Guinea Pigs Doing Theology

One of the things that's been on my vocational To-Do list for a very long time is teaching a class called "The Lamp and The Mirror: Illuminating and Reflecting on Personal Theology." I have an outline, but haven't actually road-tested any of it yet. And I'd like to present it to a group of volunteers and get feedback from them before I offer it to the general public and ask to be paid for it.

It occurred to me yesterday (after my conversation with princesca) that it might work to create an LJ community and invite my Friends to spend six weeks (one lesson a week, giving plenty of time for reflection and response) to participate.

Who is the class geared to? Anyone who wants to dig into his or her personal belief system, whatever spiritual path they are on. It is more slanted toward people who haven't done this kind of in-depth work before -- and I suspect that, on the average, my Friends here reflect more on their spiritual lives than the general populace -- but I think there is always value in looking past one's habits of belief to their roots and implications.

From my outline: "The class is not about teaching a specific theology, but clarifying what each of us believes, why we believe it, and what the consequences of that belief are. The goal is that by the end of the class, participants will have a deeper understanding of their personal faith, and will have developed tools for further reflection and investigation in this area, if desired."

( The Outline is Behind This Cut )

Participating in the class would involve reading lesson materials I post to the class community, posting your own responses to the lesson text, posting your homework, and reading and responding to the posts of others. Part of the purpose of the class is to be enriched by the diversity of spiritual experiences of the group, experience the dignity of being witnessed and affirmed in personal beliefs, and grow from the experience of asking and responding to mutually respectful questions.

Again, I sense that the people for whom this class will be most valuable are those who don't engage in community reflection to the degree that LJ'ers do.

What do you think?

Any volunteers?

If you have any LJ friends who you think would like to participate, please feel free to point them to this entry.

bookchick, I'll see you in a few hours!

More Alarms At Night

[A No-Prize to whoever can identify the original source of the title of this entry.]

I don't know if anyone ever checks time-stamps on LJ entries (I usually don't) -- but my last entry was posted just before 6:00am on a Sunday morning.

So what the blazes am I doing up at that hour on a Sunday?

I found out this morning that my cell phone has a friendly little feature that I'd never encountered before: an audio alert that the battery is almost dead.

Except that I'd never heard this alert tone before, and it only goes off at five or ten minute intervals, so it was hard to find it. I'd left my phone in my purse last night -- which is why it hadn't been plugged in to the charger on my bedside table.)

So after being partially awakened a couple of time by a loud series of descending tones, I finally got up to track down the sound. Having never heard my own phone make this noise, it never occurred to me to check it. By the time I'd heard the alerts three more times, and run around the house madly trying to figure out what it was, I was awake.

But now I'm going back to bed.

Let's Try It Then

Enough of you have already indicated an interest in "test driving" my class, that I've set up a new community, lamp_mirror

Please drop by and join the community if you're interested in taking part.

Because I'm going to be inviting some non-LJ friends to join, I've also established a new LJ account for public contact, which you'll see on the community.

We'll get started in a few days.

Thanks for your support!

Swashbuckling is a Super Power!

Via dancingchaplain

I always did like Nightcrawler best. . .

( Behind a cut because the image is large )

Text!

Thanks to bookchick, who did a terrific "birthday" tarot reading with me this afternoon (more on which tomorrow, perhaps) and then spent more than an hour thrashing through my website text with me and giving great feedback.

Tomorrow I will contact my webmaster friend and pass along the text, plus confer about material for supporting pages.

I need to add a page that gives more info about what a spiritual direction session is like, and talk about fees.