Well the big news is that I’m almost done with the PhD dissertation. I’m sitting on a fairly full draft, a proofreader is working through it, I’ve had a good friend read the whole thing, and my supervisor is working their way through this version. If all goes well, I’ll do some final edits, supervisor will sign off, copies will be printed and sent off to my three external examiners, they will read it and be convinced it’s up to scratch, and it will ‘Dr. Patrologist’ from here on in.

In January, as my last post mentioned, I’ll be teaching a 1-week course again at MALS, and I plan to work through Nyssen’s De deitate filii et Spiritus Sancti et in Abraham. This means that for the rest of November and December, I’ll be preparing that text, which also means I’ll be producing (a) a Patristic Readers edition of the text, (b) an English translation (there isn’t one), and (c) since this will be a third Nyssen text of suitable length, I plan to incorporate it with Ad Ablabium and Ad Simplicium to produce another print version. Sales of my first reader have been unsurprisingly miniscule, but I’m not bothered by this. My market is niche, and I derive a lot of benefit from the preparation of these texts.

My other plan for summer here going forward is to turn attention back to article writing and really get a few articles submitted over the next 4 months. I don’t lack for materials, but I do need to turn them into submissables.

I have no idea what I’ll be doing in 2017. I’m applying for jobs, obviously, but I have an unhealthy pessimism about employment in contrast to my otherwise general optimism. If I can find a few more online students, I’d be happy to take them on for the year ahead. We’ll see.