January 9, 2003
What they teach in seminary[11:00 PM]What theya0shoulda0teach in seminary
- Old Testament: Pentateuch, Wisdom, Prophets, Lesser Prophets, Psalms, Writings.
- New Testament: Four Gospels, Letters of Paul, and other infinitely variable combinations
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Liturgy
- Pastoral Care: Rogerian and Whitehead Models of pastoral conversation
- Field Education: in which the Field Ed supervisor, usually the Rector of a local church, gets a Youth Group leader for a semester.
- Theology: Systematic and Foundations and other elective perversions.
- Preaching
- Canon Law
- Christian Education
- Christian Ethics
- Bioethics
- Human Rights
- Christology
- Church History (I actually stood at the ancient tomb of the Venerable Bede at Durham Cathedral in England this summer and cursed him for having to read his History of the Church in middle English)
- Anglicanism (insert the appropriate -ism for your denomination)
- Clinical Pastoral Education - in which the seminarian approaches and occasionally exceedsa0the limits of his/her ability to endure an endless summer ofa0colonoscopies by peers.
- Small business management
- Yoga
- Desk-top Publishing
- Alternative spiritualities
- How toa0relate to people who think you are God
- How to relate to people who think you are Satan
- Small engine repair
- How to relate to people that you think are God
- How to relate to people that you think are Satan
- The difference between annuals and perennials
- How to keep from thinking you are God
- How to keep from thinking you are Satan
- Landscape Design
- How to relate to your Music Director who thinks you are Satan
- The Music Director is incapable of thinking of you as Goda0a0
- Electrical Contracting
- Masonry
- Plumbing
- How to relate to the Altar Guild who thinks you are Satan.
- The Altar Guild is incapable of thinking of you as Goda0a0a0a0
- Telephone repair
- How to relate to your Office Manager who tells you not to ever touch the officea0machines while she’s away.
- How to buy something you desperately need but have no money with which to pay.
- How toa0get the church Matriarch to think something’s her idea.
- How to age bills gracefully.
- Howa0to keep from counting the days to retirement.
- How to tell someone at three in the morning that their teen-ager has just been killed in a wreck.
- How toa0have a relationship with your family
- How to continue toa0have a relationship with God (who?)
Fabulous. I have been making notes to write a si ilar piece, "What I Learned in Seminary." This either inspires me to get on with it, or tells me it's been done to perfection already.
As I recall, the Venerable Bede has recently been sainted. But there are tons of books out there calling him Venerable. It's going to take a long time.
In a previous life as a radio news director, I got to know a youngish county supervisor who ran a dairy farm. He resigned about halfway through his term to go to seminary. Today he has a parish in a smaller farming community near here and spends much of his time doing many of the same things he did around the farm, handling much of the maintenance himself. Outside of Mass he is generally dressed like the dairyman he was, complete to the rubber boots.
He is a good man, and much loved.
Just a small quibble - Bede writing a history of the church in "middle English"? The hey? I assume he's talking about the Historia Ecclesiastica, which was, of course, written in Latin.
Even if Bede were to write in the vernacular, he couldn't have been writing in Middle English, which I'd always been taught was used between 1350 and 1485.
Am I totally missing something? Or is my masters in Early Medieval History finally coming in handy?
If Saint Bede the Venerable -- as he is commonly referred to in the Catholic Church, at least nowadays -- wrote in "English" at all it was Anglo-Saxon, since he was born in 672 and died in 735.
http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/saintb10.htm
His most famous work, the History of the English People was written in Latin, (titled "Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum") but was soon translated into Anglo-Saxon at the behest of King Alfred, says http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02384a.htm
(Jo probably knows all this stuff off the top of her head. I had to look it up.)
Zizka's comment about him being "sainted" recently made me look it up. He was canonized (declared a saint) and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church at the same time, in 1899 -- which I guess is "recently" in Catholic history, and more proof of the near-glacial speed at which the Church sometimes moves. Its forgiveness of Galileo after less than 400 years is da*n speedy in comparison!
Sadly, I got to sem and discovered that ethics is OPTIONAL.
The "middle english" Bede is probably Alfred the Great's translation into Anglo Saxon.
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