Not really saying anything. Especially after a long conversation this afternoon about “making ourselves marketable” to one institutional niche or another, just once again feeling the strictures of academic life that, as often as not, severs thought into so many discrete lifeless pieces.

Just like last time I took this class, I’ll learn enough to be able to very roughly translate a short passage from German to English at the end of the summer, and so pass the test. And then I’ll forget everything about the language within three weeks, since my knowledge of it never penetrated its purely structural aspect.

Language. Most of the summer’s working hours will be devoted to language study, in an effort to reinforce a few things before the year starts and I actually need to use these things. Since Rousseau will figure in a couple of my fall classes, I’ll slowly work through The Social Contract and possibly also the Discourse on Inequality in French. I’ll do something similar in Latin, picking a few texts and just working with them for a bit each day, with a wider variety: sections from Gratian’s Decretum, probably, some of the Carmina Burana, maybe Unam Sanctam… My girlfriend will join me in this one, and we have yet to decide on the texts. My French and Latin are basically secure (though still far from effortless), so this is just an effort to ease myself back into their academic use.

More strenuous will be my effort to learn German, more or less from the ground up. I took a reading course a few years ago (which I’m enrolled in again this summer), but I never used it and very little of it stuck. This summer, my goals are to work through the reading book (again), to practice actually speaking with a handful of friends who already can or need to learn, and to practice reading some simple piece of prose (Hesse’s Demian has been recommended).

Reading. A friend and I carry on a little reading group in contemporary critical theory, which I’ll keep up with–and which might take up all the reading time I have remaining. We’re in the middle of Nancy’s Inoperative Community now, to be followed up by Blanchot’s Unavowable Community and possibly Agamben’s Coming Community (though I’m not actually sure that last one is at all related to the former two). With what time remains, I have a little pile of political theory and social criticism I’d like to start before I have to go back into theology full force: Michael Walzer’s The Company of Critics, and Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution and Crises in the Republic.

Writing. Little to none. I’d prefer not to stop writing completely in the months leading up to the start of my degree, but I really don’t have any time left if I plan to do all of the above (plus buy a house and move!). What little I do write will be on this blog, or on a few simple, just-for-fun projects I have going on the side–a short commentary on the Schleitheim Confession, and disputed question on infant baptism.

As usual, that’s probably more than I can realistically hope to do. Oh well!

So I begin again at Notre Dame in the fall, the Ph.D. in moral theology. For the most part, I’m really excited to go back. I couldn’t ask for a better faculty–the department is absurdly well-rounded, and their scholarly habits are unimpeachable. Nor does it seem I’ll be wanting for a stimulating group of fellow students. My main anxiety is political: I’m going in with a rather low capacity for responding charitably to challenges from the right, and that’s undoubtedly most of what I’ll be getting. (I’m extremely grateful to have missed the whole Obama fiaso. Even the 36 hours I spent there the other weekend were enough to drive me slightly insane.) But for that, I’m sure coping mechanisms will eventually be found.

It looks, moreover, like I’ll be embarrassingly wealthy while I’m there. I’m even buying a house! If I go through on my thought to make doctrines of property and poverty one of my areas of research, that’s going to get uncomfortable very quickly. For now, it’s just kind of relieving–especially since it will make it possible to seriously chip away at the $45k of student loans that are weighing me down.

• Gospel of John, with John Meier
• Theology of Augustine, with John Cavadini
• Eckhart’s Latin Works, with Stephen Gersh
• Sacramental Theology, with Nathan Mitchell

All the professors are top-notch, clearly, and I think the themes will interweave surprisingly well. A few other things I know I’ll be posting on are these:

• Michael Sattler’s ecclesiology
• Believer’s baptism
• Negative theology
• The Johannine epistles
• The doctrine of hell
• “Nonresistance”

Here’s hoping I work at least half as hard as I plan to!

First, I’m taking an Old Testament survey course with Gary Anderson. There will be a lot of review here, but also some emphases that are new to me. Anderson seems to be planning on making consistent note of how these texts have been (and should be) appropriated by Christians. It is, uniquely among courses in biblical studies I’ve taken, a course in the Old Testament, in the ancient witness to the work of the same God who eventually took on flesh in Christ. Fruitfully, though, it doesn’t look like that approach will overpower Anderson’s ability to view the text as a Jewish work written for Jews. In fact, half of our secondary texts come from Jon Levenson, the Jewish theologian who has done so much in comparing Jewish and Christian readings of these texts. So this will be a profound lesson in Old Testament hermeneutics for me, which I very much look forward to.

I’m also taking Intermediate Latin, focusing on reading classical texts like those of Livy, Catullus, Martial, etc. With any luck I’ll also find time to keep up with a reading group in Christian, probably medieval, Latin, so I can keep developing my familiarity with that vocabulary and those grammatical shifts.

Third, a course on Jonathan Edwards, particularly his moral theology, with Jennifer Herdt. I know little to nothing about Edwards at this point, but I’m about halfway through Marsden’s magnificent biography of him (really, the best written biography I’ve ever encountered) which is filling out the picture. There are many aspects of his thought and life that trouble me tremendously, but much that I also find quite profound. He seems to have woven trinitarian theology and theological aesthetics into his ethics in an unusual and, fittingly, beautiful way. I’m also looking forward to paying attention to the development of his thought with respect to the question of membership in the church, which shifted overtime from a broader, Christendom-style inclusion to a more disciplined conception of the community of converted believers.

