Writing Invitation: Send Us a Prayer for Those in an Academic Field

Dear ESN Blog Readers,

We’re seeking prayers written for and/or by those in a particular academic field. We plan to publish these in the Spring 2020 semester and beyond. We’d love to see more prayers about the particular joys and challenges of fields as diverse as classics and computational biology, ecology and theoretical mathematics, medieval history and business management. We plan to publish a series of these prayers in the spring 2020 semester, and we may extend the series if we get enough material. We welcome both short and long entries. As a general guideline, 100-500 words is a good number to work toward, but we’re very flexible on word count for this project. We’ll start collecting material right away, so please browse our guidelines below and send us a prayer!

Writer’s Guidelines

We welcome prayers for those in all field areas, and we welcome your creativity. Feel free to send us prayers celebrating the things you love about a field, praying for its practitioners to flourish in the virtues and skills it requires, interceding for important breakthroughs in research or wisdom in teaching in a field, etc. We encourage a view of a field area that includes all career stages, but we’re also open to a prayer specifically for a career stage (such as being a postdoc or achieving tenure) if that’s what you find yourself writing.

We ask that all submissions for this project conform to the InterVarsity Basis of Faith statement. We hope to publish a wide range of submissions. Sadly, we do occasionally have to decline a submission that doesn’t quite fit our particular publishing needs at a certain time. We ask for your patience and generosity in these cases, and we look forward to sharing many prayers on the blog this coming spring semester, Lord willing.

Rough word count: 100-500, flexible

Examples: A Prayer for Student Writers, A Prayer for Those Studying the Humanities

Note: Not all of these are focused on one specific field, but they model some similar modes of prayer to what we’re looking for here. 

Deadlines

We’ll be reviewing submissions in several batches, with prayers received earlier likely to be published sooner in most cases. Please pick a deadline that works for you from these three: Nov 25, Jan 10, Feb 20.

How to Submit

We’re trying out a very simple online submissions system to make it easier for our small staff to organize our inboxes. We think you’ll like it as much as we do. We’ll review submissions after each deadline and get in touch. See below for easy submissions steps:

1. Click here: https://intervarsityesn.moksha.io/publication/emerging-scholars-network/3/submit
2. Upload your prayer as a Word file
3. Copy/paste a short bio into the Cover Letter space (we’ll share bios at the blog with prayers, unless you specify that you prefer anonymous publication)

That’s it! We look forward to reading your prayers.

Hannah Eagleson

Associate Director of ESN

Hannah Eagleson

Hannah Eagleson is Interim Associate Director of InterVarsity’s Emerging Scholars Network (ESN). She launched and still edits ESN’s collaboratively written devotional for academics, Scholar’s Compass. Hannah also crafts other community-building events and materials for ESN. She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Delaware, and an MA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. she’s working on a novel about a dragon who gave up fending off knights to become a tea importer in eighteenth-century England.