Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

Christ and the academy

Faith and Reason, Part 1

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Frequent ESN contributor and Graduate & Faculty Ministries Staff Mark Hansard returns to give us a summer series on faith and reason. We’re always happy to share Mark’s thoughtful writings. Interested in reading more by Mark? You can explore his thoughts on learning about godly scholarships through Hebrews, his popular posts on The Fruit of the Spirit in Academia, or all of his literary and theological reflections for ESN. 

In this series on Faith and Reason, we will take a brief look at a Scriptural basis for using reason and logic, and then we will visit several thinkers through the Ages and their views on how faith and reason go together. [Read more…] about Faith and Reason, Part 1

Developing Christ-like Character in Grad School

writing photoRecently, I was pleased to write a recommendation for an outstanding 4th year medical student’s application for a residency program. I’ve been asked to write and review a number of recommendation letters over the years. While the letters I’ve written and read highlight a wide range of positive attributes, two characteristics have stood out to me lately. Supervisors recognize someone who is confident. For example: “she displays decisiveness.” They also value someone who is humble—“receptive to feedback,” and “shows respect and concern for others.” Confidence and humility are what author Andy Crouch refers to as being ‘Strong and Weak’—embracing authority and vulnerability.[1] Personally, I aspire to such traits, but I struggle to cultivate them in my own life. I want to be confident, but I sometimes feel inadequate. I desire humility, but I can be prideful or arrogant. Perhaps you struggle with the same tensions. Most of us can agree with Paul who wrote, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15 NIV). [Read more…] about Developing Christ-like Character in Grad School

Letter to My Self, Starting Graduate School

Historian Ryan Wilkinson, PhD finished and starting a tenure track job in the fall, writes a letter to himself at the beginning of graduate school. We hope it’s a great encouragement, wherever you are on your academic journey. 

Dear Me,

Well, congratulations—you’re going to graduate school!

So—this is your future self, writing from a decade ahead to let you know that you’ll have a lot of fun. On the other hand . . . it won’t all be easy. Hmmm? What do I mean?

Well, let me give you some examples. You’re going to spend an entire Spring Break working on a seminar presentation, and then discover that everything you did all week was wrong. Oh, and there’s the time when you’ll lose a month’s research to malware. You’ll get a paper back with three words of feedback: “Very disappointing, Ryan!” A professor will suggest that a misplaced diacritic accent in a foreign-language citation halfway through a paper casts doubt on your fitness for this career path. Your first article will be rejected when you first submit it. You’ll spend years noticing other students outperforming you, getting grants and jobs and praise sooner than you, and just seeming smarter than you. When it’s all over, you’ll spend years on the tenure-track market, wondering if it will all pay off.

Now, hang on; it’s going to be ok.

Many of these disasters will turn out for your benefit. You will have professional triumphs, and they will tend to grow out of earlier problems. You will do good work, and you will be proud of it. You will publish. You will accept a tenure-track job. But make no mistake: this path is not for the faint of heart. Think long and hard about why you’re doing this. There are plenty of things you could do instead, and you’ll need to know why you should keep going. A decade from now, you’ll be smarter, and you’ll be done, but you won’t be any more valuable than you are today—and you won’t be any more valuable than the bus driver who brought you in this morning. Graduate school will not make you significant.

The good news is that you don’t need it to. On the other hand, I’m really glad you chose this path. If you give up prematurely, you’ll be hearing more from me—and I won’t sound as friendly! The path ahead is a gift and a treasure worth all the pain. It’s the right path for you; you can even think of it as a kind of priestly service.

Now, I get that you don’t fully understand that yet. In fact, I know that you’ve been wrestling pretty deeply with doubt, even though you rarely admit it. You have a lot of questions about God and the Christian life. Frankly, you’ll find even more questions here. In coming years, your training will expose you to some disturbing things—things difficult to reconcile with old beliefs. That’s ok. You have questions; go ahead and ask them. God is big enough to handle them. Proceed carefully, and prayerfully, but don’t fear new ideas. Sometimes, you’re just going to have to be ok not having things figured out.

I think this may surprise you, but in the next decade you will find answers—answers that satisfy you deeply, that enrich and revitalize your trust in God. A decade from now, the biblical gospel looks bigger, more beautiful, more complex (sometimes, more terrifying), more powerful, more reliable, and more relevant than you know today.

