Fill out our fall Writer’s Survey.

One of the main themes we’re exploring this year on the blog is vocation: What does it mean to be called to follow Christ? What does it mean to pursue an academic vocation? What does it mean to put the two together? Scholar’s Compass built a great foundation for thinking about those questions on the blog, and this year we’re launching a new series to build on that foundation. Scholar’s Call will allow writers to explore integrating Christ’s call to follow Him everywhere with His call to follow Him in the academy.

Emerging scholars often tell us that they don’t know where to start when they begin trying to integrate faith and their subjects.  Our goal with Scholar’s Call is to generate a series of documents for each discipline that can serve as springboards or starting points for exploring what it means to integrate Christian theology/spirituality and thoughtful engagement with an academic discipline. Ideally in time emerging scholars will be able to visit our website and find a collection of places to start in each discipline, embodying different thoughtful approaches from Christians in that field. Look for pieces exploring these questions to start appearing in September.

Whether you’ve just started thinking about these ideas and want to try writing about them as an experiment, or you’ve spent your whole career refining your understanding of these things, we’d also love to hear from you. Please feel free to glance  at our Writer’s Guidelines below and fill out our Writer’s Survey.

Scholar’s Call  Writer’s Guidelines

Update September 7: Due to receiving some wonderful material in a longer format, we now have two options for Scholar’s Call submissions. Scholar’s Call  Springboards are shorter pieces (750-1500 words). A Scholar’s Call  Series  is the format for longer reflections requiring more than one post, for instance conference papers also appearing as part of  the Scholar’s Call collection, or simply longer explorations of an idea.

Scholar’s Call Springboards

In this series of springboards to further study, we invite Christian academics to reflect on how Christian theology and/or spirituality shape their understanding of their academic disciplines and how their disciplines in turn deepen their theological perspectives. We see theology as a rich category, encompassing academic knowledge and also the spiritual formation which teaches us how to love our disciplines as part of our love for God and neighbor. These pieces may be provisional, explorations rather than finished theories (though we certainly welcome the fruits of long reflection as well).

These pieces typically feature the following:

1. A piece exploring in 750-1500 words a few ways that the author has found in which Christian theology and the author’s academic discipline inform each other.
2. A brief bibliography (about 5 works) suggesting resources emerging scholars can explore for further thoughts on how that discipline and theology interact.

Scholar’s Call Series

Have a conference paper that fits with the idea of Scholar’s Call but is longer than 1500 words? Excited to explore an idea in a bit more depth? We also publish a Scholar’s Call Series collection, which allows writers to explore over a number of posts. If you’re interested in this option, please get in touch with a brief description of  what you’d like to do and/or a manuscript.

Click here for pieces which are part of Scholar’s Call.