I’m starting a new blog. It can be found here. It will be my “professional” blog and will restrict itself to purely academic matters of medievalism and Scripture interpretation. There are occasional items that might get cross-posted here but, for the most part, they will be distinct.
I’m doing this for a couple of reasons.
One is so actual medievalists who come by on occasion won’t have to wonder if I’m actually going to say something they’re interested in or just rant some more about the Anglican Communion and its woes. Dr. Nokes has probably heard more about Anglicans than he’d care to know…
Another is that with a separate blog for such material, I’ll be more likely to actually post material there.
Another is that it will allow me to focus this blog more on the direction it seems to be taking which has liturgical spirituality at its heart.
So–pop over, check it out; it’s still a work in progress, of course, but hopefully it’ll grow into something interesting too.
- Yes, I’m still alive. Barely. But I’m buried under a mound of crap.
- I did finally send off one thing that should have been done a month ago. It’s a project M and I are doing together. More on that one later, perhaps.
- I have 217 feeds waiting for me in Bloglines. That means y’all are still alive and writing. Good news, but I fear they’ll continue to pile up for a while. I may be mostly away until the end of Lent or so.
- I do have something in the works for the Cafe so I’ll still be marginally about.
- Thomas, I fear I don’t have any other good recommendations on Anglican lectionaries. There are a few historical works out there on the BCP but they seem few and far between. The only two things in my library that are even close to the topic are Marion Hatchett’s Commentary on the Prayerbook and Martin Dudley’s The Collect in Anglican Liturgy: Texts and Sources 1549-1989. Christopher, M, or others may be able to point you to some other, better stuff. The single most instructive thing I’ve found to do is to peruse Chad Wohler’s amazing BCP site and to print out various liturgies/tables/etc. and to study them in parallel.
- Lil’ H is no longer wandering the halls at night and—for the moment at least—has stopped stripping off her diaper at night. Instead, she and Lil’ G are bunking down together—at Lil’ G’s insistence. As the big sister, G sleeps on the outside so H can’t roll out…
- Enough procrastinating–back to work. Y’all take care of the Anglican Communion while I’m away, ya hear?
I make it a policy not to talk about my day job here. I mention it now to say that I’m changing jobs to a short-term contracting position that will assist us financially and give us flexibility about where we go at its end.
Posting may well become lighter…
On the other hand…
I’m still racing to get the dissertation finished up. I’ve tried several things that haven’t necessarily helped. My director has told me that writing even a few sentences a day will help move me through a dry spell to some productive writing. Furthermore, Dr. Nokes has made a call for more medievalists to actually post on medieval stuff. Too, Dr. Drout, working on recording the Paris Psalter has mentioned the need for more awareness of liturgical issues among Anglo-Saxonists. Pulling these together, I’m thinking I may work out some sections of some of my chapters here.
Parts of my dissertation work with Benedictine Revival Anglo-Saxon liturgical practice to illumine how these liturgies impact Scripture interpretation; since my dissertation’s readership is primarily New Testament scholars and Anglo-Saxonists without specialized liturgical training, I’m including some introductory portions to orient my readers. I may post some sections here to help move things forward.
Wikipedia is cool. And important. But I’m thinking of something else today… I’m thinking of local wikis, personal wikis.
When I was studying for my doctoral exams I plowed through dozens of books in a wide variety of topics. On my best days, I headed a new file with full bibliographical info, either scanned or typed in the table of contents, briefly summarized each chapter and made bullet-pointed lists of quotes I thought I might use at a later date. On my worst, I’d make some random comments about whatever part of the book I’d read, maybe dismissing it as: “basically coming from Y perspective, not much new, just louder and in English…” or some such. These now exists as Word files scattered across several directories.
I was looking over an Internet Archive scan of Frere’s Use of Sarum the other day thinking, “Gee, wouldn’t it be handy to have a table of contents or a list of chapter headings somewhere accessible for this…”
I’ve become convinced that the best way to handle this, to group my files where I can access them quickly and easily is to migrate them to a wiki.
Hard drive organization between research and sources has long been an issue for me but the more I think about it, the more logical a local wiki is to managing it all. Especially for maintaining text and image files, the ability to create logical but non-linear structures of organization is key. There are some free wiki sites out there (like free blogging sites) but I opted to go with a more more geeky approach: I’ve downloaded mediawiki–the same wiki that Wikipedia uses–to run on my test server. (Mediawiki requires a MySQL installation and I’ve got one there.) I haven’t had time to fool with it yet and certainly plan not to until the dissertation is done, but I think these are the way of the future.
I have a new post up at the Episcopal Cafe and (brace yourself) it has nothing to do with Communion without Baptism!
There is actually one more in the series that I intend to post but it currently sits half-finished on my hard drive. I thought it’d be better to post something else than to cast up half-baked thoughts to conclude a discussion that so far I’ve found very informative, respectful, and thought-provoking.
Update: The comment issues overnight seem to have gone away…
Things are heating up and hard deadlines with very short turnaround times are appearing for both the dissertation and a major work-related side-project. Time and resources will be sucked up by those rather than other endeavors (I spent last night wrestling with web server configuration rather than psalm pointing comparisons–same level of geekiness, just different fields…) As I threatened before, pieces will still appear at the Episcopal Cafe but I will be posting less here and commenting less as well.
The Anglican soap opera will have to manage without me for a while…
As a parting gift, though, I commend to those interested–especially the Anglican Breviary crowd–this four-volume translation of the pre-Pian Roman breviary:
Winter
Spring
Summer
Fall
I’d love to compare it to the AB but that’s a project that–well–I don’t have time for at the moment…
(h/t the Breviary page at Wikipedia which has a great collection of links at the bottom)
I met with the department yesterday and laid out my plan for completing the dissertation… I have a stretch of roughly 20 weeks this summer between semesters and that’s when it needs to happen. As a result blogging will slow–or at least will take a noticeably 10th century turn.
I have to get through grading and I do hope to put out the promised trial liturgy page (…and my entry for the Common Prayer carnival…and the carnival itself…), but then all spare brain cycles will be devoted to the dissertation.
Things will also continue to appear at the Episcopal Cafe. In fact, there’s one over there now…
I’ve now added my static pages to the sidebar under the comments with the super-clever title “Pages”…
More will be arriving there as time allows.
This is the new web home of haligweorc.
There will be a few more changes coming in the near future. All good as far as I know…
We did loose a post or two and a few comments but other than that, everything else seems to have made the change fairly well.
I’m hoping to have left some baggage behind at the old site. Much less will be written about the Great Unpleasantness; much more will be written about things spiritual and medieval. Hopefully much more will be written of and therefore on the Damn Dissertation. Time will tell…
