Reading Weekend

A few days ago a girl in middle school asked me why I was doing homework if I wasn’t in college. Well, I explained, I’m in grad school. But then she looked even more confused. “What’s grad school?”

Good question. Maybe one way to answer it is with a snapshot of my weekend. It was spent almost entirely in the library. The usual suspect was to blame: a major research paper.

In a situation like this, I like to be in a place where I have lots and lots of resources at my fingertips… and where I can work late. First I stopped at LSTC’s JKM Library, where I obtained the passwords for an online database of journal articles dating back decades. But after hours, I head down the street to my second favorite library: the Reg.


In 1939, the University of Chicago discontinued its Big Ten football program and then, as if to drive home the point, built a massive library where the stadium used to be. The Regenstein Library – or “Reg” – is known as much for its brutalist architecture as for its book collection – a whopping 4.4 million volumes, including stack after stack dedicated to theology. And as an LSTC student, I have access to it all. Paper: completed.

Of course, my weekend was spent only almost entirely in the library. There were also those few hours spent wine-tasting with friends old and new. Koinonia, as another blogger recently illustrated, is as important as anything we do here – even during a reading weekend.