Another chapter off to my supervisor

Cars parked on a Sunday Afternoon

That might not look more than a typical street scene but have a go at counting the number of cars parked in it. Normally the car parks are pretty empty at 3:30 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon which is when that photo was taken.  The reason they are full is the induction of our former minister was being video relayed to the Jesus Centre (the building with the red cross on it) and people from the congregation had met to watch it. The actual induction was in Southampton. I was not there, I live just across the road but I was trying to finish another chapter of my thesis. 

I am not sure I did, I had got towards the end the previous day, but as is the way with lots of my writing I got to the end and then realised what the chapter was about. Or rather in this case I realised that I was coming to an uncomfortable conclusion but it echoed someone else's conclusion only whose? Spent a good two to three hours looking for it and did not find it. The Sacred not as perfectly ordered but the point at which disorder becomes part of the whole system. I am fast becoming convinced that the Reformed tradition has the calmness of the experienced sailor or mountaineer who talk matter of factly about things that make other people's blood run cold. The mistake is to think that they are not concerned about these things. They are, in some ways they are more concerned but they have learnt that the skill of remaining calm is the skill of survival. Ok so maybe I should search for something on the chaotic and the sacred.

I came across quite a remarkable paper by Belden C Lane when he talks of differing types of Sacred Space in America but totally manages to ignore his experience in worship in church on a Sunday. No I am not surprised, the Reformed tradition has a deep ambivalence there. It would want both to accept and deny the existence of sacred space at that point. However try and make sense of it and I am struggling. There is a rupture and I am beginning to suspect the rupture is in the basis of language itself. For such a strongly Word based tradition that is deeply problematic.

Week 17: Well still writing despites cold and computers interfering

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far:33,912
Words typed this week: 3068
Words lost this week: 0
Total increase: 3068
Days I managed to write this week: 4

This won't be long, as you can see a pretty credible increase this week, indeed I actually have not written up all I have drafted, my head became too fuzzy to concentrate due to a cold. The cold is a pain in several ways. It stopped me going into work on Friday which would not matter but it meant that I could not pick up my new router, which as my old one went defunct due to the prelude to a powercut means my internet connection is quite low. Although I am at present feeling like grumbling about this, it may be a good thing in that it allows me to get through more reading which I really need to. Does any doctoral student get enough time to do all the reading they need to.

The good news is that despite this I have found a place in Barth where he states the standard Reformed understanding on sacred space. No this is not new take on Barth, nor is Barth being particularly clever rather he is just the only Reformed theologian to actually think it was worth writing about, after all there was no controversy, you learnt it at Sunday School and that was that.

Next week I am going to have to re-write my stuff around theory and space. I don't think I did it particularly well first time through but now having written most of the rest of the chapter I think I may have a better idea of what I need to write. I need to check through several things and there are things I need to include that I excluded.