I’m going to seminary (kind of)

Well folks, I’m going to seminary. Or, rather, a seminary course is coming to me, thanks to the interweb. I’ve been accepted into the TH434: Readings in Postmodern Philosophy/Theology online course at Northern Seminary, which I heard about via Emergent Village.

The class is led by David Fitch and Jeff Holsclaw, and it runs from June 30 — September 14. The course description is provided below:

This course surveys several major thinkers in Postmodern Continental Philosophy as well as an assortment of theological responses to postmodernity. The course aims to introduce the student to first hand encounters with the thinkers that are shaping the theological mind of today in response to postmodernity. The student should come away with a basic understanding of the formative philosophical issues facing current Western theologians and church practitioners. The student also will be prepared for further reading and engagement with philosophical writings that are setting the course for so much of the post­Christendom West.

It won’t be an easy ten weeks, but it will certainly be illuminating. I pray that this is only the beginning of a long journey.

Senior paper redux

I lied. It was an honest mistake, though, because I really did think the previous post regarding my senior paper would be the last. Several things have happened, however, that necessitated a follow-up post.

The first is that I couldn’t help posting the picture on the right of myself presenting the paper at the Research Symposium for Senior Recognition Day. An entire semester’s worth of work and I am holding up a cartoon.

The second - and more exciting - reason for the post is that it has been published(!) in an online magazine. Precipice Magazine is an “online Christian resource for dialogue, interaction and opinion about… the postmodern era; as well as the subsequent rise of the emergent church”; I have blogged about it previously (here and here). The article, which is word-for-word what I wrote for my senior paper (minus citations and footnotes, unfortunately) can be found here.

But that’s not all. A condensed version will soon be published in another, more prominent online magazine. All I have to do is some how hack off 2,000-3,000 words in the next couple of days (it’s 4,379 words, remember?). Blogger TallSkinnyKiwi has called the aforementioned publication “possibly the greatest emerging church online publication ever.” More on this when it’s published.

Also, I want to thank people for reading the paper and giving me constructive criticism, comments, and questions. I would like to take the time to answer all of them, but I’ve been so busy finishing the school year and preparing for/taking finals. I’ll be home in a week, and I should have more time then to respond to various comments.

The final senior paper post

I spent a good portion of this semester working on my senior paper and finally turned in the final draft on Friday. It went through several drafts and I worked closely with an academic adviser to clean and tighten it up. The title of the paper is Toward a Postmodern Youth Ministry: An Examination of Postmodern Youth Culture in Conversation with the Emerging Church.

I am presenting a distilled version of the paper this Tuesday, May 1 at the Research Symposium for Senior Recognition Day here at school. If you’re a student at Luther and you’re interested, it’s at 10:10 in the King room on the second floor of the Union.

I’ve also uploaded the paper and would love to hear some feedback. You can download it here (PDF, 197kb). It is seventeen pages total, but just think of it as reading a chapter in a book. If you read it, you can leave me feedback via commenting on this post.

Senior paper progress via Twitter

I haven’t updated much in the last week, but I have a good excuse. I’ve been working on my senior paper - in fact, I am working on it now, taking a quick break to write this post.

Yesterday I put the finishing touches on the outline of the paper, which ended up being about six full pages, single-spaced. My goal today is to write all 15+ double-spaced pages of the paper and submit it as a rough draft. As of this posting, I have six pages and 1557 words written.

Here’s the cool thing. I am updating my Twitter page with my progress as I go. If you’re really bored, check it out here and follow my progress. While you’re at it, sign up for Twitter and friend me… it’s pretty much the coolest Web 2.0 app since flickr.

Spring semester classes

This is my last semester at Luther, and I have satisfied most of my requirements for everything; all I need to do now is gather a few remaining credits. Here is my list of classes for this semester.

PE-100: Personal Fitness & Wellness: “This course will focus on the knowlege and skills necessary for developing and maintaining a healthy, physically active lifestyle throughout one’s lifespan. General topics include major health issues such as physical fitness, nutrition, stress management, substance abuse and disease prevention.”

