SYLLABUS FOR

TOPICS IN CHURCH HISTORY

GLENN MILLER

THIS IS A NET BASED RESEARCH COURSE

 

 

This is our tentative syllabus for Topics in Church History.  As all of you know, this is a course is planned around individual research and the use of the internet as a means of collaborative research.  Topics is an unusual course.  It is not a directed study where students  prepare a final paper for a grade.  The goal of the course is to provide a student with the chance to do research in a collaborative fashion on a topic of their choice.  The purpose of the course is for the student to do serious research with the aid of the instructor and other researchers and in the process to learn

 

 

  We will have two Saturday sessions to begin the course.  These will met on September 9 and September 16.  We will met from 10:00 to 12:00 and from 1:00 to 3:00 on both dates.   The task for the first day will be to discuss three books:

 

James West Davidson, et al., The Art of Historical Detection I and II.  (This is often published as two volumes.  I would suggest that you purchase the one volume version.  It is cheaper.)  The book provides some interesting examples of the way in which research can challenge established interpretations of the past.  We will assign specific articles for discussion after the class list becomes more final.

 

Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge.  This is a very good discussion of what contemporary historians are thinking about the craft of writing history.

           

            The second week is when we formally present our proposals for study.  A good proposal should take this form:

 

            Topic: A clear and concise discussion of the research that you plan to do for your project.  The best way to envision this is to ask what it is that you hope to learn.

           

Preliminary Insights: All research begins with some “preunderstanding.”  Often, all that separates good research from less adequate study is the researcher’s clarity about his or her assumptions.  If you know what you assume to be true, you can test your assumptions against what you learn from the sources and modify them as you learn more about the subject.

           

Method or Plan of Approach.  Method is an academic word that describes how one plans to go about a project.

 

 It can be simple: I plan to read as much as I can. (This is called a literary method).

 

Or it can be informed by theory.  “I have long felt that the study of theology in 19th century America needed to be done from the perspective of gender rather than from the perspective of the history of philosophy.  I plan to study Horace Bushnell from this perspective.”

 

Or it can describe the kinds of information that will be studied.  “I am very interested in the ways in which the church interacted with marriage and marriage customs in the early 20th century.  I plan to study statistically the wedding licenses in the town of The End of the Earth, Maine, for the years 1910-1920 to see how many were performed by clergy and how many were performed by others.  I am also interested, where possible, in locating the addresses of those who were married, perhaps through the town registry, and seeing if there is a correlation between marriage in church or by a clergyperson and social and economic class.

 

Or it can describe a find that needs exploration:  “I found five boxes of letters and personal papers from the estate of the Rev. George Goodfink in the Maine library.  I plan to read in those documents to see if I can understand what ministry was like in the 1930s in a rural area.

 

Or it can describe the use of another discipline or discipline to inform historical study: “I plan to apply standard sociological methods to the study of Methodism in early 20th century.  In particular, I want to test H. Richard Niebuhr’s assumption that Methodism represented the lower middle class.”

 

Other Methods:  Since Method is a fancy word for “problem solving,” it follows that there are many different methods that are closely related to what it is that one hopes to learn.  One good way to determine a method is to take one’s Topic and ask how one might find an answer to the original question.

 

            Preliminary Bibliography and List of Sources:  Basically, the question is where are you going to begin to look for material to answer your questions.  The work, source, has historians use it, is not a magic term: it just means where you can learn something about something.  Traditionally, historians have divided sources into primary and secondary.  Primary sources directly reflect the thing being studied.  They may be a town or church record, a diary, a newspaper article from the time, or even an artifact, such as clothes.  A secondary source is, in contrast, usually the product of another’s research into a topic.   Part of the ambiguity in this classification is that the same material may be a primary source for some topics and a secondary source for others.  Thus, Herodotus’ History is a primary source for ancient Greek literature and a secondary source for the development of Egypt.

 

            In today’s world, newer forms of communication have dramatically increased the number of types of primary and secondary sources.  In addition to radio and television programs and scripts, we have tapes of oral presentations, the vast amount of material on the Internet, computer programs, and other resources. The databases maintained by corporations and other groups are also sources of information, both about those who compiled them, and those whose lives are summarized in the base itself.  Amazon.com may have the best list of religious “seekers” in the country, for example, and more information about them—income, residential patterns, and the like in existence.

