I started offering SeumasU classes (not by that name!) in 2019. I went full-time (ish), ditching my other work in 2020 thanks to the pandemic. So I’m now steaming and streaming into my 4th year of trying to teach somewhat-more-communicatively, online, as a full-time occupation (it’s not full-time, but it’s my full-time occupation, if that makes sense). And, it’s really possible.

When I look back over the slate of courses I’ve run in the last four-ish years, everything ranging from teaching absolute beginners the foundations of speaking Latin and Greek, through to playing table-top RPGs in Latin and Greek, through to reading the broadest selection of texts, covering 2800 years of Greek and 2100 years of Latin, with a high commitment to keeping our conversations in the target language as much as possible, using English whenever it serves best purposes, and helping students to learn to read, process, and communicate more readily, more accurately, more fluently, more confidently, and more joyfully in these languages.

My own speaking skills are coming along, as are my writing and reading. I don’t get as much time outside teaching as I’d like to just sit around reading slabs of Greek and Latin, but when I can I do. And seeing students come on board and read and discuss Plato, Homer, Lucian, Proba, Eudocia, Boethius, Ignatius, Augustine, Dhuoda, C.S. Lewis, Aquinas, Erasmus, Pausanias, Plutarch, Cicero, Tertullian, Egeria, Gregory of Nazianzus, William of Rubuick, (Ysengrimus), as well as some anthology classes, and even more. This is a dream come true.

Occasionally I get asked if I would think about taking an academic job. No one’s knocking on that door, and I am out of the academic game long enough that I make a terrible candidate. But also, you would have to offer me something incredibly compelling to give up the joy and the wonder that is SeumasU.

So, maybe it’s time you starting speaking ancient Greek and/or Latin, to read the ancients and the not-so-ancients in their own tongues, and to join the great conversations yourself!

Here’s my general advice for autodidacts, people looking to do a lot of Greek reading, or anyone really wanting to kickstart and turbo-charge their Ancient Greek. It’s also more of less what I tell students to do (especially if they have finished Athenaze vol 1)

These days I would almost certainly tell you to read Athenaze. My case for Athenaze as a beginning textbook rests on two principles. Firstly, it’s the best continuous-narrative textbook that we have. It’s far from perfect, the textbook itself isn’t great, but that reason alone is enough to use it. Secondly, while it’s difficulty + vocab gradient is too steep, it’s less steep than anything else. So, I would start with Athenaze.

Should you read the Italian version? Yes, but with caveats. (i) If you have no background in the language at all, buying the Italian version and not the English will leave you without grammatical explanations, which is going to make life hard; (ii) but if you can get things explained one way or another, the Italian is superior; (iii) the Italian editions can be hard to get hold of, depending on your luck in ordering things from Italy. (iv) the main advantage of the Italian is simply this: far, far more connected prose to read in Greek. At least double.

When you get to the end of volume 1, you should definitely do volume 2. But it’s also around this time that you can profitably read other beginner/basic things. I’m not saying someone should necessarily read all of the following, but one could! You’ll definitely need to do some lexicon work if you tackle anything outside the main line of your textbook though, so have Logeion bookmarked. But you could start by reading:

1. Mark Jeong’s Greek Reader
2. Alexandros, τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν παιδίον
3. Charles Moss’ First Greek Reader
4. The JACT Reading Greek course (at least 1-8 after Athenaze ch 16, then I would leave the rest until after Athenaze vol 2)
5. Stoffel’s Epitome of the Greek New Testament
6. My LGPSI
7. Galilaiathen (my in-progress Athenaze-linked NT-Koine reader. Currently at ch 13 in writing this)
8. WHD Rouse’s A Greek Boy at Home.

If you read all that, you’d be well, well situated for going on to read a lot of ancient Greek. This is how I’d design a fairly comprehensive reading program of extensive reading for beginning students. Once you get a lot of beginner reading done, it’s time to read more and more broadly and extensively, but I think that probably needs another post, another time.

So, like many people I’m intrigued by the possibilities of chatGPT. I have been particularly impressed that it renders responses to prompts for Latin with texts that on the whole both (a) grammatical, and (b) make sense. On the whole, it struggles with Ancient Greek, often producing texts in Modern Greek instead. I have had some limited success with getting it to produce Ancient Greek though. In the post below, I include some of my results with their prompts.

