Tuesday, February 03, 2004
(9:53 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Yes, Classes Have Finally Started
My long personal nightmare of Hegel and leisure time is now over: after six long weeks, I am now back in black at CTS. I was 15 minutes late to my 9:00 class, due to my wildly optimistic idea of how long it takes to get from Bourbonnais to Chicago in the middle of a snow storm, but after that, there were no problems at all.
I have systematic theology with my Bonhoeffer professor, Laurel Schneider, and Kuni is one of the TAs for that class and will be giving a couple lectures. It should be good to get some actual broad theological study under my belt. The class on empire (not globalization, as I have previously said) with Ted Jennings should be wonderful. Today he gave a lecture on Badiou, noted the current vogue for materialist readings of early Christian texts, and said that such readers are almost certainly right not to see any hope for genuine transformation coming out of the Actually Existing Church. Still, he said, it's worth a shot.
The best news was that I did very well on my Bonhoeffer paper, which is especially significant given that Laurel said she was grading based on publishability (if she ran her own journal, she would publish an A paper). I went to her office after class to ask if she could give me some guidance on possibly getting it published, and she said that if I assembled a list of journals that have been publishing articles on Bonhoeffer, she would give me some information to help me to discern which to send it to and would reread it for me again with a mind toward actual publication in a non-Laurel Schneider-run journal. Even if I don't ultimately get it published, it seems like a valuable exercise -- so I was pretty excited about that.
Tonight I looked through the last three to five years of a few big name theology journals, and I noticed a few trends. First, people cannot get enough of Levinas. Derrida is cool and all, but Levinas is where the action is right now. Second, there appears to be a minor vogue of Jonathan Edwards and Schleiermacher. Finally, the journal put out by the University of Chicago Divinity School just loves Voeglin -- within the past couple years, there have been several articles on him, including even a comparative analysis of Voeglin and Levinas. The message here: maybe instead of going to the Institute for Christian Studies, all the DVH disciples should have just gone to U of C Div School. Because it's that easy.
I apologize -- normally I don't use the Weblog as a personal journal. As I get more into my classes, I'm sure I'll have more of substance to write about.