 

            In short, no list of sources for research today should only include books and traditional artifacts.  Keep asking what else is available and what you can learn from it.

 

 

The proposal should be available to all members of the class, via email, at least a week in advance.  Feel free to email me or call me for help in preparing your prospectus, if needed.

 

Third through the Fifteen Weeks:

 

This is our research period.  Since we are not meeting in formal classes with highly structured assignments, you will need to take responsibility for determining your own program of study and for reporting that program of study to others.  You should plan to devote at least the three hours that you would normally invest in a class to your research and most people will include some of their normal hours of preparation for class as well.  Your emails should be clear about how much time you invested in study and how you spend that time. 

 

You should write at least one email to the whole list serve each week that describes what you have done during that week and any questions or ideas that you might have had while you did your work.  Each week, you should be prepared to respond to at least three of your colleagues emails with insights, if any into their projects, reactions to their emerging ideas, questions or suggestions from your own research that may be helpful.  If you plan to be using some unusual resources, let your colleagues know.  (For instance, if you will be in New York and plan to use the New York Public Library).  You may be able to help them with some Xeroxing or the like.  The more you exchange, the more you will learn.

 

 

The Final Project:

 

            Part of the fun of serious study is communicating the results to others and getting their reaction to one’s ideas. We will meet in a final seminar in January on a mutual agreed data to discuss your final papers.  They should be substantial reports.. These papers are due no later than January 8.   While papers for the final discussion can be in preliminary form—and some students may wish to wait until after the discussion of their work before finalizing their papers—they should not be late.  Late papers interrupt the work of the whole seminar, and we may not be able to discuss a paper that is late.   It should be said again that the focus of the class is not on the final presentation but on the process of studying the topic.   If you have to shortcut anything, make it the final research report and not the research.

 

            Some students may want to use a more research oriented format for this paper than they use for most of their seminary work.  Most seminary classes ask for students to present their work in an essay form that essentially tries to develop an idea or ideas in an extended form.  Such essay writing is very valuable, and most research eventually ends up being presented in essay form.  But, the essay form is not always the most useful way to present the results of a research project and since good essay writing is (or ought to be) time consuming, it may deflect a person from other goals.

 

The following is a standard research format that may help organize a paper that is a report on a process rather than a more literary product:

 

I.                    Statement of the question to be answered.  What was it that the researcher wanted to learn?

II.                 Method used to answer the question

III.               Previous research into question.

IV.              Clear statement of the principal conclusions reached during the study

V.                 The evidence for those conclusions.

VI.              Suggestions for further research.

 

Such reports may be thick or thin.  Some of the best research reports may only be a comparatively few pages while others may be more lengthy.  But they are much more tightly organized and disciplined than an essay.  The emphasis is on what was to be learned, how it was learned, what was learned, and what evidence exists for those conclusions.

 

 

 

Grading:

 

            The email discussions:  This will count for 50 per cent of the grade.  At the end of the semester, you should have written ten reports to your colleagues on your work and have replied to at least three of your colleague’s work over the semester.   I will covenant to respond to every report and to respond to as many of your responses to colleagues as possible.   All correspondence to be evaluated should be public and send to all participants.

 

            The Research: This will count for 30 per cent of the grade The primary purpose of this course is to engage in some serious study of a subject.   Such aspects of serious study as finding appropriate bibliography, reading reviews of key books or responses to key articles, formulating and testing hypotheses, using the best reference works, etc. are the meat of the course.  All of this work will be indicated in your emails, of course, and will be discussed as the semester goes on.  I covenant to respond to each of your weekly reports and to respond to as many of your responses to others as possible.  My hope is that this course will open up some of the pleasures of research for the student.

 

            The Final Report.  This will count for 20 per cent of the grade.  The final report is deliberately undervalued in the grading of the course.  The emphasis of the course is on the process of learning about history and historical matters and not on producing a literary product.