Hello again,
So, I am starting to settle in here at St. Paul Seminary
School of Divinity. In many ways it has
been an easy adjustment since I was already at a major seminary when I was at
Mundelein, but there are enough differences that there have been some things
that take a bit of getting used to.
Most major seminaries (maybe all of them) in the country
have guys in theology wearing clerical clothing, the shirts with the funny
collars. This is something I expected,
but it does take some getting used to.
At Mundelein, for the most part evenings were casual, out of dress
code. But here we have to be in dress
code through supper. This is a minor
thing, but a takes a bit getting used to.
The course work here is pretty good. It seems to me that the workload is a little
lighter due to being on the semester system instead of the quarter system that
Mundelein had. I have some pretty good
classes and enjoy my instructors well enough.
At Mundelein I gave a rundown of which courses I had each quarter, so I’ll
do that here by semester, I will start at the beginning of Monday and go until
I get through all of the courses, so that is the only order I am using.
My first class on Mondays is Communication Skills for
Ministry. I didn’t really know what that
was when it showed up on my schedule. It
is pretty much so far a music course, but it seems like the instructors are
teaching, rather than just having us sing as I complained about in the choir
class at Mundelein. I think that this
course will also have us practice reading for Mass. This is important because later this year we
will be installed as lectors, and surprisingly few of us have ever read at
Mass.
The second class I have on Monday’s is History of Christian
Tradition I. We have already covered a
bit of the pre-Christian era and will be going through the ideas of where
Christianity comes from and its development all the way to the Renaissance time
frame.
My last class on Monday is called Supervised Ministry:
Mission of a Parish. This class ties in
with the teaching parish program which I will mention later but is kind of
basically to give us an idea of what a parish is about from the intent of the
Church through Canon Law and such, even if that isn’t what we always see. It is a once a week course so kind of just an
overview.
Tuesdays I pick up the other three classes that I have this
semester, obviously most of these meet twice a week, but I don’t figure you
need my whole schedule. My first class
on Tuesdays is Introduction to Sacraments and Worship. I think that the title is pretty
self-explanatory in that we will begin to learn what should be going on in the
liturgy and why. We will also be
touching both on the theology behind the sacraments and the way that they
happen, stuff that will obviously be expanded on in later years.
The second class I have on Tuesdays is called Old Testament:
Pentateuch. The Pentateuch is the first
five books of the Bible, what Jewish people refer to as the Torah. Since this is our first scripture class here
at St. Paul Seminary we are starting out learning about different approaches to
reading and interpreting scripture and then we will be applying them to the
Pentateuch and then a bit more of the Old Testament. The most common method of biblical
interpretation for Catholics is called the Historical-Critical Method. In this method quite a bit of time is spent
looking at old copies of the texts to figure out which are closest to what the
inspired authors intended, then looking at what was going on at the time and
the literary genre the text is written in and then figuring out how it can be
applied today.
The last of my classes this semester is Foundational
Theology. This is a course that in the
past might have been called Fundamental Theology or even Systematic
Theology. It is a course about theology,
what it is, what purpose does it have, how do we do theology and how do we use
it. This course is also going to begin to get us doing theology.
In addition to these courses we have morning prayer, Mass,
and evening prayer every day. We also
have a formation session as a class on Wednesday mornings. We each meet with our spiritual directors and
formation directors every two to three weeks.
So again, seminary is very busy.
One really cool thing that St. Paul Seminary does is that
they have what is called the Teaching Parish Program. Each seminarian is assigned a teaching parish
that they are to go to for all four years.
If a guy’s teaching parish is less than 60 miles away they go one Sunday
a month and every Wednesday, if, like mine it is over 60 miles we are required
to go for one full weekend and one Wednesday a month, although I will probably
do a little more since I like the opportunity to be at the parish. Each semester has different goals for the teaching
parish program, this semester for my class is simply to get to know the pastor
and the parish.
Well, That is probably a long enough update. Again I ask for your prayers and assure you
of mine.
Peace,
Adam
