Kristen has been a busy girl, Part One
I’m not sure how I feel about this teaching a 5 week course. It was good to have off the first part of the summer, but because I didn’t know how busy I was going to be once teaching started, I didn’t really make the most of the first part of the summer when I wasn’t teaching. Only a couple more days of class now, and August should slow down significantly. I have a cool bunch of students and it’s been really nice getting to know them, but teaching every day has been quite an adjustment. I’m ready for a break.
This summer I’ve also been working at church (far fewer hours now that I’ve been teaching, too) for the kids’ ministry. It’s been a nice change of pace. The biggest development has been that I had a real conversation with our pastor (who I love to death, but with whom most of my exchanges tend to go, “How are you doing to day, Godly woman?” to which I reply, “I’m good, how are you?”), who got to find out what happens when you push one of Kristen’s Serious Interest Conversation buttons (categories are primarily movies and Christian apologetics, but also include the war on terror, taxes, composition theory, and roller coasters). By this I mean one of those moments where you get me started on a topic and expect me to be as laid back as I usually am but are promptly shocked by the enthusiastic flow of information and opinion that takes the place of my typical type of response.
Rickey chose Christian apologetics, quite by accident. I was there on a day that I wasn’t usually there because of shifting my schedule around to teach. He asked why, and I was telling him about teaching, and from there he made the somewhat dangerous choice of asking about what I was teaching. (I say dangerous because you really shouldn’t ask this question unless you are seriously interested in an answer because you’re ensured of a long and probably needlessly detailed one). And so then the geyser began. I tend to design my WL1 courses around the idea of tracing the relationship between religion and literature from Gilgamesh to Shakespeare. Naturally, I do some Old Testament and New Testament (I’d just finished 2 days on the Old Testament when he was asking me these questions and was getting ready for my NT day). He kept asking what I do with the different works I mentioned and I was glad to answer him. Along the way I mentioned my use of “Discovery Channel Days” where I spend time giving them background information that they won’t be tested on but that (hopefully) they will find interesting. This includes my days on the origin dates/authorship/sources of the gospels, how the Bible came to be translated into English, and the history of the English language.
Particularly the first one I’ve gotten really great responses from students about. So much of the information they will encounter (when they do) about the New Testament is going to give them one point of view about it that says that none of the authors credited with the four gospels is actually the author, that none of them are written within the lifetimes of the authors and most other eyewitnesses, and that they rely heavily on sources (each other and some external ones). I can’t prove that those views are wrong, but there are certainly a lot of scholars who disagree that the intros in these WL anthologies (and, sadly, many religion course textbooks) completely ignore. It’s sort of a double edged sword, bringing this up with them, because when I do it, some of them have inevitably never considered that there are questions about authorship and sources with these texts, and so I’m the one who’s first bringing into their minds the idea of questioning it. Others have heard of it but have rarely heard any of the conservative scholars’ points of view, so for them, it’s really important to have someone lay out another point of view on the topic. For the first group, I have to say I don’t feel guilty. Sure, it’s problematic that most professors are politically liberal and few are Christians, but it doesn’t help conservative/Christian students a bit to live in ignorance and never really dig into their views and beliefs and question them and, if they decide to, learn to defend them. I hope I don’t shake someone up to the point that they lose their faith, but if I did, it wasn’t very strong to begin with. Aside from the information I’m giving them, I hope that they will take away with it a tendency to dig and find our answers (or at least other perspectives) for themselves if they find a belief of theirs challenged.
Anyway, back to the story of my pastor finding out about one of my conversation buttons, this was the type of thing I was telling him about doing in class. He’s like, “You should be in seminary.” I said, “No I shouldn’t.” Most people with my interest in religion and really digging in it do go into seminary or something similar, but that’s part of the reason there is a big void of religious people in places like academia. I think I will make a lot bigger difference in this world trying to help fill in some of that void rather than just going where the rest of the people like me are, where I will have more company.
Rickey wants me to come just sit in his office with him sometimes and talk (he says he doesn’t get the chance to have many conversations like the ones he was having with me that day, not since he left seminary), which I look forward to having time to do.
He also says he intends to introduce me to Lee Strobel, the guy who wrote The Case For Christ (the book that introduced me to the wonderful world of Christian apologetics, which has since become my primary reading interest outside of school), The Case For Faith, The Case for a Creator, and I think a few others. He apparently knows Lee and was supposed to see him during his trip to CA a few weeks ago (which was after we had this conversation), and he’s going to be trying to have Lee come to our church to speak sometime soon. Dude, if I get to meet Lee Strobel… That’s like getting to meet C.S. Lewis, almost. I’ll probably be even more excited than I was to meet Matt Diaz of the Atlanta Braves, which happened a few weekends ago and that I’ll tell you about in “Kristen has been a busy girl, Part Two,” forthcoming most likely later tonight. (I took a nap this evening so I can stay up to watch the Braves-Giants game tonight, so I shall be up quite a while.)
