"Faciendi et Credendi" means, in Latin, "Believing and doing." For the Christian, this should evoke the Letter of James: "What good is it if someone says he has faith but does not have works?" (2:14). It also evokes the idea that the study of religion involves both the beliefs and practices of a religious community. Finally, it recalls that students of theology and religious studies are engaged in both classroom learning and active participation in volunteer service, ministry, etc.

Faciendi et Credendi is the blog for the Religious Studies/Theology Program at Loras College. It is an ongoing, public account of student progress that the program requires of all its majors. The blog provides an electronic “space” for students to reflect on their experiences as a major and on the relationship of those experiences to other facets of their life at Loras.

In order to post to the blog, first find the appropriate topic by clicking on the Blog Prompts tab. Find the prompt based on how long it has been since you declared your religious studies/theology major. Then, return to the Home tab and click on New Post in the top right corner of the page. This will open an html editor where you can type your post.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Semester 2 Week 6

Last semester I took a class called Wisdom of the Prophets.  In this course we dove deeply into the Old Testament prophets and learned what their individual themes were, how they portrayed their message to the Jewish people, and how God was portrayed in each of their books. Some of the themes we saw in the Old Testament were the suffering servant in Isaiah, which is related to Christ as the suffering servant in the New Testament, justice, and repentance.  Personally, it was a very interesting class for me because I had always thought the God in the Old Testament was not relatable at all and very harsh and demanding.  But through the closer study of the prophets I began to see that God was harsh out of love and justice and it pained Him to see His people turn away from him.
          This class did reach its objective in the fact it helped me to demonstrate that I can read “texts” analytically looking for their religious and theological values and show this through writing and oral communication.  There were two specific projects that we did in this class that I think really helped me to be able to reach this objective.  The first project was where we were in groups and each group was given an individual prophet or part of a prophetic book.  We were then instructed to discuss who the prophet was, what his message/theme was, and three modern day prophets who related to him.  Then we were supposed to display all of this on a poster board to fit the class theme of a well known online website.  So for example our group did Google Search, other groups did Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.  It was very challenging to have to present the information we found in this way, but very informative and helped me learn a lot because we had to work together as a group to think outside of the box and be creative when none of us really are not known for our creativity.  So to make this project work we had to utilize a lot of teamwork and work to each other’s strengths.  The second activity we did, which was an in class activity.  Our professor gave us different paintings portraying scenes or prophets from the Old Testament.  We then had a about three or four paintings assigned to our group and we had to analyze them and think critically about what the painter was emphasizing about that specific scene or prophet he had painted.
          I thought this class did a sufficient job of helping the students reaching the objective stated above, but I do have one suggestion to continue to help the class grow.  I feel we had a lot of lecture in this class and while I know lecture is the basis of any class, I feel we had too much of it and not enough in class group discussions or projects.  Overall, I felt this class was a great learning experience and I look forward to my future classes in this field of study.      
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