Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

Ecclesiastes

What Shall We Remember?

Pulitzer Prize Photographs: A Traveling Exhibit of Award-Winning Photography. http://www.newseum.org/exhibits-and-theaters/traveling-exhibits/ [Retrieved 12/27/2013].
For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to take my girlfriend for a date through the Pulitzer Prize photography exhibition in Philadelphia. She is much more artistically-minded than I and we had talked before about visiting a gallery or museum sometime. I love photography and thought that the exhibit would be a classy and apt hybrid between our interests. What I had forgotten was that the Pulitzer Prize is awarded for photojournalism, which meant that though each shot was notable for composition and technique, they primarily represented the biggest (and often most tragic) news events of each year. This meant that our “date” consisted mainly of silently studying the most graphic, gut-wrenching photos of every major war, famine, and natural disaster from 1940 and onwards. There were photographs of Iwo Jima, of mass graves in Rwanda, of the World Trade Center exploding, of soldiers in Vietnam and Aleppo and Syria and Zimbabwe and Cambodia, of funerals and caskets. There were photographs of assassinations, of executions and prisoners, of burning and bloodied bodies, of race riots and shootings, of lynchings and genocide, of women buried under mudslides and earthquakes, of children with mangled limbs and gaunt skeletons and napalm-seared flesh and in body bags. In essence, it was a collection of the world’s most provocative and inarticulably dense depictions of human emotion.

Kent State Shooting. http://www.famouspictures.org/kent-state-shooting/ [Retrieved 12/27/2013]. Click here to see how to view the picture via the copyright holder.
It was not the most romantic of venues.

We are both “internal processors” of emotion, so we took a break partway through to get some coffee and decompress. Sitting quietly in the cafeteria, we talked absently about the photographs. “It reminded me of Ecclesiastes,” she said, and I thought about all the futility and sorrow and frustration encompassed in that book: [Read more…] about What Shall We Remember?

In Its Time

[The third post in a series on becoming a Christian physician. Earlier posts are Do You Want to Be a Doctor? and Helping People Is Not Enough].

Editor’s note: Lacking joy in the ordinary (and necessary) practice of eating? Bob Trube’s Book Review: Eat with Joy (Rachel Marie Stone. InterVarsity Press, 2013) provides “a taste” of a helpful resource.

After working 24 hours on call in the pediatric ICU, I was exhausted. I wanted to sleep, but friends had recently been reminding me of the health benefits of breakfast, so I dragged myself to a local diner for breakfast and sat at the counter next to a father and his little daughter. “We graduated from the booth to the counter,” he was explaining to the waitress, trying to hide his pride. The little girl looked shyly up, swiveling playfully on the rotating seat as she stretched up to rest her elbows on the countertop. I tried not to glance at them too much, but I was overwhelmed and fascinated by many simple things: the widening of her eyes at the stack of pancakes, the delighted silence as she chewed her way through the syrupy mess, the polite sips of tart orange juice from a well-worn cup.

The hospital tends to “stick” or creep into the outside world. That weekend I had been having nightmares, imagining what it would be like to suddenly find that my eight year old daughter was brain-dead, or my ten year old son was killed in a car accident, or my brother’s cold turned out to be leukemia.*  Random and otherwise innocent sounds would make me think of beeping monitors and noisy breathing machines. It seemed difficult to completely extract myself from the hospital. Even when I went to the DMV, the inspector saw me in scrubs and asked, in an attempt to connect, “Do you work in the hospital?  Have you seen dead people? . . . Are some of them children? That must be hard; I can’t imagine.” [Read more…] about In Its Time

Finding Calcutta: What is My Legacy?

Funeral Procession c. 1950s. Oil on composite board 30.5″ x 29.25.” Aaron Douglas Collection, Amistad Research Center Tulane University, New Orleans, LA

Probes:

  • How would you articulate the gulf between a secular legacy, one of the world’s primary measures of a life’s work, and faithful fulfillment of Christian calling?
  • How have you received affirmation/fulfillment in the blessing of Christ’s call and following Christ’s call?

Defining legacy

1. Law. a gift of property, especially personal property, as money, by will; a bequest

2. anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor: the legacy of ancient Rome – From Dictionary.com.

The world focuses on what can be experienced directly – what is seen.  It is a great temptation to make that the measuring stick of our life’s work, our impact on the world.  We are called to trust in God with a belief that he is working through us toward what He knows we can and will become eternally.

There is a Christian legacy for those who know and follow God.  Abram’s calling shows this in God’s promises (Genesis 12:1-3).

[Read more…] about Finding Calcutta: What is My Legacy?