Juditth and Andrew

This past week was officially Week 1 of first term. I had my first tutorial on C.S. Lewis with Judith Tonning, and had an introductory meeting with my other tutor- Andrew Linzey. Judith and Andrew will be rather influential in my academic development this fall and I will be referring to them frequently, so you should try to remember their names. On Tuesday, I had completed my first paper for Judith. The tutorial started by me reading the paper to her (scary!) and then us discussing. Whlie there were a few mistakes in my analysis, overall the tutorial went very well. Judith is really nice and is going to be a great person to work with. I am psyched! Then after much relaxing on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, I met with Andrew on Wednesday afternoon (by the way I meet with both of my tutors at their houses...pretty cool, but also kind of intimidating). It is hard to describe my meeting with Andrew without taking up 50 pages. He is incredibly charasmatic and our meeting was unbelievable. When I first rolled up on my bike outside his house, he came outside, threw his arms in the air, and called my name, "Jason!" It was awesome and he made me feel so welcome. We have never met each other before, but it felt as if we were great friends. We proceeded to chat for the next two and a half hours on his couch. I told him my life story and then we discussed what we were going to study together this fall. I told him that I really wanted to do something that would be complimentary to my C.S. Lewis tutorial, and he has a bunch of different interests/ strengths in theology, so he is pretty flexible. We eventually decided on "The Inklings," which in brief was an informal literary society during the 1930s and 1940s in Oxford, consisting primarily of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Works like the "Screwtape Letters," "Lord of the Rings," and "All Hallows Eve" were read in their very first drafts to this group of people. They were all great friends and had a strong influence on each other. Needless to say this is something that I am extremely interested in and very excited to be studying...One other thing that is crazy/ maybe cool about Andrew is that this is my secondary tutorial, which only meets 4 times all term (once every other week), and unconventionally, Andrew decided that he wants to meet every week for the next four weeks and then we will be done in mid-November. It means that I have a ton of work every day for the next month, but then the last three weeks of term (when Dani will be here), will be less stressful- still a lot of work for Judith, but only one tutorial every week...Well that's about it. Stay posted because I will continue to talk about Judith and Andrew a lot the next few months. They are amazing scholars who will hopefully become great friends. Basically, I have awesome tutors.