Notes on The Epistles of Ignatius to
Ephesians
Magnesians
Trallians
Romans
Philadelphians
Smyrnaeans
Ephesians: Positions himself repeatedly as a martyr-to-be, and focuses largely on unity--the importance of unity to believers and the church, and how Christians should be submitting themselves to the Bishop in the name of maintaining unity and obedience. Avoid false teachers (which they've done well so far) and false doctrines, pray, be humble, fear God, meet frequently, love each other, and remember the glory of the cross and God's calling on your lives.
Magnesians: Again, positions himself as a martyr-to-be and focuses largely on unity, with more emphasis on obedience and not dissenting than Ephesians. Refers both to the unity of the church and the unity of Christ as both flesh and spirit, with emphasis on honoring their (young) bishop and not acting outside the bishop's purview or against his wishes. Emphasizes that Christianity is not Judiasm, and that the church should leave behind Judaism and be only Christian.
Trallians: Obedience is a more important theme in this one than unity, though there's still a good deal about the importance of unity. The bishop and deacons should be obeyed; the importance of humility is stressed (using himself as an example); heretics and "snares of the devil" should be avoided. The particular heresy of the Doectae is emphasized as something to be avoided, and unity and love are the ending notes of the letter.
Romans: Really focuses on the martyr-to-be status, probably because if he's headed to Rome to be martyred and writing to Romans, they're the ones who are most likely to see him. "Don't free me!" and "Let the wild animals eat me" are interesting themes that do seem to say both "do!" and "don't!" at the same time, but I'm also unsure how much of my reading of that is colored by the lecture before reading. He asks that his martyrdom would actually attain, and that if/when people pray for him, it be for that, because the glory and kingdom of God are shown and he'll attain heaven through being killed for Christ(ianity?).
Philadelphians: Be unified in who you obey (the bishop), what you believe, and what you do (only one Eucharist). God (and also Ignatius) wants you to be unified and obedient, and it's also important that you not be Jewish, not go back to Judaism, and remember that Christianity is better than Judaism.
Smyrnaeans: Speaks bluntly against various heresies about Christ, both the idea that Christ was somehow not bodily crucified and that Christ did not have a body after the resurrection. This is also the most condemnatory of the letters we read, explicit in its claims that those who do not believe, who are not partaking in the Eucharist and prayer, and confessing the proper version of Christ, will all be damned.
Things I Like: It's always interesting to read more, and to see how authorship is impacted by form. Those things really come out in these letters.
Things I Don't Like: It's really disconcerting to me to see the beginnings of supercessionist theology in action, outside the canonized NT in addition to the various aspects of the NT that are already familiar to me.
Questions I Still Have: I need to think more about the idea that hierarchy is necessary for unity, and what the value of unity actually is. I'm not convinced that it's as important, at least now, as it was, and I'm not convinced that if we continue to insist on hierarchy we're actually doing good.
Also, given the "you're going to hell" vibe of the last letter, I'm curious about the evolution of the idea of hell/eternal punishment, particularly since it doesn't work that way in Judaism or even Paul's epistles.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
The Didache
From Earlychristianwritings.com
a.k.a. "The Teachings of the Apostles" or "The Teachings of The Twelve," probably not written by one of the Twelve, but written in their name so as to claim their authority.
Chapter 1 Summary: There are two ways, life and death. Be peaceful and always giving, even when you wind up giving because you are forced. Giving is better than receiving, but receiving when in need is acceptable. Be extremely thoughtful (prayerful?) about those to whom you give, waiting and being sure rather than doing so on impulse.
Chapter 2 Summary: Don't sin gravely.
Chapter 3 Summary: Don't sin in other, non-grave, ways. Be meek.
Chapter 4 Summary: Do good. Be kind, thoughtful, and carefully consider your actions, remembering that people are all people and all under God. Don't be a jerk. Acknowledge your sins, and don't think you can or should pretend you're without sin.
Chapter 5 Summary: The Way of Death is pretty much the opposite of everything in the first four chapters. Don't do it.
Chapter 6 Summary: Don't follow false teachers, and don't eat food that's been sacrificed to idols. It seems that there's the possibility of a slight but unclear reference to keeping kashrut laws when it says "concerning food, bear what you are able," but I'm not entirely sure what this would mean (is this admonition to keep the laws you can, or to separate Christian dietary law from Jewish?).
Chapter 7 Summary: Baptism--cold water is preferable, the one being baptized should fast for a day or two before, and there's an element of confession involved that isn't word-for-word prescribed.
Chapter 8 Summary: Rules for fasting--don't be a hypocrite, and prescriptions for when you should fast--and instruction to pray the Lord's Prayer 3x daily.
Chapter 9 Summary: Instructions for Eucharist--open only to baptized Christians--the prayers that should be said before Eucharist and over the bread.
Chapter 10 Summary: Prayer that should be said after Eucharist. Prophets should be "allowed to make Thanksgiving as much as they desire."
Chapter 11 Summary: True prophets are those who preach and teach for edification, stay only one day, (maybe two, but not three), act in accordance with God's laws, and don't ask for money or take more than bread.
Chapter 12 Summary: Accept other Christians for a day or two. If they want to stay, they should work and not be idle.
Chapter 13 Summary: First-fruits of wine, grain, meat, oil, bread, money, clothing, and possessions, go to the prophets. If you don't have a prophet, then first-fruits go to the poor.
Chapter 14 Summary: For Christian assembly, come together, confess, have communion, be thankful. Don't do this with people who are at odds with other Christians until they are reconciled to each other.
Chapter 15 Summary: How to appoint bishops and deacons. Accept reproof.
Chapter 16 Summary: Meet together often. Don't slack. The Lord is coming soon.
Things I Like: This is, in itself, a seemingly really nice summary of the now-canonical New Testament.
Things I Don't Like: I am highly, highly, HIGHLY skeptical of "abortion" being listed as a grave sin in Chapter 2. Cultural context like the presence of abortion in both medical and religious texts, and the determination of "life" as "quickening" in Christian tradition, as well as the likely religious/political agenda of the website itself make me think this is a very specific translation choice.
Questions I Still Have: Is the distinction drawn here between grave and other sins the beginning of, or otherwise related to, the Roman Catholic distinction between mortal and venial sin? This is more geeky curiosity than actually relevant to anything.
a.k.a. "The Teachings of the Apostles" or "The Teachings of The Twelve," probably not written by one of the Twelve, but written in their name so as to claim their authority.
Chapter 1 Summary: There are two ways, life and death. Be peaceful and always giving, even when you wind up giving because you are forced. Giving is better than receiving, but receiving when in need is acceptable. Be extremely thoughtful (prayerful?) about those to whom you give, waiting and being sure rather than doing so on impulse.
Chapter 2 Summary: Don't sin gravely.
Chapter 3 Summary: Don't sin in other, non-grave, ways. Be meek.
Chapter 4 Summary: Do good. Be kind, thoughtful, and carefully consider your actions, remembering that people are all people and all under God. Don't be a jerk. Acknowledge your sins, and don't think you can or should pretend you're without sin.
Chapter 5 Summary: The Way of Death is pretty much the opposite of everything in the first four chapters. Don't do it.
Chapter 6 Summary: Don't follow false teachers, and don't eat food that's been sacrificed to idols. It seems that there's the possibility of a slight but unclear reference to keeping kashrut laws when it says "concerning food, bear what you are able," but I'm not entirely sure what this would mean (is this admonition to keep the laws you can, or to separate Christian dietary law from Jewish?).
Chapter 7 Summary: Baptism--cold water is preferable, the one being baptized should fast for a day or two before, and there's an element of confession involved that isn't word-for-word prescribed.
Chapter 8 Summary: Rules for fasting--don't be a hypocrite, and prescriptions for when you should fast--and instruction to pray the Lord's Prayer 3x daily.
Chapter 9 Summary: Instructions for Eucharist--open only to baptized Christians--the prayers that should be said before Eucharist and over the bread.
Chapter 10 Summary: Prayer that should be said after Eucharist. Prophets should be "allowed to make Thanksgiving as much as they desire."
Chapter 11 Summary: True prophets are those who preach and teach for edification, stay only one day, (maybe two, but not three), act in accordance with God's laws, and don't ask for money or take more than bread.
Chapter 12 Summary: Accept other Christians for a day or two. If they want to stay, they should work and not be idle.
Chapter 13 Summary: First-fruits of wine, grain, meat, oil, bread, money, clothing, and possessions, go to the prophets. If you don't have a prophet, then first-fruits go to the poor.
Chapter 14 Summary: For Christian assembly, come together, confess, have communion, be thankful. Don't do this with people who are at odds with other Christians until they are reconciled to each other.
Chapter 15 Summary: How to appoint bishops and deacons. Accept reproof.
