Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

questions

Snapshots of “Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?”

Ian Hutchinson, Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles? An MIT Professor Answers Questions on God and Science (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018).

Being a Christian has engendered in me a greater interest in intellectual matters I might not otherwise have taken seriously. History is no longer for me the torture it was as a schoolboy. And that is in part because I see the significance and relevance of history in my Christian faith. A deeper knowledge of the history and philosophy of science, beyond the logic of the disciplines themselves, I find fascinating and of enormous help in better understanding the relationships between the communities. – Ian Hutchinson, Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles? An MIT Professor Answers Questions on God and Science (InterVarsity Press, 2018), 13.

Introduction

Similar to Friday’s Taking the “Selfie Challenge”, today’s post arose from a series of recent publication quotes shared on the Emerging Scholars Network’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. What brought Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles? An MIT Professor Answers Questions on God and Science by Ian Hutchinson to my attention? [Read more…] about Snapshots of “Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?”

Book Review: Questioning Your Doubts

Questioning Your Doubts: A Harvard PhD Explores Challenges to Faith, Christina M. H. Powell. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014.
Questioning Your Doubts: A Harvard PhD Explores Challenges to Faith, Christina M. H. Powell. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014.

Questioning Your Doubts: A Harvard PhD Explores Challenges to Faith, Christina M. H. Powell. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014.

Summary: This book comes out of the world of academic research and proposes that the process of questioning our doubts as well as our faith builds bridges of understanding deepening both our exercise of reason and confidence in our faith.

[Read more…] about Book Review: Questioning Your Doubts

Call for Science Career Questions

question mark photo
Photo by Martin Pettitt

Are you an emerging scholar in the sciences looking for someone to answer your questions about graduate school, career choices, life/work balance, and more?

Members of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), an association of Christians in science, would love to explore your questions on the ESN blog and then continue the conversation at ASA’s new Nexus Forums. Email ESN with questions and we’ll pass them on.

To get a free Student Basic membership to ASA, click here.

Releasing the Helm: Letting Theory Critique My Faith (Scholar’s Compass)

Natural Bridge Releasing the Helm

We must listen with all our might, with all our will to discern, laying aside our very human desire to be right with a prayer that we may be faithful. - Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009

Reflection

The air conditioner’s white noise makes my meeting with my dissertation advisor dreamlike, as if the discussion we are having isn’t real, as if my legs’ adherence to the sticky metal folding chair is a discomfort that I would vaguely remember when I wake up.

I’m telling him that to apply postmodern poststructuralist theories of my field to my dissertation entails a critique of my own faith. I am planning to study a migrant congregation, a group with which I share similar religious beliefs. To be frank, I fear my own spiritual destruction. [Read more…] about Releasing the Helm: Letting Theory Critique My Faith (Scholar’s Compass)

Devotions: “In-spite-of” Wisdom

Areopagus. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areopagus. Accessed 4/12/2014.

“For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new. So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.” (Acts 17:20-22)

Wisdom from God comes in many forms. Sometimes it provides us amazing answers to challenges about our faith. Other times God provides opportunities to engage our faith in the “wisdom of the world.” I call this “in-spite-of” wisdom. In spite of the current talk and philosophy and manner of life around us, we can share our faith. A couple of notes about this kind of wisdom from Paul. [Read more…] about Devotions: “In-spite-of” Wisdom