This morning while I was eating breakfast and reading The Way of Perfection on my Kindle, I noticed that something was trying to download and taking it's own sweet time. I was a bit worried about what it might be and if I should try to block it in some way. First Things appears like this every month, but I think I just got one, so I didn't think it was that. Then when I checked my email at work, I had received a notice from Amazon saying that I had purchased Prayer Journal. "What the heck is that all about?" And then it was this! I'd forgotten that I pre-ordered it and that today was the release date.
I've only had a minute to glance at it, but the first paragraph augurs well.
AMDGDear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth's shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of dear God, is that my self shadow will grown so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.
I ordered the paper and glue version of the book, and it shipped this morning! I'm really excited to have a look at it.
ReplyDeleteI will probably order that too, eventually, but after the past month I'm a bit resistant to filling up any more shelf space. Still, it is MFOC, and she has a whole section of my library to herself.
DeleteI did finally order House of Words which arrived yesterday, but it's a slim volume.
AMDG
Mine arrived today! I can't wait to read it. But I have to teach Brideshead Revisited on Thursday (first three chapters) so it cannot be tonight. Grumpy
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to read it slowly since it's so small, but I'm having trouble stopping.
ReplyDeleteAMDG
I must go ahead and order this.
ReplyDeleteYep
DeleteStill haven't opened it! got to finish a paper by December 1, teach Brideshead again on Tuesday and thursday, go to a conference on Friday to Monday, and write a paper for my own conference on 13 December!
ReplyDeleteThat conference sounds intriguing to me. I wish I could come. Then again, I wouldn't mind sitting in the back of your BH class either.
ReplyDeleteAMDG
Me too/neither. After I finished my last degree in 1979 I swore I would never go back to school, but I think I could sit in on a class.
DeleteHello! I was away in Baltimore at the AAR. My classes are getting better but it's taken me a long time to learn to teach American students. I'm still miles from having the time to read Flannery's book.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read it either. In fact, for a while I forgot I had it. I've been reading Therese, and now something about St. Josephine Bahkita, and now I have Dorothy Day's Diaries.
DeleteAMDG
"it's taken me a long time to learn to teach American students."
ReplyDeleteSounds like there might be some interesting anecdotes there.
Yeah, I'd be interested in knowing how it's different.
DeleteAMDG
Well it's not very interesting and I don't have any great anecdotes. When I was at University in the 1970s, British education was elitist specialist education. That means that a student spent all of their time studying one subject, and were taught it as if their aim inlife were to become a professor in that subject. In fact, many became for instance upper civil servants: they had been trained to be very good at examining documents and such. Law and medicine are both undergraduate subjects, and tackled in the same way. So that no student is pre-med or pre-law (I barely knew what those phrases meant when I came to the States) and in fact very few students aspire to go to graduate school. Of course in the 25 years I taught in GB, from the late 1980s until 2010 the 'elitist' part vanished. The polytechnics were all turned into Universities (a wag said, '100 New Polytechnics were created - ie they turned all the Universities into Polys by mistake). The numbers attending University were enormously expanded. But the education we gave was still 'watered down specialist education'. To take an example, an engrossing subject, as my professors understood it, would be, 'did a covenant league exist in ancient Israel?' In other words, the minutiae of Old Testament high criticism was the normal fare. Even in my years of teaching, with greatly lowered expectations of students, we still taught the 'insides' of the subject, teaching about the debates between academics within the subject as if that were very interesting and important. Most theology students wanted to be either a teacher of Religious Studies in a school or a minister of religion, or a Youth Minister of some kind. Many or most of my former students are one of those. Imagine teaching a young boy or girl of 20 whose ambition is to be a Christian Youth Minister in the Scottish Highlands.
ReplyDeleteThe more pius kids tended to want to be ministers of some kind while the more liberal or open minded wanted to be teachers. Now of course the norm in the United States is generalist education. I am teaching business or architecture or engineering 'Majors'. They have no interest whatsoever in the internal debates between academics within the subject, and these debates are of no relevance to them: they are not what they need to take away from a general theology course. But what do they need to take away? How to teach people who are not taking theology because they want to, because it will be central to their chosen professions, but largely to people who are being compelled to take a compulsory theology course? Its a completely different ball game. And another thing: the system of generalist education means that the graduate students know less about the subject than third or fourth year undergraduates in GB. I could go on, but I think you can see why it has taken me three years even to begin to see my way how to teach in the USA.
I've had conversations with Paul in which he always over-estimated--really over-estimated what a Graduate student in the US might be able to comprehend. Most of students in the seminary were far from being able to have that kind of discussion--even the doctoral students. Many of them could not have given you a rudimentary explanation of the Trinity.
ReplyDeleteAMDG
Perhaps Oxford and Leuven aren't the best places to get a sense of American graduate students. All the ones I met were incredibly bright and knowledgeable - and would have put many of their European counterparts to shame.
DeleteOf course, you have better students at ND.
ReplyDeleteAMDG