This summer I’ve also been working at church (far fewer hours now that I’ve been teaching, too) for the kids’ ministry. It’s been a nice change of pace. The biggest development has been that I had a real conversation with our pastor (who I love to death, but with whom most of my exchanges tend to go, “How are you doing to day, Godly woman?” to which I reply, “I’m good, how are you?”), who got to find out what happens when you push one of Kristen’s Serious Interest Conversation buttons (categories are primarily movies and Christian apologetics, but also include the war on terror, taxes, composition theory, and roller coasters). By this I mean one of those moments where you get me started on a topic and expect me to be as laid back as I usually am but are promptly shocked by the enthusiastic flow of information and opinion that takes the place of my typical type of response.
Rickey chose Christian apologetics, quite by accident. I was there on a day that I wasn’t usually there because of shifting my schedule around to teach. He asked why, and I was telling him about teaching, and from there he made the somewhat dangerous choice of asking about what I was teaching. (I say dangerous because you really shouldn’t ask this question unless you are seriously interested in an answer because you’re ensured of a long and probably needlessly detailed one). And so then the geyser began. I tend to design my WL1 courses around the idea of tracing the relationship between religion and literature from Gilgamesh to Shakespeare. Naturally, I do some Old Testament and New Testament (I’d just finished 2 days on the Old Testament when he was asking me these questions and was getting ready for my NT day). He kept asking what I do with the different works I mentioned and I was glad to answer him. Along the way I mentioned my use of “Discovery Channel Days” where I spend time giving them background information that they won’t be tested on but that (hopefully) they will find interesting. This includes my days on the origin dates/authorship/sources of the gospels, how the Bible came to be translated into English, and the history of the English language.
Particularly the first one I’ve gotten really great responses from students about. So much of the information they will encounter (when they do) about the New Testament is going to give them one point of view about it that says that none of the authors credited with the four gospels is actually the author, that none of them are written within the lifetimes of the authors and most other eyewitnesses, and that they rely heavily on sources (each other and some external ones). I can’t prove that those views are wrong, but there are certainly a lot of scholars who disagree that the intros in these WL anthologies (and, sadly, many religion course textbooks) completely ignore. It’s sort of a double edged sword, bringing this up with them, because when I do it, some of them have inevitably never considered that there are questions about authorship and sources with these texts, and so I’m the one who’s first bringing into their minds the idea of questioning it. Others have heard of it but have rarely heard any of the conservative scholars’ points of view, so for them, it’s really important to have someone lay out another point of view on the topic. For the first group, I have to say I don’t feel guilty. Sure, it’s problematic that most professors are politically liberal and few are Christians, but it doesn’t help conservative/Christian students a bit to live in ignorance and never really dig into their views and beliefs and question them and, if they decide to, learn to defend them. I hope I don’t shake someone up to the point that they lose their faith, but if I did, it wasn’t very strong to begin with. Aside from the information I’m giving them, I hope that they will take away with it a tendency to dig and find our answers (or at least other perspectives) for themselves if they find a belief of theirs challenged.
Anyway, back to the story of my pastor finding out about one of my conversation buttons, this was the type of thing I was telling him about doing in class. He’s like, “You should be in seminary.” I said, “No I shouldn’t.” Most people with my interest in religion and really digging in it do go into seminary or something similar, but that’s part of the reason there is a big void of religious people in places like academia. I think I will make a lot bigger difference in this world trying to help fill in some of that void rather than just going where the rest of the people like me are, where I will have more company.
Rickey wants me to come just sit in his office with him sometimes and talk (he says he doesn’t get the chance to have many conversations like the ones he was having with me that day, not since he left seminary), which I look forward to having time to do.
He also says he intends to introduce me to Lee Strobel, the guy who wrote The Case For Christ (the book that introduced me to the wonderful world of Christian apologetics, which has since become my primary reading interest outside of school), The Case For Faith, The Case for a Creator, and I think a few others. He apparently knows Lee and was supposed to see him during his trip to CA a few weeks ago (which was after we had this conversation), and he’s going to be trying to have Lee come to our church to speak sometime soon. Dude, if I get to meet Lee Strobel… That’s like getting to meet C.S. Lewis, almost. I’ll probably be even more excited than I was to meet Matt Diaz of the Atlanta Braves, which happened a few weekends ago and that I’ll tell you about in “Kristen has been a busy girl, Part Two,” forthcoming most likely later tonight. (I took a nap this evening so I can stay up to watch the Braves-Giants game tonight, so I shall be up quite a while.)