PCAP-450: Stewardship & Sustainable Development: US Energy Policy: “Since energy is vital to all dimensions of life, patterns related to energy production and consumption pose a host of social, political, and environmental challenges that require moral deliberation. This course draws upon the Christian stewardship tradition and the concept of sustainable development to examine U. S. energy issues. The course gives special attention to the energy policy of the Bush Administration, the potential of renewable energy sources, and the long term disposal of high-level nuclear waste.”

GRK-202: Readings in Greek: I am one of two people in this class, and I’m fairly certain we’ll be doing lots of New Testament study.

HIST-139: Modern Middle East History: “Students in this course investigate the history of the Middle East, including Iran, Turkey, and northern Africa. With a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the course allows students to understand the cultural and material processes that inform current events. The course provides important historical context for intellectual discussion among the Abrahamic traditions and requires students to consider social, economic, and cultural factors that may find expression in religious canon and practice.”

PHIL-230: Philosophy of Science: “A study of the nature of scientific methodology, which has entitled the sciences (especially the natural sciences) to their authoritative status as reliable sources of knowledge and rational belief. This involves issues such as the relation between theory and evidence, the nature of confirmation, explanation, probability, and rational considerations in delivering and consuming scientific information.”

REL-490: Religion Senior Paper: As I mentioned last October, I’ll be writing my senior paper on the emerging church. I’m not yet sure of the focus of the paper - whether it will be an overview or a more focused topic within the emerging church. I have quite the reading list, though, and I’ll likely post that later.

Senior paper shift

In order to graduate from Luther College, one must either (a) write an extended (20+ page) academic paper in his/her major or (b) organize a creative senior project such as an art show, etc. Because my major, Religion, is an academic one, I must write a paper. The senior paper is a one credit hour “course” which is a faculty-guided independent project. I optimistically enrolled in the senior paper course for this fall, hoping to get it out of the way so that I might have an easy spring semester. I submitted a proposal with the title of The Function of Music and Dance in Communal Utopian Societies in the Early Nineteenth Century.

Now, I know that gets you going, but not so much me. I emailed a professor in the department and asked if I could write my paper next semester instead, and on the topic of the emerging church. Now this gets me going. I also asked if he’d be my academic sponsor for my grant proposal to attend Mainline Emergent/s: Conversations in Theology, Hope and Practice at Columbia Theological Seminary in January 2007. I received an enthusiastic response to both questions. I can’t wait to write this paper (I’m not sure I ever thought I’d say that).

If you’ve no idea what the emerging church is, here is a full transcript (.pdf) of Dr. Scot McKnight’s address “What is the Emerging Church?” at a conference called An Eternal Word in an ‘Emerging World’? at Westminster Theological Seminary.

Fall semester

In honor of the first day of class, here is a list of the courses in which I am enrolled. What you won’t see on here is my senior paper, which I’m not sure if I am going to do this semester since my paper adviser accepted a position in Scotland during the summer.

• PCAP 450: Journalism, Law & Ethics: Using a case study approach, students will be exposed to specific areas of communication law and ethics. This course will acquaint students with aspects of the American legal system related to journalism and the mass media, and will instill in students an appreciation for the underpinnings of American democracy as expressed in the law. Further, ethical questions journalists must face at the edges of the law will be explored.
• GRK 201: Intermediate Greek: A review of ancient Greek grammar, vocabulary, and syntax, followed by readings in both the New Testament and classical authors.
• REL 364: Buddhism: This course introduces the historical, textual, and doctrinal foundations of Buddhism as well as contemporary issues raised by Engaged (socially active) Buddhism and by the feminist study of Buddhism. The course will focus on the analysis of excerpts from the Pali canon and selected Mahayana Sutras. Time will be devoted to the historical development of Buddhism as well as contemporary forms of Buddhism in South and East Asia. Particular emphasis will be given to the basic Buddhist ideas and their implications for rituals, ethics, and the life of the communities. In addition, the course will explore the expression of these ideas in self-cultivation practices, popular piety, ethicalsystems, and the social agenda of selected Buddhist schools today.
• REL 239: Prophets and Prophecy: This course will examine prophetic literature in the Bible, in particular Isaiah, Jeremiah, Joel, Amos, Exekiel and Hosea. Through group discussion students will practice reading and understanding biblical texts with an emphasis on their historical and literary contexts. Textual material from extra-biblical sources will also be studied. The main focus will be on understanding the prophets in their own time. There will, however, also be discussion about the contemporary relevance of these texts.

