Week 3, semester 2

My roomates are home from their weekend retreat in Quebec and I'm filled up on cookies from Jasmine. I'm listening to KT Tunstall's "Heal Over" since I think Rosie and I may do it for the Restless Hearts Cafe next Tuesday (if I can learn it, that is).

So the week. Latin was full of ipse, ipsa, ipsum (which means himself, herself, itself) and all the variations of that, we got sentences like "He himself must truly look inside himself by himself", its ridiculous but apparently these Romans liked emphasis and redundancy. In philosophy we talked about Thomas Aquinas some more- the nature of evil, the impossibility of its being a nature since existence is in itself a good thing, what we can call evil, its cause... and also about the soul (appetitive and intellectual parts) and man's last end. Here's a bti from my notes that I found interesting:

"Christianity has often failed to eliminate a Manichaeism that sees the body as sinful. The body is an instrument of righteousness. That mistake can be made about the mind as well, which happened when the attention of Christians moved from the body to the mind. We have seen the mind as an instrument of wickedness, not of righteousness. To see reliance of the mind as a sinful refusal of reliance of God is not have a disdain for God's order. Aquinas does assert the power of the intellect."

Dr. Tingley is (of course) very big on the importance of reason, which is cool because I know a lot of Christians do disregard it. Anyway, moving on...

Art class was cancelled, because Dr. Tingley's slide show was erased from his computer. Which sucks for him. I use the time to get all my Latin done though, so it was great and saved me staying up super late that night.

In Dr. Patrick's class we talked about William Harvey, John Ray, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke. Ray especially is interesting, he was a hardcore Christian and that is why he doesn't get a lot of credit these days, even though he was the 'father of botany' and Linnaeus gives him the credit for starting taxonomy in a serious manner. We also learned about the Royal Society which still exists in Britain, and then we talked about the "four levels of happiness": animal, intellectual, charity, and knowing God (I don't have the actual names for them but there is a book by Robert Spitzer called "Healing the Culture" where he talks about this, although the idea has been around for ages.)

Oh and we talked about the sermon on the mount section where he says "unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." He talked about how this is emphasizing how important grace is, as it is the only possible solution to a righteousness of that standard. Jesus then deconstructs the legalistic approach to righteousness with 5 examples, one of which is: anyone who kills will be judged, anyone who dismisses his brother is in danger of hellfire. This standard is impossible for us to meet on our own, it brings us, once again, right back to the first beatitude: poverty of spirit.

We had bookclub on Tuesday evening (the friendship chapter of the four loves), and afterwards had a prayer service for Gideon, Jasmine's little brother who has cancer and was going in for surgery on Wednesday morning. Apparently surgery went well, they removed most of the lower lobe of his left lung. We're praying hard for him and the whole Stairs family!

Wednesday was Latin again and Music, where we talked about Handel (listened to a bunch of his oratorio Israel and Egypt) and the transition to the classical period. We're cruising through history! We got our research paper topics this week as well- I'm going to do mine on the operas of Puccini, so I'm pretty excited for that!

In Literature we talked more about George McDonald and his novel Lilith, and also about a short story we read called "Life in the Iron Mills" by Rebecca Harding Davis. It was a really sad story set in the industrial revolution. As much as Dr. Patrick talks about how degraded today's culture is, I'm glad I didn't live back then.

Scriptures class was about Augustine on recreation (a sermon on Romans 8) and original sin, and also we started on Thomas Aquinas' Compendium on Theology. I did a synopsis this week on part of this work where he talks about hope, which I thought was really great (the Aquinas, not my synopsis haha). Oh and we got the topic for our research paper in that class as well- we have to compare three of the writers we've studied and write 10 pages on something to do with them. haha its pretty vague but I'll probably look either at how they all see a particular passage of how they see a theme (the theme might be easier). Here's a link to the Aquinas Compendium, he talks about hope in part two, chapters 7-10 (the last three chapters, he died before he could finish the rest): http://www.diafrica.org/kenny/CDtexts/Compendium.htm#B7

Prof. Tucker taught us about essay writing on Friday. We don't have science class with Dr. Metelski for a couple of weeks (this is a scheduled thing, they are trying not to overload us with classtime since they're giving us more homework).

I went to a birthday/baptism party on Friday, and also to a concert of a friend of a classmate. On Saturday I baked bread (yay!) and made crepes and banana bread, I was feeling very domestic! This morning i went to Church, Timothy's coffee shop, and then skating on the Rideau canal!! I'll put pictures up next week. In the meantime, here's a picture I took at the young adults retreat last weekend.

love,

Starr

Week 2, semester 2, 2008

I'm sitting in my living room listening to a yellowcard cd I got from the library. Tonight I'm tired, but I had a faily productive day, after Latin class I read this week's assigned reading from the Summa Theologicae (Aquinas), and also the chapter on friendship from the four loves, which we'll discuss tomorrow at book club. After class I did my Latin homework, read this week's section of Paradise Lost and the short story for lit. class on Thursday: "Life in the Iron Mills" by Rebecca Harding Davis. It was quite sad, but I guess that's to be expected from a story set during the industrial revoution. There's a lot going on in it, lots of statements about gender and class situations and God, and it really puts you into the shoes of the poor worker.

