The Student Side of Me

The month nearly passed by without a single blog post, and I blame it on school.  Graduate School to be precise.  For the past year and a half I have been working on a Masters in Religion in Middle Eastern and North African Studies (MRel) through the Institute of Middle East Studies at the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary.  In short, the program looks at the many dynamics of the region (history, politics, culture, religion, etc…) and examines how people of faith can develop the theology and practices to approach this unique context in a meaningful way.  So far it has been a very rich experience that is giving me tremendous insight into my professional and personal presence in Lebanon.  

The MRel consists of four modules and a capstone final project.  Each module involves 20 weeks of online study and two weeks of residency study in Lebanon at the middle of the term.  The current module is Middle East and North African Cultures and I just completed a very intense 12 days of residency training.  We spent a lot of time looking at culture from a social science perspective and investigating matters of personal and group identity, topics of missiology, and specific cultures in the region.

For me it was a very fast and hard exposure to the technical field of the Social Sciences (sociology, anthropology, cultural and ethnic studies, etc…).  We spent a significant time learning about and applying ethnographic research with all it methodologies and techniques.  The highlight was a weekend home-stay with a Druze family in the Chouf Mountains.  It was a real laboratory of examining culture while making some inspiring human connections.  Despite a life spent bouncing across culture lines, these lessons and exercises greatly enhanced my observation and interpretation of culture.  It’s like I acquired a sharper pair of glasses to view the environments and people around me.  I had been watching culture on VHS but now I’m enjoying it in BluRay! Not only is such a study significant to my work at Dar El Awlad and my many cross-cultural personal relationships (including my marriage!), but the subject matter leads me to examine my own identity, social roles, and personal dimensions.  The MRel is continuing to be very much a curriculum for self-discovery and awareness.

Despite the amount of time, readings, lectures, outings and discussions at these residencies, I often feel like we barely get past the surface of the topics we examine.  There is so much depth to all these matters and they play out so distinctly in each specific context and individual.  It has been satisfying to apply what I am learning to the contexts where I am.  I can’t guarantee that it is making me more effective at what I do, but I can say that it is helping me on a great personal journey of recognizing the challenges of this world, celebrating the opportunities around us, and becoming more and more comfortable with God’s greatness and my smallness in it all.