Week 12 at Yale: Finishing the Semester

This post is part of my series “God and Man at Yale Divinity.” For the related post on the 2019 Harvard-Yale game protest, see The 2019 Harvard-Yale Game Protest.

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

I just completed the twelfth week of my first semester at Yale Divinity School, the last full week of classes. It’s hard to believe how quickly this semester has passed.

We’re off the entire next week for Thanksgiving, which will provide valuable time to finish papers. When we return, there are two regular days of classes, then Wednesday serves as a makeup for Labor Day, reading week, and final exams.

Then that’s it. The semester is over.

Finishing Up Papers

This week, I made some significant progress on my New Testament paper. I have my paper in a cohesive form, which means the most strenuous work is over.

Right now, I’m going back and adding some additional sources, making some edits, and rethinking some arguments where necessary. I anticipate this taking a few days.

Once I am done with that, though, I will be able to begin reshaping and significantly revising the paper. I am becoming much more optimistic about my ability to get everything done, though I will have a packed schedule during Thanksgiving break to get there.

Trimming Down

I have found the most challenging part of writing papers here so far to be working within the space limitations. I know that it is an excellent skill to develop—to be concise and focused—but it’s a constraint that I really didn’t face in college.

I recall my professors being pretty loose about the maximum paper limitations. I wrote several papers for undergrad—not just my thesis—that were significantly longer than what I am writing this semester.

Ten to fifteen pages really isn’t a lot of space to do much of anything. Things have to be extremely tight, and I have to jettison a lot of good material to make things work.

Emphasis on Papers

I picked up a stack of books from the library this week to use as sources in my World Christianity class. I have a lot of work to do on that one still. And, while working on completing these papers, I have to study for final exams.

The main concern, however, is not the exams, but the papers. They are the bulk of the work and a huge portion of my grade. They are incredibly time-consuming, yet I enjoy doing them.

I enjoy doing the research, learning about a subject, and putting something cohesive together that I can share, even if it is only with the instructor.

There is a tremendous amount of pride that comes with writing a good paper, and I am so grateful to be where I am, to have found something that I enjoy doing so much. If I can make a career out of this, I know that I will have really made it.

In the end, I hope to have some work of which I can be proud and which can serve me well going forward, particularly since I hope to move onto Ph.D. work when I complete the program here.

I am glad to be here. I am grateful every day that I have been able to come to a place like this. It is such a tremendous honor and privilege to be a student at Yale, and I will be forever grateful for it.

Final Exams

The final exams here are nothing like the exams I had in law school, which is a bit comforting.

In law school, I would dedicate forty hours to study for each exam. With five exams, that would amount to two-hundred hours of study time per semester.

I think I studied for maybe three hours for my New Testament mid-term exam, and I did reasonably well on it.

I probably studied closer to ten hours for my Greek exam, but that was mostly going over vocabulary.

I anticipate something similar for the finals. The finals are just really not a huge source of stress for me. I’ll study the best I can, and I’m fairly confident I’ll do fine. I don’t have a large amount of anxiety surrounding them, as I did with the exams in law school.

I guess we’ll see, though.

Resources at Yale

This week I had my last section meeting in New Testament. For this meeting, we went to the Yale Art Gallery, which is quite an impressive place.

We viewed exhibitions of sacred spaces from Dura-Europos, an ancient city in modern-day Syria on the eastern border of the old Roman Empire. Dura-Europos was a Roman garrison city that was excavated in the 1920s and 1930s by a Yale-led archaeological team, which is why the university possesses such a remarkable collection of artifacts from the site.

The recovered remains, which were buried for thousands of years, are on exhibit there. They are incredibly well preserved, and they contain the earliest known examples of Christian art. (Also on display is art from the city’s synagogue and a local mystery cult.)

It was an impressive thing to see, and it is a reminder of just how much Yale has to offer and what incredible resources the university possesses.

It is a real privilege to study here and to be a part of the Yale community. It’s a shame the protesters at the Harvard-Yale game don’t realize just how lucky they are.

This is a great place. I am thankful every time I get to step on this beautiful campus.

Religion, Art, and Resistance to Empire

There are some things here, nonetheless, that seem so absurd to me that I cannot help but to take note. (Though, it never occurred to me to protest and disrupt other people’s lives to make my point of view known.)

One such example at the Divinity School is the class “Religion, Art, and Resistance to Empire” that I noted in my previous post.

This class focuses on the efforts of the Philippine people to fight back against American rule over the islands from the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 until the United States granted the Philippines its independence after World War II.

According to the advertisement for the course, the class “will explore religious and artistic response and modes of resistance to U.S. imperialism, using the Philippines as [the] primary case study.”

I am not one to defend the evil deeds that the United States has committed over the years. The focus, however, on America’s sins while ignoring the much greater atrocities in world history—and the great good America has done—says a lot about the attitude here and among the woke scold in general.

For example, I have not seen any classes focused on the evils of communism in light of the religious persecutions that occurred in the Soviet Union or continue to occur in China, North Korea, and Cuba.

Only European/American capitalistic cultures are worthy of disdain.