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