Well it feels like progress

When I got my to do list it felt like a huge mountain to climb and I was already exhausted. There were only ten of them but some were huge and with some I was not sure how much underneath would need changing once I started. My supervisors kept telling me that the corrections were not that huge. I did not believe him.

Well I am prepared at the moment to accept a bit of humble pie. Since Christmas I have done a second edit on the the two chapters with major corrections that I saw him about before Christmas and I have also sent him two other chapters. One chapter does not need any changes although I may just do some for the heck of it well actually I have some nice quotes from interviews that might just go in.

The work since Christmas has persuaded me that I did base my findings on my observations. I have put in quotes all through two chapters and they provide strong evidence for what I have concluded on many points. They also do something very interesting as I have not worked them into the text (many are too long for that and others are tangential). The quotes interact both with the text I have written and with each other. The result is far closer to the thesis my supervisor originally wanted with multiple voices working through the text. I have enjoyed creating questions and patterns that placing the quotes next to the text creates. I know many ethnographers suggest this as a method but when I have read texts set out like this the interaction seems minimal. The texts remain largely separate and linear. With my thesis this has not happened. For instance I assert one thing in the text and there are three snippets around it. One is a senior member saying what I have said about another, the next is a junior member who addresses the senior member and final one is a story told by the person the other two are talking about. It shows without doubt the inter-textual nature of the interviews. I could not read one separate from the others.

However I am also very glad that I have used narrative fact-ion within the thesis. These set the context for the happenings within the thesis and for the exploration. They also bring to prominence the anthropological element of the thesis rather than the interviews.

However I suspect my examiners were wanting a linear thesis and what they have now got is a tightly woven one instead. I am however enjoying creating the weave although I expect I will not find rewriting the chapter on Belonging nearly as much fun though I know where I am going with that.

Almost stopping for Christmas

Parcels for posting and Christmas reading

Well I did not write last night but then I finally got my tradition chapter of my thesis sent off to my supervisor close on midnight. Now I am not expecting him to read it until probably late January at the earliest, maybe February. However, I wanted to get it out of my in tray so that when I get back from Christmas I can have a good go at getting the flows chapter into final form.

Even with finishing so late it took a lot of effort to get there. I started using Pomodoro technique on Saturday to increase my production rate as Christmas and remains of cold had hit it the previous weekend. I also wanted to go to a party on Saturday night. A friend M holds a fantastic Christmas party every year. It includes elements of young person's birthday party as her son's birthday is around then, get together of families to share a meal (chilli made in huge quantities and served with rice) and Bohemian drinks party. Finishing with an intimate group of friends who sit around the table and chat sociably until the small hours of the morning. It is very inclusive and very relaxed. The late night sociability with friends is something I have rarely done since I came to Sheffield twenty years ago and felt good.

So I started, and I got to the stage where there was just one section that needed working on. So I went to the party, stayed later than intended. My decision was to sleep out and then get on as best I could. So I was rather surprised to get up after five hours sleep and find myself ready to work on my thesis.

However, yesterday was a long haul. It took me to lunch time to finish the section, and then I had to check the Grammar and do the bibliography. I have not found a good way to move references between Scrivener and Word. So what I do is to put in Scrivener enough detail (normally authors surname and date plus page) to hopefully find reference in  Mendeley and then when I switch to Word I go through and check it all through very thoroughly and put in the references.

This was hard going for the chapter on tradition as there are at least twice as many references as their are for any other chapter. This is because the autoethnography has been done by me interacting with the texts from and on the tradition. Actually this chapter is still very clearly work in progress. If I get to getting it published it will definitely be one chapter that needs a lot of work. Actually it will need to break into at least two chapters just to deal with the stuff that is in their. Did you know Calvinist/Puritans/Reformed used to view science as a spiritual discipline and an act of devotion to God? Just one of the odd facts I pulled up yesterday while reading up on Dissenting Academies. They taught science because that is how they understood it, not because of commercial applications. If you wanted a commercial education there were plenty of other schools offering that, and they were cheaper too.

