Direction

"I think I'll apply to PhD programs." Yes, these words came out of my mouth at dinner a week or so ago. A doctoral program has been in the works for me all along - it's just been a matter of timing. Given the cacophonous Episcopal Church and my place within it, the timing seems appropriate.

My summer reading list includes:

• Langdon Gilkey's Through the Tempest AND/OR Nature, Reality, and the Sacred
• Stanley Hauerwas' After Christendom? How the Church Is to Behave if Freedom, Justice and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas AND/OR In Good Company: The Church as Polis AND/OR Unleashing the Scripture
• Martha C. Nussbaum's The Fragility of Goodness AND/OR Poetic Justice
• Paul Ricoeur's The Symbolism of Evil AND/OR The Rule of Metaphor AND/OR Time and Narrative AND/OR Memory, History, Forgetting
• William Stringfellow's An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land
• Kathryn Tanner's The Economy of Grace AND/OR Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity AND/OR Theories of Culture AND/OR The Politics of God
• David Tracy's Analogical Imagination AND/OR Plurality and Ambiguity
• J. Denny Weaver's The Nonviolent Atonement
• Walter Wink's The Powers That Be

The list seems a bit much, but I will be working in the library 20 hours / week and I cannot imagine there are THAT many students in and out of here from June through August (there aren't that many students in and out of here now)!

Through some reading and discussions with folks like AKMA and Dr. Wondra, I figure I'll have some sense of where I ought to apply. For now I'm considering the University of Chicago Divinity School (Tanner, Tracy, and Nussbaum) and Duke (Hauerwas).