Week Two

I bought a digital recorder to record all of my class lectures, and
found that I can listen to lectures at 1.5 times normal speed, with
occasional stops to gloss my class notes. It makes me aware of how
much wasted time there is in a lecture. :-) Plus, it's fun to listen
to my professors talk fast in a high pitch.

Cathy suggested a daily 30 minute power nap, and this works well. I
set my timer 40 minutes when I get home, and if I don't get to sleep,
get up anyway. Friday I was tired, but other days went well. I know
it seems ridiculous to worry so much about sleep, but I think a lot
about this. It makes me feel old when I'm tired and look around at a
bunch of twenty-somethings in the classroom.

Met with my contextual education class. I will assist chaplain 4
hours per week at Gwinnett Medical Center. I would like to work
Monday mornings, since no classes then, but if I work mornings I will
likely be assigned to emergency room, since resident patients will be
bathing/eating breakfast, etc. I do not feel prepared for this at
all. But then I wasn't prepared at all for pastoral care last year,
and somehow got through this...grace happens.

My Old Testament class uses the Jewish study Bible, and the notes are
wonderful. It has more notes than Biblical text on some pages, so
more like a commentary than Bible.

I have procrastinated on deciding my attitude towards scriptures. On
the one hand, I believe that scripture is divinely inspired. On the
other hand, as my Old Testament prof continually points out, it is
difficult to accept the text literally. (And I cannot do like Origen
and say that the literal meaning is the least useful.) In O.T., we
don't ask "did it really happen like this?" but instead we ask "why
did the people tell the story in this way?" So far I have been able
to hold a paradox in my mind with no problem.

For my finance friends: does this conflict in beliefs mean that my
belief system is lexicographic?

In pastoral care we have focused on the paradigm shift during the 1990s in how to give pastoral care. Essentially there has been a paradigm shift, where the clinical model of one-to-one care based on a "standard" person has been criticized for many reasons. Many of these are related to shift towards a postmodern philosophy.

In finance, over this same time period we saw a shift from assumptions like investor rationality and homogeneous expectations to greater
acceptance of papers examining behavioral issues. I doubt many in finance would attribute this shift to post modernity in culture, but I have to wonder if some of the postmodern philosophy didn't leak over into this last bastion of rationality.

In pastoral care we write reflection papers...in one paragraph write a summary of a paper, then our reflections on the paper. I have no idea what this means, so I just followed directions and reflected on the paper. (When all else fails, read the directions.) There is a two page limit, and since papers are submitted electronically, I can't fudge in the usual ways-- making margins 0.9 inches, reducing the font to 11.9 instead of 12, instead of double spacing use a space of 1.9 between lines. This is the real curse of the electronic age. Below is my reflection on a paper by Ramsay, chock full of jargon (jargon is the only remaining means of meeting space limitations).