Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

Highlighting Community

Highlighting Community: Apply for the Harvey Fellowship

application photo

ESN likes to share opportunities for Christian scholars. Today a friend in the Harvey Fellowship program describes her experience and invites ESN members to apply.

After I graduated from a rigorous Christian college, I thought I knew a thing or two about the integration of faith and learning. Without a doubt, my alma mater gave me an excellent start. But since graduation my journey as a follower of Christ and as an academic has been most powerfully shaped by my experience as a Harvey Fellow. I was fortunate to be encouraged and befriended by two Harvey Fellows while I was in graduate school, even before I had applied—one in my Ph.D. program and the other in my church. The Harvey Fellows Program has continued to connect me with other academics and leaders who have similar faith commitments. These relationships, in my experience, are what make participation in the program such a blessing.

How can you join this group of scholars? Apply for the Harvey Fellowship! Here are a few things you need to know in order to do so. First, a bit about the program: the Harvey Fellows Program provides financial support to Christian students pursuing graduate studies at premier institutions with a vision to impact society through their vocations. For more than twenty years, the Program has sought to mark, equip, and encourage individuals to actively integrate their faith and vocation as leaders in strategic occupations. Fellows who are selected through a competitive process receive a $16,000 stipend that may be renewed for up to an additional two years.

The Harvey Fellows Program welcomes applicants who

  • proclaim and actively seek to demonstrate personal faith in Jesus Christ and a desire to serve and witness in His name.
  • are enrolled in or have applied to a full-time graduate degree program.
  • have applied to or are attending a premier educational institution—typically those with an internationally recognized reputation as a “top five” program in the specific discipline or field.
  • Can demonstrate that their intended vocational fields have a significant impact on society, and yet appear to be underrepresented by Christians—that is, they are in “strategic” fields. The most successful applicants tend to be preparing for careers in the following fields:
  • Management, economics, and finance
  • Public policy, diplomacy, and law
  • Film production and the arts
  • Applied and theoretical sciences
  • University teaching and research

Applications must be completed online and are accepted between August 1 and November 1 for Fellowships to begin in the fall of the following academic year. The deadline for applications to be completed is November 1. All applicants are notified of award decisions by March 1. Additional information about the program and application process can be found at www.harveyfellows.org.

Reimagining the Sacred & the Cool: A Literary Symposium (Highlighting Community)

 

Missing Books and Culture? Want to have awesome conversations about literature and faith? Wishing you could hang out in a cool Christian study center this spring? Our friends at Upper House, a Christian study center in Madison, Wisconsin, have a way to address all three of those longings. John Wilson of Books and Culture will be a panel moderator at Upper House’s literary symposium on April 7, an event designed to gather Christians across the region for thoughtful conversations in an amazing space. Browse the event description below, or go straight to the event website. 

Reimagining the Sacred & the Cool: A Literary Symposium at Upper House

Many have argued that the cultivation of a shared literary and moral imagination is vital in a flourishing democracy. And yet the study of literature, and the humanities at large, is no longer central in our educational institutions. While some blame pop-culture, a lack of funding, or technologies of distraction, others have looked within. In Lisa Ruddick’s groundbreaking essay, “When Nothing is Cool,” she argues that “decades of anti-humanist one-upmanship,” and a general “thrill of destruction,” have resulted in a sweeping malaise of suspicion that now defines academic discourse. “Nothing in English is ‘cool,’” she says, but “on the other hand, you could say that what is cool now is, simply, nothing.” Which begs the question, if nothing is cool, what can we celebrate, let alone enjoy?

In this one-day symposium, we will examine the landscape of a literary culture at the limits of hermeneutic suspicion. One path forward, according to philosopher Richard Kearney, would be to reimagine the sacred as a fundamental category of criticism, even for scholars and artists who do not think of themselves as explicitly religious. Looking to the work of 20th century atheists, agnostics, and apostates, like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust, Kearney illustrates how spiritual and moral impulses consistently inform the literary imagination. In a contemporary setting, the same impulses are voiced in the poetry of Fanny Howe, the late Mark Strand, and Adam Zagajewski, along with the novels of Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Don DeLillo, and Michel Houellebecq.

On April 7, 2017, we warmly welcome both Ruddick and Kearney, along with literary critic Jon Baskin, poet G.C. Waldrep, and editor John Wilson, to help us reimagine the sacred, and the cool, and reconsider the place of the literary imagination in our world today.

Highlighting Community: Spring Lineup at Center for Christianity and Scholarship (North Carolina)

 

We love to share the work of other organizations and scholars with similar goals. Our hope is that these updates on different Christian communities will encourage our readers and also provide great event ideas and conversation starters for Christian communities in different places. Today, we’re highlighting the spring activities of the Center for Christianity and Scholarship, in North Carolina’s Research Triangle. 

