Beirut, Lebanon 2011
In June of 2011 I returned to Beirut to commence teaching a class on Philosophy at CAIT, the Christian Alliance Institute of Theology.
The course was one of my own design. For textbooks I used Craig and Moreland’s Philosophical Foundations for A Christian Worldview and Cowan and Spiegel’s The Love of Wisdom. The class took place over eight days over which I averaged 4.5 hours of lecturing per day. The class consisted of ten students who hail from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Sudan. For assignments I gave a series of vocabulary quizzes, comprehension questions, two assignments on logic and a research paper.
It was the first time I used a translator. His name was Boulos and on top of the translation work he does for CAIT he does translation for various other organizations, manages an evangelistic radio station out of Cyprus, and does book translation work. Most recently he has translated two works for Ravi Zaccharias International Ministries. I found teaching through a translator difficult but fun at the same time. The biggest challenge was that Boulos would get pretty tired after about 3 hours even with the breaks every hour. The next challenge was the specific language the discipline of philosophy uses, for many words Boulos had to discover how to translate the intent of the word rather than the word itself. For example translating ‘Metaphysics’ came out ‘things outside of the material.’ These translation problems extended to the student assignments. As I do not yet read Arabic it was hard for me to mark the students works. We tried using Google Translate for the documents but it was too poor to be of much use.
The students were a good mix and some of them were more adept with the subject than others. I am not going to share names as some of the students situations are such that to do so may put them into difficulties. One student, I will call him B1, came to the class with a minimum of academic experience or theological background. As such, some of his questions and statements came off as a little heretical. Some of the other students reacted pretty strongly to what he was saying but I found that he was very interested in the material and just didn’t know how to formulate his thoughts. With a little patience I think we made some real ground. Another, lets call him B2, had a background in both Western Philosophy and Arabic Philosophy. Answering his questions was a real challenge. He definitely kept me on my toes but we had some real positive interchanges.
In the end there was some good stuff and some challenges but I look forward to my next trip.
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