Theses

I am taking (most of) today off, because I spent the whole day yesterday in the library finishing two really big papers. Here are the titles and theses from these respective papers.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Emergence of Latin American Liberation Theology

The emergence of liberation theology in Latin America in the early 1970s was certainly inevitable. Latin America, along with the Latin American Catholic Church, had been experiencing many crises and changes within its diverse socioeconomic and sociopolitical spheres. Much like the maturation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own theology in response to problems with which he was intimately involved, there was a growing sense of urgency in the 1950’s and 1960’s regarding the problems plaguing Latin America.

An Exegesis of Mark 12:28-31 in Light of Alain Badiou’s Reading of Paul and Romans 13:8-10

Badiou further illustrates this paradoxical relationship between love and the law. He makes the distinction between a “legalizing subjectivation, which is a power of death, and a law raised up by faith, which belongs to the spirit and life.”¹ In the setting of faith, love names a “nonliteral law” or, perhaps, a “law written on the heart,”² which actually does the work of creating postevental truth. This truth is “postevental” because for Badiou, “the Truth-Event is simply a radically New Beginning; it designates the violent, traumatic, and contingent intrusion of another dimension not ‘mediated’ by the domain of terrestrial finitude and corruption.”³ If this is the case, perhaps Jesus in Mark is far more revolutionary than our watered-down, millennia old ticket-to-heaven.

If you’d handed me the second paper a few years ago and told me I wrote it I would have just laughed at you. Or thrown up.

1. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: the Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003. 87. ↩
2. Romans 2:15 ↩
3. Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. New York: Verso, 1999. 146. ↩

Spring semester

I made it through my first day of class, and I thought y’all might like to know what this website will be distracting me from this semester. Here they are:

• ENG 210: Effective Writing: A writing course that includes practice and instruction in writing for a variety of audiences, emphasizing revising and responding to others’ writing. Students discuss well-crafted prose essays that include effective argument and clear language and organization.
• GRK 102: Elementary Greek II: The second course of a two-semester sequence which continues the study of ancient Greek grammar, vocabulary, and syntax. Passages are drawn from a variety of Greek works, including the New Testament.
• REL 334: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: An introduction to the life and thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian executed for his participation in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. His theological ethics are examined in their historical context through three major primary texts: The Cost of Discipleship, Ethics, and Letters and Papers from Prison. Attention is given to the significance of Bonhoeffer’s work for today.
• REL 485: Seminar - Paul as Contemporary Cultural Theory: Seminar will explore and evaluate the prominent and recent return of Paul as a topic of contemporary cultural and political theory. Writings, ideas, and possible legacies of Paul will be discussed in relation to contemporary questions about freedom, universality and the political status of ethnicity, messianism and the utopian future, and questions about the “neighbor” as “other.” Readings will be comparative in focus, with Pauline writings being placed alongside texts from Nietzsche, Kafka, Freud, and others. Students will read some of the recent discussions of Paul by contemporary theorists like Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek. The class will be of benefit to those interested in theories of religion and culture, the “return of religion” in contemporary cultural theory, the interpretation of early Christianity, or the possibly radical political significance of the Pauline tradition.¹

And then there are the staples: Collegiate Choir, Undeclared, FOCUS, frisbee, being a Resident Assistant, etc.

1. I need to take a nap after just reading the course description… ↩

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