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Essays on eschatology and salvation turned in. Need to do one more small project to close out another class and I’m done until late January.

This post is a round-up of tools and tidbits that have been useful to me over the last four years of formation. If you are in discernment for the diaconate or in the midst of aspirancy, some of these things might be useful to you. Diocesan programs can obviously vary from place to place.

If your formation program includes access to a library - especially a seminary library - take the time to become familiar with the various databases available for access. Many times, things that are not available in one database are actually sitting in another one. Some of them will give you online access to complete books, though the path to getting there might not be immediately obvious. My first go-tos tended to be Atla, JSTOR, IxTheo, and the Oxford eBook collection, but access and mileage varies according to your particular institution.

We had a “get acquainted” session with the librarian at one point early on, but I don’t think I really got the hang of online research until I was in my third year. Our librarians can also get scans of physical texts if they’re in the holdings but not online and can usually turn around requests very quickly.

Familiarize yourself with any in-house style guides. The individual instructors will tell you in their syllabi what, if any, formatting expectations they have, but it’s very good to know what the institution expects as well. St. Meinrad’s in-house guide is largely based on Turabian, with some important deviations peculiar to theological texts, biblical citations, magisterial documents, and primary sources. In some cases, they defer to the style guide used by Liturgical Press (abbreviations and so forth). Refer to these guides early and often as you’re writing, particularly anything around citations. Get used to doing things according to the institution’s way, and life will be easier.

If it’s been several years since you’ve been in school (and who among us, amirite), find a blank MLA template for Word (or LibreWriter) and use it for all your short-form stuff. If you’re a weirdo, you can find MLA templates in LaTeX. I nearly wrote my closure papers in LaTeX, but I couldn’t work out some tiny quirk with footnote formatting, so I dropped back to LibreWriter

For formal papers, getting a handle on citations is a must. There will be lots of them, and I found Zotero invaluable. If you’re familiar with Mendeley, you should be able to pick up Zotero pretty quickly, and the price is right: it’s free. Both are databases for tracking research sources. You can annotate PDFs in Zotero, which connects to Word and LibreWriter for inserting citations and auto-generating bibliographies. Once you get the workflow down, using it is a breeze. I have saved almost everything I’ve read for school (as well as all the books I’ve bought) in my Zotero database.

Grammarly has been invaluable in correcting some bad habits. I have also used Claude to review papers for flow and structure. A prompt I used recently went something like this and turned out to be very useful in tightening up a few things.

This essay is for a masters-level theology course I am completing as part of my preparation for ordination to the diaconate. I would like suggestions regarding structure, flow, and any minor grammatical or spelling errors. I want to leave the text as intact as possible, so please do not suggest substantive changes beyond structural/organizational, or the grammar errors I have already mentioned. If you have other suggestions beyond what I have specified, inquire first before showing them to me so that I can opt to decline seeing them.

Quizlets are useful for generating flash-cards and practice tests. Basic, limited access is free. We also used Google Docs to collaborate on study guides for tests.

If you need to suss out a piece of music real quick, but can’t read sheet music well, Sheet Music Scanner might be worth a look. Take a picture of the music, give it a second, and it plays it back to you. This has been especially useful for the weekends when I get assigned as cantor for mass.

Happy Memorial of St. Nicholas, who allegedly decked Arius' halls at the Council of Nicaea.

One of the papers I wrote for my closure project was an analysis of City of God as a template for the modern apologist. Augustine didn’t mount a courtroom-style defense of the faith like Justin Martyr, nor did he use the language of statesmen like Tertullian. Instead, he met pagan arguments on their own terms, without appealing to external authority. In fact, the authority he quotes most often is Varro, who tried (and generally seems to have failed) to systematize pagan belief.

The lesson for the modern apologist, I think, is to survey the landscape around us like shipwreck survivors and make use of the things lying around the shore. It’s almost a commonplace these days that the world is slowly careening into the darkness of a post-Christian era. You’re either lost to the zeitgeist or hunkered down as part of a vital remnant. I’m not sure that either of these views is particularly useful. The deep yearning for the transcendent hasn’t gone anywhere, and neither have the urges to worship or at least make use of the forms of worship and ritual (see Charles Taylor). This ought to give us tremendous hope and optimism as evangelists and apologists. An alternative to the immanent frame will have to be proposed from the highways and hedgerows, not the doorways of the narthex (see James Shea).

Just asked Claude for book recommendations based on things I’ve enjoyed in the weird/magic realism genre…this is what it came back with:

  1. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
  2. Little, Big by John Crowley
  3. The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
  4. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
  5. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño