theo|digital

Well, it’s been a difficult road. I’ve been on a brief hiatus from the thesis for about five days—last Friday I turned in a full draft for my advisor’s editing pen. I’m afraid it’ll be rather torn up when it comes back. Instead of feeling relief as I expected, it was probably a low point, feeling like much of my 135 pages of writing was actually rather poor.

I’m feeling a little bit better now (though I haven’t gotten it back yet), although I’m acutely aware of two mental lists: one of edits in each chapter that must happen before I turn in a final draft—things like missing paragraphs, errors, footnote corrections, etc. The other is on general content—sections that I think could use an overhaul. The problem here is that this list is pretty long. I could probably edit and re-write for about a year before I felt like there was stuff here worthy of turning in.

Instead, I think I’m going to have to do the hard work of settling for something that doesn’t meet my expectations, or better put—lower some unrealistic expectations. This is my first attempt at answering a fairly complex question: how does scripture exist and work in a digital context? There are a variety of approaches, and inexhaustible list of questions, and not a few unprovable conjectures. As I hope to continue thinking about these questions for a long time, I’d rather think about this as an opening stab.

Because my advisor (who has enough responsibilities poured on him that I’m not sure how even finds time to read) doesn’t have my copy back yet, there’s not a lot I can complete from my editing lists until I get it back. Even so, I finished writing the short personal introduction today and this afternoon plan on generating a good draft of my bibliography (from Zotero) —something I didn’t include in my draft.

Final copies to readers will probably have to be done by 29 Oct around 2:30pm—Scot McKnight is only around on campus on Thursday afternoon until about this time, and I need to make sure he has enough time to read it.