Fall Activities

This fall, I will be completing my coursework. First, I have to finish an incomplete directed reading in medieval theology. After many changes in the reading list, I believe I have settled on a final lineup, rounding it out with representative works of Hadewijch, Meister Eckhardt, and Cusanus. Second, I am doing a course on French feminism, wherein we will discuss de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous, Wittig, and Clement, along with an anthology of essays relating these thinkers to religious studies. I am hoping to be able to complete the medieval materials early in the semester and the feminist paper before Christmas.

I am serving as TA for Constructive Theology, the capstone course of CTS’s MDiv program. Students undertake a major project of developing their own theological position, in dialogue with a particular context and a major systematic theologian from the tradition. It will require a lot of grading. With this course, I will have TAed the entire required theology curriculum at CTS, in order. I am also providing technical support for an online course in Public Theology, setting up the course page using Moodle course-management software and helping students start up their own blogs.

I will be attending the AAR/SBL meeting in San Diego in November, where I will be giving a paper on Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of the Letter of James, under the auspices of the Reading Theory and the Bible group. Before that, I will be on a panel at the ALSC conference in Chicago, on “The Internet, Publishing, and the Future of Literature,” along with blogging megastars Scott Eric Kaufman and John Holbo. SPEP and MLA are also both in Chicago this year, so I will try to attend at least a session or two, time permitting.

Although the exact regulations surrounding this are unclear to me right now, I hope that I will be permitted to take my required methodology exam (over deconstruction, even though it’s not a method) before the main group of four self-selected exams. If that is the case, then I will take it late in the semester, finishing off my required exams and coursework in one fell swoop. Then after Christmas, I can direct my full attention to studying for my remaining exams — in philosophy of religion, theories of community, patristic and medieval theology, and a trio of major figures (Kierkegaard, Barth, and Bonhoeffer). For a good chunk of this, I can thankfully review things I’ve already done in my coursework; this is especially true of the latter two exams.

Beyond that, I’ll just be trying to hold together a few scraps of a personal life and struggling to maintain fiscal solvency. All in all, it’s not quite the infamous “Semester of the Damned,” but still, I can’t wait until it’s over.