Oh I also have cheated, I tend to use Wikipedia not as a source of information but as a place to say "this is not just me".  That is things I know, but I can not document where I know them from. My father was employed there, and while he was there I picked up in general conversation this fact, really is not reference. My supervisor does not like Wikipedia in academic work, so he suggested I took a reference from Wikipedia. Well yesterday I found myself with no other alternative to Wikipedia but to take it reference, fortunately to a source which I a pretty sure does actually give the information given.

I have a big question, why has the Reformed tradition lost confidence in its spirituality. The more I read both historical books in the tradition and also accounts of the tradition it seems that we had what many would say was a well developed spiritual industry about a century and a half ago. Since then we have been persuaded that we do not have one! It is rubbish, when people put the Reformed tradition down for being "anti" then I nearly always can be sure that far from being anti, we have been particularly pro.

Anyway largely stopping for the next few days as Christmas is upon me. I have parcels to post, family to visit and other things to be doing. I will be back writing next weekend so I am taking a couple of books hoping that if I read some of them this week then I will save time afterwards.

Weeks 55 & 56: Filling a gap

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	92,759
Words typed these fortnight:	1,681
Words lost these fortnight:	0
Total increase:	1,681
Days I managed to write this fortnight:	2

Apologies for the lack of Triskele in this blog, I have run out of time to add the bits and anyway I need to finish this section and then do it. What I have been doing is trying to put together a section on using the sociological theory that I am doing to understand worship. In this I am not looking at the standard theories of ritual but am picking up ideas of identity. The intriguing thing is that the Reformed Tradition actually is honest enough to suggest that this is precisely what is going on in worship. That is that worship is the fulfilment of what we were intended to be. Humans were designed by God to be worshipping animals, it is due to the fall that we fail to do this regularly and that society is not designed around worship.

It must be remembered that Reformed Worship is also centred on God, worship is done because God and God alone is worth worshipping. The iconoclasm is not centrally about destroying pictures, images or such that are there, it is about removing that which attract false worship. That can equally be success,  money, social norms  or a celebrity. That which attracts what rightly belongs to God is an idol and needs destruction. As such it is a very ascetic tradition and nowhere is this more seen as within the ritual of worship. It means building theory onto what the ritual is doing rather than developing a much broader analysis is a bit like trying to work out how a car works by reading the highway code instructions on maintenance.

However the tendency within the tradition is to turn the whole thing into a matter of theology and to concentrate on the sermon and what is preached. It is thought if you get your theology of worship right and have sound sermons then you have things sussed. Again this is reductivist and fails to take on the many and varied ways people interact within the worship. The sermon is the start of the process as far as the congregation is concerned and people are interacting internally with it.


Anyway the piece needs another few hours on it before it is ready to be sent to my supervisor. Then there is sorting out what I will do over Christmas. The task is to take something I can do without carrying a huge number of books around. The introductions sounds like a good idea.

So you have theoretically a twin poles pulling at worship. Worship is in some ways the apotheosis of what it is to be human and yet at the same time it stretches out towards the divine.

December 12 Supervision: I am officially writing up

The photo was taken as I was leaving Birmingham University Edgebaston Campus. The tree was a casualty of last winters storms and has since been carved. Today it worked as a focus of this photo in the increasing dusk as after 4:00 pm I headed to University Station. I rarely see the dusk in Birmingham as my supervisions are middle of the day, so this and the January ones are the limited.

Actually this supervision was a lot harder work than many of mine since I started writing up. That is not to say my supervisor thought the work was not good enough. If anything he thought that what was coming was good but there is a huge gulf been good as an idea and right for submission and he wanted to go through the ways what I was doing was not right on the page. This included my need to interact more with the theorists. It now appears that it is only some theorists that I need to do that with and those are the crucial ones. I can do it with a couple a lot better than what I have done quite easily and that will make it a stronger thesis. Then there is developing what the thesis is dealing with. Part of me wants to go back and do that right now but I think I have other items that need removing off the to do list..