#1 Write a Latin poem in the style of Psalms about the absurdity of 21st century America

Note: probably the most impressive answer of them all. And it’s got some pretty sharp lines in there too!

#2 write a short story in classical latin about a dog and a soldier

Canis et Miles

Erat miles fortis qui in bello pugnaverat. Multos annos militavit et multa pericula passus est. Tamen, una die, dum ambulabat in via, invenit canem pauperem et infirmum. Canis fessus erat et famelicus, nec habebat ubi caput suum ponere.

Miles misericordia motus est et canem secum portavit. Canis deinde in castris militum habitavit et miles eum curavit. Dedit cani cibum et aquam, et canis fortitudinem recepit.

Per multas hebdomadas, canis et miles amici facti sunt. Canis militem semper secutus est et militem semper custodivit. Cum milites ad bellum iter facerent, canis semper ad pedes militis fideliter stetit.

Tandem, in una die pugnae, militem vulneravit hostis graviter. Militem inimici circumveniebant et occidere parabant. Canis tamen non deseruit militem. Canis ferociter latravit et hostes a milite repellit. Militem deinde levavit et ad castra reportavit.

Miles canem semper gratum habuit et semper ei gratias egit. Canis deinde in castris militum habitavit et semper militem custodivit. Semper amici fuerunt, canis et miles.

Notes: the story is predictable, a little boring, but very much sensible. The Latin is correct, if somewhat simple and almost a medieaval narrative vibe.

Why is πόρνη translated as ‘prostitute’, but πόρνος is not?

This question arose on the sinking-ship of Twitter, and since I was tagged, I started to think about it. I don’t have a very in-depth answer, in that I’m not a lexicographer, nor I have really done a very very deep dive on the question, but here are some initial thoughts. I am very happy to receive feedback, pushback, or any -back on this post.

Just setting aside the 1 Cor 5; 6 question, we are dealing with the relation of at least 5 words (certainly more, but at least 5 in tight focus): πόρνος, πόρνη, πορνεύω, πορνεία, πέρνημι

Working backwards a little, πέρνημι is a verb that tends to mean things like “sell as a slave”, and so perhaps more generally to turn things into marketable goods. This seems to be the verbal origin of πόρνος and πόρνη, and you can see how this applies to sex-slavery in particular – we are primarily dealing with women trafficked for sex.

So when you come to πόρνη, generally speaking you are looking at a noun that denotes someone trafficked for sex. No real distinction is made about who is doing the trafficking, but I would be pretty hesitant to suggest that a πόρνη was generally considered to be in control and agency of their own prostitution – that doesn’t fit ancient moral codes, views of women, or social and economic practices of prostitution. There were independent sex workers in antiquity, but for the most part these seem to have been women who were already sex workers who managed to obtain freedom, and continued on in the same trade. A woman who did have the freedom and economic means to not sell sexual services, and who then chose to do so, would fall under general Graeco-Roman society’s opprobium, because it’s seen as self-degredation, whereas enslaved women in sex-work are seen as degraded (by others), the social status being degredation in either case.

So when we come along to the masculine counterpart term, πόρνος we have a much more complex set of questions to deal with. The lexica tend to supply three main senses: (i) a [male] prostitute, (ii) an active or passive participant in male homosexual activity, (iii) a ‘fornicator’, and then metaphorically (iv) an idolator.

Sense (iv) really applies to biblical literature where adultery and fornication is set up as a metaphors for spiritual unfaithfulness. (i) is the male version of πόρνη. Generally male prostitutes were young males, with male clients. (ii) is used primarily in a pejorative sense, by extension of the fact that male sex-workers were young and generally serviced male clients. That leaves sense (iii).

Which is where we probably need to talk about πορνεύω and πορνεία. The verb πορνεύω seems to be used in the middle to refer to selling one’s sex services, and in the active its usage is a little less clear; the active seems like a later usage, and requires a bit more investigation than I’ve had time for so far.

