Week 54: First Draft of the final substative chapter done

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	92,759
Words typed these week:	3,555
Words lost these week:	0
Total increase:	3,555
Days I managed to write this week:	3

There is an incredible feeling of having got to this stage. I have a thesis and what is more it written down on paper. The last chapter has been more of a big dipper ride than most. The big question was could I bring it altogether to make sense at the end. I feel I have done so, but I found as I tried to make progress that with wanting to create an argument I had first to go backwards and state things that would otherwise have been irrelevant to this thesis. It was also scary that although I had an idea I did not know that I could bring it off. What had to happen was a whole host of diversions and excursions that seemed to be going off at all sort of tangents had to be pulled together in a synthesis that made them to fall together into a whole. In the last section (apart from the concluding paragraph) I finally get to one of the big issues that has driven my thesis. It is there but I am struggling towards it. Technically I have tomorrow on my timetable to get to this point. A day under the timetable is as good as week at the moment.

This does not mean I am finished. I have a substantive first draft and means I am finally on the writing up stage. I have some major work to do on at least two chapters. The one on worship needs a theory section put on the front, intriguingly I think I am going to have to draw more on the tradition than in other chapters and it has occurred to me that this might be right. The other one is that the chapter on the tradition needs a complete rewrite with the description and theory integrated. My methodology chapter needs to be cut by half at least. There are some obvious cuts and I will need to remove some arguments I am indulging in. Then there are the Introduction and Conclusion to do. Oddly enough I began to realise some of what I needed to put into the conclusion only as I got to the final part. I need to discuss to the extent to which I think the Reformed Tradition is similar to other traditions, I am pretty cautious of generalising from it.

Another intriguing is that once again I have ended up dealing with theorists of globalisation and nationalism. This doctorate is about the small scale and the local but theorists who have been most useful through out were working on a much bigger scale.

Ever so often I want to answer the question are you postmodern with the response no I am Reformed. There are surprising reflections from one to other that it is difficult for me to tell what in my thought is there because I was raised Reformed and what has come because of my more recent engagement with thinkers who are often characterised as Postmodern through working with social theory.