Latin class has been full of pronouns and perfect, pluperfect, future perfect tenses, but also of stories about Cicero, Etruscans, and how Professor Blaedow suggested the name Thunder Bay University for the new uni. when that city's name was still Port Arthur, because he unearthed an interesting old native legend about 'thunder bay'. They scoffed at him and called it Lakehead University, he went on to work elsewhere, and then a few years later found out that they had renamed the whole city Thunder Bay! This man is amazing.

We finished talking about Augustine last week in philosophy, and moved on to Aquinas. They seem to be of the same point of view on a lot of things, except that Augustine is more of a Platonist and Aquinas is a huge Aristotle fan, always referring to him simply as 'the philosopher'. Aquinas' Summa is super organized, he looks at every question from every possible angle, and he lists all the objections to his opinion and then refutes them and gives another author who supports his view. I definitely don't understand everything he's saying, but he's all about man fulfilling his nature by using all the parts of his soul correctly: The passions (simple and emergency, or 'concupiscible and irascible' as he calls them, and the intellect (practical, or the will, and speculative, which knows for the sake of knowing. We read some Schaeffer, who doesn't think Aquinas saw the fall as complete. He thinks that Aquinas put too much stock in the human intellect and only saw our wills as fallen. Tingley doesn't see that so much in Aquinas. He thinks that to use our reason less than it has potential to be used is to throw God's gift to us back in his face...

Last week in Literature we talked about Lilith, the novel by George McDonald. It is so strange, and its weird because he sees it as his most important work, like it has all this important in it which God has shown him (either he put it very cryptically or it is a Christianity unlike any other I've ever seen). He was a Scottish clergyman (Anglican i think), but only worked as a priest for like 2 years, after that he mostly just wrote. The thing that completely rocked the boat for me is that he is a free-will theist, meaning that he thinks everyone will eventually be redeemed (after time in hell, for those who are non-christians in this life). He thinks that the final victory would never really be won if there were to always be souls suffering in hell. I don't think I agree with this at all, there is just way too much Scripture that seems to contradict it. But then I really don't know anything about the ideas or opinions involved...

What else? We did some copernicus and kepler in science class, astronomy stuff. Talked about the Renaissance and humanism in Art. Went through the entire Messiah in music, John Chrysostom's homilies on Romans 8 and on Baptism in Scriptures. And in trivium we listened to a talk by Janet Smith called "contraception: why not?" She advocated natural family planning (which is apparently actually really effective if you do it right now that they know so much about how it all works) and I have to say she has a pretty convincing argument. I'm kinda glad I dont' have to think about decisions like that yet, I have enough on my plate as it is! :)

most of my classmates have been busy applying for colleges, and in the case of my roommates, scholarships for their med school which will resume in May/July. I plan on phoning the UofS this week to make sure I don't have to completely re-apply, I'm 99% sure i don't have to. So far I've been feeling fairly at peace about the prospect to going back to my science degree next year, although i still have no clue as to where it should lead me. I'm realizing that if I want to be a doctor it has to be a very clear and persistent calling, otherwise I'm setting myself up for misery. Do I feel that? Well the persistent part is definitely missing right now, and John Patrick always paints a fairly bleak picture of what the medical world is like... I seem to change my perspective on it every couple of months.

This weekend I went on a retreat with the Metropolitan Bible Church young adults group. We went to the Tim Horton's camp in Quebec, it was really beautiful and the weather was great on Saturday which was a blessing since it has been frigid yesterday and today. We played games and sang a lot of worship songs and listened to a speaker talk about the biblical metanarrative. I can't say i really learned a lot but I was challenged to think about what the real world is like and remember that having a bunch of intellectual head knowledge won't do much if its not engrained into your heart. Augustine is such an amazingly great place to learn and question and be envouraged, but it is a bubble. When everyone was talking about how great the weekend was and how much they learned, I realized I'm at an 8 month spiritual retreat. Which is great for growth, but will be hard to leave. Anyway I met lots of people and had a good time, I'm glad I went for sure.

This week promises to be busy, I still have tons of reading to do. My roomates will be leaving for a retreat with another church this weekend (St. Alban's, the one we actually attend on Sunday). So i should be able to have a productive weekend even if its a bit lonely. We're hosting an Indian Food night on Wednesday, Jenny's been cooking up a storm for like 2 weeks so i'm excited :)

Must get to bed, I want to get groceries before class tomorrow...