πορνεία though, clearly is related to all these words, but I do agree with the general idea that it comes to be used as a catch-all term for “all forms of sexual immorality”, which is a pretty large set of practices, and it depends upon what speakers/communities consider to be immoral. If you’re in a community whose normative view of sexual behaviour is with a sexually faithful marriage, then any departure from that, whether it involves the transfer of money or not, could be considered πορνεία. We would also need to consider a bit more broadly the question of whether sex with enslaved persons “counts”, or is considered indifferently, and then how much this broader idea of πορνεία weighs back in to usages of πόρνη and πόρνος.

Alright, so this is me thinking aloud basically, and now I’m going to loop back to the original question – why do translators treat πόρνη in 1 Cor 6(:15) as a profession, but in 5:11 as a descriptor of sexual immorality? Let me suggest briefly then why this is a plausible reading and translation strategy:

1. πόρνη is established as a term to refer to female sex-workers, very often trafficked women. The noun stands with this meaning, it’s not transferring over a more general meaning from πορνεία to a women who is engaged in sexual immorality more generally.

2. πόρνος is a more difficult to pin down term, its more precise meaning differs more in contexts. Here, in the context of a vice list of descriptors of behaviour rather than occupations, I think it would strain our understanding of the text to suppose that in the midst of behavioural terms, πόρνος should be understood as an occupation.

Lately I have been listening to Ursula Le Guin’s classic novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which portrays the world of Gethen, populated by a version of humans that are androgynous most of the time, except for a period once a month (kemmer) where they become male or female. It’s a good novel, and it’s a concept that is explored with rich texture and thought. However, one of the criticisms that Le Guin always endured was the choice to use the pronoun ‘he’ throughout for these androgynous humans. In a follow-up story in the same world in 1975, “Winter’s King”, she choose to instead use ‘she’ throughout. The choice of “they”, I understand, Le Guin felt was too confusing.

Of course, being who I am I wondered what would happen if you were translating this text into ancient Greek, and this strikes me as offering up a particular conundrum. I’m of the view that Ancient Greek’s gender system basically breaks down to:

Masculine = positively marks a person (a sentient animate being)

Feminine = positively marks a person as female

Neuter = categorises something as a person or non-person

That needs a lot more exploration and explanation, especially I don’t mean that the grammatical gender that nouns have, implies the above. But when you use modifiers, articles and adjectives, and you select a grammatical gender for them, this is the kind of implication. You can read a much smarter discussion of this here: Mussies 1971 on Grammatical Gender.

Now, if we were to translate LHoD into Ancient Greek, what would we do, what should we do? Here’s the question- I think that by Ancient Greek’s own patterns, you would default to masculine pronouns, articles, adjectives throughout for discussing the humans of Gethen, because they are marked as persons. I think you’d only use feminine modifiers and determiners to refer to a Gethen human during kemmer when they took on female biological traits.

Except, and here’s the conundrum part, most contemporary readers of Ancient Greek have been habituated to think of gender in several modern languages (including English), and in their reading of Ancient Greek, so as to treat masculine as marked for maleness, the way English ‘he’ has come to be marked for exclusivity rather than inclusivity, and so a contemporary reader of an Ancient Greek translation of this sort is probably going to read it in the same way that contemporary readers of Le Guin’s English novel read the “he” choice as unsatisfactorily gendering the androgynous humans of Gethen. Which, if you were going to cater to the sensitivities of contemporary readers of AG fiction (small group that they are), you would be left with a set of translation questions similar to Le Guin – do you then choose to use feminine modifiers as a reverse of standard practice, do you use neuter ones and risk the de-personalising effect that tends to have by turning persons into non-persons, or do you attempt some creative reimagining of the language to create a 4th gender category (the way some Latin speakers use a non-binary set of endings in contemporary Latin)? Or, do you just translate it with masculine modifiers and tell modern readers to learn to read them as marking personhood not maleness exclusively?

Syra, quae male audit, id quod medicus dīcit audīre nōn potest; itaque interrogat: “quid dīcit medicus?” Aemilia (in aurem Syrae): ‘Medicus puerum dormīre’ dīcit.”

