Day Fourteen: The Bible and the Formation of the Gospels, Day Four

I ask students to get up after prayer and write their Bellwork on the whiteboard. They know the routine. Kinesthetic learning. I have side conversations with students as they make their way to the board to write their response. I tell them that studies have shown there is a positive correlation between memory retention and adrenaline levels. Just getting up and moving around can help raise adrenaline levels and, as a result, they may be more inclined to learn something that day. I do not tell them that the study I am referring to used rats to prove this correlation.

The Main Building at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana. When I was accepted into the Notre Dame graduate school to study theology, the first thing I did was thank God! The second thing I did was call my parents! (photo P. Smith)

Normally, when you want to share good news you do so orally or in person. In the modern world, “Snapchatting” seems to be the popular method. Maybe Instagram is pretty common, too, although there are fewer words involved. Next year it will be something different. Ten years ago “Tweeting” was common, and five years before that, Facebook was the mode of choice. But my students admit that if it is really good news, chances are, they will want to share it in person. At the very least, they will want to hear the voice of the other as good news is shared. Anthropologically, this is “good news” for us! It seems, at the end of the day, we desire direct, personal contact with each other…at least for the really important things. I explain this to my students. Someone might “Snapchat” a picture of them with a bored face as they endure another hour with me in school; this is pretty low-stakes. But if they found out that they got into Princeton or Notre Dame or whatever their top choice school is, they will wait until class is over to tell their best friend, face to face. I use this concept in the next section of class when I teach them about how the first Christians literally “ran” to share the news with their best friends…it helps to teach my students why Christianity cannot just be a personal Faith or a personal choice…it must be a community of people praying together. If it is really “Good News”, then we should want to share it with as many people as possible.