Finally, Postmodern Theologies with Cyril O’Regan. This course will spend its first half on later Derrida’s supposed religious turn, reading his Acts of Religion, Gift of Death, On the Name, and Circumfession. His conversations with Marion and Levinas will be kept closely in mind here, of course, as will Caputo’s interpretation of Derrida as a religious figure. The second half will turn to Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault, quite different thinkers both continuing Nietzsche’s tirade against the Christian tradition. Both thinkers, in quite different ways, also refashion and reintroduce some notion of transcendence (more horizontal than vertical) which will be of particular interest to us as we read for religious themes.

I also have a few other projects to keep me engaged over this semester (as if these courses weren’t enough!). I’m submitting a paper proposal on Michael Sattler and the idea of ‘the perfection of Christ’ for the Believers Church Conference at Canadian Mennonite University next June–thus the recent glut of posts on Sattler. I’ll be working on that paper slowly throughout the year. More importantly, I’m beginning work on Ph.D. proposals, which will likely circle around the theme of political theology. More on that as I figure it out.

That’s the plan for the fall, in far too many words, and so also the topics for this blog over the next several months!

Now that the main source of stress has ended, so (hopefully) has my recent silence. You’ll recognize the source of all my recent posts in the papers I just mentioned.

Next semester’s classes are more than promising, if somewhat overwhelming:

• Mystery of God, with Cyril O’Regan
• Patristic Exegesis, with John Cavadini
• Readings in Reformation Theology, with Randall Zachman
• Jean-Luc Marion and Phenomenology, with Kevin Hart

Alongside the course on Marion, Hart has agreed to meet once extra per week to read through Husserl’s Ideas I and, if there’s time to get into it, some Heidegger. Two authors I could never get through without help! Not to mention, Marion himself will be joining us from Chicago for at least one seminar.

Is it wrong to be so excited about next semester before the dust has settled from this one?

Asking the question “Why do you care?” struck me as something more nearly answerable. Social ethics are my most persistent concern, I stammered, but I care about systematics because of my conviction that our systematic reflection (on the nature of God, on sacramental practice, on the mysteries of salvation) is included in and inseparable from moral formation. More than that, I think that working through our confession of faith reframes the entire moral question, redirects it towards that Kingdom of God which is not of this world, requires things of us we wouldn’t otherwise expect. I want our activists to engage in consciously christoform protest, our systematicians to aim their speculation at the concrete (moral) upbuilding of the church, our moral theologians to acknowledge the unity of eschatological and political questions (for example).

Recognizing this passion doesn’t get me much further in choosing an academic specialization, but it helps me to set priorities and grant some order to my training. And maybe it helps more than I think with this former task as well, because it changes the question. No longer What will be your academic priority? but From what perspective can you best perform your passion, or best exercise your gifts? Can you speak most coherently on this theme as a systematic or moral theologian, and will that placement allow you to adequately challenge the discipline you want most to challenge? Do you want most to demonstrate the way that moral theology can be done by reference to formally systematic topics, or that systematic theology can be done with an ethically-informed shape and telos?

Surprisingly, it’s the latter that is most appealing. That doesn’t necessarily mean I concentrate on systematics rather than moral theology, but it does require a definite intentionality with regard to the shape I give my program here at Notre Dame.

I’m not so naive as to forget that most of these jobs have been turned over to inevitably exploitive industry, displacing workers and using methods impossible to sustain. I do think, though it may be proof of the “choose your battles” mantra in our present situation, that to live a life devoid of the hand labor is to live by unreciprocal consumption, in every instance ignorant of natural limits on consumption. Not that everyone should be a farmer?the world desperately needs people-workers, of course?but that the connection between consumer and producer must be intimate and intentional, never in ignorance; the Christian community must recognize that hand labor is equal to service is equal to congregational leadership in terms of “ideal Christian occupations.” The Christian community of my experience has largely overlooked this.

I could also talk forever about the obvious pull of Christianity towards environmental partnership, intentional partnership over impartial stewardship, and how working the land and keeping it is more faithful and effective than simply combating past maleffects on their own terms?that’s not really motivating me either.

Farming would bring discipline; living in a barn would reduce dependency on material goods and modern luxury; working with the nature would connect me to her in a way I’d rather not miss. These are welcomed benefits, but again, not my central reasons.

My desire to work, perhaps to farm, stems from an increasingly overwhelming disgust with the academy, an increasingly overwhelming awareness of the chasm between humanity and creation, and an increasingly overwhelming feeling of my own lifelong lethargy and inability to do hard work. My desire to work is wholly visceral; any reasons I can give are reflective and to some extent defensive.

“If it feels right, do it” they say, and I don’t really know how to live any differently, though it worries me that I don’t know how to judge instinct. I’ll most likely apply for a few farming internships for next season and involve myself in it over the course of this semester. That way I can feel through my interest and cleanse myself of overly-romanticized images of farm life. Most likely I should involve myself just as heavily in urban service, so as to more tangibly know urban life and needs and to cleanse myself of negative stereotypes. Hopefully regular work at the Catholic Worker will fulfill both.