Category: Featured
The Editor Returns To Seminary!
I began this website in December of 2007 as a way to give counsel to seminary students from a vantage point outside seminary. Now, I have returned to seminary, this time as a Ph.D student. I just completed my first semester toward a Ph.D in Christian Philosophy at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. [...]
Start the Semester Off Smart
The first week of seminary is over, and looming ahead are due dates for reading, papers and tests. You know this because you should have a syllabus for each class, which contains all the assignments you’ll need to complete this semester and their due dates. This is awesome. It’s a time management bonanza. If you [...]
Category: Featured, Time Management
Ministry Is For Broken People
The true reasons people go into ministry are manifold. We’ve written at length about the need for divine calling. But not surprisingly, there are human factors as well. One major human factor that is widely unacknowledged is personal brokenness. I’ve never met anyone in ministry who didn’t have some level of emotional wounding in their [...]
Category: Emotional Health, Featured
Survival Skill # 1: Triage
Triage (`tree-ozh), from French, “to sort.” 1. A process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate medical treatment. Triage is used in hospital emergency rooms, on battlefields, and at disaster sites when limited medical resources must be allocated. 2. A system used to allocate a scarce commodity, [...]
Category: Featured, Time Management
Stumbling at Seminary: Cheating
(From the archives. ) In an interview with the dean of students at a leading evangelical seminary, I asked about the most common reasons people did not complete seminary. One of his answers was a shock to me: students get caught cheating. Seminary students have ample opportunity to cheat. You can plagiarize—representing the academic work [...]
Reflections on Graduating Seminary
by Britt Treece A week before Christmas, after six long years of study, I graduated from seminary. Looking back, I’ve had a lot of thoughts, questions, comments, and recommendations, so I thought that organizing some of them would be helpful both for me and for past, present, and future seminarians. (Since it took me six [...]
Attending Seminary Means Living In a Foreign Land
When I went to seminary, it entailed a move from Florida to Texas. There was a shift in geography, but there was also a shift in culture-a pretty dramatic shift, as anyone who’s moved to Texas will probably tell you. I grew up in South Florida. I was a native Floridian, which was pretty unusual. [...]
Category: Emotional Health, Featured
My First Semester Shock, or Seminarians Without Chests
I approached seminary with many of the common illusions seminary students have. I thought it would be a spiritually vibrant and intense time, full of people who were overflowing with passion for Christ. Boy was I surprised. My first semester, I enrolled in Hebrew class, like many beginning M.Div.-ers. I made friends with some other [...]
Category: Featured, Spiritual life, Stories
Seminary Syllabus Strategy #4: A Study Plan for Each Major Exam
Similar to creating a writing plan for papers, you should block out dedicated study time for major exams. If you do this now, at the beginning of the semester (and stick to your schedule), then you won’t be pinched to find time to study. It’s pretty simple: Reserve study blocks beginning about a week before [...]
Category: Academics, Featured, Time Management
Seminary Syllabus Strategy #1: Get It In Your Calendar
The first week of seminary is over, and looming ahead are due dates for reading, papers and tests. You know this because you should have a syllabus for each class, which contains all the assignments you’ll need to complete this semester and their due dates. This is awesome. It’s a time management bonanza. If you [...]
Category: Academics, Featured, Time Management
