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:
- Click here: https://intervarsityesn.moksha.io/publication/emerging-scholars-network/3/submit
- Upload your prayer as a Word file
- 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
Dr. Hannah Eagleson loves building the ecosystem Christian scholars need to flourish and create positive impacts, in the university and beyond. She is Associate Director of InterVarsity’s Emerging Scholars Network, a digital first ministry serving thousands of early career Christian scholars. Dr. Eagleson launched the ESN student/early career track at the American Scientific Affiliation annual faith and science conference. She is the editor of *Science and Faith: Student Questions Explored* (Hendrickson, 2019), and the one-semester guidebook *Scholar’s Compass: Connecting Faith & Work for Academics* (InterVarsity Emerging Scholars Network, 2021), with design by noted liturgical artist Ned Bustard. She also launched the Scholar’s Compass online devotional series in her previous role as ESN Editor. Dr. Eagleson holds an MA from St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD) and a PhD in Renaissance literature from the University of Delaware.