So, in Chapter 11 of Familia Romana, Ørberg uses a simple but effective technique to introduce indirect speech (oratio obliqua, or as I prefer to teach them, clauses acting as nouns) to the learner. Syra can’t hear well, and so has to have the doctor’s comments repeated to her. This device or trope invites endless repetition, moving between direct and indirect speech.

The other week I inflicted the same technique on my Greek optatives class. As one of the optional uses for the optative is indirect speech in secondary sequence, you can generate infinite (though possible boring) content by taking any text, and fronting it with some kind of Greek equivalent, e.g. ἡ Σύρᾱ εἶπεν ὅτι…. You can do this transformation on direct speech in dialogues, of course, or even on a third person narrative, by reporting sentences as the speech of the author/narrator. You can even do this to textbook content, to keep it easy:

«ὁ Μῑ́νως οἰκεῖ ἐν τῇ Κρήτῃ· βασιλεὺς δέ ἐστι τῆς νήσου.»

τί εἶπεν ἡ Μυρρίνη;

ἡ Μυρρίνη εἶπεν ὅτι ὁ Μῑ́νως οἰκοίη ἐν τῇ Κρήτῃ, βασιλεὺς δὲ εἴη τῆς νήσου.

In light of last week’s discussions on twitter and then here, I ended up doing a bunch of reading and reflection about CEFR things…

Not that you have the time, but sitting down and reading some of the extended documentation on CEFR scales is not an unprofitable activity. I think in a lot of discussions we drop CEFR assessments as macro stand-ins for proficiency, without really paying attention to what they are meant to mean. In particular, the CEFR standards also recognise that different skills also have sub-elements. E.g. just in terms of speaking you can rate how a person speaks in terms of fluency : how quickly they speak, how and why they hesitate, how long pauses are, and turn-taking; accuracy : how consistently they use grammar and vocabulary correctly; range : in terms of both breadth of vocabulary, and also breadth of structures they use; phonology. People can be better at some sub-elements, and worse at others. It’s not monolithic. Proficiency is a multi-factor, multi-faceted thing.

Secondly, I was doing some musing on how long it takes to achieve various levels and what is required. I spent a bit of time looking at the cross-language estimated for various European languages, which tend to break them down into “Instructed Hours” and then “Additional Hours”. These estimates tend to come in around 1000 instructed hours to reach C2, and an equivalent number of extra hours.

I broke that down with some examples as:

Option A: 4 years of college, 2 x 12 week semesters, 2.5hrs instruction a day, 4 days a week.

Option B: 5 years of SeumasU, 40 weeks a year, 5 classes every term (e.g. 5 contact hours a week)

Option C: Live-in immersion, if you could take 52 weeks of 5 days a week, 4 hours of class + 4 hours minimum extra study.

I also often refer to an article in the Foreign Language Annals [1] , “Setting Evidence-Based Language Goals”, by Senta Goertler, Angelika Kraemer, and Theresa Schenker, which looked at benchmarking in the college German program at MSU. The research is interesting on a number of levels, but not least that they place some revised benchmarks for levels of college study:

It’s also worth noting, if you don’t know, that there does exist a set of CEFR-aligned tests for Ancient Greek (https://www.languagecert.org/en/language-exams/classical-greek) covering A1, A2, B1, for “Reading and Language Use”. The sample materials are worth looking at. The A1 vocab list is very long in my opinion, full of things that aren’t that common in Ancient Greek teaching materials. It costs money, and it probably needs to be done through online proctoring, which I don’t really believe in.

There are no vocab estimates or lists for CEFR standards, they don’t function like that. There are some estimates out there. I imagine it differs by language. Something on order of 10,000 words for an active C2 vocabulary. That’s quite large by any standard. More like 5000 for C1, which is closer to the active vocabulary of a native speaker without tertiary education. Greek, I think, has a smaller core vocabulary, but a larger peripheral vocabulary. Which is why a mastery of a smaller range of words goes further, but also why you never feel like you know all the words.

All this got me thinking in turn about two things:

1. Could you write Ancient Greek content keyed to CEFR guidelines?

To which the answer is yes. I am doing some experimenting in this area at the moment now, thinking through “okay, a person at A1 is attempting to learn core functional abilities in the language, to cover a certain range of situations and competencies, what is the Ancient Greek needed to do that?”

