An Epilogue and New Blogues

Well it is a tradition of mine to “review” my classes after a semester is finished. I don't do it every semester, but I intend to at least. Before I get to that, though, I'd like to introduce my blogging buddies to my blogging seminary buddies. Hmm… the categorization police might come after me, for the first category includes the second, but you know what I mean.

I've added links to the blogs of three classmates and friends from seminary. Jennifer often has very encouraging posts, such as her staple “PTL” posts that quickly mention all kinds of praiseworthy things of the week; Brad is busy engaging with issues of Christ and culture and has produced some thought provoking commentary; and John is the shutterbug, who tries to post at least one interesting photo he has taken each week. I probably should follow the example of each of these three here on asisaid. They each add something nice to my blog roll.

Now to the postmortem. Probably the big surprise of the semester was Spiritual and Ministry Formation. We spent about 1/3 of the class dealing with calling and very practical applications of Myers-Briggs (I'm INFP) to ministry. The rest of the class featured a theological hero each week and asked “what is it about the Gospel of Grace that enabled” that person to achieve the amazing things that they did. This always served as a springboard into a topic such as God's sovereignty and human responsibility. Dr. Douglass approached it with a real zest and it was more fun than I ever thought I could have in an evening class!

I expected Church History: Reformation to Modern to be good, and it did not disappoint. Dr. Lucas is another great professor (who is also now on my blogroll), and his classes were tiring, not because they weren't interesting, but because I often felt like I was flying through time in them. He would cram so much great stuff into each lecture that it was as if I had experienced weeks or months of events in an hour and fifteen minutes. His class can literally wear you out! Wow. The accelerated speed made it possible to see how things connected by virtue of the fact that connected events came up in fairly close proximity, rather than days or weeks apart from each other in the lectures.

Introduction to Counseling with Dr. Winter was an interesting overview of a very complex field. I enjoyed seeing the connections with psychology and better understanding how pastoral counseling might be implemented. I wish I could take a one semester course from Dr. Winter on each of the one week units (depression, perfectionism, homosexuality, etc.) — I think that could be helpful. His assignments encouraged some useful self-reflection (for improvement, not for narcissism).

Finally, Beginning Greek I was a course I did not want to take. I really hoped to skip it since I had previously taken Koine Greek back in 2005 (and a bit of self-teaching in years prior), but I missed out on testing out by a small amount. I was bummed out going into the class, but it ended up being a delight. Dr. Doll (who finished his M.Div this semester and is now off to some fortunate church to pastor), who was formerly a classics professor, put his knowledge to great use and helped really dig into some of the interesting cultural and literary connections between the Greek language and the New Testament. It was great; I only hope Greek II and Greek in Exegesis this summer will prove just as good.

Well, that's all for now.