Since 2012, the Center for Christianity and Scholarship has worked with students and faculty at Duke University and around North Carolina’s Research Triangle to create and sustain a community of scholars interested and engaged in discovering what it means to think as Christians about the workings of the physical world, social structures, history, art, philosophy, and other fields of study. CCS engages the university in three primary ways: public lectures, courses and reading groups for university students, and training and development opportunities for university faculty.

If you live around North Carolina’s Research Triangle or are in the area this spring during one of our events, we invite you to stop by! This spring’s upcoming public events include:

Servants With a Heart Meal Packing Service Project

Saturday, January 28th, 12:00-2:30 pm, Card Gym

Co-sponsored by: Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., Alpha Phi Omega, Asian InterVarsity, Cru, Center for Christianity and Scholarship, Episcopal Center, Graduate Christian Fellowship, Presbyterian Campus Ministry, Reformed University Fellowship, Servants with a Heart and Wesley Fellowship

Email info@christianityandscholarship.org to register

Exhausted From Your Insta-Snap-Tweet-Texting Life?: Sociological and Theological Reflections on Technology

Felicia Wu Song, Associate Professor of Sociology, Westmont College

Tuesday, February 21st, 7:30 pm, Rubenstein Library 153

Just Art? Social Protest Art, the Contemporary Refugee Crisis, and Georges Rouault’s Miserere et Guerre 

March 30th, Nasher Museum of Art

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Yale University

Co-sponsored with Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts

Short Courses

If you are affiliated with Duke, you’re invited to join one of CCS’s short courses. You can find more information on the CCS website and email info@christianityandscholarship.org with questions.

Technology: From Genesis to Jobs

Co-taught by Jed Atkins (Assistant Professor of Classics) and Edward Dixon (CCS Director). Meets five Fridays, beginning January 27th from 11:45-1:00 pm.

True Story: Scripture, the Whole World, and Me

Taught by Edward Dixon (CCS Director). Meets Tuesdays starting January 31 from 11:45-1:00 pm.

Ted Davis at U of Minnesota: Galileo and the Garden of Eden and More (Highlighting Community)

ESN loves to share what likeminded scholars and groups are doing in our Highlighting Community blog feature. Next week at University of Minnesota, historian of science and previous American Scientific Affiliation president Ted Davis will join a forum discussion on faith and science and give a lecture on Galileo and Eden. See below for details. Ted has a busy speaking schedule this spring, including talks in Texas and central PA, so stay tuned for more. For previous interviews with Ted at ESN, see this link.

Foundations Forum Discussion: Scientific Inquiry and Faith

With almost 80 percent of Americans professing some type of religious faith, it is important to consider how these views interact with science. Can faith somehow support scientific inquiry? Or does faith necessarily clash with the callings of science?

Join us the evening of January 26th for a discussion moderated by University of Minnesota professor Jennifer Alexander. We’ll host Dr. Michael Ruse, a secular philosopher of science from Florida State, and Dr. Ted Davis, a Christian historian of science from Messiah college, to discuss the relationship between science and faith. Organized by Campus Atheists, Skeptics, & Humanists, Anselm House Students, and the Round Table, with the help of many other student groups. More detail here.

Date: Thursday January 26 at 7 pm

Talk by Ted Davis: Galileo and the Garden of Eden: Galileo’s Hermeneutics, Modern Christians, and Natural History

To defend Copernican theory from the charge of being contrary to the Bible, Galileo argued that God’s “two books” of Scripture and nature could be harmonized by recognizing that Scripture is “accommodated” to ordinary human language and ideas, which are not scientific. Galileo’s hermeneutical strategy was widely imitated by scientists and clergy in the nineteenth century to help Christians accept an ancient Earth. Since then, however, American Christians have responded to these hermeneutical strategies in varying ways. This talk analyzes what Galileo said, shows how his arguments were reprised in nineteenth-century arguments about the relationship between natural history and Christianity, and explores the trajectory of these arguments into the present day.

Hosted by Anselm House and the University of Minnesota Center for Early Modern History, further details here and here.

Date: Friday January 27 at 3:30 pm

Highlighting Community: Graduate Prayer Lunch at University of South Florida

UniversityofSouthFloridaPrayerGroupKevinOrner

Kevin Orner connected with the Emerging Scholars Network (ESN) at the American Scientific Affiliation Annual Meeting this summer and shared with Tom Grosh IV about a graduate prayer group at his institution. ESN is delighted to feature it in highlighting community. 

When I arrived to the University of South Florida (USF) in August of 2014 to begin my PhD in Environmental Engineering, I found that many Christian organizations existed, yet none targeted graduate students. Initially, my wife, Sarah, and I volunteered with the undergraduate InterVarsity chapter. After classes started, I stayed after one of my classes to talk with one of my Environmental Engineering professors. She mentioned that she was a Christian and that one of her other PhD students was also a Christian, and we talked about the need for Christian graduate students to gather and pray for one another. We decided to meet together over lunch the next week to prayerfully consider our next steps in starting such a group. So began our prayer group. [Read more…] about Highlighting Community: Graduate Prayer Lunch at University of South Florida