Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

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Science Corner: H2O Christmas Tree

christmas tree photo
The long, thin needles have a lot of surface area and relatively little volume, ideal for exchange of heat and water vapor. (Photo by Stigs )

We talk a lot about science here; how about a chance to do some science? If you have a real Christmas tree in your house, keep track of how much water you are putting into the stand. Then set out an equivalent volume of water in a bowl or cup or whatever. Making some allowance for initial replenishment of dehydration, all of the water you are putting into the tree stand is evaporating into the air. If it weren’t, the tree would be getting bigger. The water in the bowl is evaporating also, but most likely you’ll observe that the tree stand is losing water faster than the bowl. Trees are more efficient evaporators. In a sense, a tree is designed to optimize the flow of water from the ground into the atmosphere (among other things). Which is handy, since the tree needs water to flow back down from the atmosphere in the form of rain.
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Book Review: What Your Body Knows About God, by Rob Moll

What Your Body Knows About God: How We Are Designed to Connect, Serve and Thrive Rob Moll (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014).
What Your Body Knows About God: How We Are Designed to Connect, Serve and Thrive by Rob Moll (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014).

What Your Body Knows About God: How We Are Designed to Connect, Serve and Thrive. Rob Moll. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014.

Summary: Explores how our neurophysiology enables us to connect to God and others and how spiritual practices, liturgies, and opportunities to serve enable us to physically as well as spiritually thrive.

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Science Corner: I’ll Be in Scotland Afore Ye

downtown pittsburgh photo
In Pittsburgh, there’s more than one river that will take you ‘dahntahn.’
Photo by jpellgen

In a lovely bit of metaconvergence, two studies on convergent evolution showed up in the news this week. The first looked at ants in Arizona and whether five distinct populations separately stopped producing queens with wings in favor of wingless ones. The second was more extensive, showing that a wide range of species across phyla all have the same solution at the genetic level for coping with a toxin produced by some plants and toads. Both studies suggest that natural history was not purely random, and “replaying the tape” as it were might not always produce wildly different results.

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Becoming a Thoughtful Christian in the Secular Academy: Part II

University of Montana. Photo taken by John Hundley.

Last week I wrote about my journey as a developing follower of Jesus in a secular university.  I told you that I’d become a stronger Christian during my time in the academic world, and now I want to tell you a little bit about what happened in my mind and heart during that time. This post is, to an extent, a response to Andy Walsh’s question in the comment thread of last week’s post in this series:

You mentioned that your Christian faith is stronger as a result of the experience. Did you find that aspects of your theology changed during that time? To put it another way, were there any shifts in what you believed along with how strongly you believed them? […]  I was just musing that we (Christians broadly) talk a lot about strengthening/deepening our faith, and I wondered if that was a general phenomenon, or if it correlated with particular beliefs. In other words, is it possible to have a strong/deep faith in anything, or are there certain beliefs which are more amenable to that kind of reinforcement.

I came into college a brand-new believer and left a pretty new believer — going on 6 years now, nearly all of which passed while attending the U of Montana. So you could probably guess that my thinking has been shaped a lot by the academic world. And you’d be right. The methodology I began to put to use in school sparked further personal research outside of the classroom. The critical, “outsider” lens, which is generally employed in the secular classroom, caught my attention. Secular scholars have come up with some really tough arguments that I needed to overcome or adapt if I could continue to believe in the creation of the world — however long that process took — and the physical resurrection of Jesus.

Those are two beliefs, creation and resurrection, that my academic research has greatly strengthened. [Read more…] about Becoming a Thoughtful Christian in the Secular Academy: Part II