Finished with the First Draft?

I might actually have finished the first draft of the reception history of the parables book. That depends on whether I can get permission to use one of the works of art on the parables that I have requested permission to use. I have two options from Africa that I am trying to obtain. If I can get one of them, then I have one more section to write. If not, I think I will go with what I already have.

The drafts of the first two chapters are now in pretty good shape, and both of them are also within striking range of the 20,000 words per chapter goal. I spent some of last week cutting 4000 words from Chapter 2.

The first draft of the five chapters is still ~54,000 words over the word limit for the book (I've already cut ~10,000 words), but Chapters 3-5 are in very rough shape. I am in the process of working through Chapter 3 now and have cut significant sections of what I wrote on Luther, Anna Janz, Calvin, and Maldonatus. The section on Bunyan alone is over 6000 words, at least 4000 of which I need to cut. I will include those sections on the blog, however, so they won't be completely lost.

Another major change is that I have replaced the section on Chaucer with a section on John Gower. I had deleted Gower because Chaucer is more well-known and the sections on the parables were rather entertaining (e.g., where some Friars live in The Summoner’s Tale!). What I realized, however, is that Gower's work interacts with the parables more deeply and significantly, so I returned that section to the chapter and deleted the Chaucer section. 

So, here is the list of what is now included in the book, although I have time to change some things:

 A Chorus of Voices: The Afterlives of Parables,

Chapter 1: The Early Church (~26,000 words)

1.     Irenaeus

2.     Gospel of Philip

3.     Clement of Alexandria

4.     Tertullian

5.     Origen

6.     John Chrysostom

7.     Augustine

8.     Macrina the Younger

9.     Ephrem the Syrian

10.  The Good Shepherd in Early Christian Art (Roman catacombs; Dura Europos)

11.  Illuminations from the Rossano Gospels  

12.  Byzantine mosaics; S. Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy.

13.  Romanos the Melodist

Chapter 2: 500 – 1500 CE (~23,000 words)

1.     Gregory the Great

2.     Bede the Venerable

3.     Ahadith of the Laborers in the Vineyard in Sahih al Bukhari

4.     Wazo of Liège

5.     The Golden Gospels of Echternach

6.     Theophylact

7.     Hildegard of Bingen

8.     Chartres Cathedral

9.     Thomas Aquinas

10.  John Gower

11.  Antonia Pulci

12.  Albrecht Dürer

Chapter 3: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (~37,000 words)

1.     Martin Luther

2.     Anna Jansz of Rotterdam

3.     John Calvin

4.     William Shakespeare

5.     Rembrandt

6.     John Bunyan

7.     John Maldonatus

8.     Domenico Fetti

9.     George Herbert

10.  Roger Williams

Chapter 4: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (27,000 words)

1.     William Blake

2.     John Everett Millais

3.     Fanny Crosby

4.     Leo Tolstoy

5.     Adolf Jülicher

6.     Frederick Douglass

7.     Charles Spurgeon

8.     Emily Dickinson

9.     Søren Kierkegaard

Chapter 5. Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (~38,000 words)

1.     Flannery O’Connor

2.     Thomas Hart Benton

3.     Parables and the Blues

4.     Elsa Tamez

5.     Octavia Butler

6.     David Flusser

7.     Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

8.     Godspell

9.     Thich Nhat Hanh

10.  Rich Man and Lazarus, (a painting from Solentiname) or

11.  African painting/art (?)

Do you see any glaring omissions or something that I should cut?