Chapter 16 Summary: Meet together often. Don't slack. The Lord is coming soon.
Things I Like: This is, in itself, a seemingly really nice summary of the now-canonical New Testament.
Things I Don't Like: I am highly, highly, HIGHLY skeptical of "abortion" being listed as a grave sin in Chapter 2. Cultural context like the presence of abortion in both medical and religious texts, and the determination of "life" as "quickening" in Christian tradition, as well as the likely religious/political agenda of the website itself make me think this is a very specific translation choice.
Questions I Still Have: Is the distinction drawn here between grave and other sins the beginning of, or otherwise related to, the Roman Catholic distinction between mortal and venial sin? This is more geeky curiosity than actually relevant to anything.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
In Spirit and Truth, Ch2
Chapter Focus: "five biblical passages that indicate how faithful worship involves seeing the world as it really is--that is, to see the world as revealed by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ" (33).
Main Points:
Reading 1: John 4:1-30--the Samaritan woman at the well
**Three major points of dramatic tension (pg 34):
*Jews and Samaritans generally didn't associate with each other
*Jewish men generally didn't associate with women not in their families
*This woman was an acknowledged sinner and rabbis didn't generally associate with acknowledged sinners
**"To worship in spirit and truth does not mean to worship in some sort of internal or private 'spiritual' manner as opposed to the public worship of the Jews or Samaritans. Spiritual worship is not opposed to life in the created world per se, but to the systems of the fallen world" (35-36, original italics, bold mine)
**"True worshippers, Jesus claims, will worship in a way that overcomes..divisions" (36)
Reading 2: Romans 12
**"When Paul tells the Romans to present their 'bodies as a living sacrifice' [he is] defining Christian worship within the sacrificial tradition of the Old Testament [Micah 6:6-8, Psalm 51:17], but especially the part of the tradition that stresses the ethical life of the worshiper" (36-37)
**"Reasonable worship with our bodies involves a transformed mind...a transformed way of seeing the world" (37). Reasonable worship is embodied, and involves more than individual bodies, but also the corporate body of Christ.
**"Our sacrifice requires that our life and work in the world conform to our worship, not that our worship conform to the world" (38, original emphasis)
Reading 3: 1 Corinthians 11--eating together as worship
**The context is a full meal, not the symbolic communion of today's services. So when the meal is/was stratified along socioeconomic lines, the divisions of the community prevented full communion of/with/as the Body of Christ. That's no good. This points to the importance of worship as corporate, not solely or primarily individual.
Reading 4: 1 Corinthians 14
**Community (that welcomes/honors/nurtures all) as worship
**Problem addressed: "members who did not care whether their personal worship habits were edifying for the community" (speaking in tongues in ways that are creating problems for the worshiping community as a whole) (39).
**Worship should/can/must be enthusiastic, but it also must be the case that personal worship habits that are performed in community are not detrimental to the community (40)
**One possible "solution"-style interpretation of 1 Cor 14 33a-36 is to say that Paul is insisting that women are subject to the same rules of controlling themselves as men. I don't buy it, as Paul didn't seem afraid of running out of paper in order to get across specific points, and adding the "when appropriate" or "just like men" suggested by the authors doesn't seem to be that difficult. And comparing women to petulant children does nothing (good) for me. (41)
Reading 5: The book of Revelation
**Rather than trying to figure out exactly what John meant and predict the end of the world, the authors "suggest that the Revelation to John is about how worship enables us to see more clearly what God has been up to in the world in every age between the first coming of Jesus and the second coming of Jesus. The Revelation gives us insight into how the world of the spirit (the divine realm) corresponds to the world of the here-and-now"( 43)
**That there is tension in the choice of who/what to worship is not intended to suggest that Christians should withdraw from the world, but rather that the world in which we live now does not function as it was intended to function, and in a world that is truly worshipful, "the glory and honor of the nations is a future of peace and abundance, with no more domination by death, poverty or privilege" (46)
Things I Really Like:
**Context and explanation for claims that might be otherwise unfamiliar--pg 37 is a well-reasoned explanation of why "spiritual worship" in 12:1 might better be translated as "reasonable" and the implications of that change.
**Pg 45, first full paragraph, is a very interesting way of thinking about "The Beast" and what it might look like today. It's refreshing to see proposed interpretations that not only acknowledge the presence of social and socioeconomic injustice, but link them very closely to God's heart.
