Saturday, August 19, 2006
(5:07 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Saturday Plan-Blogging
Things I want to do before the beginning of classes (September 5):- Today or tomorrow -- Finish 20th Century paper. Working title: "The Trinitarian Turn in 20th Century Theology: A Selective Survey."
- After that's done -- spend a week or so working through some liberation theology: Guttierez, A Theology of Liberation; Dussel, Ethics and Community; Sobrino, The True Church and the Poor. At some point, perhaps squeeze in Sally McFague, Models of God, to follow up on all this process stuff I've been doing.
- Then begin at least my thought process for the panel on Theology and the Political. My tentative theme: People actually sometimes did theology after the High Middle Ages, you know. In fact, some of them even talked about the stuff you're gesturing toward, and it might be helpful to check out their work!
- Concurrently with those two things, get back on the wagon with Latin -- I'm almost done working my way through the grammar book (although I got a little bit bogged down in the various forms of conditional statements), but I didn't do a very good job of keeping my reading process going alongside that. Hopefully I can get through the rest of the grammar book and a couple more "books" of the Confessions before the school year begins.
- Also before the end of the summer, I'd like to take a day or two and hammer out a solid draft of my presentation paper on "Situating Zizek's Paul." (In anticipation of this, I have been reading Santner's Psychotheology of Everyday Life -- though honestly, I don't think that my knowledge has particularly been enriched. It seems like a variation on the time-honored Zizekian genre of "well guess what -- Important Figure X is secretly just like Lacan!" Santner does a lot with Freud, Lear, and Laplanche, too, but the overall structure is pretty similar, and even the writing style has some echoes.) I already have some usable material written, and it would be good to have this out of the way.
- I'd also like to get Reinhold Niebuhr's Nature and Destiny of Man read before the summer ends, but that doesn't seem likely at this point.
If all goes well, I'll start the school year with no outstanding incompletes, with at least one and hopefully two conference papers already written, with a much better grounding in Latin than I had in the beginning of the summer, and with only around 15 more books left on the 20th Century list.
Next semester, I am taking Philosophical Thought (a PhD required class), a directed reading in Medieval Theology (hence the desire to shore up my Latin), and (tentatively) Homosexuality and Hermeneutics -- though I may drop the latter and take a hypothetical seminar on Butler and Foucault if it ends up being offered. I am serving as a teaching assistant in History of Christian Thought, as I've mentioned before, and I am also most likely going to take the 20th Century exam before the end of the semester.
Thus, by Christmas time, I will have completed my required TA position, ten or eleven out of my fourteen courses, and one out of my six exams, and I will also have made my AAR/SBL debut and had an article and a full-length book review published. Truly, I will have earned my presents!
Given that I'm going to achieve so many wonderful things, though, I can't quite understand why it seems so overwhelming to write eight or so more pages on this dumb paper.
