St Andrew's Day End to Acwrimo, but not finished

Well I am writing to the line as today is the Acwrimo. I technically have failed to get through what I set myself to do. I wanted this chapter finished and I did not get there. It will take me the next two weekends to get to the stage when I can send it to my supervisor. This was the original plan before AcWriMo  but I was hopeful as I have useful ways to spend the extra two weeks. I have however finished expanding the section on Congregational Studies and am largely happy with it. Indeed it has become a lot stronger and more interesting. All I really need to do is think whether I need to give one of the questions of my thesis around what role worship plays within the identity.

In some sense the easiest bit is the bit I have left to last. So I hope that next weekend  I can expand the literature review on the theorising of identity so that it looks and feels more like a traditional literature review. In some parts that is the easiest point as it is the stuff that I have revised most often in the process of putting this thesis together. Ironically it is also the most wide ranging of reviews.

Time wise however next week is time poor with respect to thesis. This week for work I am at a focus group in London.  It is a once in six month meeting and it just happens to be next week. It is in London because it is winter, and coming further North in the UK is fine for Southerners when there is a chance of decent weather but not when it gets dark early in the evening. So all us Northerners (some  have to travel over twice the distance I do) have to head down to balmy London. I wonder if the Scots fly down to these events. Then next weekend my nephew is coming to stay for a weeks work experience. So I need to fit working around him as well.

Anyway there are some good aspects to having had a go at Acwrimo as well.

1. It got me writing again and I am enjoying the writing far more this time. I have not got the space in my timetable this revision I had when doing the original writing, but  I do find that writing expands to fill the time I allow it.
2. I learnt again that I need to have music on when I am writing but not Ravi Shankar. I automatically get up and do something different every time he comes on my play list. I guess I better remove him from it before next weekend.
3. Jogging is good for writing. Now I am slightly jogging phobic. This dates back to my late teens when I tried to get into jogging just before I became ill. The result was I associate jogging with being ill. However, as part of my getting fitter, I need to be road fit as well as generally fit. That means I actually need to be either walking or running on tarmac surfaces for quite a distance. Well walking for miles just does not fit into my timetable most of the time. So I gave in and am trying jogging. The surprise is that I have a better writing day if I jog first thing in the morning. It seems to get the antsy mood out of me and I settle quicker into writing.

So yes I have not completed what I set myself to but I am pleased with what has been achieved.

Well New Introductory Section Finally Drafted

It is interesting sitting down and watching my drafting approach to writing. I will start out with a pretty broad remit and go off on lots of tangents. The topics I normally find interesting. I will then spend quite a bit of time deciding what to write. Then I will start writing.

Now that sounds as if it is all drafted but it isn't. Normally I will only gain clarity of what I want to argue when I am drafting. Therefore there is a process of going through and through my text to get it not only to cover the area it has to cover but also to get the argument clear.

I had two things I wanted to argue in this section. The first was pretty clear and that was that there was no right dimensionality to religiosity and the use of apparently simple terms such as "belief" and "belonging" hide as much as they reveal. The simplistic reason for this is that often in the literature they are used in a technical way by the writers but interpreted in a non-technical way. There is also no agreed technical meaning. For instance belonging could mean:

• has formal membership of a congregation
• regularly participates in public worship
• identifies themselves as belonging to

The three are not the same. A paper that takes one of them might differ completely from a paper that takes another. The habit of not clearly spelling this out means that there are difficulties in dealing with the literature but we do not want three dimensions for belonging. The problem really is we think of belonging as a binary, either you do belong or you do not.  Therefore, we feel there ought to be a simple test, but in reality people negotiate belonging in a complex way.

"Belief" is even more complex but perhaps is closer to adequately theorized.  I am not sure whether I should take a "belief" as uniform or "situational". In fact as in a sense the situation is singular this study cannot determine that. However I do think there is elision in Belief between accepting proposition and a performance of belief which has more to do with confidence/trust/allegiance that with propositional truth. In the second sense I can actually see it playing within the congregation. It fits with the occasional comments on an individuals faith that came up in interviews and in conversations. These were not people who usually went out of their way to make statements about what they believed but were people who acted in certain ways.

The later half of this month has to be spent expanding the bibliographic sections of the thesis which basically means writing more about what the people I have cited actually say.

800 words out of a thousand and half the topic not written

Its been one of those frustrating weekends thesis wise.  The task in hand is to write a thousand words on Believing and Belonging and situate my thesis against that debate. Problem one, is that while I have something to say about Belonging I have very little to say about Believing in my thesis. Problem two there is a vast and complex literature which is bigger than the papers in the topic in my discipline indicate. Problem three my thesis is primarily about the third b and that is behaving. Belonging just happens to connect with their behaviour and the topic. What is more that is an ethnographic finding.

