Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Judges, Jail and Jesus

I cut off my blog a little early last night so let me tell you a bit about what we did. If I remember correctly, I stopped blogging to go to dinner. Dinner was great last night. The Andrews, Dyana, Jordan, two of Dyana’s friends that we have assimilated into our group (Esther and Kelsey), and I ate dinner at Appel. The food wasn’t any better than it has been, but we had a fun time. We had airport syndrome again, minus the fatigue. We were all making hilarious jokes and people stared at us from across several table lengths, but we didn’t care. We had a great time. Unfortunately we had to set a more serious tone so that we could study.

When we got back to the dorms, we all had to go upstairs and get our course packets so that we could commence our studies. Last night we studied pieces from the New Testament. The main theme of last night’s reading was to love everyone, despite any kind of treatment you get from them. There were also parts about how you should conduct your life in terms of charity and prayer. After today’s lecture, I definitely noticed a bit more about the subject than I did when we went over the material at Pinole. The discussion session also helped bring in some other views about Jesus and the philosophies he was informed of by God. I was also able to use some of the ideas we came up with last night in today’s discussion. I have a feeling that meeting in a group like that will be of great benefit to us.

Prof. K’s lecture today was interesting. One of the main points he made today was that the Bible is full of contradiction. The strange thing is, he claimed that this didn’t make it any less reliable of a source. That confused me. I wouldn’t trust a statement or source that was as contradictory as some of the pieces we read. I don’t know why I’m not used to contradiction yet because Plato had a lot of it and so did a few other philosophers we studied. I will just have to move past it though.

Our discussion session was very calm, just as I thought it would be. Everybody was basically building off of what others were saying or posing a question that would support the other side of an argument. I had tried a Socratic Seminar in my English class last year, but it failed because nobody was talking. This is how the discussion was supposed to be. It was very informative and a little fun. I hope our discussions continue in this direction.

After our discussion session, we enjoyed another wonderful lunch at Trillium. Since I told you about it yesterday, I’m just going to skip ahead to our guest speaker. Prof. K invited Judge Judy (not the one from TV) to speak to our class. She was very informative. She spoke about the different kind of cases that she handles, different aspects of broken laws and about the implications of old laws. I enjoyed listening to her speak. She was very confident and had the complete attention of everyone in the lecture hall. I have to admit, I was not looking forward to taking more notes, but I’m glad that I had a chance to listen to her.

After we listened to Judge Judy, we came back to the dorm and now I’m writing this blog. The Andrews and I are about to go to office hours with our TA so that we can make a good impression and clear up anything we didn’t quite understand. Until tomorrow, I’m signing off.
PS- Here are some more great pictures of Cornell's campus. Enjoy











2 comments:

  1. Alex,
    Your pictures are great, but could you put a brief description of what the photo is for those of us who have never been to Ithaca or Cornell? Thanks. Mom (Darlene Elms)

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  2. I too felt as though this was a very different spin on the old and New Testament ---- and this put both into context with law and the individual, I thought.
    Nice summary-Ms. K

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