Don’t expect me to release Ancient Greek for A1 any time soon though…

That said, the amount and volume of material needed to go from A1 to A2, and then A2 to B1, and then B1 to B2, just grows and grows. You need reading material, listening material, watching material, and time spent in live conversation. And more and more of it. A full sequence of material to take you from A1 to C2, we are talking about a minimum of 2000 hrs of content. But really more. So, no, I am not releasing “Seumas’ Course to C2 Mastery in Ancient Greek.”

2. C2 isn’t unrealistic for PhD graduates in classical languages

I mean, plenty of them aren’t C2, but let’s put it like this – if you do a 3-4 year bachelor degree, and then 7 years for a PhD, that’s 10-11 years you’ve put into higher education. Even if you didn’t do Greek (or Latin or whatever) in school (which I didn’t, by the way), you could very reasonably get to B2 at the end of 4 years, which is often considered functional fluency, and then you have 7 years to reach C2, which is entirely achievable. That suggests to me that it is a methods problem, though it’s not only a methods problem. But PhDs in Ancient Greek could be C2 proficient active users of the language, if we designed our education systems to produce them.

[1] Foreign Language Annals, Vol. 49, Iss. 3, pp. 434–454. © 2016 by American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

I realised that not everybody is on twitter (blessed are you), and so here’s a short note that a few months back I started (yet) another blog/substack, in which I write about Christian life, praxis, and do book reviews. If that’s of interest to you, hie ye to jeltzz.substack.com

This weekend, I’ll be hosting an online conference on the online teaching of (classical) languages. If you haven’t heard that by now, apologies for not telling you! I thought I would put up a last call for registrations here. It’s On Saturday 15th October, 3-6pm US Eastern Time (New York). You can find out about our excellent range of speakers here:

I’d be so pleased to have you join us, and if you’d like to register, head along to this page and let us know.

Strange Fruit (original by Abel Meeropol)

(English Below)

καρπὸν τὰ τοῦ νότου ξύλα φέρει ἄτοπον

(ἐπί τε φύλλοις αἷμα, τῇ τε ῥίζῃ αἷμα)

ἀνέμῳ σῶμα αἰωρούμενον μέλαν νότῳ

ἄτοπος τῶν λευκῶν κρεμασθεὶς καρπός 

νόμιον τοῦ ἐσθλοῦ νότου θέαμα

ἐξῳδημένα τε ὄμματα στόμα τε διεστραμμένον

μαγνωλίᾱς εὐωδίᾱ καινή

καιομένης ὀσμὴ σαρκός ἀλέπτη 

καρπὸς τῇδε τοῖς κόραξι δρέπειν

τῷ ὑετῷ συλλέγειν, τῷ ἀνέμῳ ἀνασπᾶν

τῷ ἠελίῳ σήπειν, τῷ ξύλῳ καθιέναι

καρπὸς τῇδε ἄτοπός τε πικρός τε.

Original

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

(Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,)

Black body swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

(The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,)

Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh,

(And the sudden smell of burning flesh.)

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

I realise that by now you are mostly used to me starting umpteen projects. Some of those get finished. Some of them are ongoing. And some eventually wither and die due to my lack of impetus. Anyway, none of that deters me, really. I spend my free time working on things that I get passionate about, and if that passion gets sustained to completion, all the better for you and for me.

All of which is to say that I’ve been working away at something else new recently, and I want to share a small glimpse of it. The idea is to produce a Reader’s version of the LXX Psalms, with accompanying devotional commentary and notes. It aims to do three things: (a) combine enough tools and tips in one place for your intermediate and up reader of Greek to read the Psalms with understanding, (b) alongside a framework for understanding the content and theme of each psalm, in a way that makes them more approachable for personal (and corporate) prayer, (c) while giving myself an excuse to diligently read and write about the Psalms in conversation with the great tradition of the church.

Unlike some other things that I’m working away at much more rapidly, I expect this to take a few years to reach completion, and I’m quite okay with that. I’ll post future samples for this to my patreon.

LXX Psalms Dev Reader Sample

So, if you’ve read through parts one, two, three, four, you’ll have gathered that I have a lot of criticism of online theological education as a model. In this post I want to push back against myself, and really suggest that there are two key things that are worth thinking through and applying.

