Thursday, February 08, 2007

Spring Lineup

The title of this post is meant to conjure up good feelings about baseball season's rapid approach. My Red Sox have a new lineup, and with the exception of JD Drew I am excited about it. I am going to be complaining about Drew all summer (and hopefully deep into the fall), so just get used to it.

And here is my own fall lineup.

>The Radical Reformation: A seminary in church history focusing on those people I now count as my forefathers and mothers. A very helpful course, for any Anabaptist theologian has to meander through a highly variegated garden of potential historical sources.

>Contemporary Systematic Theology: Here we are asking the basic questions. Method. What key assumptions drive a theology forward or hold it back? Only those who take up the task after Barth and Tillich are covered here, which makes it a wild and wooly experience.

>20th Century Catholic Renascence: Just keeping tabs on what the Vatican has been up to the last 100 years. Did you know they have been producing a windfall of terrific literature to complement the renewal in theology? I'll tell you all about it after I pass the class.

>And our departmental colloqium is reading Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov and The Underground Man are two absolutely stunning pieces of literature. I have been thoroughly unsettled since picking them up. Few authors have been able to capture their audience's attention and expose their most guarded and hidden assumptions.

Let's hope I can survive it.