How have I not updated since June? I have a weekly reminder in my diary to post here, and every week I think "Oh, I'll do that next week".
Here are some notable things that have happened in my life since then:
I finally, after nearly two years of living here, managed to jump through enough bureaucratic hoops to get a Belgian residency card, which had about three months of validity before it needed renewing. Fortunately the renewal process is much more straightforward, and my card for next year has been approved, so I just need to go and pick it up.
I finished my bachelors summa cum laude, with an average of 87.16%. I was a bit disappointed with the grade for my bachelor essay, at 15/20 (roughly equivalent to a solid 2:1), given how much work I'd put in compared to some other courses where I sailed to higher marks, but I got plenty of actionable feedback and understand what went wrong, so I'm confident I can do better next time.
I came back to the UK for a month or so over the summer, mostly staying in London, but also fitting in various visits. I went to Wales, to hang out with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bunnypip, cuddlyviking plus (now scarily grown up) kids, and meet their new dog. Then it was up to York to see leonato, between plays this time, so not getting to see him on stage was compensated for by him not being completely exhausted. I then headed across to Ripponden for a couple of days with my parents, who are getting by well enough, although my Dad's mobility continues to gradually decline, and finally made a flying visit to Manchester to have more holes poked through my genitals (very NSFW pictures here) before returning to London, and thence to Brussels.
I've started the Research Master in Theology and Religious Studies, majoring in Biblical Studies. For my thesis I'm going to be comparing attitudes to illness, medicine and disability in ancient Israel and Ugarit, and asking what that can tell us about the respective theologies. I'm about four weeks in to the first semester and thoroughly enjoying myself. So far the taught courses seem more specialised than those of the bachelors, but not that much harder conceptually - although I'll have to wait and see whether the grading turns out to be more stringent. This semester I am taking:
Here are some notable things that have happened in my life since then:
I finally, after nearly two years of living here, managed to jump through enough bureaucratic hoops to get a Belgian residency card, which had about three months of validity before it needed renewing. Fortunately the renewal process is much more straightforward, and my card for next year has been approved, so I just need to go and pick it up.
I finished my bachelors summa cum laude, with an average of 87.16%. I was a bit disappointed with the grade for my bachelor essay, at 15/20 (roughly equivalent to a solid 2:1), given how much work I'd put in compared to some other courses where I sailed to higher marks, but I got plenty of actionable feedback and understand what went wrong, so I'm confident I can do better next time.
I came back to the UK for a month or so over the summer, mostly staying in London, but also fitting in various visits. I went to Wales, to hang out with
bunnypip, cuddlyviking plus (now scarily grown up) kids, and meet their new dog. Then it was up to York to see leonato, between plays this time, so not getting to see him on stage was compensated for by him not being completely exhausted. I then headed across to Ripponden for a couple of days with my parents, who are getting by well enough, although my Dad's mobility continues to gradually decline, and finally made a flying visit to Manchester to have more holes poked through my genitals (very NSFW pictures here) before returning to London, and thence to Brussels. I've started the Research Master in Theology and Religious Studies, majoring in Biblical Studies. For my thesis I'm going to be comparing attitudes to illness, medicine and disability in ancient Israel and Ugarit, and asking what that can tell us about the respective theologies. I'm about four weeks in to the first semester and thoroughly enjoying myself. So far the taught courses seem more specialised than those of the bachelors, but not that much harder conceptually - although I'll have to wait and see whether the grading turns out to be more stringent. This semester I am taking:
- History of Eastern Christianity - super interesting, and taught by my Syriac/Coptic professor from the last couple of years, who is one of my favourites.
- Jewish-Christian Relations - also super interesting, although I think it's going to be quite tough. The first few lectures have been a history of 2000 years of antisemitism, and we're now about to move on to first Jewish, then Christian theological responses to the Shoah, and then finish with a section on "Entangling the Shoah, the Establishment of Israel, and the Nakba". Not exactly a walk in the park...
- Prophecy and Reception in Antiquity - the first few classes of this course have been a bit of a recap of the bachelor level course on the Prophets, but I think we're about to start hitting more new material now. I was a bit cautious at first, because the more experienced of the two instructors had the lack of consideration to die unexpectedly in a hiking accident over the summer[1], and I'd not been terribly impressed by the other guy when he took me for Hebrew in my first year. But I think that Hebrew course was literally his first time teaching, and either he's learned an awful lot about good pedagogy since then, or Hector left excellent lesson plans, or some combination of the two, but in any case, the course seems really well designed with a good mixture of lectures and reading and interactive work
- Johannine Literature - as with the previous course, the first few classes were mostly a recap of material I'd covered in the bachelor, but we're about to start getting deep into the Christology, and I'm super excited about it. It's another relatively inexperienced instructor, but he's clearly very smart. The classes are somewhere between lecture and guided group discussion, which I think requires quite a well-informed cohort to work, but fortunately that appears to be the kind of cohort we have.
- Catechesis and Pastoral Care in Various Stages of Life - this is one of the Truncus Communus courses that all theology masters students have to take, and I am yet to get excited about it, but it will probably be useful background if pursuing ordination ever comes back on the table
- Contextual Hermeneutical Approaches to the Bible - this is another Truncus Communus course rather than part of the Biblical Studies major, and whilst in theory the subject matter is exactly my cup of tea, I'm not entirely gelling with the course so far. The main method of assessment is a piece of work where we have to pick a passage from the New Testament and analyse it using seven different hermeneutical approaches (liberationist, post-colonial, feminist, trauma, etc) in the context of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. I don't think this is a terrible assignment by any means, but trying to fit in seven different lenses to a sensible word count means that we only get 350-400 words for each, which seems like it's going to really limit the depth of each analysis. Also, I am slightly grumpy about the restriction to the NT, although I've done my best to get around it by picking two options which are explicitly engaging with the Hebrew Scriptures (Acts 8.26-36 or Hebrews 11:8-28).
- Greek 1A - I'm doing this course to bank some high marks without much work, as my Greek is entirely self-taught up to this point, but comfortably above the level needed for this module
- Syriac 1A - again, I'm basically just banking some marks here, as I audited this course two years ago
Yes, yes this is a daft number of courses to be taking in one semester, although if you ignore the two languages that I already know it's only a /little/ bit daft, but it should mean that in my second year I'll have a much lighter load and can really concentrate on my thesis. On which note, I should go and tackle that pile of reading about Pastoral Care...
[1]The light-hearted tone here is me Coping[tm]. Hector had taken on something of a mentor role for me, and I am still very much in the throes of grieving him.
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Date: 2026-10-15 04:46 pm (UTC)From:I'm also moving into the Masters section of my course and there are some definite parallels.
I'm really sorry to hear about Hector though.
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Date: 2026-10-15 05:18 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2026-10-15 04:54 pm (UTC)From:I am sorry to hear about Hector, that's really really sad.
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Date: 2026-10-15 05:19 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2026-10-16 10:22 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2026-10-17 04:24 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2026-10-17 04:28 am (UTC)From:How long is your dissertation?
I'm currently doing a 3-year MA in 2 years, as well as auditing some Level 5 courses and doing the formation stuff (and driving backwards and forwards to Cardiff) but I still doubt I have bitten off ad much academia as you have xxx