Another day in paradise

It has been a little more than a week since my last post, so I am getting better at this.  I woke up this morning to yet another beautiful day.  The sun is shining and it looks as if it will be warm again.  I am really liking this weather.  I think it was last year in the month of January when Boston saw only four or five days of sun.  That is certainly not the case here and definitely no snow.

Everything has been going well so far.  I have found my stride and I think that I am in a place where I can balance my time versus the work that needs to get done.  This semester is proving to be more difficult in terms of the amount of reading for each class, but again not as much written work.  In my Intro to Worship class we have finished examining the structure of worship.  For this section we had to visit four different parishes, one of which had to be racially different from our "normal" worship community and one had to be in a different liturgically based denomination.  We had to write up reviews of our experiences with special focus on different aspects of worship such as space, objects, movement, texts, and music,  as well as others.  This was great because it again afforded me an opportunity to see different styles of worship within the Episcopal Church.  For my other denominational church Lauren and I went to an AME church in Berkeley.  It was amazing.  The service lasted more than two and a half hours but it was still pretty cool.

My history course continues to take us through the Reformation.  Yesterday we talked about Luther and Calvin.  I am working on a group project now which requires us to work on a wiki page.  So we have to create a page about the English Reformation because we are Episcopalians.  There are many other denominations represented in the class so they have to write about their denomination's place in the Reformation or how the Reformation affected them.  This course is by far not as intense as last semester's history course but still it has its merits.

My other two courses, Pastoral Theology and Leading Though Lament are also pretty good.  The Lament course is small so we are learning a lot and having some pretty good discussions.  The Pastoral Theology isn't bad either but I am learning more than I thought I would.  So as far as school goes everything is good and hopefully it will stay that way.  Not much else has been going on.  Lauren and I are taking a mini vacation to Las Vegas.  We are going to celebrate one of Lauren's friend's birthday.  I will let you all know how it was when I get back.

Viva Las Vegas!!!!!!!