Beginnings

Today was the first session of Early Church History, my fall term required course at Seabury; it’s a small class this year, so we’ll operate it as a more of a seminar, which’ll be good. Much as I delight in lecturing, there’s a special joy in a discussion wherein participants can follow their interests and their own reasoning to get at a finer understanding of the issues we’re studying. The class showed a ripple of enthusiastic approval when I indicated that we had commissioned audiotexts of some of the primary source materials for the term; Trevor and I had known this was a winner, but have been having a hard time setting it up.

A week from tomorrow the biweekly Introduction to Christianity course begins in earnest (we had an organizational meeting last week). I’ll be teaching five sessions that draw on these chapters from St. Luke’s Guide to the Faith, the Church, and the Parish; I have an audio version of the first chapter posted at the Disseminary site (subject to slight enhancements shortly intro and outro added), and will add the subsequent chapters as soon as I can.

I have my copy of Andrew Huff and the Pool of Lost Souls — do you? (I’d propose an audio read-along of this, but I honestly can’t imagine when I’d have the time. Plus, I’d mangle all those Anglo-tongue-defying names.)

2 thoughts on “Beginnings

  1. Derek, we ordinarily have a FTE enrollment of about 90 to 100, but we had an off year for recruitment last year (transitions in the Dean’s office, in Admissions leadership, and in Development (which does a lot of the PR work for us)). So the incoming class of M Div juniors is pretty small, and our transfers and cooperative-programs students often have already taken Early Church (and Bible courses, since “it doesn’t matter if they’re taught by Anglicans”).

    So yes, this year, it’s that small — but that’s atypical.

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