

I look forward to seeing how these projects will take shape on the ground in Boston through Hannah’s creation of an ESN Hub, on-line through various platforms, and connected to other developing ESN hubs.

Thank-you, your support and encouragement are much appreciated as we take these next steps in expanding the gifts offered by ESN to those called to journey through and serve in higher education. As a “Welcome” to Hannah, please take a few minutes today to write a note of encouragement to her in the comment section below. In the note you may desire to pass along congratulations to her and husband  J. Nathan Mathias  (Research Assistant,  MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media). They married at the end of last month. Lots of transitions — a theme she’ll explore on the blog in July.  To God be the glory!