Well as ready as I will be for next supervision

Well this has not been a week of good progress. Good progress would mean that I basically had my chapter on tradition back in draft. It did not sound much to do, just an extra section that gives the references to people who have also written about the tradition and something on Bourdieu. The shock was to realise that the language he was using reflected very accurately a specific theorem. The remains the Bourdieu was quite a skilled user of statistic, but many of his followers have a simplistic understanding of what he was doing. He was choosing statistical techniques because they fitted with what he was researching. That does not make those statistical techniques somehow better than others but it does make his use of techniques better. Well David Cornick returned the compliment and started using "habitus" without referencing Bourdieu.  Now I have the idea I have to go away and think what the implications are. For a start things do not behave as nicely with human culture as you do with probabilistic models.

Progress on the whole has been slow, I did have an extra day on Tuesday as the UCU was on strike again only I seem to have a rare ability to throw migraines on strike days with the result that my brain only started functioning late on in the day. Then on Thursday I was feeling off colour but went into work anyway. The result was that for the first time in a couple of years I have had a head cold. I have had a couple of days when the effect of the cold left me decided feverish. The result is that I have not made the progress that I hoped on the chapter of tradition.

However I have sent the tradition chapter in its very much draft form to my supervisor as I am aware that things are dropping into place in a way that they did not in the final stages in the spring. I want to check with him that these ideas are at last coming on with something that is worthwhile. This chapter is growing and I suspect that it could grow further.

I am beginning to wonder if there is not a book that looks at the way that the Reformed tradition is embodied in the local congregation. This would expand this chapter to fill the space and mean I needed to spend more time reading the tradition. I am getting more confident with handling it and my hand waving is getting less arbitrary. For instance I have replaced a section on falling out in general with a synopsis of the big falling out for the Reformed tradition which is the debate between Predestinarianism and Armininianism which happened at the second Synod of Dort. What it actually did was provide a template for future fallings out within the Reformed tradition! I am at the point of wanting to check how Scotland dealt with Congregational discipline for another part and slowly but slowly I building a much more Empirical model.