Diploma Fun

I was able to pick up my diploma yesterday. Not completely unsurprisingly, it had a nice big mistake on it. I had been told the university makes a lot of mistakes as far as printing honors on diplomas, so I checked that portion, only to have my eyes move up a bit and see the wrong major listed. Yikes!

Fortunately, they have a fancy-schmancy raised print printer on site, and they printed up a new diploma within a few minutes. Everything looks correct now.

None of the Pomp, All of the Circumstance

Well, I “walked” at the Lindenwood's commencement back in May (see All of the Pomp, Most of the Circumstance), and could have graduated, but I needed four more classes to complete my second major (English) and minor (Philosophy). With those classes done and my last final turned in tonight, I walked off the campus with my BA complete.

It is amazing I am done. After four and a half years, and 141 credit hours, it is complete. And quietly so: I handed in my essay at 8:03 p.m. after two and a half hours of exam time along with a friend of mine who also was finishing up this semester. My professor, Dr. Canale, upon realizing her class had served to “graduate” us, shook our hands and congratulated us.

I get to pick up my diploma from Academic Services after January 1.

Some Hope Abandonded

Well, it didn't go nearly as well as I hoped. I know I messed up on at least a few IPA symbols when writing out how sentences should be pronounced (and other bits of that may be wrong — it is very hard to sound out words properly when you can't make any sounds), and a few other things are questionable. I'm just hoping things are better than they seemed.

I'm not sure if they did, but by gaging the mood of everyone after the class, I think if the professor is merciful enough to grade on a curve it should not be too bad. I hope. It was probably one of the worst “feeling” tests I've taken, though.

I guess I'm only in the 8th circle or so, so I won't get to see any stars tonight… good news when I get it back would solve that, though.

Abandon All Hope

If I seem a little scarce, that's because of an exam I have tomorrow night for History of the English Language (those wondering about the Dante reference in the title should assemble the initials of the class's name, which gives the name students affectionally refer to the class by). At any rate, the tests in this class are absolutely legendary in their infamy. Every English major hears horror stories about how difficult these tests are.

There are many reasons for this, none of which I'll bore all of you with tonight, but I'll say this for now: I hope I am as fortunate as Dante and can look out to the stars tomorrow night.

The Beginning of the End

Of my time at Lindenwood, that is. Today was the first day of the last semester of my time at Lindenwood University. Having fulfilled all of the general requirements for graduation, as well as my religion major, last semester, this semester's primary purpose is to complete two courses for my English major, American Lit II and History of the English Language. Since I knew I was going to have at least one course spill over into this semester, last fall I picked up a philosophy minor, which meshes well enough into the religion major that I only needed to take three extra courses beyond the electives I had previously chosen in religion. One of those I took last fall, the remaining two I'm taking this fall — Aristotelean Logic and Medieval Philosophy.

Aristotelean Logic is an independent study my philosophy professor came up with as a substitute for normal logic. He thought I might especially enjoy this. In addition, because that left me with a light load, I'm doing another independent study with him just for fun: “Calvin and Aquinas.”

More on the courses themselves in the near future.

All the Pomp, Most of the Circumstance

I've been behind on blogging about what I've been up to, so let's go back to May for a second. Because of some complications, I'll be finishing up my BA in December rather than in time for the traditional May graduation. The problem is, at least at LU, there is no ceremony in December. To remedy that, the powers that be allow December graduates to “walk” in May, which I did on May 20.

It was a nice enough experience, complete with all kinds of cord-y and tassle-y goodness. Unwittingly, I ended up being especially “colorful” at the Baccalaureate ceremony the night prior to the commencement. Due to low attendance to the Baccalaureate, the administration merged that ceremony with the graduate student commencement. Apparently, virtually all of the undergrads thought it was only a graduate ceremony, so only two undergraduates — myself being one — showed up. Unlike the undergraduate programs, the graduate programs do not offer much in the way of cords for honors, so here I was with my cords and double tassel (representing two majors) in the midst of a bunch of people in just black with one tassel. Everyone kept asking me exactly what I had done to get all the colorful garb. One group actually picked a leader to come over and query me about it. “I'm an undergrad.” That pretty much took care of the curiosity. I blended in a bit better the next morning in the undergrad commencement.

The truly priceless moment, however, was when my one professor saw me. The program called for all of the graduate students to march in with the faculty applauding them, followed immediately behind by undergraduates. As one of just two undergrads at the Baccalaureate, my one professor did not realize why I was there when he saw me (several others knew I was going to be there and so they weren't surprised). His eyes grew very large and he said “You're getting a masters degree!?!?” Given that he was just a week away from receiving his Ph.D., I'm sure he was concerned if I was already finishing my masters while taking undergrad classes I might try to beat him on my dissertation too.

Ah, what fun. Probably the best part was seeing my professors in their academic regalia. My mother nabbed a number of pictures that have various professors in them, which will make for a nice keepsake in the years to come.

At first, I was going to title this “All the Pomp, None of the Circumstance,” but that isn't quite true. I've completed one hour more than required to graduate (129 of 128), but if I called it quits now I'd have only my religion major. Next semester I will complete my English major and Philosophy minor. I think those additions are well worth the extra six months.

