reflection on the first week of class.

a friend of a friend of a friend or someone said something like "i never went to happy hour until i went to seminary". seriously. i walked out of class today thinking, "how in the world do i decompress from that?!" really, the class seems simple enough, but is totally overwhelming for me.

the class is global theology. basically, the premise is to compare western theology with non-western theology on different theological topics. the problem? i don't know what topics there are, much less what different perspectives have to say of them. it's a new class and my advisor (who's actually in the class himself) told me it would be a good introductory class for someone who has never had any theology before. it seems like really, it's an intermediate class for someone who has a basic grasp of both European (western) and non-western theology.

i like the idea of our own history and background shapes our theology, and i understand that our own perspective isn't always the "right" one, and that we really do have to look at all that we understand as Christians thru the history of the european church, to some extent. no one can separate the european influences of the canon or the reformation from their own experience of the Gospel. and a good question is what was cultural and what is essential? but that's as far as my understanding of the class so far has gone.

our discussion today was painful. the professor introduced a few ideas, then we broke up to discuss them. i didn't really understand what his question was that we were to discuss, nor did our group (it seems) talk about anything that any of the other groups discussed. we had a class discussion, and i couldn't follow at all. people had different contributions or comments to make, but none of it seemed to follow the other. all of it seemed foreign or at best, not related. i didn't understand the vocabulary, at least in the way they were using it. the professor would throw out something like "so-and-so's idea of blank" as a reference for a point he's making, but i have no idea who that is, or maybe i've heard the name and know he's a historical Christian figure who has made contributions to the way we understand Christianity today, but i really don't know who they are or what they said. i mentioned this to a guy at the bookstore, and he suggested getting a theology pocket dictionary. maybe i need to just keep wikipedia up in class at all times!

on tuesday, i felt like i had a decent grasp. the workload doesn't seem intense, and i was able to mesh the notes i took in class with the notes he posted online. today, he continued lecturing from the same set of notes, so i followed along with his notes and took my own notes, too. i eventually gave up. i have no reference point for anything he said, and it mostly went in one ear and out the other. i mean, a lot of it seemed like "duh" stuff, but i just didn't grasp why any of it was important, or how it was connected at all to the topic. i can't even put a title on the topic we discussed today! argh!

i'm really hoping that as i just throw myself into it, a framework for understanding this class will start to appear. thankfully there isn't a final exam, just a few papers, a group presentation, and a group paper. all of the students in my group are new this quarter, and in fact, i'm the only american. that makes it more interesting to me, tho. at any rate, some of them have some theological background, but not me! so they should be helpful. i can teach them american culture, they can teach me theology! (i wore my "i heart moose" shirt today, and one girl asked if we eat moose here. she said they eat anything with 4 legs, and even some without legs, like snake!)

ok, so my other class doesn't seem to fit, either, but in a different way. in church in mission, he lectured on colonialism, neo-colonialism, and post-colonialism. the reading i'm doing right now is on multicultural congregations in the US. and our group project that we're working on is about the white presbyterian church, so all we learn should be filtered thru what would help us with our group project. so yeah, i don't get how it's all linked.

so yeah, that's my first week. pretty crazy.