Academics
I hope you don't mind these rambling conference dispatches: Day 3 at Oxford Patristics. I enjoyed some interesting papers on Gregory of Nyssa. It's always tricky at a conference to go to papers that are not directly tied to your interests, but are tied enough that
Updates
It's the morning of the 3rd day of the conference here. Firstly, one could play 'beard bingo' here. There are several different types to watch out for: 1. Hipster theologian, 2. American college professor, 3. 18th century gentleman, 4. Orthodox priest, 5. American college professor '
Academics
Well, today I'm off to Oxford. I'm attending the XVII. International Conference on Patristic Studies, where I'll be giving a paper on Tuesday morning about Basil's exegetical practice in Against Eunomius, very specifically on Acts 2:36 and how this interacts with
Academics
Recently I've enjoyed reading two unrelated but stimulating discussions taking place. The first example you can read here and here. I would summarise Skinner's concerns in the second post that in a democratised (and that's probably not the right word) sphere, everyone feels the
Pedagogy
Last week I got to some chatting about the difference composition exercises might make between classical Greek students and Koine/Seminary students' learning outcomes. Here I share some thoughts on composition exercises. If you look in most traditional textbooks for classical languages, exercises typically focus on translation. The bulk
Pedagogy
I don't really like to spend my time criticising pedagogical approaches, but last week a sponsored post by Dr. Kinneer appeared over at http://www.challies.com/sponsored/ancient-greek-for-the-digital-age Now, I am all for digital tools, and I think what Dr. Kinneer goes
Greek
I have taken courses in both disciplines, and taught students who have come out of both processes, and Classical students almost always have better Greek than NT students. There's a very simple set of reasons for this though, and it doesn't really have to do with
Greek
As I mentioned earlier, I spent the last week taking a small group through some selections of Josephus' Antiquities. In the course of doing so, it again struck me the great gap there is between training in Greek grammar and fundamentals, and reading actual texts. This was highlighted in
Language
As I mature as both a reader of ancient texts and a teacher, I find myself saying a lot more, "It depends...", as well as "You could translate it that way", "That's one way to render it", and a lot of "
Updates
As promised, I have a new short pdf text up at Patristic Readers, it's Gregory of Nyssa's Ad Simplicium, De Fide. I decided to tackle this short text after finishing up Ad Ablabium, partly because the latter is too short for a print volume by itself,
Latin
No true Scotsman is a form of (informal) logical fallacy, of the type where having set up definition X of something, e.g. “A scotsman is blah, blah, blah”, and faced with a particular example, “Well then, so-and-so is a scotsman, based on your definition”, the interlocutor moves
Pedagogy
Here are some ideas I was tossing around with some students last week. Let me list the exercises first. 1. Read a passage, 10 or so verses or more, at a measured pace. No analysis, just ask yourself, “what percentage of that did I understand?" 2. Read a passage