It appears that my second year of classes are going to be a lot more intense than the first. I just finished Contemporary Society and the Church, and will post the final paper on here for anyone interested in Isaac Asimov. This was a very practical class that saw us looking into the various ways that modern technology, ideas and social “revolutions” have affected the church, as well as looking at how other churches do things.
Every couple of weeks we had labor intensive projects which then were written up as papers, which were then discussed by the class. It started out as a great class, and I continued learning a great deal, but between the changes taking place at Nashotah House and the changes in our professor’s life, he kind of dropped off the radar after the residential week, and other than a one-hour conference call mid-course, we got no feedback from him at all. So, I’m still not sure how I did in the course. If it were just the grade, that would be one thing, but it’s the feedback from the professor that’s actually more valuable. Fortunately, I was working in a group with a Deacon and a former military Presbyterian pastor who turned Anglican, so I did get good feedback from them.
The current class is on Homiletics, or how to write a sermon. I’m currently exhausted. <g> And we’ve only had 2 weeks. Everything was last minute, because the professor didn’t get asked to teach the course until about 3 weeks prior to, which meant we didn’t get book lists or syllabus until about 2 weeks prior, and the amount of work in the residential week was brutal. Good, informative, completely out of my comfort zone, but excellent stuff – just more than this middle-aged woman is used to dealing with. 🙂 I’ll be posting the sermons I write as I go – there are two thus far, and I’ll have a third by next week (which *should* put me a week ahead in class). Uploading videos of sermons when you live in the boonies can take several hours to accomplish, so it’s probably good that I’ll be doing things ahead of time. My upload speed last night was .4 Mps, not counting it becoming overwhelmed and disconnecting, and when you have a 455 MB file, it’s gonna take some time.
I did get to meet the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry – actually got to sit next to him at lunch. That man has got the energy of a 2-year-old! While he was raised Episcopalian, he was also raised by a Baptist grandmother, so his style of preaching is definitely much more dramatic than your typical Episcopalian. Being that the student body at Nashotah is about 80% Anglican, I was interested in the Q&A session he offered to us. We had submitted questions for consideration, and the acting dean asked the questions. The responses were really good, and very political – as in, he never actually answered anything controversial. I am reminded of:
which was fun to watch, but rather disappointing for all that.
So, that’s been the last… 4? months of my life. I’ll try to get back to posting a bit more regularly.
Passage of Hours 