Chapel Credit
I attend LeTourneau University, a Christian college. Students there are required to attend 38 "chapels" a year -- chapels are small hour-or-so long assemblies wherein there is a bit of worship and then some message. Kind of like church, only smaller. And mandatory. Small cards bearing the day's date are distributed, and one prints one's name and student ID on it to demonstrate attendance by returning the card at the end of chapel. As Christian colleges go, LeTourneau's chapel attendance policy is fairly lenient, but I have still grown to resent it.
Most of the chapels are, in my opinion, not worth attending. There are a few, but they are just that -- few -- and walking down to the assembly building (and back) to spend an hour receiving absolutely nothing by way of spiritual or intellectual -- or even recreational -- enrichment (other than the praise/worship period before the message) thrice a week is just not good common sense. Which is, I suppose, why the administration mandates them -- because it's a poor decision. It's not a very flattering judgement, but it is far preferable to believing that they think the drivel (as it usually is) is actually valuable and needed that emphatically.
Disclaimer once again on the occasional valuable, enriching chapel experience, which I most certainly do *not* wish to insult in any way.
Now, if you fail to attend your 38 chapels by the end of the semester, you must listen to chapel recordings (on audio cassette from the library, or RealAudio on LeTourneau's website) and then turn in a page-or-so summary on it. Unfortunately, something is wrong with either their software or mine (and my roommate's, and...) and the recordings play back at roughly 90% speed, making all voices and music distorted. Added to this is the occasional piece of microphone hullabaloo, which sporadically makes the speaker completely incomprehensible. And music ain't fun to listen to, either.
Oh, and if you don't meet the 38 even through make-up reports, then your privileges are slowly revoked until, eventually, you are asked not to return the next semester.
As you may guess from the general tone of this introduction, I wrote my 25 entries this year while in a rather cynical mood. I did three of them ahead of time, but the other 22 were written in the night and morning before the afternoon they were due. I flatter myself that they have witty (or otherwise) comments, and a decent amount of actual valuable commentary. The unfortunate thing is that since they are all intended to be summaries, there are times when even I'm not sure if some of the snide (or insightful, or whatever) remarks were my own or the speakers' themselves.
In any case, upon re-reading them this summer, I found them entertaining (if a bit typo-ridden -- remember, I was listening to chapels all night-and-morning long), and I thought I'd put them up here to share. Perhaps I'll correct some of those typos. This is, after all, the Internet. I would hate to let errors into something so grand and perfect.
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