End of Another Year and I am still doing Thesis

Well I admit that most of this week I have taken off, but I still needed to get some work done so I came back from my parents on Friday and have spent quite a bit of Saturday and today working on the flows chapter.  The result is that chapter is back in supervisor draft, and I now have the challenge of getting through the three data/ethnographic chapters.

I was not needing to alter the argument within the flows chapter, but I was needing to incorporate the thinking of Zygmunt Baumann on liquid nature of modernity and on Pete Ward's take on that. Actually this did the thesis some good as at one point I was wondering whether they were working in the same way as me. There does seem to be a tendency among Social theorists to skim the surface of the metaphors they use. My experience in writing poetry is that a metaphor really starts to work when you begin to understand it. The better you understand it, the better and more illuminating it is as a metaphor. Indeed the care with which I have invested in understanding the metaphor and how I am applying it is paying dividends. I was sitting down with Pete Ward's book when he asserted that if we changed the way church was organised we could still keep the gospel as it was. However, I had already looked at the relationship between ideas and people and realised that these are different takes on the same problem. So if you organise church differently, you reorganize people encounter with the Gospel and therefore the Gospel you proclaim. I suspect it is this realisation that is at the heart of the need to restate the Gospel in Reformed thought. If a society reorders itself then the terms change their meaning so you need to rethink the formulation. It is not that there are not references, but that the magic blanket of language that allows us to do so many things slips quite easily.

Anyway I had to work the whole thing through and am now pretty happy with the chapter. It is making an argument and I think that works.

Now I have to get on with the ethnographic/data chapters. Come Monday morning I will need to sit down and do quite a bit of work on focussing. The idea is to use the chapters not only to describe aspects of the placements but to focus on aspects of the tradition and also aspects of the metaphor. The conclusion of each chapter then becomes crucial as it should pull together these aspects from within the chapter. I however need to spend quite a bit of time thinking this clear. It would be nice to have one to one mappings but I somehow doubt it.