Posted by giveawayboy on July 25, 2004 at 12:06:06:
In Reply to: Re: Dostoevsky posted by PS on July 23, 2004 at 16:49:04:
Steve: Cool! Also glad some friends were with us. I'd love to get a bunch of them in classes. ;-) Sali is a Religious Studies major at USF now.
Bill: Yes, friends were with us, but in my dreams we are always together. So, how did Friday night go? Good I hope. I heard Alyssa was there. Neat!
Steve: I really am excited about the masters classes I have coming up next month.
Bill: It all sounds very exciting though I can't connect to all the particulars. I guess it's because you are on the inside of the religious studies world. Different perspective I guess.
Steve: I am working on two thesis projects, and I have no clue which I will use for my masters thesis. The first is on the need for (and lack of) the study and validation of authentic religious experience in New Testament scholarship, this study being correlated with the study of the phenomenology of religions, universals in religious experience, and true objectivity vs. the religious experience of the scholar. Of the many scholars considered in the three correlative areas, I build most on Joachin Wach.
Bill: I figured you and Wach would stick together a bit. I was right on.
Steve: The second is an examination of the development of the "new perspective" in Pauline studies, considering the various theories proposed since the Holocaust in addressing the decontextualized misinterpretation of Paul's theology long embraced by the church (with its concordant anti-Judaic tendencies), inadequately understood through the lenses of Augustine and Luther, resulting in the post-Reformation interpretational model that Krister Stendahl neatly dubbed "the introspective conscience of the West."
Bill: Would love to hear more about this, but that should wait until we have any human to human time.
Steve: BTW, "19th-Century Russian Literature" was one of my favorite under-grad non-Religious Studies courses. I did term projects on Crime and Punishment--first on the salvation/resurrection themes and the "repentance" of Raskolnikov, followed by a more in-depth analysis of his dual natures.
Bill: I still have yet to read CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. I've only read BROTHERS KARAMAZOV and some shorter stories by Dostoevsky. I also read FATHERS AND SONS Turgenev. Tolstoy always left me with this strange Gibran feeling. Not sure why. I liked Solzhenitsyn's THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, but read it so long ago. I want to visit it and BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. You are by far the more accomplished of the two of us in the world of Russian lit. My Russian claim to fame would be Marc Chagall, the Jewish artist, who loved to paint Jesus as if he were the Messiah. I think Marc had an inner sensitivity to spiritual reality. His works are powerful and haunting.
Peace, Bill