Adjustments

I am sitting here trying to finish the essay for this week (on Irenaeus’ understanding of the plan of salvation) before tomorrow’s tutorial session. This prompts a bit of self-reflection. I have a tendency to bite off a bit more than I can chew, and it looks like my original plans for lecture attendance is going to need to be pared back a little bit.

The German that is on for Wednesday mornings is a reading group—which depends on a better grasp of German than I have at the moment. It looks like what I’m going to need to do is book myself into a language lab and get my German up a bit higher before joining the group either next term or next year.

I’ve also found last week that this weekly essay is a bit larger task than I originally anticipated. It probably involves reading and taking notes on around 200 pages most weeks and then producing a word-efficient 2000 word essay. While I can probably do it and attend all the lectures I originally wanted to, it’s not going to leave much room for error. I had two bad work days last week and found that I had to skip the lectures today to get the essay written—that’s not a good sign about the margin of error that I have under the current scheme.

Accordingly, I think I shall drop Aquinas’ philosophy from Monday 2pm. I missed the first lecture for this last week as I underestimated how long it would take to return to Wycliffe Hall, eat lunch, and return to the relevant College for the lecture. Having now missed the first two lectures out of a sum total of eight, makes this one seem like an obvious one to be dropped and picked up in a later year.

I think I will also drop Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I think this work is far more important than is often realised by theologians, because most Christian ethics draw on elements of Aristotle’s account for building blocks at points and yet Luther in places seems to see Aristotle’s approach as lethal for a biblical understanding of salvation. Nonetheless, of the subjects that are left, it is the one that has the least connection to work I’ve already done. Eliminating it has the further advantage of freeing up Tuesday morning, which would mean that (with Aquinas gone at 2pm Mondays) I have two whole blocks of time freed up to get work done.

Last week felt like Monday and Tuesday were little more than lecture days (that left me quite drained), so I didn’t even begin to start work until Wednesday (and even then and I didn’t start until mid-morning due to German). This should significantly change the make-up of the first part of the week.

It is a perennial issue, my appetite for knowledge is usually requires a greater investment of time than I can manage. Hopefully I can choose some of these things up in the years ahead, but for now, less is more. MDB