My informal meeting with the director of the doctoral program which I am to begin in the fall was a very interesting encounter for me. The Boston College School of Theology and Ministry will my twelfth educational institution, but I can already tell that this feels like a very different thing. In trying to think about it, I came upon the word pastoral, which I will try to explain.
Up until now, school has been about someone telling me what I ought to read and write, with evaluation based upon how well I have managed to understand or apply the things I was told to learn. The tasks and questions are different now. It's not what I am supposed to read, but whose influence I want to form me and make me want to read things. It's about mentors and finding people who can help me know how to read the things I want to read and write about. It's about building connections that will help me get to the sort of campuses and libraries that have the people and books I want to form me. The director made me feel like someone who was going to be initiated into a conversation and shepherded into a culture.
I know this a corny thought and betrays my shallowness, but I came out of the meeting feeling like I had received the words of Obi Wan Kenobi, "You've taken your first step into a larger world."
The director also bought me a cup of coffee and a pistachio cookie.
I have had cookies with chocolate chips
ReplyDeleteI have had cookies pecans, almonds, and walnut
I have had cookies with macadamia nuts too
I have had cookies I thought of every imaginable kind,
though a cookie with pistachio nuts is something new
-If you step into the larger world, poems like this are all that await you: BC must have much more to offer!Congratulations, and good luck
Wow, anonymous, that's a pretty weird comment, and I'm not sure what it means, but thanks for the well-wishes!
ReplyDeleteIs the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry faithful to the authentic teaching of the Church?
ReplyDeleteYour posting for today was a good entry, but you should not have ended with the pistachio cookie. Especially with the words corny ,shallowness, and Obi Wan Kenobi in very close proximity. It is an open invitation to bad poetry and detracts from the rest of the article.No need to post this
ReplyDeleteSharon: I have my worries about this, but we shall see.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous: Yeah, this is one of my persistent bad habits both in speech and writing. My second reader during licentiate spent a lot of time trying to get me to avoid such errors; as I wrote in my essay for the application to this new program, one of my worries was that maybe I have set myself up poorly for academic writing by all of the less disciplined and informal writing I have been doing in the interim (e.g. blogging, homilies.)