start of spring quarter 2010-2011

Hello again,

So my third quarter of seminary is off to a pretty good start, a crazy sort of busy, but I think that I’m starting to find out that that will be par for the course here. Speaking of par, I forgot to mention in my last post that while on break I swung a golf club for the second time in my life. I enjoyed it and thought that I did pretty well. I asked my step-father, who golfs a lot, if he had some old clubs that I could bring to the seminary since we get to use the golf course on the seminary owned property (independently managed) for free… I haven’t gone out with them yet, but we’ll see how that goes.

So, I have a 17 credit load again this quarter, two credits for my field education and 3 for each of my 5 classes. My classes seem pretty interesting on the whole, so I am excited.

My first class on Mondays and Thursdays is Latin III. We switch instructors this quarter which I find a bit odd after the first two with the other instructor. This is my first class taught by a lay person at the seminary, but there will be others. I enjoy the new instructor’s style and look to finish out my study of Latin forever after this quarter.

After Latin III I have the priest that taught Latin I and II now teaching “Intro to the Old Testament”. I enjoy scripture study so I am looking forward to this course a lot. One of the first things that was clarified, although I’ve read this before, was the truth behind the different stories of why Catholics and Protestants have different lengths to the Old Testament. The truth is that neither truly dropped or added books. Since the Old Testament is the Jewish Scriptures it would be easy to look at what they use. The problem is though, that by the time of Christ the Jews had two different sets of scriptures, one in all Hebrew with 39 books (what Protestants now use) and one in Greek with those 39 plus another 7 (what Catholics now use). The authors of the New Testament reference all but one of these 7 books in a scriptural context since they were mostly in Greek speaking territory (or evangelizing to Greek speaking territory). The canon (list) of books used fluctuated a bit for the first 400 years or so of Christianity but was pretty well standardized after that until the Protestant Reformation at which time Luther decided to go back to the Hebrew text for the Old testament.

My last class on Mondays and Thursdays is Metaphysics. This is kind of the basis for all philosophy, often summarized as the “Study of Being”. It is looked at in the processes used by St. Thomas Aquinas.

Tuesdays and Fridays I start with the class “Intro to the New Testament”. This will talk about the whole New Testament, but it seems like we are going to focus pretty heavily on the Gospels, especially the Gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew since they are what is called the “Synoptic Gospels”, meaning that they line up and it is actually thought that the authors of Luke and Matthew based some of their writings on the already written Gospel of Mark, but added in the oral tradition from the area that they were writing for.

My last class of the quarter is Medieval Philosophy. This is going to be an overview of writers form St. Augustine, to St. Thomas Aquinas as far as I can tell. It will be good to see the development of Christian thought in this period, so I am actually looking forward to this class somewhat.

So as this quarter started we also started Lent, it doesn’t always work that way with Lent being based on the date of Easter which is movable. I shared the reflection that I had written for the nursing home for Ash Wednesday. It turns out that in addition to there I ended up giving the reflection at the parish of the Deacon from the nursing home since he was running the Ash Wednesday service at Noon there.

I went over to the Quad Cities of Iowa and Illinois on Friday into Saturday to visit some of my friends from when I lived there. Other than that the quarter is pretty much picking up where I left off before break.

Peace,
Adam