Essay topic:

The Sermon on the Mount (Matt 4:24-7:29; cf Luke 6:17-7:1) as Evangelion.

I have what is a late draft in very faint draft printing that refused to scan so I typed it out.

It is a great example of a floundering student struggling to come up with anything that might get close to 3000 words.

I have been reminded that in amongst all this out third child was born and was pretty unwell for some time so I may have had other things on my mind.

There is an argument in there somewhere under the incoherence, but a 5 was generous.  Luckily he didn’t give the essays back, the comments would not have been fun to read.

Sermon on the Mount

After the genial style of Dr Ian Gillman this subject in second semester 1992 was a return to the formidable Professor Michael Lattke.  I had done two external subjects of his but this was the first time I met the man.

Again, I must have been leaving work early on Wednesdays to attend lectures at the University of Queensland. My recollection was that I was one of the few attendees not training or already in ministry. Lattke took no nonsense from Christians who were used to their own interpretation of scripture. If they suggested anything other than what was there he would say “I do not see that in the text” and that was it.

This was my last religion subject at UQ and meant I completed a major in the rules of the day. It was also the last course that I used my strange two disk (no hard drive) computer with a dot matrix printer and Webster’s word processor.

I was rather out of my depth here and his assessment methods exposed that rather well. I doubt he trusted undergraduates to work and so we had a mid semester exam, which I did poorly in, an essay and a viva.

Now I had done vivas in my medical course, which were pretty terrifying, but Lattke’s amazing office with floor to ceiling books and his no nonsense questioning were something else entirely. He called it an academic conversation. It is a great technique to find out what people have absorbed in a course and I suspect far too labour intensive for use these days. He told me I was a solid 5 (out of 7) student and that is what he gave me overall.

The second essay topic was thus:

Protestant- Roman Catholic relationships were marked by deep antagonism until the 1960’s.” Discuss this claim with respect to Australia.

I suggested that the antagonism was from the clergy and church leaders with much cooperation and respect between the laity of each church.

This is the marked copy with his generous comments.

RE215 – Australia

I got a 7 (out of 7) rating overall for the subject.

The essay topic I chose was:

Investigate the truth of the claim that “revivalism” has been at one time both the most invigorating and the most disruptive force in American Protestantism.

I suggested it was more disruptive than invigorating.

I couldn’t find the essay I submitted but this is late draft with a few corrections. I also have a word count written in with each hundred words noted. Such was the world before automated word counts.

RE215 – America

After six years slowly doing an external studies BA part-time at the University of Queensland, external studies ended and I became an internal student to finish my degree. Just as I had been fortunate enough to be just outside Brisbane to qualify as external, I was fortunate to be not too far out such that I could attend classes now that external studies had ceased to be. It has just struck me how the concept of needing to be outside a city to do external studies seems odd now, when so many people study online due to time factors rather than distance.

I chose this course with Dr Ian Gillman who had supervised my last external course. So from 4-6pm on Wednesdays in first semester 1992, I left General Practice behind and attended actual lectures again with actual other students. The timing suggests a shift from external study to evening classes. I have no recollection when the tutorials were held.

He let us choose to have 2 assignments for assessment, rather than an exam, along with a mark for tutorial participation. The texts were Ahlstrom’s “The Religious History of the American People” and Breward’s “Australia – ‘The Most Godless Place Under Heaven’?” I still have both books and have since picked up some of the recommended reference books he suggested over the years.

The loss of external studies meant the excellent lecture notes and study guides were replaced by notes and actual participation. There was a fair bit a material given to us at the tutorials. I found this all very interesting, especially the American section. I always though the Great Awakening would have made a good board game.