An anti-realist Christian sketching out new regimes of truth. Trying not to RAGE or OMG<3... too much.
* By the way, the title refers to a tendency for Christian Fundamentalists and Evangelicals (and NeoFundamentalists) to be anti-intellectual. By anti-intellectual, we do not mean dumb or stupid, or even “against reason and logic”. Instead, we refer to the tendency to distrust the Academy and to build up their own networks of knowledge creation and curration.
For the best treatment on Evangelical anti-intellectualism, see Mark Noll’s classic work, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
This evening I was reading the excellent Revelation: Vision of a Just World by the beloved ESF and I came across this bit:
Background: ESF has been talking about John’s opponents in Asia Minor, most notably the Jezebel in Thyatira and the Synagogue of Satan in Smyrna. She suggests that the most likely explanation for both is that they were well-to-do Christians and Jews* who allied with the Roman Empire and tried to distance themselves from the poor messianic Jews and Christians who refused to participate in Emperor Cult in order to remain in the Empire’s good graces.
After the separation of Judaism and Christianity into two different religions and the political ascendancy of Christianity after the demise of the Roman Empire, the rhetorical situation of those reading Revelation has drastically changed.
Christian preachers who today repeat John’s charge against Judaism as “being the synagogue of Satan” do so in a hegemonic rhetorical situation, where Jews belong to an often maligned minority group.
Revelation’s defensive rhetoric of self-preservation of Jewish identity has been turned into a language of hate. Throughout the centuries and still today, John’s vilification of his coreligionists has evoked the Christian response of anti-Judaism, engendering the vilification and persecution of true Judaism.
Such vilification is often still legitimated by Revelation’s claim to be the reliable “word of God.”
How often has history misremembered lead to unspeakable bloodshed?
* At this time, Jews and Christians were not fully separate and not fully separate throughout the Empire. In many places, Christians were seen by Jews and especially the Romans as yet another Jewish sect.
My little boy goes back to day care the first week of August; my classes start the last week. This gives me three weeks of unscheduled time. Here is how I plan on using that time:
Here’s how I really plan on spending my time:
1) Prepare for my classes. I’ll be teaching seven classes on four subjects in three formats starting on the 23rd. To do that well, I’ll have to be well prepared. I’ll spend most of my time planning weeks, outlining and writing lectures, etc.
2) Read. For someone in my position, to be constantly reading is of the utmost importance. I plan on spending the first and last parts of my day reading. At first I will set a goal of one chapter from two books a day and adjust from there.
3) Get published. The first two goals are easy. This one is difficult, especially for someone who hasn’t been published before. My goal is to reduce my 130 page thesis down to 20-50 pages and submit that to some journals on early Christian history. Getting it accepted by one will greatly help my chances at getting into a PhD program, especially because my travel abilities are limited. I’m going to set aside an hour or two a day working on this.
4) Get entrepreneurial. Some friends and I have a dream of putting out college-aged teaching material. We dreamt about it last year and its been on my mind every day since. Now that focus can be found in my days, I plan on devoting an hour or two a day for planning, writing, and just plain doing.
It’s awfully ambitious, but the above isn’t really work; it’s what I would do if I could choose what to do… well that and take classes until I die.
Raise you hand if you think that the Pharisees were the evil brood of vipers that got Jesus killed. Such an assumption is as understandable as it is unjustified. Jesus levied a considerable amount of criticism towards the Pharisees and since his day and age, they have been Magneto to our Xavier. But, what if our reading of them, embodied within 2000 years of Western anti-Semitism, is fundamentally flawed?
The hatred of the Pharisees is so engrained in Western culture that I don’t think it is actually possible to rehabilitate their image. One of the reasons is that because we see them as Jesus’ enemies, we often recast them in our enemies light. One of the best examples of this were the Reformers rereading the worst of Catholicism into 2nd Temple Judaism and most notably the Pharisees.
Luckily, we have a whole slew of scholars who, over the last 30 years, have worked to undo these assumptions. (Thank you Stowers, Sanders, and Wright for actually looking at them apart from 2000 years of demonization.)
For an excellent introduction to the topics, see the following post: The “Hypocrisy” of the Pharisees.
Now, how does such a shift change the way we think Jesus interacted with the Pharisees and perhaps more importantly, how does it shift how we deal with our theological opponents?
I am thinking of different ways to score and foster student interaction in online discussion forums. My goal is to have students meaningfully interact with one another.
As of right now, I have a requirement that they respond to three students posts and I ask that each of those responses are 100 words long, have 2 citations from the reading/lecture and engage the discussion. The word limit is there for force space for engagement, the citation requirement is there to get them to ground the discussion in the sources (and to keep things out of opinion land); both of which are designed to (hopefully) get them to engage the ideas of the other students and hopefully spark meaningful discussion.
Last semester was a disaster in my online classes in terms of discussion. I did not have tangible requirements, I did not have quick feedback, and when I did get around to giving feedback, if it was present, it was thin. I was pretty overwhelmed with the volume of first-time teaching I was doing ontop of seminary classes. Not an excuse, just an explanation.
![klingons[3]](http://pomoxian.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/klingons3.jpg "klingons[3]")
Today is a Good Day to Discuss:This semester, my online class is doing so much better in terms of discussion. I attribute it to the above requirements and I am forcing myself to give detailed feedback the day after the discussion posts are due. Additionally, I am reading through all of the initial posts and instead of trying to respond to each one (which kills discussion), I post a sticky which guides the general conversation.
While the content of the discussions are up (especially the posts), there still is a lingering problem of overall student cross-engagement. I want to improve the overall quality of discussion, not just increase individual outputs. So, I am thinking of trying out the following:
So, according to the above, there would be three scores that go into a student’s weekly score:
The hope is that the above would get the students to a) read all the other posts, b) think critically about the other student’s posts, c) explain their critical thinking, and d) have an investment in the overall discussion (an investment in the classroom community).
I’d love to get your feedback, especially if you have taken or taught an online class before.
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