Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

faculty ministry

Faculty Fellowship Dinners at the College of William & Mary

Faculty Dinner at Cambridge House, September 22, 2022. Photo courtesy of Paula Puckett

We are grateful for this report from Paula Puckett, GFM Faculty Minister at William & Mary. It models faculty members encouraging each other in following Christ as well as the strength of partnership between Christian study centers and on-campus ministries.

The past three years at William & Mary have been particularly exciting. Two streams of ministry converged to more effectively serve faculty and students.  The first is the growth of InterVarsity’s traditional Faculty Ministry.  With more than 70 faculty and professional staff now on the mailing list, and a part-time InterVarsity staff who serves them, faculty are regularly invited into fellowship and to events that foster their spiritual formation such as lunchtime Sacred Space gatherings.

Meanwhile, Cambridge House Christian Study Center, part of the rapidly-growing Consortium of Christian Study Centers, was established next-door to William & Mary, with the vision to “set a table with the riches of the historic Christian tradition, for the moral, spiritual, and intellectual flourishing of the W&M community.”

When partnering together, Cambridge House and InterVarsity Faculty Ministry co-sponsor various events which invite W&M faculty to envision Cambridge House as a place that both ministers to them and that allows them to minister to others. 

One such shared initiative is the new monthly Faculty Fellowship Dinner series launched this Fall. The first one took place on September 22nd over a home-cooked meal of Moroccan chickpea stew.  Professor Aaron Griffith of the W&M Philosophy Department shared briefly on the intersection of faith and academic vocation.  He poignantly offered his reflections on what it means to love within the Academy, asking,

“Are we here as Christian faculty only to create ‘safe spaces’ for Christian students, where they can be shielded from a ‘dangerous secular culture,’…Or are we to encourage our students to love their neighbors on campus and in Williamsburg? How can we model and propel students to see and respond to those who are suffering around them—the least, last, and left out? How do we promote the self-emptying love of Christ (Phil 2:7) in our students? How do we turn enemies into neighbors? How do we, in other words, encourage our students to have their focus outward on those around them and avoid promoting an inward, fear based protective attitude.”

 Griffith then shared from the writings of Aristides, a 2nd century Christian philosopher:

“Christians love one another. They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If a man has something, he gives freely to the man who has nothing. If they see a stranger, Christians take him home and are happy, as though he were a real brother. They don’t consider themselves brothers in the usual sense, but brothers instead through the Spirit of God. And if they hear that one of them is in jail, or persecuted for professing the name of their redeemer, they all give him what he needs. If it is possible, they bail him out. If one of them is poor and there isn’t enough food to go around, they fast several days to give him the food he needs. This is really a new kind of person. There is something divine in them.” [The Apology of Aristides the Philosopher, Texts and Studies 1 (1891) pp. 1-34]

He then asked the gathering: “What would it look like for Christian students and faculty on this campus to have a witness like this?!?”  What followed was a rich discussion that left us challenged, inspired and longing for more such conversations in the years to come. 

Book Review: Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science

Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science by Edward Lurie (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1960. Note: reprinted in 1988 by Johns Hopkins U. Press).

Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science by Edward Lurie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Louis Agassiz might well be considered the foremost naturalist of the first half of the nineteenth century. He brought a rigor to the scientific enterprise in America that inspired everyone from cabinet members to farmers. And he also reflects the human dilemma of being caught late in life in a paradigm shift as the work of Charles Darwin won over a younger generation of zoologists, some who had studied with Agassiz.

This is an older work, published in 1960 and a cheap find at a used book sale at our local library! Lurie traces Agassiz from his youth in Switzerland, his clear sense of a plan for his life from age 15 that led to a succession of studies first in Neuchatel, and then in Germany, his efforts to forestall his parents aims that he would settle down to a respectable medical practice in his home town, and fortuitous relationships with Humboldt and Cuvier. It was with the latter that his metaphysical and scientific convictions about special creation and the fixed nature of species were formed. During this time he gained great reknown in Europe with lectures on glaciation and how these wiped out species and how different species were specially created in various locations following the last ice age. [Read more…] about Book Review: Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science

Book Review: Education’s End

Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony Kronman (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 2007).

Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 2007).

My rating: 4 of 5 stars.

Anthony Kronman had me by the time I got to the subtitle. I wanted to know, “why, indeed, have our colleges and universities given up on the meaning of life?” It brought to mind a conversation with a religious studies faculty about the evidence from studies of spirituality in higher education of the longing of students to talk openly about these questions in their classes. The faculty person said something to this effect, “I could never do that. What we are about is the academic study of religion and not the personal beliefs of students.”

Kronman begins the book describing a philosophy seminar on Existentialism taught by his undergraduate college department chair. The seminar met in the chair’s home. The readings were demanding, the discussions about a life well lived were passionate. Birthed in those discussions was the conviction that higher education was a place “where the question of what living is for can be pursued in an organized way” (p. 6). His book is an impassioned argument for both why higher education has largely abandoned such discussions (except in late night bull sessions!) and what is to be done. [Read more…] about Book Review: Education’s End

Book Review: The Humanities and Public Life

The Humanities and Public LifeThe Humanities and Public Life edited by Peter Brooks with Hilary Jewett (Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2014).

My rating: 3 of 5 stars.

There is no question but that the humanities are under fire. Budgets are being cut, sometimes whole departments. How then to justify the humanities within the university, without accepting “instrumentalization”, a term thrown around much in this book, which means roughly, being able to demonstrate some “deliverable” or bottom line worth.

Peter Brooks, the editor of the book,and organizer of the symposium from which the articles and discussion in this book was drawn, starts with the “Torture Memos”, a series of Justice Department documents from the second Bush administration that justified waterboarding and other forms of torture against detainees deemed to be “dangerous” to national security. Brooks believes this to be the result of poor and unethical reading by those who formulated these memos (an assumption I question), and something that the humanities fundamentally address. [Read more…] about Book Review: The Humanities and Public Life

“Christian Faculty Mentoring Students” Resources

When Kelly Arispe first dreamed of becoming a professor, she hoped to follow in the footsteps of the mentors who had so deeply enriched her own college experience. . . .  — From Beyond Academics: Kelly Arispe and Spanish Linguistics

Christian Faculty Mentoring Students and Beyond Academics: Kelly Arispe and Spanish Linguistics are two of several excellent resources for Faculty Ministry. As you may guess, I’m really excited about the growing bank of resources focused on gathering students and faculty together. Yes, another subtle plug for what has been referred to as Dinner Table Conversations 🙂

Read, share, discuss, brainstorm on summer/fall gatherings for conversation/storytelling/mentoring. . . .

For additional material visit Faculty Ministry Resources and the Faculty tag at The Well. If you have similar stories to share from your campus, please visit Faculty Ministry Writers’ Guidelines and Write for Us (The Well).

PS. I’m on a road trip to As We Worship, So We Believe: How Christian Worship Forms Christian Faith. I can’t wait not only for the presentations, but for the Dinner Table Conversations (especially meeting on-line friends in person) at the 2014 Ancient Evangelical Future Conference (6/5-6, Trinity School for Ministry, Ambridge, PA). AND writing about them. To God be the glory!