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Miscellanea
Things I need to remember:
• Asking for help is not, as it turns out, fatal.
• Laughing is easier than pulling your hair out, and doesn't have the unfortunate side effect of making you look like a plague victim.
• Even the biggest tasks can be defeated if taken a bit at a time.
• I can write a paper the night before it's due, but the results are not all they could be.
• Be thorough, but focused.
• Trust yourself.
• Honesty, always.
Historians are the Cassandras of the Humanities
no subject
Date: January 24th, 2013 01:40 pm (UTC)I have given up on finding a textbook for this course! I assign articles and readings from primary sources instead. The whole idea of the course is simply that over 2000-odd years, the idea of Christianity has been shaped by people coming to different answers to a set of core questions or ambiguities about the basic Christian idea. Sometimes a group with a different answer is declared heresy, sometimes they get folded into orthodoxy, or later, they simply break away. I also try to emphasize logical consistency (which of course, religion always fails) but I let the students make of it what they will. They find it easy to critique the Cathars or the Mormon as being logically unsupportable.
When we get to things like modern Captialist/Calvinst right wing Christianity, the wildly inconsistent positions of the Baptist denominations, or the pure insanity of people like Lou Engle and Bryan Fischer, they are used to calling bullshit, so they find they have the habits of mind and the courage to call BS on modern day Christianity. It's been quite a wake-up call for a lot of them!
I get tired of it (this is my fourth go around) but it really is one of my favorite courses to teach!