First post!

Welcome to the Theo 10001 Spring 2008 Foundations class blog for my two sections.

The purpose of this blog is to allow us to share our ideas with one another as a class, try out our ideas and practice communicating them in an ungraded format, and play with applying the ideas we're learning in class to our personal experiences.

Participation in the blog will count towards your class participation grade. So if you're shy in class, this is a good place to contribute. It also gives you (us!) a chance to reflect on the class discussion and get that extra word in.

Informal language is welcomed; abusive comments will be deleted. Be respectful of others. If you want to comment anonymously, it's relatively simple to set up an untraceable google identity. If you want credit, you can share the name of that identity with me. Please remember that this is the internet and don't reveal anything about yourself or others that not everybody in the whole world should read.

That's all the boring preliminaries. On to the title. I've named the blog "think-theologically" in light of the course goals I developed for our time together. This is my understanding of the theology department's goals for this first university requirement course, and the basis for our syllabus:

Course goals:

• Learn a specifically theological way of reading Christian texts. In order to do this, we will:
  
  
  
  1. Become familiar and comfortable with various ways of interpreting the Bible, especially patristic typological readings and historical-critical methods (parts 1 and 2).
     
  2. Using these tools, examine the development of Christian doctrine during the patristic period and how it was influenced by Christian practice (parts 3 and 4).
     
  3. Think critically about applying theological ways of reading to our own time and situation (part 5, course blog, discussions, and reflection papers).
  
  
• Learn a specifically theological way of writing about Christian texts and topics (course blog, reflection papers, exams, and term paper).

To do this, we need to have several things: historical knowledge of the context of early Christianity to help us interpret the texts we read; knowledge of a variety of early Christian texts to interpret; and an understanding of our relationship to early Christianity, both personally and socially. Then we can use these understandings to help us express an interpretation of Christian literature -- and the expression of an interpretation of Christianity is theology. Thus, thinking theologically is critical thinking from within the Christian tradition. I'll have more to say about this in class.

The class resources are divided between the first two kinds of knowledge (understanding of your personal and social context is something I depend on you to know!): history of Christianity and early Christian texts. The text list is here.