University of Kentucky 3

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9. I would take Plutarch with Dr. Martin, as I recall. I always felt like I was just about ready to begin each degree as I finished it. When I finished my classics degree, I felt like I was just about ready to get a lot out of it if I were starting.

That first year doing classical Greek I felt like I was scrambling. We were given a certain amount to translate each class. Class time consisted of going around the room and translating. It was very hard for me to get through the amount of translating assigned. I would copy and blow up the pages and try to create a kind of interlinear. Sometimes I would try to work back to the Greek from the English.

One thing is certain. I was so focused on getting through the grammar and syntax that I didn't learn much about Plutarch himself. I had a nice schedule going. I might teach Greek in the morning at Asbury and then drive to an Arby's just off the campus of UK. I'd have my choice of the day with a cherry turnover and try to finish as much of the translation as I could with Cordon Bleu in hand.

I think I took Dr. Martin again for Greek Tragedy (different works) the next year. Other than that I had Thucydides with Robert Rabel the next year. By then I was a little more facile with my Greek and got a little more out of the content. I had wanted to take Plato with him and went to the first day of class. Another regret but I just didn't have the margin to pull it off and had to drop the first week. I missed out on Homer too, much to my disappointment.

There were some great students on this same venture with me. I remember one in particular who had gone to Berea College, a college where students can have free tuition if they work on campus. I wish I remembered their names. They had done classics in their undergraduate programs and seemed so much ahead of me.

10. Over the summer, I went through Wheelock's Latin. Quite a tall feat I was trying to pull off. Having only had two and a half years of high school Latin, I was going to jump straight into master's level classes. Wheelock is of course great. I used it several times to teach Latin at IWU and will use it again online at Houghton in March.

I think the first Latin course I took was with Jane Phillips. I can't remember if she had once been a nun (my high school physics teacher had been. can't remember if I mentioned her). I really enjoyed her as a professor. I remember once she expected me to know what "fracture" was (she was trying to give me a hint) but I didn't. Fracture is when the priest breaks the big wafer in front of the church when consecrating the elements in the Eucharist. Not my tradition.

I think my first Latin course was "Juvenal, Martial, and Statius." It wasn't too bad because these satirists tended to write in snippets rather than prose. I also had two semesters of Latin prose composition with Dr. Martin, going from English to Latin. That was a bear.

A highlight was taking Virgil with Louis Swift. He was Dean of the Undergraduate School at the time. He was a widely known and respected figure who has now passed. I remember a brief conversation with him at a fellowship where he mentioned he could never quite figure out the imprecatory psalms. I had never really thought much about it. I told him that I tended to take the enemies in those psalms as figurative enemies like my struggle with some vice.

Interesting that I had unthinkingly allegorized those psalms without even knowing it. But that is what unreflectivity does--it is something you don't even know you are doing. I do believe my openness to "more than literal" or figural readings of the biblical texts is rooted in a kind of typological penchant of holiness preaching. My grandfather Shepherd apparently taught a whole class at Frankfort at one time in "types and shadows" between the Old and New Testaments.

11. I'm trying to remember what other courses I took. I took a course with Rabel on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. We read book 10. That was very enjoyable. I had always liked Aristotle, although I have moved beyond him in almost every category. He of course is the underpinning of Aquinas.

I took two semesters of Sanskrit as linguistics courses. That was fun. I forget the professor's name but he was very kindhearted. All of my professors at UK were really nice people, and several seemed clearly to be people of faith.

I needed to have French for reading knowledge in preparation for doctoral work, so I took a French for research course. Unfortunately, it was at 8am, and I lived over a half hour away. I was not yet a morning person either. The only thing that mattered grade-wise was the final exam. So I came to the class three times--the first day, the last day, and one random time in the middle. I got an A on the exam.

I took a course on Cicero in which we read De Amicitia and De Senectute. I've tried to add up the philosophy related courses I took here and there in grad school to see if I reached the 18 hours that is standard to teach philosophy. I think I just barely make it. [1]

[1] Philosophy of Theism, Apologetics, Aquinas, Aristotle, Cicero, and then you have to decide about Barth, Plutarch, etc.