[THO] And It Begins

I'm not impressed with the keyboard on this laptop, I seem to have worn it out in a single semester! Yikes.

Yesterday I was back in class. Theological Hermeneutics with John van den Hengel. John rocks as a professor, he studied under Schillibeeckx and did his PhD on Ricoeur. This course is on Ricoeur and I couldn't be happier. Ricoeur also rocks. The reading is pretty heavy, but we each present once in the course and write an exam. They have tried to make the workload more reading than writing to allow us to also work on our research thesis.

Today I had a class with my director. I'm the only real student in the course! Of course that course is going to be intense, Heather Eaton is big on readings. This week I am reading Ernst Mayr's "What Evolution Is", and really looking forward to it. This is a course on the various ways the conversation between science and theology takes place. Our focus will be on those who take evolution seriously, and because it is a reading course we basically wrote the curriculum today. There are two students auditing so I'm not alone, but I am the only one with an obligation to actually do the work! The last thing we will look at is the Intelligent Design conversation which is something that really bugs me - bad science and bad theology put together really irritate me. I had lunch with Prof. Eaton to kick off this semester in terms of my research, unfortunately I'm not sure I have enough support to break new ground methodologically - that means I won't be developing ways to find evidence trails through Emerging Church blogs. But I have some alternate ideas to get at the same information in more "traditional" ways. There will be plenty of time to be a maverick later. ;-)

My afternoon was spent in a class with Carolyn Sharp. The course is a theology and ethics course en francais. I'm actually going to enjoy the class despite the large amount of reading in french that is required. Prof. Sharp was a lot more generous linguistically than I had expected.

I have one more class to experience, it will happen on monday. I am studying von Balthasar with Prof. Peelman. The lectures are likely in french, but the good professor has agreed to let me record the lectures into my notes. MS One Note is great for this, it syncs the recording to your typing! That makes finding critical moments so much easier. I am looking forward to that one too.

I'm not sure the impact on my posting. But I'll try to keep you all up on the evolution of my thought.