InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network
If medicine is about the alleviation of suffering and the postponement of death, is not all of our work ultimately futile? In a society that idolizes success and hides the dying and dead away from full view, what message can physicians give?Read more…
ESN: One of the largest themes of the series has to do with issues of faith and ambition. It seems that God has called us to do our best work for Him, and yet He’s also called us to seek humility and associate with the humble. Any further thoughts on navigating that tension?Read more…
It is too risky not to engage with a Christian academic community. Read more…
This week wraps up our Scholar’s Compass series on Faithful is Successful. When we started way back in February, my area was looking like Narnia’s hundred-year winter . . . Read more…
When I teach students to look at art, the first question I ask them is “what is it?” By this, I do not mean ‘what do you think you see?’ but ‘what do you actually see?’. – Sarah AwadRead more…
If we wish to be set free from this false significance, to take a new perspective on our career and the use of our time, Laura S. Meitzner Yoder’s thoughtful chapter “Interruptions are not distractions” provides us with a deeply beautiful corrective. Read more…
The man standing at the podium swipes his hair back again and continues with is presentation. He has a new theory, challenging the one that has become the status quo, which has staved off competing explanations for decades. He drops numerous names and somehow in the mix mentions the deficiencies of his father. I begin to suspect that this proud, brilliant, and yet surprisingly insecure scholar is no longer filling just a lacunae in the field but a hole in his heart.Read more…
I hope that Christian scholars will be emboldened to excel in their work while wholly immersing themselves in the story of God. Integrating faith and scholarship is difficult in many fields. We haven’t always been very imaginative in how we’ve undertaken that. We should do all we can to nurture conversation and push the frontiers of thought in that connection.Read more…
Today I’m thinking about how academics can use their gifts to serve the church, encouraged by Bruce Huber’s essay in Faithful is Successful. As Huber wrestles with the thorny question of ambition, one of his conclusions is that ambition can be pursued rightly in the context of service to the body of Christ. This has me thinking about the many faithful scholars I know through ESN and elsewhere. I thought I’d make a partial list of some ways I see the fruit of faithful scholarly ambitions supporting the church, universal or local.Read more…
Too often we are so immersed in the tacit standards of our own discipline that we don’t stand back and try to reimagine them in radically Christian ways. Not jettison them and start over, but just notice how our standards and expectations embody and reinforce our sinful nature, and imagine how those particular sinful patterns and blind spots might be redeemed, right here in the specific department or conference or library where we find ourselves. It’s exhilarating, really, if we let our imaginations run wild a bit.Read more…
David Vishanoff’s paper is a fascinating challenge to both Christian and secular academics to rethink the attitudes we have towards studying other cultures and worldviews. His model of ‘sacrificial listening’ has arisen from his study of Islam – as well as other world religions – and essentially consists in pursuing relationship rather than objectivity as an epistemological value.Read more…
The common thread is that life is a journey and our career is a part of that journey. Our careers are our work, the product of our offering to God as we work out and grapple with what we do and who we are. My story is just one of many that can be an example, but everyone has their story.Read more…
I left a highly secure job as a high school teacher in a beautiful suburban setting, teaching subjects that I loved most to share. Life was ideal and my income was strong. Yet, God had other plans. Within five years, my husband and I had four children and in the sixth year my mother had a paralyzing stroke the month before my husband was to start graduate school.Read more…
What is your greatest fear as you move through your academic or professional training? (Seriously. Please take a moment and give it some thought before reading on.)Read more…
There is a huge cultural gap between the church and the university, and we are called to bridge it. Frankly, I have never felt completely home in either world. While my university friends need to learn to see nuance and diversity in the Christian tradition, those in the church have much to learn from the university. During our time at the University of Florida my wife and I collaborated with a local Christian Study Center to try to bridge these two worlds. We sponsored speakers who lectured both in a professional setting at the university and also to local church audiences.Read more…
The author first remembers rethinking models of success when he and his wife, also a professional historian, discovered they were having twins near the end of their respective PhD programs. The future was very promising then, with various competitive research grants won and a publishing contract obtained together, for a historical project they had been working on alongside their dissertations. Certainly a rare and exciting feat for two young married historians. At first the oncoming twins seemed the ‘first major speed bump’ towards this ‘fast track to success,’ but naturally, children are much more than that! Read more…
A congressperson once asked a scientist, “Why should we keep funding so many research projects when such a small percentage actually make important contributions to human society?” The scientist replied, “You are right that very few projects have profound results. But the problem is that we don’t know beforehand which few projects will be the important ones! So we have to do them all.” I see an important parallel to family life here.Read more…
Our careers and our families are both goods God has given to us that enrich our lives and can bring Him glory. Both are secondary to our relationship with God through Jesus Christ, without whose abundant and undeserved grace we can literally do nothing (not even exist).Read more…
It was stunning news. I listened with disbelief as my colleague described how a patient of ours, in whom we had uncovered a host of serious diseases over a few years, was now newly diagnosed with cancer after an incidental scan.Read more…
If your work never has a clear substantive connection to your faith, this does not mean that God cannot be intimately involved in your research life. In the chapter I write about ways that my faith influences both the process of research and the substance. Read more…
My vivid imagination has created a wonderfully precise image of a Christian graduate student who talks, teaches, writes, and researches with faith, intelligence, and success. She is articulate about her beliefs among her colleagues, brilliant in her research, and is influential in her students’ academic and spiritual lives.Read more…
For the last almost two years, I have juggled a number of different roles: continuing to oversee Karisimbi Partners with frequent travel to Rwanda, conducting leadership training seminars in China periodically, refurbishing a 150 year old farm house, barn and vegetable-stand, supporting my wife’s work in a stressful senior executive role, being the primary caregiver, playdate scheduler and sandwich maker for our 5, 8 and 11 year olds.Read more…
When I was in high school my parents hosted a regular home church meeting. I did not attend. Instead, I spent my church time hanging around a Baptist church that had some friends my age and a pretty cool youth minister.Read more…
ESN interviews Bryan McGraw, a politics professor at Wheaton, as part of the Faithful Is Successful interview series. Read more…