I'm excited!!!!
Of course, you're not at all surprised, are you? :-)
The first week of classes was largely of an introductory nature, where we were settling into the class venues (most of which are in the shiny new Uniting Church Centre for Theology and Ministry- very nice and modern) and working out what the course would look like over the semester, the various assessment hoops that we will have to navigate, etc.
However, this week, things have started to heat up and get a bit exciting. I was totally blown away by my Making, Housing, Feeding class yesterday morning and came away buzzing. Now you may not think that three hours spent discussing a potted history (from New Testament times up to the 3rd century CE) of the Baptismal rite: how it was performed, the theological significance of the symbols etc, is all that exciting. Maybe I really am a sick and twisted puppy, but I found this session rivetting both in content and presentation.
The lecturer was Andrew McGowan, and this was the first time I have had him as a class teacher (and seriously hope it won't be the last). He managed to convey an enormous amount of information in the 3 hour slot (have I mentioned before that I'm a bit of a content junkie? :-), but did it in such a way that I felt like I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. Lecturing without any notes, just some Powerpoint slides with brief dot-points (for our benefit, not his) and some printed notes that he gave us with various excerpts from documents illustrating his points. He really knew his stuff, and was quite happy to divert along different paths when asked questions by members of the class, and then calmly continue on to meet his intended end point.
(One of the very cool things about the United Faculty of Theology is that the combined teaching staff, drawn from the UCA, Trinity Anglican and Jesuit Theological colleges, consists of an incredible group of scholars, many of whom are renowned nationally and internationally in their particular areas of teaching and research. And Andrew McGowan is certainly one of these. It's a slightly surreal sensation to look at my book shelves, and see the names of a number of my lecturers staring back at me, because they have literally written the textbook, or a definitive commentary, on their particular areas.)
In the evening, I had my second Ethics class for the year.
Hmm... I think it will take me a little while to get my head around this subject. Already there have been heaps of new concepts, principles, terminology etc that my brane is herting trying to remember and understand it all. I also find it vaguely amusing that we seem to have a lot of lawyers in the class -and just to be very even, in the class we have one ministerial candidate for each of the Uniting, Anglican and Jesuit traditions who were lawyers in their former lives- as well as a retired magistrate and another practising lawyer (studying theology part-time). So- not quite the same bouncy feeling as I got from the morning class, but I think I will get into the swing, and once I do, the new concepts will be really helpful in helping to inform the way I approach and analyse ethical issues (so that's also exciting, but in a less immediate way :-)
I have also just finished preparing for the first of my tutorials in Christology class. One of the things that got me dangerously excited this time last year, was the tutorial readings I had to do for the Groundwork in Theology class. I have a feeling that a similar thing is going to happen in this class.
WOO-HOO! :-)
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