Letter 04-2007. Study courses.

29^th April, 2007

Dear friends,

It is time to give you some insight in what I am here for, the studies. This letter will give a short presentation of all the courses I follow, and then there is a good chance that some of them will have a further description later. Course (if that is the right English expression) is here in general called „Veranstaltung“, and is normally lecture or seminar. In Norway you will not necessarily see the difference, but here a lecture is a lecture, the teacher gives a speech. Two hours a week gives two credits. A seminar demands active participation from the students and two hours a week gives five credits.

I have made some changes in my schedule after I came. I mentioned an NT seminar about Jesus, with which I struggled a couple of weeks ago. I found out that it took more time and strength than it gave knowledge, so I have dropped it. Another NT seminar I had planned taking, about Paul, was for teachers, it was for students without Greek, so they did not want theology students there, so now that course is also out. A course on the devil was at the same time as the NT course on Jesus, and as I had not been there the first lessons, I would not have got credits for it. The last course I planned, but do not take, was an introduction to religion and church sociology.

Over to what I actully take: I have mentioned the lectures about the theology of NT. It is a bit over my head, but at least I am physically present. There are not many teachers using visual equipment, but in these lectures we get some useful sentences on a screen, so then I write, and at least I have this to bring from the lecture.

I have also mentioned that I take an OT seminar. The subject is creation. As this is a seminar, active participation is demanded. Wednesday I will be active, or I have actually been active for some days already in order to prepare this activity. The activity is called „Referat“ and is a 15 minutes speech for the rest of the class, with a couple of pages with key words for their memory. My subject is „Creation myths from the Old Egypt“ and I have been around in the library finding relevant literature, used my dictionary actively trying to understand what is written, and I have now understood enough to believing that I can carry it through. For this first „Referat“ I write each word I have planned saying, and then we will see if I might manage to be more free in the other courses where I will have to perform later. „Referat“ is an activity which demands a lot from me, but I also think that I learn a lot from it, both regarding language, performance and knowledge about the actual subject.

One course, a socalled block seminar, I have already completed. It was called „Leipziger Land. Exkursionen mit dem Rad.“ and was a course consisting of two Saturdays biking around villages northwest of Leipzig in addition to an introduction class about the villages in a historic perspective. It was a nice course to attend in the beginning of the semester. I came to know both fellow students and the area around Leipzig, and I also got a bit sun burnt. I soon got confused about the number of villages and churches we had visited. I guess it was close to ten on each trip. On the second trip I brought my camera. I have now managed to save photos on this computer, so some of them might soon be on my blog together with the letters: http://banglahanne.blogspot.com/

I will have two other block seminars, courses with classes in the weekends, this semester. One is about the late gothic village church, and is conducted by the same teacher as the bicycle course, so we will be out in the field again, but without bicycles this time. The other block seminar is about the Orthodox churches and ecumenism.

To compensate for the courses I dropped, I have chosen to follow some others. I have mentioned one earlier, a seminar in systematic theology about the evangelical sacraments. They normally use the word evangelical when we in Norway would have said Lutheran. It might be the course I find most exciting. It is not always so easy to catch the nuances between Catholic and Lutheran eucharistic theology when they are presented in German, and I do not have the capacity to read all the literature carefully enough to understand it, but it is exciting.

I also follow lectures on Catholicism in the past and present. The ecumenical mood here will probably get some attention in next letter. It is an evangelical faculty, and I think the lectures show it, but I have heard some humour in the lecturer's voice, so he might not be so impossible.

I have also chosen to follow two courses on practical theology. One is lectures on pastoral care in specific life situations. The other is a proseminar on sin. In addition to dividing the courses here in lectures and seminars, the seminars are divided in to categories, lower (pro) and higher (haupt) grade. The PT seminar is the only I follow on lower grade, and I must admit it was nice to experience that not everybody knew everything, as most of them have come some semesters shorter than I have, and that not everybody necessarily was so familiar with „Referat“ and other working methods though they were German.

In total this gives a little more than 30 credits, that means a quite normal semester. But the credits do not come without work. If I want to pass the OT seminar, I must back to the Egyptian creation myths...

Greetings from Hanne.