Love,
Starr

Augustine College, Semester 2, week 1

Hey all,
Well I'm not sure how long this might last, but I thought i might attempt to follow in the footsteps of my roommate Jenny who keeps a blog of what we're learning here at school. While hers is comprehensive and insightful, mine will not be, but I think it might be good, if for no other reason, for me to briefly review what i've learned during the week.

Monday: Latin at 8:30, not 7 hours after I got home from the airport. It was a little rough, I'll be honest. He said "Today I'm going to do the translating" and then proceeded to pepper us with questions....
In philosophy class we talked about Augustine's On Grace and Free Will, which was quite interesting and we even manage to stay away from a heated debate and hurt feelings among the classmates from varied backgrounds. We thought about the exact moment when a man turns from bad to good (in the action itself, or in the intention to do the action, or when the man sees that the good action is good....?) and whether this is initiated by man or by God. We'll finish talking about this work next class, and start to cover Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, which we read over the week and is very dense and reminiscent of Aristotle (not surprising since his whole goal was to synthesize Christian and Aristotelian thought).
I made chick pea/ hot italian sausage/ jalepeno/ tomato/ carrot soup and I've been eating it all week! :)

Tuesday: Art, where we talked not about art, but about seeking truth and using reason and how Christians are often so suspicious of reason but how really it will not fail you; its not your reason that is limited its just that we often lack reason...
Then in Sci/Med/Faith with Dr. Patrick, we talked about
a) the sermon on the mount- rejoicing under persecution and being salt of the earth. He has this thing that the sequence in the beatitudes is a character sequence, and that at any point in the sermon on the mount if you can't handle what Jesus is saying you have to go back to the beginning, 'blessed are the meek', back to humility, and start all over again.
b)the first scientific revolution. we talked about Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. we also have an assignment on William Harvey and John Ray for next class.
c)sexuality and the benefits of natural family planning over contraception (one of his favourite topics)
After community dinner we had our first book club of the semester, which will now be led my Emily (our RA). We're reading CS Lewis' The Four Loves which I'm excited for. I found out that most of my class had never smelled sweet peas before! (he talks about them in the first chapter) so I'm resolved to send them as gifts at some point, if possible...

Wednesday: Latin again, this time it was better because it was a little fresher in our minds, we'd spent tons of time over the last two days on our homework, and Prof. Blaedow spent a good 10 minutes telling us a story about Cicero tearing down this guy names Catiline in defence of the Republic. The quiz was pretty hard though, he sprung a new type of question on us...
In music class we talked about Bach and Handel, compared them, and listened to music for the coronation of George II.

Thursday: Literature class was spent talking about the allegories he was handing back, intro-ing the next part of Paradise lost, wrapping up loose ends about the romantics, and introducing George McDonald's Lilith, which we are reading this week (i'm a little over half-way through it). Oh and we also talked about Dicken's A Christmas Carol, which we did before the break. so it was a pretty intense class.
In the afternoon we had scriptures class, we're talking about re-creation and I'm not gonna lie, it seemed pretty random and hard to follow to me (and to my classmates as well) but I took lots of notes and hopefully someday I'll look back on them and get more out of them... Just tonight I read Homilies by Chrysostom and Augustine on Romans 8, we'll talk about that next class which should be more interesting.
Chapel was good, we sang the first noel and we three kings because father Hayman holds that they're actually epiphany songs :)
On Thursday evening I went to the young adults group at the Met Church, it was really fun, especially since Jasmine and Kendra came along with Peter, Ben, and I. (that's one third of our school haha). They're doing a series on love there as well so we'll be talking about it lots in the next few weeks. I decided to go to the winter retreat with them next weekend; its at the tim hortons camp and promises to be lots of fun, and I should be able to work hard this week to not have a lot of homework on the weekend.
Friday we had Sci/Med/Faith with Dr. Metelski, he talked about Copernicus and got more into the physics and astronomy side of things than Dr. Patrick had. Then over lunch we discussed the phrase 'True Christian' and whether it should be used and whether such a thing exists and how it would be defined (we have a discussion over lunch every Friday- its called Disputatio et panis salubris) and then in Trivium we looked at fallacies with Dr. Tingley, such as false dilemma, non sequitur, begging the question, hasty generalization, and 'no true scotsman' (don't ask).

After all this, all the girls got together for some biscotti with brie and cranberries and nachos with homemade salsa supplied by Kendra's generous family (yum!) except for Kendra herself who went home for the weekend and Rosie who rushed to Toronto because her friend had had a baby that afternoon! I went and bought the book I needed for literature, read, did Latin...

Today I've done more latin and more reading of various things, but I also went walking in the gorgeous warm sunlight and exchanged a couple Christmas gifts that didn't fit. Whilst writing this, I'm listening to CBC's tribute concert to Oscar Peterson. I'm a little sad that they're doing more talking than playing music, but I guess it would probably be more meaningful if I was listening closer. Its quite sad that he has died, but he certainly was an amazing musician... Its time for bed though the church service starts at 9:15 and I wanted to get a few more things read tonight!

love,
Starr