After meeting with my director last Thursday, I have a new deadline for chapter one: May 1st. Although I already have 21 pages written, it still feels like a daunting task as chapter one involves the literature review. Half of my scholars write in German, a couple in French and a few in English. So I'm committing to translating some German for the chapter 30 minutes a day for the next month. The plan to complete the rest of the chapter in a month involves a daily focus on either a scholar or theme. The first two weeks will be primarily on the scholars. So yesterday, I wrote on Ephrem A. Davids' Das Bild vom Neuen Menschen which I discovered will offer some helpful material for my dissertation. He deals with some of my favorite subtopics such as the image of God and sanctification. Today, I'll be delving into one of the 'biggies', Hermann Dörries, who wrote Die Theologie des Makarios/Symeon, one of the longest works devoted to Macarius: 459 pages of text! Tomorrow will be a French scholar, Vincent Desprez, and later in the week, three Anglophones (Marcus Plested, Alexander Golitzin - my director!, and Columba Stewart). Getting some of the challenging German work done early in the week is a better idea than leaving them until the end of the week!
I've requisitioned a number of books from Marquette and Inter-Library Loan this past weekend. One is a major work on Macarius written in the late 90's by Klaus Fitschen. Then there are the SEVEN Finnish-German conferences on Macarius. I've looked at five of them before, but discovered this weekend that two more conferences took place in 2003 and 2007. (More reason to finish soon, so the 2011 conference doesn't become part of my reading requirements...Or maybe I'll have the opportunity to present at the 2011 conference if I finish my dissertation!) There are occasional papers given at the conference in English (or at least published in English - so maybe they'd let an American sneak in...)
The reward for a month of solid work will be a trip to Pittsburgh for the PTS alumni days! The travel arrangements are already in place, but it will feel wonderful to get on the plane knowing that chapter one has been turned in!! Stranger things have happened.
