In celebration, here's a proud photo of my student card I've been meaning to post. Darn! I accidentally covered up my picture with my thumb.
The "140" refers to Wolfson College. My "Graduate" status allows me to check out 20 library books instead of 10 at any one time - wahoo! - and other privileges like membership in the swanky University Club. The spiky building on the right is the Bodleian Library, making this a "Bod Card" and granting me admittance to that revered institution. I don't remember what Group A means. The barcode is scanned in at libraries and the dining hall. On the back is a magnetic strip, so the whole thing functions as a swipe card to get me into university and college buildings.
The last week of term wasn't that much different from the others. I went to my Constantine lecture on Monday and had a great time as usual. This last one was mainly on legends about Constantine, including his mother (St. Helena) finding the True Cross in Jerusalem and the infamous "Donation of Constantine." The latter was a document in which Constantine says he was instructed in the faith, baptized, and cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester (he wasn't) and he grants the pope supremacy over all other churches and over the emperor, the right to wear imperial garb, and lots of land. How conveeeenient, as the Church Lady would say! It was proved in the Renaissance to be an 8th-century forgery.
After class, I turned in my first Oxford essay, as the lecturer was also the tutor of the first two weeks of our historiography seminar. I was so intimidated writing that essay! It's just a short one, less than 10 pages, and doesn't "count" towards our degree (it just provides preparation for the examination), but since I am hoping to get a scholarship for next year it needed to be good! At least it was on a familiar topic - the 2nd-century Christian writers' views of Greco-Roman pagan culture. I haven't received any feedback on it yet, but I believe I will at some point.
The middle of the week was mainly spent working on the next essay for the seminar (we have to do four in total, one in each historical period). This one was on the treatment of miracles in the church history written by the Venerable Bede, an early medieval English monk-scholar who was known for his careful use of sources.
Thursday I had a meeting with my supervisor, Dr. Morwenna Ludlow, in which I learned more about what next term will look like. Sounds like we will meet for individual tutorials each week, in which she will mainly prepare me for the general examination on the Early Church (I'll take that around the same time as the Historiography one, late next Spring). So I'll be studying general topics like the development of doctrine (Trinity, nature of Christ, etc.), development of the papacy, the early church councils (Nicea, Chalcedon, etc.), the rise of monasticism, and similar stuff. I will have to write an essay to present to her each week. At the same time, she will either teach me Greek or find me a Greek class to join. Then in the summer we'll start talking about my thesis, which is where my specific interest in early Christianity and paganism comes in. I'm excited!
Friday was my last historiography seminar. It was on Herbert Butterfield, an early-20th-century historian at Cambridge. He was mildly interesting, but I'm not too much into the moderns. This and the previous seminar were held at St. John's College, which is apparently the wealthiest college at Oxford. It was lovely, but I wouldn't have known it was super-rich if I hadn't been told. I do know our seminar room was extremely overheated - perhaps that's the English way of showing off wealth. :)
The college owns lots of property around town, a beautiful old manor house next door, and the nearby Lamb and Flag pub (which C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and friends moved to after many years at the Eagle and Child). Our tutor encouraged us to drink lots of beer at the Lamb and Flag, as proceeds from it go towards graduate scholarships. We were planning for a pub gathering after our last seminar anyway, so we obediently patronized the Lamb and Flag for about an hour.
It was a good time, but most of it consisted of a good-natured argument between Sam, an evangelical (left), and Jeff, an Orthodox Christian (middle, happily being strangled), about the authority of the Bible vs. the authority of church tradition and whether liking "high church" (ceremony, candles, robes, etc.) meant you were a liberal. 
I was mostly bored with that, but I did enjoy chatting with Russ (right), an ex-lawyer from Denver who has friends in Portland. It's fun to talk to someone who's familiar with my hometown - the other week I mentioned that I had briefly considered playing basketball with Wolfson, and he said, "Of course, Rip City, right?" How fun. This time we talked about how great McMenamins pubs are.Then I walked home in some of the worst weather we've had yet - cold, driving rain and wind - and waited for David to get home from his first day on his new job! I think he's planning to give more details in a post of his own at some point, but it seems like a good job so far. As a reminder, it's with O2, the big cell phone company, in the city of Slough, which is not far outside of London. The huge downside to the job is the commute, which is much worse than he had thought. It takes several buses and two train rides to get there, taking almost two hours each way! And on the way home, the train is completely jammed with people coming home from London, and is standing room only. A little car may well be in our immediate future. (He thinks the drive would take about an hour.)
So what in the world am I going to do with myself over this long break? Plenty! First of all, I still have two more essays to write for the historiography seminar. The first is on John Calvin, which I'm writing today and will turn in tomorrow. The second is on Lord Acton, who I did a presentation on two weeks ago, which is due by Christmas.
Second, I'll be preparing for next term by doing lots of reading my supervisor suggested as well as some brushing up on my pitifully rusty Greek.
Third, I'll be seizing the opportunity to work on my websites, especially Sacred Destinations (the one about religious sites and travel). I am really enjoying that one, and have been working on it in any spare time I can find. Now is a great opportunity to be able to use the excellent Oxford libraries for research on it (I just checked out the excellent Oxford Archaeological Guide to the Holy Land and the one to Rome) and hopefully do some travel to get some good photos I can put on it!
That brings me to the fourth thing that I will hopefully be doing over the break - some travel! David and I are talking about a mini vacation of a few days somewhere around Christmastime, depending on what he'll have off from work. We were first thinking someplace warm, relaxing and exotic, like Tenerife, Tunisia, or Turkey (T places are warm, I guess). But now we're thinking more along the lines of a place where we can do more sightseeing, but where it is still warmer than England, like Sicily or Rome or something. Exciting to think about, no matter where we end up!
No comments:
Post a Comment