One of this course's goals is to improve our relationships with the Bible, especially the New Testament. That immediately faces the challenge that coursework is easy to compartmentalize and turn into a grade-getting game. Life becomes much more manageable when we turn it into a set of neatly separated compartments that we attend to one at a time. Yet the Christian faith is life; Jesus reigns over and fills all things. He won't stay put in one of our compartments. (And if he does, that's not the real Jesus.)
This assignment is meant to tear down the compartments that isolate Bible study, worship, and the rest of life. You keep a running log where you reflect on instances where what you learn in the course or in the New Testament relates to other classes outside religious studies and to aspects of your life outside school.
Before you begin, review my workbook tips. Create the file in which all of your work will go. Make sure it's regularly and automatically backed up, and easily available. (I use Simplenote, which is a light alternative to Evernote, so I can access the same synced entries from my computer and my phone.) Then begin a log in which you record the following kinds of observations:
In a paragraph, how does something you have learned from the NT (understood in context) or elsewhere in this course apply to another course (preferably outside RS), elsewhere in college, or in your broader life (preferably beyond church), so that one illuminates the other? Explain, appealing of course to the course concepts and materials in question.
Do not just process or "journal" your thoughts on something from class. Instead, articulate connections between the course material and something other than the course material — preferably from another course in another discipline.
Over the course of the semester, keep adding dated entries to this exercise, even as you add additional workbook exercises below it in your workbook.
Strive to complete seven or so entries over the course of the semester. These are not meant just to record your reactions to events! They are for training you to process what you are learning by developing and analyzing connections.
Near the due date, conclude your log with the following assessment, and submit it:
How has your appreciation of the New Testament and its domain (range of relevance) changed over the course of this exercise and this semester?
Remember, a number of our readings are deeply interested in these kinds of connections. You may look to them for guidance and inspiration. You can read a sample of the way I myself have approached matters at the intersection of the Bible, theology, and life in my book on the Lord's Prayer.