Firstly, I think we do need to circle back to the question of who theological education is for. And in this regards, I think the two different populations : (1) those heading into full-time vocational ministry, and (2) a broader group interested in theological education, set up different demands on theological educators. I would posit that generally speaking, the best approach for group 1 remains full-time residential community living and in-person instruction. I don’t think you can do formation of character and spiritual-formation in particular, very well, except through intentional community life. The shift of that type of education to online is a mistake.

I will add certain provisos. I do think that there’s a strong reverse case to be made, where people either involved in or aiming for vocational ministry in their current contexts should not be pulled out of those contexts. In that case there becomes an even stronger onus on the community, ecclesial or otherwise, to be the locus of spiritual formation. Let’s say, for instance, a ministry candidate from a minoritised ethnic group who is deeply embedded in their local ethnic-ecclesial community, and lives pretty far from seminary. It would be better, I propose, for that person to stay put, and be mentored in their context, and access theological education in terms of knowledge and skills, by distance. Preferably through online delivery + residential intensives. This should then become a kind of dialogic process between student, community, and seminary.

Insofar as online actually makes it possible to serve a broader theological education remit, increasing access to students who could not or would not otherwise take theological education, especially in terms of distance or part-time study, I think that’s a different kettle-of-fish. So, I think seminaries probably ought to make a conscious and clear distinction between “here’s our program for those training for congregational ministry, you come live here for 3-4 years, and you do X”, and “here’s our program for anyone else – you do a diploma/degree structure program, over an extended period of time, but this isn’t an equivalent to the other program”.

That said, my second main point is this: do (online) education better. I realise that in ’20 and ’21 it was a scramble for most professors. Everyone had to move online at a moment’s notice, and those who weren’t used to that found themselves balancing (= crushed) by not only the stress of the pandemic, but also the demands of online teaching. But, recorded lectures, static content, etc., will not do the job. If we want online education to be good, it needs investment. That means (a) that institutions and their teachers invest in making it good, and (b) that institutions spend money to make it good. Teachers can’t make it good if their institutions don’t enable and empower them to. Or, they shouldn’t. I know this won’t dissuade some from doing so anyway, but professors shouldn’t be up to 2am creating amazing online resources and investing untold unpaid hours for an institution that doesn’t value them and invest in them.

In my view, doing it better means we need active investment in (i) delivering quality content, (ii) with an active pedagogy that is prepared to do the hard and difficult work of moving beyond presentational and lecture type models, (iii) does not divorce content production from instructor-interaction, (iv) sustains and practices live synchronous interaction of instructor and students. Let me say it again, if online instruction is primarily content you consume, then how is it truly better than reading some books, listening to a free lecture series, or watching youtube tutorials?

I have yet to see an institution, seminary or secular, truly do online education well. I’ve seen plenty doing their best, but I’m waiting to see someone blow me away with an approach that is thought-through, pedagogically informed, and invested-in by the institution.

My third point is a bonus: neo-liberalism will gut seminaries. The massive on-going shift of neo-liberalism in tertiary education has the effect of turning faculty into employees, divesting the bulk of teaching to casualised adjuncts who are shut out of long-term academic careers because they are disposable waste-products of research programs, and treating the institution as a money-making endeavour in which administrators run the show. This is a mistake on every level, and it is bad for everyone except an elite. It shouldn’t be this way in seminaries, but the more that seminaries adopt college/university models, the more they trend in this direction as well. Seminaries need a renewed vision of what they are (a community of faith-scholars gathered around the common pursuit of knowledge seeking and knowledge sharing), and what they do (practice lives of scholarly virtue and inculcate others into the praxis and dogma of their communities). That ultimately means that faculty are the college, which means investing in long-term tenured faculty, as well as divesting themselves of a business model or a model in which administration is actually in charge.

Okay, I think I’m done. Hope you’ve enjoyed this series. If you ever find a college doing online well, let me know!

This upcoming term (Oct 2022) I’m launching a new class which I’m hoping will become a long running entity. It’s Greek Patristics Readings, and it differs in two important respects from my usual class offerings.

