Every seminarian is required to have a spiritual director. A new guy gets a few weeks to figure out who he wants to ask, but he should have one before very long.

As I thought about, I remembered how it worked: There is a priest who is the spiritual director for the seminary (he also accepts personal directees). By such-and-such a date, you had to notify him who your director was, and that director had to come from an approved list. I imagine if you wanted someone not on the list, you could ask, but you couldn't pick just anybody.

Did you study apologetics in Seminary? Or does that just naturally come about in studying philosophy?

Neither one. I studied it here.

The worst possibly way to learn apologetics is by studying it, the second worst possible way is to learn it by reading the writings of apologists.

Sign...the road not taken. That looks great, I wish I could sign up. I have no interest in being ordained, but part of me thinks that if I had the chance to do it all over again, I might have studied theology or Biblical studies rather than mathematics. Or maybe tried a double major or something equally idiotic.

I just noticed this....I feel the need to respond.

I agree that intensive study of the Biblical languages is not the best approach to studying the Bible, but I think a good grounding in the Biblical languages is a good starting point because before you can interpret a text, you must first be able to read it.

It is quite true that the language based approach is relatively new, but isn't it clear that the reason why that is is because in ancient times, it wasn't necessary? And for more than 1,000 years, knowledge of Biblical Greek was so bad that even if people wanted to do an intensive word study of the New Testament, it wouldn't even be possible because the tools didn't exist.

For the Fathers of the Church, intensive study of the Greek language wasn't necessary because they were native Greek speakers who knew and understood Greek in a much deeper way than anyone currently alive possibly can. For us today, even native Greek speakers, who speak modern Greek, cannot come to an equal understanding of Biblical Greek that the Fathers had.

It is like, no one today makes an intensive word study of the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, we don't need to because we are native English speakers, we understand these texts perfectly well.


But imagine 2000 years from now, the English language has evolved to a point where even native English speakers cannot understand the Declaration of Independence because it is written in an incomprehensible ancient dialect knowledge of which has largely been forgotten, and the text was widely known only in translation. And imagine that, in order to get a degree in American history, one would have to take 3-4 years of courses in '18th century English dialect' to even be capable of reading the Declaration of Independence in the original language. At this point, wouldn't it be really useful to do an intensive word study of such texts as the Declaration, the Constitution or the Gettysburg Address?

Except St. Augustine, one of the greatest exegetes in the history of the Church, knew neither Greek nor Hebrew. Nor did St. Thomas Aquinas.

I thought textualists or "Consitutionalists" do exactly that.

As well as Political Science scholars.