Things I Need to Vent About:
**Saying that spiritual blindness has nothing to do with physical in/ability to see does absolutely nothing to stop privileging physical sight. This sort of language, along with other healing passages that link spiritual deficiency or problem to physical "defect," have serious historical and contemporary real-life implications for those of us whose abilities aren't normate, and just saying "but I don't mean REAL eyes!!" doesn't fix anything. I'm not going to call this something I need to get over. It's something that needs to be worked through, not only by me, but by theologians and Christianity in general.
**Is "complete fellowship with God" (36) possible for those of us not fully divine in addition to fully human? Genuine question.
Main Points:
Reading 1: John 4:1-30--the Samaritan woman at the well
**Three major points of dramatic tension (pg 34):
*Jews and Samaritans generally didn't associate with each other
*Jewish men generally didn't associate with women not in their families
*This woman was an acknowledged sinner and rabbis didn't generally associate with acknowledged sinners
**"To worship in spirit and truth does not mean to worship in some sort of internal or private 'spiritual' manner as opposed to the public worship of the Jews or Samaritans. Spiritual worship is not opposed to life in the created world per se, but to the systems of the fallen world" (35-36, original italics, bold mine)
**"True worshippers, Jesus claims, will worship in a way that overcomes..divisions" (36)
Reading 2: Romans 12
**"When Paul tells the Romans to present their 'bodies as a living sacrifice' [he is] defining Christian worship within the sacrificial tradition of the Old Testament [Micah 6:6-8, Psalm 51:17], but especially the part of the tradition that stresses the ethical life of the worshiper" (36-37)
**"Reasonable worship with our bodies involves a transformed mind...a transformed way of seeing the world" (37). Reasonable worship is embodied, and involves more than individual bodies, but also the corporate body of Christ.
**"Our sacrifice requires that our life and work in the world conform to our worship, not that our worship conform to the world" (38, original emphasis)
Reading 3: 1 Corinthians 11--eating together as worship
**The context is a full meal, not the symbolic communion of today's services. So when the meal is/was stratified along socioeconomic lines, the divisions of the community prevented full communion of/with/as the Body of Christ. That's no good. This points to the importance of worship as corporate, not solely or primarily individual.
Reading 4: 1 Corinthians 14
**Community (that welcomes/honors/nurtures all) as worship
**Problem addressed: "members who did not care whether their personal worship habits were edifying for the community" (speaking in tongues in ways that are creating problems for the worshiping community as a whole) (39).
**Worship should/can/must be enthusiastic, but it also must be the case that personal worship habits that are performed in community are not detrimental to the community (40)
**One possible "solution"-style interpretation of 1 Cor 14 33a-36 is to say that Paul is insisting that women are subject to the same rules of controlling themselves as men. I don't buy it, as Paul didn't seem afraid of running out of paper in order to get across specific points, and adding the "when appropriate" or "just like men" suggested by the authors doesn't seem to be that difficult. And comparing women to petulant children does nothing (good) for me. (41)
Reading 5: The book of Revelation
**Rather than trying to figure out exactly what John meant and predict the end of the world, the authors "suggest that the Revelation to John is about how worship enables us to see more clearly what God has been up to in the world in every age between the first coming of Jesus and the second coming of Jesus. The Revelation gives us insight into how the world of the spirit (the divine realm) corresponds to the world of the here-and-now"( 43)
**That there is tension in the choice of who/what to worship is not intended to suggest that Christians should withdraw from the world, but rather that the world in which we live now does not function as it was intended to function, and in a world that is truly worshipful, "the glory and honor of the nations is a future of peace and abundance, with no more domination by death, poverty or privilege" (46)
Things I Really Like:
**Context and explanation for claims that might be otherwise unfamiliar--pg 37 is a well-reasoned explanation of why "spiritual worship" in 12:1 might better be translated as "reasonable" and the implications of that change.
**Pg 45, first full paragraph, is a very interesting way of thinking about "The Beast" and what it might look like today. It's refreshing to see proposed interpretations that not only acknowledge the presence of social and socioeconomic injustice, but link them very closely to God's heart.
Things I Need to Vent About:
**Saying that spiritual blindness has nothing to do with physical in/ability to see does absolutely nothing to stop privileging physical sight. This sort of language, along with other healing passages that link spiritual deficiency or problem to physical "defect," have serious historical and contemporary real-life implications for those of us whose abilities aren't normate, and just saying "but I don't mean REAL eyes!!" doesn't fix anything. I'm not going to call this something I need to get over. It's something that needs to be worked through, not only by me, but by theologians and Christianity in general.
