Hello again everyone,
I hope that everybody had a very happy Thanksgiving and took some time to be thankful to God for all that he has given to us. He is the ultimate cause for all the rest of the stuff that you are thankful for.
I have had a great (almost) two weeks since I wrote last. In addition to spending time in Stevens Point and the wonderful talk given by Fr. Chris regarding the new translation of the Roman Missal I have done quite a bit.
I spent the weekend before Thanksgiving staying at a friend’s farm so that I could just wake up and walk out the door for hunting. These are the friends who got married last spring and I was the best man in their wedding. I didn’t see any deer at all opening weekend, but it was still great to get into the woods for a bit. The weather was decent too. I went to Mass on Saturday evening at St. Elizabeth’s in Holmen; it is always nice to go back to the parish that I grew up going to. The new priest that came in last summer is wonderful. Sunday night I went up to my mom’s house to take Monday off for myself and Tuesday to spend with her since she had off of work.
Wednesday I went hunting at the farm again in the morning, still no deer to be seen, and then went hunting with a great friend in the afternoon on some public land that we hunted growing up, again no deer. Wednesday evening I was able to go out for wings with some good friends before hunting again Thursday morning. I wasn’t seeing any deer so I came in early to go to Mass for the Thanksgiving holiday, they asked me to be the reader, I haven’t read in that parish in more than 10 years, so that was very nice. Then I went back to my mom’s and had all the Thanksgiving stuff with family.
On Friday I packed up all of my stuff and headed back to Stevens Point. I went out hunting there on Saturday morning and saw the first deer I had seen all season and I got him, a five point buck. After getting him all butchered up I got cleaned up for the Saturday evening Mass.
This was the first weekend of Advent and the first weekend with the new translation of the Mass. I was serving (altar boy) for it and was pretty impressed with how smoothly it went. Of course there were a few hiccups since it was the first change in 40 years but the Newman University Parish was well prepared. After going out to supper with a couple of parishioners and then serving at the Sunday morning Mass I picked up one of my friends to bring him back to where he goes to school in Milwaukee, which is along my route to get back to school.
Classes started yesterday (Monday) for the new quarter and I am pretty excited for them. This will be my easiest class schedule by far, since I only have 4 classes this quarter. I still have all the other stuff like field education and formation and such, but it is nice to have fewer classes. I have three classes that meet on Mondays and Thursdays and only one that meets on Tuesdays and Fridays.
The class that I have on Tuesdays and Fridays is Political and Social Philosophy, which I still don’t quite have a handle on what we will be going over in this, maybe I’ll say more on it later. This is taught by Fr. Bob Barron, who produced the Catholicism TV series and runs to Word on Fire ministry. He is a good speaker and presents information well, so I’m sure that I’ll get a lot out of it.
My first class on Mondays and Thursdays is on the Gospel of Mark. This is normally one that people take in first year of Theology, but since I dropped Greek, this is what they had me pick up. It should be fun and educational having this presented in class. The Gospel of Mark is believed to be the first Gospel that is in the Bible to be written. It is believed to have been written somewhere between 55 and 70 AD, so the author seems to have known St. Peter and taken many of his stories directly.
My second class is Humanities II. This will be pretty fun I think. It seems like we will read a couple of novels and talk about a wide spectrum of humanities topics such as music and architecture in addition to the novels.
My final class on Mondays and Thursdays is Modern Philosophy. This will cover works by philosophers such as Descartes (although we have done some of his stuff already, he is who most of the others work off of), Spinoza, Locke, Kant, and Nietzsche to mention a few. I really enjoy the instructor for this so I am looking forward to this class quite a bit too.
We are only here for three weeks at this point, before getting another two weeks off for the Christmas Holiday. So we have a little sprint with a lot of material and then come back to finish out the quarter after the New Year’s Day holiday. We will only have six weeks left at that point since this quarter is only nine weeks long for those of us in second pre-theology. The final week of the quarter and one week of our two week break will be taken up by a mission trip. We had the opportunity to apply for going to Mali in Africa with CRS (Catholic Relief Services) or to a Native American reservation in Arizona. I have applied for the CRS experience, but we have not found out for sure if we are accepted yet.
Well, that is enough for now. I hope everyone is doing well this Advent in preparing for the incarnation of our Savior.
Peace,
Adam
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