LateAntique

I want to know too! Congrats!

Anger.

Single

I know what you mean. I just wish something would come along...

I am a bit of an old man at heart, but I hate the idea of those Kindle e-reader things. There's something wonderful about going to the library, sitting at your desk, and reading a book. I like being able to feel the book too. I hate reading on the computer and I can't imagine I'd like reading on one of those new-fangled e-readers. Now get off my lawn, Matlock's on and I've got some soup ready!

A quick look on Duke's website will show you that the Religion Dept. is not the Div School.

I had the exact same thought last night: what am I paying all this money for? If I pay a school up to 100 dollars on an application fee, I anticipate that buys me a little more than a folder in which they shove all my paperwork, not considering what is or isn't in there. Likewise, the website has said 'Application Complete' for months now - what would I have thought had next week come and gone and nobody had seen my application?

I decided to post this here instead of 'Transcripts' because it pertains to 'waiting it out'. I completed my Catholic University application back in November. Knowing that they have rolling admissions, I thought it was odd that I had not yet heard anything. So I emailed the admin asst. of the program (who is incredibly nice, by the way - it's refreshing) to ask if she knew of a timeline that we would start hearing back. She said that professors are reviewing the files this week and will meet next week to chat about who gets in. "Great!" I thought. I emailed the head cheese, someone with whom I've been in contact since last summer, to ask if he wanted me to send my updated transcript since I did really well last semester. He said something along the lines of: "I don't think your application has even come into the Dean's office yet (from admissions, that is)." WHAT?!?!! The website says my app is complete - but I call today to find out that they're missing a transcript (a transcript from another school I attended awhile ago and was told it was ultimately not important). I had that school send the transcript *twice* and it's still not there? Is this a conspiracy? I told her I'd mail my unofficial copy of this transcript out tomorrow if she would please just get my application into the professors' hands. Long story short: Be diligent. Call these schools to make sure they've really got everything together. Had I not dropped a professor this note, next week would have gone by and I would never have known my application wasn't in their hands.

I liked WKH? and Bonfire of the Humanities. Also good is The Devil Knows Latin. Peter Green's Classical Bearings is old (I believe he wrote it about the state of Classics in the 80's - when most of us were born) but still a very insightful book. I just read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which made me very happy to be in Classics. Also - I'm not a neo-con (as Hanson and Heath are often labeled), I just think they've got good points concerning the woeful state of education today.

I'd like to see more text critics, undergrads who know the languages better, more generalists and less people who spend their entire careers giving a feminist reading of line 2 in some Catullus poem.

Liar

Hi Chai, The NT and Early Christian Lit program was absorbed by the Div school's program awhile back. David Martinez, who headed up the NT and Early Christian Lit, is still there. Depending upon your interests, Chicago could be a great place to study the NT and Early Christianity. Margaret Mitchell is great, David Martinez is a papyrologist/paleographer, Hans-Josef Klauck is one of the nicest people you will ever meet, etc. Also, the Divinity school at Chicago is not like Duke's or Emory's Div schools - there is no separate religion department at Chicago, so the "Div" school is really the religion program. Your classes will not be taught from a confessional standpoint - your professor may or may not be a Christian (whereas if you attended Duke Divinity, it's guaranteed your prof is a 'believer' of some stripe). Hope that helps.

Applicant

Thanks for taking one for the team. Now that you've got that one rejection out of the way, the acceptances you get will be that much better.

ECU

Translation. That's all I'm doing and it works pretty well to keep my mind off of things.

Pharaoh

Alexander (of Macedon)

Exactly. Ever since the fundamentalist take over in the late 80's/early 90's in the SBC, the seminaries basically just hire their own. They're suspicious of people with degrees from outside the SBC seminaries. Dallas Theological is not one of the six SBC seminaries (Golden Gate, Midwestern, Southeastern, etc). There are plenty of DTS graduates who go on to do good work (I know Ben from the above post), but they tend not to hold to the fundamentalist dispensational views of DTS. If you want to teach at an SBC seminary, go to Southern, Southeastern, or Southwestern, depending upon your interests.

None of the above.

I'm double majoring in Classics and Religious Studies, both of which are seen as esoteric and useless in our modern society. I get a lot of this: Person A: So what do you study? Me: I'm a Classics major. Person A: Like Moby Dick/Shakespeare/Catcher in the Rye? A: What do you study? Me: Religion A: So you want to be a priest? OR Me: Religion A: Well I think [insert insane rambling on the nature of religion/Jesus/god/whomever based mostly off of the DaVinci Code/Wikipedia/History Channel]. Basically, when I tell people I study Classics, they just have no idea what it is. When I tell people I study Religion, they have a few responses: they confess to me, they give me their own personal faith statement (which is typically a bullshit 'citizen of the world, I hold to mutually exclusive theologies because I'm too stupid/lazy to study' statement), or they find out I'm a Roman Catholic and try to witness to me (this is the Bible belt, ya'll).

Network

By the way, Aeschylus is killing me.

Indeed. I had thought about applying there to work with him, but I'm firmly entrenched in the Farrer/Goulder/Goodacre camp when it comes to Q.

I can dig that - and in a confessional setting, that's probably something they're looking for (meeting the current challenges for the faith).