**Is "complete fellowship with God" (36) possible for those of us not fully divine in addition to fully human? Genuine question.
In Spirit and Truth, Ch1
Main Points:
**The good old days weren't always good...and really, we're a lot like the actual Christian church of the past, especially in that the need for renewal and responsiveness in worship isn't new. (14-15)
**Dissatisfaction seems to fall into two camps--traditional and contemporary--that will at least agree that something needs to change (15-16)
**Both "traditional" and "contemporary" worship styles and sides of the worship wars have problems--nostalgia, confusing and archaic language and forms, difficulty relating to "seekers" for traditionalists; consumerist model that ignores tradition and its valuable aspects in favor of entertainment for contemporary desires (16-17)
**Both miss the "more basic purpose for worship:...the way God forms us through the story of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit in the practices of living according to the Truth. Worship begins in what God does in us." (17, original emphasis)
**Worship in a Post-Modern World section lays out how Enlightenment mentalities have shaped our approaches to truth, and how being stuck in Enlightenment-Modernist notions of truth and verifiable reality present us with the major problems we face in our contemporary multi-religious world.
**One possible solution to the problems posed by our post-modern world is to "see our own particular religious tradition as our gift from God which we offer to the world with a mixture of boldness and humility as witness to what God has done among us" (21)
**Traditionalists respond to PoMo problems desire continuity and stability through looking back; nostalgia is the dominant characteristic of this view of what worship should be, and "sentimental longing for the past" is a real risk (21-22)
**Contemporary advocates want worship that meets the demands of a buyer's market, but "worship that is as transitory as the latest advertising gimmick cannot avoid appearing to be another throwaway item," and "cynicism and escapism" are the risks of this viewpoint (22)
**"Four basic levels of the Christian story: catholic..., United Methodist..., local (congregational), and individual (personal)" (24)
**"worship is essential for Christians if we want to move beyond believing with our heads to believing with our hearts. ...authentic Christian faith...must be an embodied belief" (25, original emphasis)
**DEFINITION OF RITUAL: "patterns of behavior that express the beliefs and values of a community" (25)
**Though we generally prioritize theology over ritual, ritual is inescapable. The only major questions we can really have about it are "how do we acknowledge our rituals?" and "what do we do with them when they no longer serve us well?" (The second question is mine, not the book's, but I truly think it's an important one) (27)
**Worship as Worldview subheading (28-29)--proposes an almost performative understanding of worship that focuses on acting and enacting, through repetition, the shaping of both the story and the people worshiping. Worship creates both the selves who worship and the selves who go out from worship, though there's clearly a notion of subjectivity here that wouldn't be present in Butler.
**"When our worship is empowered by the Holy Spirit, we learn how to be the Body of Christ in service to all of God's wounded creation--not only to human beings, but also to the whole planet" (30)
Things I Really Like:
**Open acknowledgment of real failings in both contemporary churches and the historical church. No delusions of perfection at any point
**Solid chapter conclusion pgs 30-31 that clearly and usefully recaps the material.
Things I Need to Vent About:
**I don't see anything wrong or inherently problematic about being part of "a world that has lost its belief in a coherent story" (pg21). We create our own narratives about how and why things work, and sometimes they're coherent, and sometimes they're not, and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. We take what works, toss or revise what doesn't, and go from there. I feel like coherence is over-valued.
**Iceberg metaphors (28) are worn out and annoy me.
**There's a point that I didn't mark up well enough that claims that worship is about seeing the world as God sees it. That, to me, seems arrogant and impossible at best, and the sort of unattainable goal that could easily get in the way of other understandings and experiences of worship. I'm just SO uncomfortable with anything that claims access to Divine understanding without at the very least acknowledgment that we're not experiencing Divine understanding, we're experiencing a limited human understanding of what Divine understanding might be, that I think it's getting in my way of understanding why the authors think this is a good idea and what they want us to get from it.
**The good old days weren't always good...and really, we're a lot like the actual Christian church of the past, especially in that the need for renewal and responsiveness in worship isn't new. (14-15)
**Dissatisfaction seems to fall into two camps--traditional and contemporary--that will at least agree that something needs to change (15-16)
**Both "traditional" and "contemporary" worship styles and sides of the worship wars have problems--nostalgia, confusing and archaic language and forms, difficulty relating to "seekers" for traditionalists; consumerist model that ignores tradition and its valuable aspects in favor of entertainment for contemporary desires (16-17)
**Both miss the "more basic purpose for worship:...the way God forms us through the story of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit in the practices of living according to the Truth. Worship begins in what God does in us." (17, original emphasis)
**Worship in a Post-Modern World section lays out how Enlightenment mentalities have shaped our approaches to truth, and how being stuck in Enlightenment-Modernist notions of truth and verifiable reality present us with the major problems we face in our contemporary multi-religious world.
