The Importance of Syllabi

I'm in the last week of preparation before my first Seminary class begins, and I just realized that I have become far too prepared... Part of the requirements of the upcoming class on the Gospels is to lead an hour-long seminar on one of the various topics given in the syllabus. Over the past several days, I dug (hundreds of pages) deep into all sorts of secondary sources to get to know my topic (reader-response criticism) very well, only to find out that the one most important source I should have read was: my syllabus.

If I had started there, I would have learned that the seminar is to be based mostly on the three articles for the seminar topic in the required reading. It's not exactly an 'open-ended' assignment. So, I guess this will be much easier to prepare for than I anticipated... At any rate, I guess I'll be (overly) prepared if people have questions outside of what the syllabus requires!

Grace

I'm pretty grateful today. I've been sick the past couple of days, and am back at work today. Knowing that my work partner is gone today, I thought I'd have a crazy day, having to do the work of two people in my short morning. But when I arrived to work today, it seems that another worker had mercy and decided to fill in for my partner, thus eliminating all of the stress I was anticipating. This is a small little occassion, but I'm very grateful!

Oily Mess: this is not subduing the earth...

When God commanded Adam to subdue the earth, I doubt he meant, "Lubricate my fish in a slimy haze." But that is what has been happening the past few days. Resulting from an explosion on an off-shore oil drill on April 20, 750,000 litres of oil spew up into the Gulf of Mexico every day. This spill hasn't yet reached the catastrophic levels of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989 (40.9 million litres spilled), but it is expected to become the worst in history if a solution isn't found soon. Today the placement of a compression dome is being attempted to cap the leak in the underwater oil well. (See Vancouver Sun's article for more.)

Hopefully this sort of diaster will get people moving on the fuel cell so we can leave behind such a nasty dependence on crude oil. Sorry, little fishes.