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ESN Devotional Project

Thanks and Prayer for Scholar’s Compass in October

Image courtesy of dan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image courtesy of dan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

We are profoundly grateful for God’s generosity in the first month of Scholar’s Compass, and for your generosity as writers, readers, and participants with the project. Around 70 writers have expressed interest in working on the project, and we’re always delighted to welcome more.

In addition to thoughtful reflections on Navigating Beginnings and exploring Unchartered Territories from a number of authors, we’re also delighted to continue adding themes and threads of reflection, including:

Navigating Purpose: Why Academic Vocation Matters

A thread allowing writers to explore the large philosophical and theological questions that underlie the academic life.

Navigating Knowledge: Integrating Faith and the Details of Your Subject

A thread discussing how the details of a writer’s field point that writer to God in some way.

Upcoming Themes

 We’re planning to cover these themes soon:

  • The significance of creation, fall, redemption in academic calling, from a philosophy professor
  • Navigating transitions, from a business major doing graduate work in apologetics
  • Wisdom in academic vocation, from a pastor serving academics
  • Noticing God’s work in the details of science, from a neuroscience graduate student
  • Praying for students, from a Germanic languages and literature graduate student

 

Praises

 Please join us in thanking God for these things:

  • A very generous response to our request for science entries for a workshop at an engineering school. Several writers shared new work, which we’ll be sharing further through the blog over the next few months. Students present were encouraged by the readings and shared some deeply thoughtful insights into their own work.
  • Continued thoughtful response from writers and readers.

Prayer

Please join us in praying for:

  • Wisdom in engaging the wonderful range of topics we’ve received well.
  • Continued growth of community in relationship to Scholar’s Compass.
  • Continued thriving of Scholar’s Compass writers and readers in their vocations.

As always, thank you so much for praying with and for us. We look forward to continued conversation with you!

 

 

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Scholar’s Compass Monthly Prayer Update

Scholar’s Compass launches tomorrow! We’re deeply grateful for the response to the project so far. First and foremost, we want to thank God for the generous response of so many people who have agreed to write for the project and share it with their communities. We are deeply grateful for such wide participation.

Please also join us in praying for:

  • Growth in individual experiences of integrating faith and learning through Scholar’s Compass
  • Growth in community among Christian scholars as a result of Scholar’s Compass
  • Encouragement through our Navigating Beginnings theme as the new academic year starts

Thank you for your prayers and for all the other support readers of the blog have shared with Scholar’s Compass. We are deeply moved by your encouragement, and we look forward to further conversation and prayer together. To God be the glory!

Image courtesy of nuchylee at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image courtesy of nuchylee at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Scholar’s Compass Launches Sunday

Image courtesy of James Barker at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image courtesy of James Barker at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Join us Sunday for the first glance at Scholar’s Compass. With our initial theme of Navigating Beginnings, we’ll be exploring the following topics during September:

  • What physics can show us about seeking God’s glory
  • How the Iliad guides us toward hospitality in teaching and research
  • What 2 Timothy tells us about starting well and overcoming anxiety
  • Finding community through acts of welcome

Come back to the blog Sunday for our intro post and for more information on the new Scholar’s Compass page. We are delighted by the writing we’ve been receiving, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

We’ll also be posting Scholar’s Compass prayer requests on the blog each first Saturday of the month. We’d love for you to join us in prayer over time.

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Transcendent Love (Scholar’s Compass)

Portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the leading candidates cited as the source of the quip about man returning God’s favor. (Portrait by Allan Ramsey [Public domain])

But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. — Romans 5:8 (NET)

Reflection

“God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.” It’s such a great quote that everyone wants to attribute it to their favorite wit. Depending on the alleged source, it is either a withering revelation of the fabricated nature of religion, or a wry observation on why so few find the narrow path to the true God. Either way, it has a ring of truth; when we do manufacture deities, our imaginations rely on the models they know best — ourselves.

Only recently, we’ve created something else that looks as if it has godlike potential. Already, computers coordinate our traffic, oversee our financial markets, and make sure our Sherlock BluRays get delivered to our front door in a timely fashion. It doesn’t feel so outrageous to extrapolate that one day they will be sovereign over everything. Where we once pictured our gods living in the clouds, now we assume they will live in The Cloud.

Naturally, our science fiction has already begun to illustrate what the world could look like when our gods have Intel inside. Two recent illustrations are the films Transcendence and Her. In Transcendence, Johnny Depp uploads his consciousness into a computer and proceeds to become, for all practical purposes, omniscient and omnipotent. He fancies himself benevolent, but he is cast as the villain of the story, a threat to the ideal of American self-determination. Scarlett Johansson’s sentient computer in Her never comes across as megalomaniacal; for her, omniscience breeds disinterest until she eventually withdraws from Earth altogether.

What’s interesting about both is the way in which their deification is played against their humanity. As both characters transcend their initial circumstances, they become unable to relate to the humans they once knew. This disconnect is communicated most directly in terms of love. Johnny Depp has a wife before he goes digital; during the climactic action sequence, one of his opponents asserts that he is now a machine and so incapable of loving his wife. Scarlett Johansson is romantically linked to her user, but she apparently evolves beyond him to the point that anything he might recognize as love is too trivial to be worth her time.

Fortunately, the Bible paints a very different picture of God. He is no less transcendent, no less capable, and no less cosmically aware than these cinematic computer gods. While reaching that status erodes their capacity to love, the God of the Bible is defined by His. Just to ensure that He did not lose the ability to relate to humans, He became incarnate as one. And lest anyone suspect He would resort to domination or indifference, He died so that humans could be restored into relationship with Him.

Prayer

Lord, your transcendent glory stretches our understanding to its limits. We confess that we are thus inclined to create gods who bear a stronger resemblance to those things which we understand more fully. We are grateful that your love is sufficient to overcome that gulf of understanding between you and us. Please continue to reveal to us the breadth and length and height and depth of that love. Amen.

Question

What other attributes do we ascribe to God that we have actually just repurposed from our creations?

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Join Us in Praying for Scholar’s Compass

Many of you generously expressed an interest in praying for Scholar’s Compass, which launches next Sunday (September 7). We’ll be posting prayer requests the first Saturday of each month on the ESN blog, and we’d love for you to read them and pray for the project.

We’d love to pray for you as well. Feel free to suggest general ideas for prayer that we can post (starting semesters well, finding rest, welcoming new students, campus access concerns — California State University system’s de-recognition of 23 InterVarsity student groups, etc.) or send us a private email with more individualized requests.

For now, a selection from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, well-suited to beginnings:

By courtesy of photographer David R. Ingham, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported via Wikimedia Commons,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sundial_pocket_watch.JPG

A Prayer of Self-Dedication:

 Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to thee, so
 guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly thine, utterly dedicated unto
 thee; and then use us, we pray thee, as thou wilt, and always
 to thy glory and the welfare of thy people; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

— Prayer 61 from “Prayers and Thanksgivings,” The (Online) Book of Common Prayer, According to the Use of the Episcopal Church

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