In the coming years, you’ll have access to one of the world’s great theological libraries. Use it. Anabaptists and Arminians and Calvinists; Catholics and Eastern Orthodox; agnostics, atheists, etc., etc. They’re all in there. I’m going to challenge you now to engage your faith with the same level of rigor and energy that you pour into your academic studies. You won’t regret it.

But intellectual enrichment can be dangerous without balance. The only way to thrive in graduate school is to thrive as a human being. Ask God for wisdom. Stay in fellowship, no matter what. Engage the church off-campus; this will help correct the limits of academic vision, which are very real. Serve others. Cultivate hobbies, without guilt. Maintain spiritual disciplines. Take time to tend your heart in every season. Spend time silent and alone, and listen to yourself. Ask yourself what you really want in life, and take your honest answers seriously. You think that silence, rest, prayer, and reading scripture are duties; you’re going to learn that they are instead the way to cultivate the life you actually want. When you let business get in their way for long, you will always diminish yourself.

Look for God in your discipline, too. It offers insight into how God has ordered the story of his creation. As a historian, you’ll see the beauty of human culture in ways you never expected. You’ll see the scope of evil and suffering more clearly than ever before. Reading over two millennia of history in depth as you prepare for your general exams, you’ll choke on the horrors that men routinely visit on each other. You’ll weep—yes, weep—over the tyranny of death. You’ll learn to fear more deeply. But God’s remedy will loom larger, and give you courage. You’ll read the judgments and promises of the prophets with a new and urgent hunger.

Not all of your insights into suffering will be vicarious. For several more years, you’re still going to struggle routinely with deep anxiety. For several more years, you and your wife will bear the sorrow of childlessness. You will have children—wonderful children—but you’ll also face unusually severe sleep deprivation. You’ll wonder how to comfort your wife after a miscarriage during the busy first week of a teaching semester. And you’ll grapple for years with wounds that other people’s sinful choices carved into your family. In the coming decade, your heart will sometimes break more painfully than you ever believed it would.

But listen: don’t be afraid of the future.

A decade from now, you are happy and often joyful, weathered but okay with it, going places but somewhat content with sitting still. Christ values you and he will not abandon you. Life is going to hurt sometimes, and sometimes your graduate studies will only add to the pain. But you will learn and grow and become more whole through it all.

Put each thing in its proper place. Graduate school is a gift, and it will shape you, but it must not define or own you. Be present with yourself. Serve your family; strive for excellence in your work. Take lots of healthy risks. Be honest and vulnerable, and don’t be afraid to suffer or to fail. As you face the future, there is only one guarantee—but it is more than enough:

Christ will be with you in everything, and it will be well.

Image courtesy of Kaz at Pixabay.com

Fifth Sunday of Lent: Jesus Speaks to His Mother and the Disciple

During Lent, ESN writer and InterVarsity graduate/faculty staff member Jamie Noyd shares her reflections. She invites us to meditate with her on six of the stations of the cross on which Christians have reflected over the centuries. See the post for the first Sunday of Lent here, the Second Sunday of Lent here, the third Sunday of Lent here, and the fourth Sunday of Lent here. You can explore Jamie’s other work for ESN, on the book of Ruth and the idea of pilgrimage, here.

John 19:25-27

Standing near the cross were Jesus’ mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary (the wife of Clopas), and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother standing there beside the disciple he loved, he said to her, “Dear woman, here is your son.” And he said to this disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from then on this disciple took her into his home.

Looking on the scene of the crucifixion is painful. Roman guards drive nails through Jesus’ flesh and his body writhes in pain. You hold your breath while they raise the cross with Jesus pinned to it. As you let it out, you step away from your watch and walk around. In the midst of imminent death, the taunts of the guards and the crowd continue. Life goes on here outside of Jerusalem’s walls as people travel through.

Making your way back to Jesus’ cross, you encounter an unexpected moment. Instead of a man fighting to stay alive or just giving up, you see one compassionately speaking with his mother. Jesus is more concerned about caring for his mother’s future by setting her up with a protector, his disciple John, than any anguish he is going through. “Dear woman” he calls her as he brings together disciple and mother into a new family. Neither would be forgotten.