**One possible solution to the problems posed by our post-modern world is to "see our own particular religious tradition as our gift from God which we offer to the world with a mixture of boldness and humility as witness to what God has done among us" (21)
**Traditionalists respond to PoMo problems desire continuity and stability through looking back; nostalgia is the dominant characteristic of this view of what worship should be, and "sentimental longing for the past" is a real risk (21-22)
**Contemporary advocates want worship that meets the demands of a buyer's market, but "worship that is as transitory as the latest advertising gimmick cannot avoid appearing to be another throwaway item," and "cynicism and escapism" are the risks of this viewpoint (22)
**"Four basic levels of the Christian story: catholic..., United Methodist..., local (congregational), and individual (personal)" (24)
**"worship is essential for Christians if we want to move beyond believing with our heads to believing with our hearts. ...authentic Christian faith...must be an embodied belief" (25, original emphasis)
**DEFINITION OF RITUAL: "patterns of behavior that express the beliefs and values of a community" (25)
**Though we generally prioritize theology over ritual, ritual is inescapable. The only major questions we can really have about it are "how do we acknowledge our rituals?" and "what do we do with them when they no longer serve us well?" (The second question is mine, not the book's, but I truly think it's an important one) (27)
**Worship as Worldview subheading (28-29)--proposes an almost performative understanding of worship that focuses on acting and enacting, through repetition, the shaping of both the story and the people worshiping. Worship creates both the selves who worship and the selves who go out from worship, though there's clearly a notion of subjectivity here that wouldn't be present in Butler.
**"When our worship is empowered by the Holy Spirit, we learn how to be the Body of Christ in service to all of God's wounded creation--not only to human beings, but also to the whole planet" (30)
Things I Really Like:
**Open acknowledgment of real failings in both contemporary churches and the historical church. No delusions of perfection at any point
**Solid chapter conclusion pgs 30-31 that clearly and usefully recaps the material.
Things I Need to Vent About:
**I don't see anything wrong or inherently problematic about being part of "a world that has lost its belief in a coherent story" (pg21). We create our own narratives about how and why things work, and sometimes they're coherent, and sometimes they're not, and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. We take what works, toss or revise what doesn't, and go from there. I feel like coherence is over-valued.
**Iceberg metaphors (28) are worn out and annoy me.
**There's a point that I didn't mark up well enough that claims that worship is about seeing the world as God sees it. That, to me, seems arrogant and impossible at best, and the sort of unattainable goal that could easily get in the way of other understandings and experiences of worship. I'm just SO uncomfortable with anything that claims access to Divine understanding without at the very least acknowledgment that we're not experiencing Divine understanding, we're experiencing a limited human understanding of what Divine understanding might be, that I think it's getting in my way of understanding why the authors think this is a good idea and what they want us to get from it.
Um, What?
A seminary reading notes blog?
Yep.
Srsly?
Mmmhmmm.
Nerdy?
Unabashedly.
A good way to avoid creating more notebooks that have to get lugged around every time I move?
Hopefully.
A space for collaboration, information swapping, and maybe even discussion?
That'd be nice. For now, I just need a space to track my thoughts without killing more trees and wasting more pens than I already do when reading. So rather than try to start a good habit at a bad time, like when I tried to systematically do reading notes for the first time while doing my PhD exams, I figured I'd use my first year as a new start to a hopefully productive way of learning. So long as I remember to tag everything, I have high hopes that this will work well.
Yep.
Srsly?
Mmmhmmm.
Nerdy?
Unabashedly.
A good way to avoid creating more notebooks that have to get lugged around every time I move?
Hopefully.
A space for collaboration, information swapping, and maybe even discussion?
That'd be nice. For now, I just need a space to track my thoughts without killing more trees and wasting more pens than I already do when reading. So rather than try to start a good habit at a bad time, like when I tried to systematically do reading notes for the first time while doing my PhD exams, I figured I'd use my first year as a new start to a hopefully productive way of learning. So long as I remember to tag everything, I have high hopes that this will work well.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)