Well due to the amount of literature I have spent quite a bit of the weekend going through and back through. Firstly I have to set up why this is relevant to my PhD, which I have done. Then I have to take each of the two concepts Belief and Belonging and discuss them as concepts. The big problem is that I would like to say "Belief" is simple and then consign it to a few lines in my thesis. However, it isn't  and I think my thesis may just have as part of the conclusion some reflection on the absence of belief statements from the context of the ethnography.

I am also beginning to puzzle out the way first person pronouns are used to signal group identity. The use of the "we" pronoun seems to signal a sphere where orthopraxy is expected by the congregation whereas "I" is used when it is acceptable for changes to occur due to the surrounding culture. The problem is that this implies that "you and me Jesus" lyrics are no longer about emotion, but rather a way of signalling wider cultural norms can be brought into the choice of music. This is interesting.

The other thing I am doing now is writing so I have enough to accurately recall the citation within the text. This will expand the literature review quite substantially and I think satisfy my examiners on that score. The interesting thing is that it might also explain why I felt so at a loss at how to engage from my thesis. Unfortunately, this also means I do close reading.  Most writers and readers are not used to this. I have already struck one significant oddity which  I have demonstrated to be odd. If you have two dimension one called "belief" and the other "belonging", then there are problems if "orthodoxy" gets into the belonging one!

Anyway I did not get as much written as I hoped and would at least like to have most on Belief written and have a rough idea where the concept of belonging is going. That means I think that I am going to claim one of my few thesis days tomorrow afternoon from work and see if I can get further on.

Well I think I know what I want to argue

I have spent quite a bit of the weekend just churning through various bits of literature. Let me say that there are three different sets of literature that are relevant to discussion Believing and Belonging.

The first set is the literature that is relevant to the discussion of what is religiosity in the broadest of terms. Grace Davie has set off a plethora of B alliteration when she coined the phrase "Believing but Not Belonging". There now is: 

• "Neither Believing nor Belonging", 
• "Belonging not Believing", 
• "Belonging and Not Belonging" (no I did not make that one up),

 although no-one seems that interested in Believing and Belonging. However, people are also extending the Bs so we now have "Believing, Belonging and Behaving" or even "Believing, Belonging, Behaving and Bonding" only you will never guess what Bonding is. At this point I say stop as the Bs are too disjointed from their actual concepts to make them memorable. I will therefore use the none alliterative form that is also in the paper and turn it into an acronym to remember it by.

However, there are then problems with the literature on Believing.  Grace Davie deliberately does not define what she means by believing and belonging. There is good reason for this, there is a whole literature about what we mean by believing. Ideas that I had up to now accepted as part of the religious/theological discourse around belief are very clearly present within the sociological discourse. Have the sociologists taken it from the Theologians or visa versa? I do not know. This brings me actually to the reason I had steered away from tackling this whole topic in my thesis. I am no longer sure what it means to believe something. Please do not try sorting this out by giving me definitions. The problem is not lack of definitions, but that I have multiple conflicting ones and they do not give a cohesive middle ground. Any further definitions will only add to the confusion. I think I am getting closer to an idea, but it is not really fully formulated and it certainly does not sit anywhere close to the simple taken from granted presumption that was my starting point. Perhaps what I like most about my "new" formulation is it actually asks hard questions of myself and what I do about belief. Then of course there is the whole faith development literature as well.

So we come at finally at belonging. Well this is where the focus of my thesis is. However, though there is some agreement that identity and identification are important to belonging yet there is not much actual definition. However, here too there is a distinction that needs to be brought. Most questions of belonging are directed at belonging to a particular type of religion. I am really not addressing that. What I am addressing is what does it mean to belong to a specific congregation. To answer that question the talk of many of the sociologists of religion about belonging is not useful. The discussion is that of social psychologists who ask what it means to belong to a group. They have a very different formulation. I also think I am going to have to sit down with Amartya Sen again and see if I can find his levels of belonging. This changes belonging completely in that it is no longer a binary (in/out) but some members are more equal than others, that is they have more power to direct the group. These are a useful theorisation along with the dimensions of that the social psychologists bring. The question then is can this low level belonging be transferred to the larger scale of religion.

Plan from here is to write out more fully my argument in the mornings before going to work this week, then to actually write it up formally with references over the weekend. So far as Acwrimo is on track!