Saturday, June 04, 2005
(5:25 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
On blogging, and human blogging in particular
One of the ads offers a way to generate blog content. The prospect is tantalizing -- what if The Weblog wrote itself?I'm depressed because I am currently thinking of ways that I can make it through this next month if I don't get the job I interviewed for Friday. Somehow it's more depressing that I can pull through one more month, though it will take some doing. Other areas of my life aren't going very well either. I got turned down from the Wesleyan Theological Journal, perhaps in part because of this paragraph in my paper:
...the concrete result of [Wesley's] movement in the present day is a collection of sects who currently exist at various removes from an original petty legalism and that are all too eager to discard the most distinctive doctrines of their founder in order to be absorbed into the homogenous banality of what in America could be called generic “church growth”-style evangelical Republicanism. I am referring, first and foremost, to that most embarrassing doctrine of all, “entire sanctification,” the doctrine that theologians continually re-think, re-explain, and re-considered, even as the hope for that gift moves further and further from the center of church life.All of the people making decisions about what to include in the journal were members of the sects in question. It's understandable that they wouldn't want to publish my paper, even setting aside the paragraph. It's not the best thing I've ever written. It could have stood some revisions, which I declined to perform. Sad, lazy me -- arrogantly assuming that people would be fooled since I mentioned some philosophers that they'd never heard of or read. (I am still waiting to hear back on two other essays, one on Derrida and one on Bonhoeffer.)
It's all making it hard for me to read Irenaeus. I only have 40 pages left of Against all heresies, which is the equivalent of 500 pages in a normally formatted book.
German is getting better, though. The strict word-order rules for dependant and independant clauses are nice; it's different from English word-order, certainly, but it's simply slanderous to say that German has random word-order, as some have claimed! It's fun that the translation exercises are including more and more quotations from Nietzsche.
