| I have one area of my education that I highly value but its very hard to explain without people importing a lot of assumptions. I like to call it critical listening but also its textual evaluation. In addition to some didactic instruction my Father gave me a short book on the principles of hermeneutics around 13. We went to different churches over the years growing up but I would bring my bible, take notes, and on the drive home from service he would ask me if anything unsubstantiated by the text was snuck in, anything against the text, etc. In the hundreds of sermons I took notes on over the years there were only 3 without obvious butchering of the text, statements directly contradicting the very text being examined, nightmarish hermenutical implications, outright fabrications, etc. The shear volume of evaluation I did against a static text was interesting. It helped me understand how to parse language, how to do evaluation, just a lot of stuff in a way that was more dynamic than something like debate club. It also helped me understand how self servingly imprecise people can be and the ways in which deceptive and misleading language is used. |