InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network
William Carlos Williams once wrote, “In summer, the song sings itself.” Isn’t that a lovely idea? It certainly captured my mood back in May as I danced around the proverbial maypole and looked over the vast expanse of the summer months blooming ahead . . . Read more…
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. Read more…
But was there ever a language in which the totality of a thing in its essence was communicated fully in words?Read more…
So what language did Adam and Eve speak in the Garden of Eden? This was a question of significant interest in the early modern period (around the 16th and 17th centuries).Read more…
Excerpt: Language is one of the things that make humans human. Whilst there are other instances of communication in the animal kingdom, some employing relatively complex sets of signals by which animals express engagement with one another and with their physical environment, we have no evidence that non-human creatures can express abstract mental concepts such as those we are discussing today.Read more…
The Edge of the Precipice: Why Read Literature in the Digital Age? By Paul Socken My rating: 4 of 5 stars What will become of reading? In particular, what will become of reading and engaging what have been considered the great worksRead more…
Why Read? by Mark Edmundson Bloomsbury USA, originally published in 2004 My rating: 3 of 5 stars English departments are under attack in higher education. To be precise, courses that involve reading literature are under attack. Some people still prize beingRead more…
Continuing our Summer Quotation Series from Hannah Eagleson. The second quotation in this series comes from G. K. Chesterton, good-humored apologist and writer: A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality,Read more…
What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for theRead more…
What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for theRead more…
Great question. Do you resonate with the response Rachel Toor received from a graduate class in physical education? When we were wrapping up, I asked them a question: “What is your relationship to reading and writing?” At that moment, theyRead more…
As I mentioned in Week in Review: Behold the Man Edition, I have been unable to put down Brian Godawa’s Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story & Imagination (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).* Below is a quote relevant toRead more…
What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for theRead more…
How well does film convey material from classic literature? Can film be used to introduce a book and draw people into reading or does it stall the imagination, even inoculate against digging into the original text? Any classroom or personalRead more…
In my post last week about advice for undergraduates, Katie Weakland shared a comment that I thought was particularly apt: I suggest meeting your major professors early in your career – your first semester – and asking them to mentorRead more…
I feel I am closest to God when writing. You’re singing praises. You’re describing the world, as it is. And even if the passages turn out sordid or depressing, there’s something holy about the truth — John Updike, commenting whenRead more…
ESN member Madelaine Hron, assistant professor in the Department of English and Film at Wilfrid Lauriern University (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), just announced the release of Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature & Culture (University of Toronto Press, February 12, 2009).Read more…
Today is John Milton’s 400th birthday – or, rather, would have been. If you choose to celebrate this occasion, you can visit the John Milton Reading Room at Dartmouth, which contains ALL of Milton’s poetry (in English, Italian, Latin, andRead more…
New from Zondervan, A Faith and Culture Devotional seems custom-made for ESN members. Edited by Kelly Monroe Kullberg (of the Veritas Forum, Finding God at Harvard, Finding God Beyond Harvard, and, most recently, InterVarsity’s Women in the Academy and Professions)Read more…
Over at Books & Culture, Karl W. Giberson reviews The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, edited by (in Gilberson’s phrase) “that arch-villain Richard Dawkins.” Gilberson is being cheeky, and he notes that, in this volume, Dawkins’ love for scienceRead more…