In the university—whether you are a student, professor, or staff—crises seem to arise each day.

  • Department budgets need to be cut and staff let go
  • A rewrite of a journal article is due by the end of the day—after teaching 3 classes
  • Missing financial aid payments have to be tracked down or else you can’t register for next semester

Our knee-jerk reaction in these moments can be to shut out everything else until we address the crisis. That student standing outside the door or call from a friend will just have to wait for another day.

Yet, paradoxically, when I focus on my needs, they seem to never be met—and they continue to grow. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal  reports how studies have shown that giving away time to others actually makes us feel less, not more, stressed. The self-focused perspective that besieges us in such situations is usually the opposite of what would benefit us most.

Though we may want to follow these words, it’s not easy. Fortunately, the shadow of the cross draws us into new ways of prioritizing life and relationships as we look beyond ourselves to the needs of others. I’ve had students tell me how when they have a deadline to meet and a friend contacts them with a need, they often find time to both help the friend and finish the work.

During these times we can take ourselves back to the cross and watch.

The shadow of the cross looms over a mother and a friend.

Breathing becomes labored for the crucified and for the ones he loves.

Through these breaths, come words of compassion.

Take care. Build a new family. Trust.

Centered on Jesus, we can build a community of care around us as we reach out and invite others in, even in the midst of pain.

In your schedule today, where can you touch someone else in need? Who can you invite into Jesus’ family?

Jesus, help us walk in your steps.

Image credit: Giotto, 1266?-1337. Crucifixion, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48740 [retrieved March 27, 2017]. Original source: http://www.yorckproject.de.

Fourth Sunday of Lent: Jesus is Helped by Simon the Cyrenian to Carry the Cross

During Lent, ESN writer and InterVarsity graduate/faculty staff member Jamie Noyd shares her reflections. She invites us to meditate with her on six of the stations of the cross on which Christians have reflected over the centuries. See the post for the first Sunday of Lent here, the Second Sunday of Lent here, and the third Sunday of Lent here. You can explore Jamie’s other work for ESN, on the book of Ruth and the idea of pilgrimage, here.

Mark 15:21

A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross.

After being flogged, Jesus starts his final journey to the crucifixion site. Imagine being in the crowds watching on the side of the road as he comes stumbling along the way, barely able to walk, let alone carry the weight of the cross. All of a sudden a Roman guard conscripts Simon of Cyrene, a member of the crowd standing next to you. This man had asked you what was happening because he had just come in from the country. Now he is an intimate part of this drama—carrying the means by which another man will die.

A new story begins for this man. His life is forever changed.

Our paths are often waylaid by others. This can be as simple as a colleague coming to our office door to share about the family conflict that happened over the weekend or as major as a parent being diagnosed with cancer. In both instances, we are asked to help carry a part of someone’s burden.

Sometimes we do it willingly, while at other times we are reluctant and may even close the door. We stop answering calls or texts. We make excuses for not going out to coffee with a friend. We pull back to create a route safe from intrusions so we can get on with the important work in our lives. But what are we missing? It could be that these so-called burdens are the truly important work.

At times we are the ones carrying the cross. We may be reluctant to ask for help, not wanting to bother anyone. Maybe all we see are the crowds around us and can’t picture anyone willing to step into a crisis we have made ourselves. From this side of the picture we can also be missing something essential to life.

Working together to carry one another’s crosses brings us into deeper relationships and community. It brings us to places where we are serving as God’s hands and feet, and allowing others to do the same for us.

It’s likely that we will get dirty doing this work. It’s likely that our original plans will need to change. Yet, the life that comes from this mess is rich. Who knows if Jesus said anything to Simon that day? Perhaps he merely shared a deep look of compassion and gratitude. What we do know is that Simon’s life changed as he became a part of Jesus’ story that has been passed down for 2000 years.

Whose cross will you step in to help carry? Even if you, like Simon, are conscripted into this work, how can you look at it anew? Or, are you the one who needs to ask someone to help with a cross that you are carrying?

It may be time to take a risk and have your life changed, as did that certain man during a short stop in town.

Jesus, help us walk in your steps. Amen.