Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

campus community

Fall Preview: Highlighting Community

fall hike photo

Fill out our fall Writer’s Survey!

In our first preview post last Sunday, we introduced several new and ongoing ways to connect with the wider community of Emerging Scholars Network (ESN) members. As we wrap up our fall preview series today, we’d like to highlight one more way to engage with community. We’re inviting members and friends of ESN to share more about their own communities on the blog this year. We’d love to encourage emerging scholars by sharing what other believers are doing to build community in their own localities or online networks. [Read more…] about Fall Preview: Highlighting Community

Fall Preview: Interviews

autumn waterfall photo

Fill out our fall Writer’s Survey!

The Emerging Scholars Network (ESN) has an exciting new direction for interviews, encouraged by last spring’s Faithful Is Successful series. The interviews in that series became a great way of sharing mentoring and peer conversations through ESN. As emerging scholars interviewed more experienced academics or peers at a similar career point, their thoughtful explorations encouraged others through the blog. We’re hoping to do more interviews that let emerging scholars “listen in” on great conversations among mentors or peers. [Read more…] about Fall Preview: Interviews

Approaching a New Semester

Preparing for the classroom to fill.
Approaching a New Term. Preparing for the classroom to fill.

Editor’s note: A powerful piece received a few weeks ago, I encourage you to join the author and myself in prayer for the new term. . . .

I have to admit a certain fear as the new semester approaches. Not so much about the teaching itself. It’s a lot of work, but I’ve done it before. What incites fear in me is the realization that I — with all my insecurities, faults and failures — am again being given sixty-some students for four hours a week for fifteen weeks. This is more time than they will spend with their parents, their pastors, and probably most of their friends. And they will be tested to ensure they pay attention to what I say. I think of the influence some of my college professors had on me, positive and negative, and I wonder what impact I will have when these students look back some day.

This past week registration opened up for the spring semester, and I have been periodically — OK, maybe a bit obsessively — checking the online rosters to see who will be in my classes. With that on my mind, I read the scriptures and my morning devotional readings this morning and processed what was on my mind in my prayer journal:

“Learn to listen to me even while you are listening to other people. As they open their souls to your scrutiny, you are on holy ground. You need the help of My Spirit to respond appropriately. Ask Him to think through you, live through you, love through you.” — Sarah Young, Jesus Calling, Oct. 31.

“Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” — John 7:38

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship. . . . It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another. . . . Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations —these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.” — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

[Read more…] about Approaching a New Semester