This chapter as my last substantive actually means that I am now officially writing up, and  that means the finishing line is in view. The only snag is that due to changes with my home congregation, our minister is leaving, my decision to return to the eldership no longer looks as if it is soft but as if it is hard. I also may have other responsibilities that may come out of this event that may need fitting in around what I am already doing although I suspect they will not start until the Autumn if they do. Therefore I am really needing to get this in a state to submit around Easter. This I know is optimistic given the work involved. Some of it is still drafting, indeed I have a piece of drafting that I need to do before Christmas. This unfortunately means that I will give less time to St Andrews Sheffield at present than they would like. This is coming particularly hard for them as we are going through a period of other losses and expect will continue to until our minister leaves.

So this year Christmas will be another working Christmas. I still have to decide what work I will take up with me at New Year but I know I will need to as I have a supervision on 9th January.  Before I stop for Christmas I need to write a piece on what the Reformed tradition "thinks" it is doing in worship. This is intriguing mix of theology and sociology but I think is possible to pull off. The problem being that most sociology of worship concentrates on ritual. Reformed worship is not without ritual and symbolism but the style is Rational, which makes an analysis based on the ideas of ritual difficult to use as analytic tools. So if it is not ritual, what are we doing? I think I have an answer but that draws on theology.

Getting back into pace in the New Year

The brain storm for the next chapter

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far: 21,720
Total increase: 383




I have been working less intensely over Christmas and the New Year. The change of 383 words is due to editing and so forth. So yes I have been doing bits. I also have been reading about Sociology of Space. There is surprising little stuff out there and what there is, is very disparate. I have found out about Psychogeography, some on the narrative of space and a Marxist on the production of Space. Within my research tradition there is plenty on Sacred space, a bit on church ecology and maybe some work on localisations. Not a lot but there was lots about situation, place, use of space and so forth going on in the congregations. So today I brainstormed space and came up with the following sheet. It allows me to create a structure that is a first draft. There is something exciting about starting this draft as it is here that I finally start to create my style of writing about the congregations. This is far more central than my previous work.




I have also got to the situation where I have submitted at least a first draft of my first chapter to my supervisor. It is nowhere near finished. There is stuff I will not be able to write until I have finished my thesis, it is methodological chapter, one piece has only just gone to my proof readers and I have not put it together, and it is too long and needs a pretty strong cut doing to it but at present I need to do a final tidy up and then leave it.

Week 10: Writing during Christmas preparations

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far: 21,337
Words typed this week: 1514
Words lost this week: 0
Total increase: 1514
Days I managed to write this week: 4

Yay over the 20,000 mark and in ten weeks. Yay that is most of my methods done. I can leave it for now and get back to it when I have actually finished my writing up so can write on the analysis with hindsight rather than making guesses about how I will do it.

I actually had enough words in my notebook to write the full 2000 but decided against them. Some of the words were repetitions, some belonged in other sections and so on. Also I have not had the same concentration this week. I was very much carving out time from what my brain said I should be using to prepare for Christmas. However the preparations are largely sorted and so I don't need to feel too worried over the time spent on thesis.

The big task for while I am away is to work out where I go next. I think I am going to start on the chapter which at present has the title location. I think I want to leave the tradition to last but we shall see. I have basically chapters based on my ethnography with congregations: location, community and worship. Location could be context, and I suspect it will be the easiest as it also have a fairly limited literature base.

However there are Christmas and New Year in the next fortnight and therefore visits to family and God-family (I am God-parent to the two girls in the family). So I am not going to be writing until about the 6/7th January or at least writing up. What I do intend to do is a lot of general writing and reading. So please don't expect anything until 6/7th and even then it may be low on word count.

Hope you all have a good time over Christmas and may in the New Year you find fresh energy to tackle lives challenges.