A Quick Update

It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve updated, so I thought I’d do a quick hits post to keep people current with my life.

-  I spent the last week of January relaxing, preparing myself for the semester. I visited with my Aunt and Uncle in Philadelphia over the weekend, and had a marvelous time watching their 500 channel (no exaggeration) television, eating great meal after great meal, getting taken out to movies, church, Doug and Buster’s (a huge arcade/restaurant), and generally enjoying their wonderful company.

- Last week was my first week of classes and I’m in for a fairly easy and hopefully stimulating semester. For the record, I’m taking

     1) Greek Exegesis, where we finally get to read and translate actual Biblical texts after spending all of last semester on grammar.

     2) Religion and the Social Process (fondly known by students as Oppression 101), where I’ll get to learn about all the inequities upon which our society is structured and how bad white straight males are. (Just kidding on that last account, our professor (who is a practicing Quaker incidentally) has a wonderfully gentle spirit and is making sure to give people room to struggle and engage with the issues).

     3) The Future of the Ecumenical Movement, in other words, my trip to the World Council of Churches Assembly in Brazil next week, with about 3000 other Christians from across the world and across denominations.

     4) Intro to New Testament, with a professor who’s teaching it for the first time. While I’ve heard great things about her, I’m a bit skeptical about the course, since it’s primarily historocritical in focus (we don’t even start reading the New Testament itself until the third week) and not nearly as challenging as my Intro to the Old Testament course.

     5) Worship in the Emerging Church, with Mark Miller, one of the foremost composers, worship leaders, and musicians in the denomination (he wrote, for instance, the sung communion liturgy in the Faith We Sing). While our first set of classes lacked focus, I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to learn from him and to visit some emergent congregations.

     Hopefully this will sate your appetites for a little while- I’ll try to get one more post before I head off to Brazil on Sunday.