IN OTHER NEWS, I completed my application to Covenant Theological Seminary this week. Hopefully they'll accept me, although I am working on some alternative applications in case things don't work out in that direction. Once the application becomes available for a January start date, I'll be applying to Princeton Theological Seminary and I am also considering applying to St. Louis University's Philosophy of Religion program. Both PTS and SLU have five year Ph.D.-track programs that seem appealing. We'll see how that goes; a lot of the decision will be driven by what kind of financial arrangements the schools offer.

A Project Doth Approacheth

This Tuesday Ey am supposed to gyve a presentaytion on Karl Barth's doctryne of Elecksion. Right now Ey am almoste donne preparing it and Ey'm eksited to see how it will goon. Ye see, Ey'm using Aepple's Keynote presentaytion sophwear insteade of PowerPointe. Ey'm verie impressed with the programme's cinamaetical effeckts. I think it lookes far better thanne my typical PowerPointe documente.

It'll bee interesting to see if it works out as welle when I actually neede it to.

Combining Work and Pleasure

If you've noticed I've been quoting a lot of Barth lately, you might guess that I've become quite fond of him. You'd be right. But, it is also because I've had the excuse opportunity to dig into Barthian history and theology lately. One of my projects this semester is to create a master thesis quality annotated bibliography and guess who I'm doing it on? Yup, Barth.

I figured if I don't have time to look into subjects I want to normally, I'll take any opportunity I can to make them part of my course work.

This project is just getting started, so I hope all of you can tolerate a lot more Barth in the mean time. As part of the research, I'm hoping to throw in some of Barth's contemporaries and fellow travelers, which logically sends me to look at Missourians Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr as well as Barth's fellow Swiss colleague Emil Brunner.

I hope I don't drive y'all crazy.

Gone School'n

I'll actually put a real post on within a day or two. Right now, I'm just trying to get through the first week of assignments for school. It is off to a really fast start this semester. I've already read, among other things, an entire novella from Herman Melville. As one professor of mine, other than the one that assigned it, says, “I'm unsure of this thing they refer to as 'American Literature.'”

See you soon.

The Road Ahead

I've been trying to figure out where I am headed, in a number of ways, for some time. In different ways, I've tried to make some strides in two particular cases over the past week. I'll deal with one way now, and one in a future post, I hope.

For the past four or five years, I've realized my calling is in academia. I'm a theologian at heart and in the present time, academia would appear to be the best place to go to work on such a pursuit. Instead of the more practical pastoral ministry, this is a ministry, but one for the mind more than the heart. That is to say, my “patron saint” would be Thomas Aquinas and not Francis of Assi; John Calvin rather than John Wesley; C.S. Lewis rather than Rick Warren. The need for both is strong; these are a complementary pursuits. Knowledge does not save, but it does provide a stable foundation for faith — it is the well tilled soil in which carefully planted seeds can thrive.

I am aware that I am squarely aiming myself for a field that is “highly competitive,” which means I must be as well qualified as possible if I hope to actually crack the nut and get in. With that in mind, I'm considering exactly what kind of training I need to take aim for. Some have advised me to make my next goal a MA in Religious Studies, presumably continuing to a Ph.D. in the same. This would be useful, but is rather limited: should I ever wish to do anything in the other realms of ministry, I'd be totally unqualified by many standards (be they legitimate or not). Moreover, while I readily admit and appreciate the usefulness of anthropology, sociology and other disciplines which inform the Religious Studies field, they are not the part of the Critical Study of Religion that I have the biggest affinity with. I'd rather focus on Christian theology and philosophy and supplement that so as to make myself able to teach World Religions and other similar courses.

It seems to make the most sense to take aim for some kind of seminary degree. Ultimately, I am mostly convinced to aim for a Ph.D. track (be it directly from a school that would start me off working in that direction immediately or working through a masters and then finding a place to continue later), but along the way I must decide whether to go with a MA in Theology or a M.Div. For my purposes, the former is mostly what I need, and would allow me to reduce the amount of time I have left to reach my goal in about six to seven years rather than seven to eight. But, again, it leaves something lacking in ordination qualifications, which I think might be a mistake. Therefore, I am mostly leaning toward an M.Div. Although I do not see myself in a pulpit ministry, I do want to pursue ordination eventually.

That is not the end of the discussion, of course. My big decision is whether I should aim for the local PCA seminary, which is small and I've been looking at for some time (Covenant), or perhaps I should instead aim for a PC (USA) seminary back East. Some of those who advise me seem to think (I suspect correctly) that the well established PC (USA) seminaries may be more oriented to the scholarly, rather than practical, and therefore better suited for an academic career. This, of course, could be crucial to actually making it into a good position down the road.

Right now, the two seminaries I'm looking most closely at are Covenant and Princeton, but I'm still doing a fairly cursory consideration. Some others that I'm planning to examine more closely are Fuller and Union. I've briefly considered Concordia, which is also in town, but I think I've ruled that out, along with Trinity. The main criteria that will end up deciding what happens are class sizes, academic job placement success rates and scholarliness. Cheaper would be nice too, but none of them are going to be cheap. I would like to stay here in St. Louis, or nearby, but I don't want to shoot myself in the foot either. I'm most likely aiming to stay within the Reformed tradition as opposed to the more Evangelical seminaries.

Any recommendations, would, of course, be appreciated.