Firstly, unlike the vast majority of my classes, this class isn’t geared towards getting you speaking Greek. Would I love you to speak Ancient Greek? Absolutely. But I also know that’s a big demand, and by running this class more in English, I hope it will open the doors to more students who want to read early Christian theological literature with me.

Secondly, participants in this class will be involved in a project to create Steadman style readers for more patristics texts. If you aren’t familiar, Geoffrey Steadman has done significantly, magnificently valuable work in making Greek and Latin texts available in a format that enables more rapid reading, with vocabulary and commentary on the page with the text. I have previously done a few of these as pdfs, and one small book, but as you can see from the website, I haven’t worked actively on those for quite some time.

Thirdly, as a bonus one might say, I’m running this class at a considerable discount. That’s partly because I will be spending that hour reading patristic Greek whether anybody is in class with me or not, partly because I want to lower the barrier to reading these important texts from early church history as much as I reasonably can. So come along, this coming term we’ll be reading Ignatius of Antioch.

Upcoming classes!

(I stopped doing posts simply about upcoming classes, mostly to reduce clutter, but I realise some people read this blog but do not get updates on my courses via other means. So, I’ll make a habit of doing a regular post before each term, and then deleting it subsequently)

I have a range of classes beginning soon, and I’d love you to come and get a healthy dose of Latin or Ancient Greek with me. Courses on offer include:

Greek

Greek 101 – Intro classes working with Athenaze from chapter 1. Get started speaking from day 1.

Greek 102 (Sun, Thu) – Two continuing cohorts working with Athenaze from ch 7.

Greek 104 – A continuing cohort working with Athenaze from ch 17.

Greek 227: 1 Samuel LXX – in which we read and discuss 1 Samuel in Greek

Greek 273 : Plato III – in which we read Plato’s dialogues. Currently reading Meno

Greek 261 : Coulda Woulda Shoulda – A targeted class where we work on active use of Greek optatives.

Greek 266: Short intro to Conversational Greek – A 5-week only course where we sample strategies and activites for speaking Ancient Greek. Run on UK time.

Greek 292 : Harry Potter in AG – with Isaac : reading and discussing Peter Wilson’s translation in AG.

Greek 293 : Intermediate RPG lite – with Isaac : play a carefully scaffolded RPG-type story-telling game in Ancient Greek.

Latin

Latin 101 – A introductory course to Latin covering LLPSI 1-12 as well as readings from my Cassandra novella.

Latin 121 – For those who have done Familia Romana and are looking to consolidate their Latin. Reading and discussing selections from Gesta Romanorum

Latin 208 : Melanchthon on the Sufferings of Teachers – An intermediate reading and discussion class in Latin

Latin 233 : Proba – An intermediate reading and discussion class in Latin of her Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi.

Other things:

• If you can get a group of at least 2 people, I can put together a custom course to suit your needs.
• I have a number of scholarships available, if finances or other circumstances put these beyond your reach. These are particularly available to students from minoritised backgrounds. Contact me via email (thepatrologist@gmail.com) to apply.
• If you’re unsure of what might be a best fit for you, I’m happy to arrange a chat to discuss your background, needs, and goals in language learning.

1. Content transfer
2. Skill Development
3. Character formation

In this and a series of subsequent posts I’m going to think-out-loud my thoughts on theological colleges, seminaries, and online education. If you’re here usually for mostly classical language pedagogy, feel free to take a short break from reading! But otherwise, we’re going to be thinking about five core questions:

1. What is theological education for?
2. Who is theological education for?
3. What is education?
4. Who are our communities?
5. What happens when we go online?

And in today’s post I’m discussing the first two of these questions: what is TE for, and who is it for?

1. less and less people present as young unmarried persons ready to enter a lifetime of vocational ministry. They are often older, married, with children, and they are less likely to spend a whole ‘career’ in congregational ministry (because our patterns of work, career, vocation, etc., have also changed).
2. who goes to theological college has also changed, as education more broadly has become more accessible, more piecemeal, and more ‘configurable’. Few colleges offer only a single “here’s the 3-year package, sign up and enlist” model. Much more common are multiple degree programs, wide selection of electives, modular, part-time, etc., etc., which increases the diversity of people entering theological college, and hence changes the intended outcome