Thursday, January 26, 2006
(2:29 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Personal/Blogological Testament: Damnation
The Semester of the Damned begins next week. As it gets closer, it looks less daunting. Due to a series of poor choices last semester, I will have to work this semester, but I have successfully negotiated for a bare minimum work schedule -- just enough to cover my basic expenses. My course schedule will be as follows:- 20th Century Theology -- for which see this post; now that I am a PhD student, this course is required, with the syllabus representing the reading list for an area exam.
- Paul and Philosophy -- this won't be entirely redundant, as we will spend the first half of the class going through historical stuff such as Spinoza. It should be a good group of people, some pretty serious students, and a good reading list. It will also help me to prepare for an AAR presentation, assuming that my proposal (which I have not yet written) is accepted.
- Womanist and Feminist Christologies -- this is an area of theology to which I've had very limited exposure. I hope that taking this course will help me to resist the temptation to engage in petty identity politics by only ever reading the classic white male authors.
- Starting in late March and extending through June: Augustine's Trinity -- team-taught by Jean-Luc Marion and David Tracy at the Div School.
Feel free to place bets in comments about which of these tasks will be left by the wayside. It would be a shame if it were the Nancy study -- although that seems to be the most obvious one, since one of the requirements of being a PhD students is to have incompletes of epic proportions -- but I might be able to treat it as the equivalent of a fourth class, to be replaced mid-semester by Augustine (at which time, hopefully, the Nancy would be finished).
I've been cutting down coffee intake recently, because I didn't think that coffee was helping me to get over my cold, but I have a feeling I'm going to need to step it up a notch in the coming weeks.
An inevitable corollary of the above: I cannot possibly run this blog in the manner to which I've grown accustomed during the upcoming semester, that is to say, I shouldn't. (I can't because I mustn't.) From here until March, then, the only things for which you can rely on me are the Tuesday Hatred and Friday Confessional.
You will not be left alone in the dark during the Semester of the Damned, my dear readers! Old and I have discussed it, and he will be continuing his normal Thursday schedule. Brad and I have discusssed the possibility of a regular Wednesday contribution from him, though it has not been confirmed. If anyone wants to do Mondays, that would help to make sure there's a regular post every weekday. (I'm not saying that I will never post aside from the regular weekly features, just that it's more likely than not that on a given day, I will not be able to post.)
All of this is contingent on you having leisure time. I would not dream of asking anyone to make a significant sacrifice of time and energy to keep this blog up and running. Yet my personal schedule challenges might present a good opportunity for this blog to move more decisively in the direction that it has in fact been moving in recent months -- toward being a genuine group blog. That has been my hope from the very beginning, even though I short-sightedly chose my own name as the URL. But as some of us know, perhaps it is best not to have an officially shared "impersonal" blog -- perhaps it is best for us to continually occupy each other's space, and for me to be displaced continually from "my own" space, with no kind of substance or self-perpetuating institution to uphold above or alongside our being-with one another.
