Progress on the book

I am getting close to completing a very rough first draft of the book (except for various introductions and conclusions). I tend to write very long for the first draft and then spend a lot of time working on getting it into shape, tightening the arguments/presentation, working on the flow, making it more readable, and so forth. As you can tell from the following outline, the hardest part of what I have left to do is to cut significant parts of what I wrote: each chapter needs to be around (less than) 20,000 words. I have already cut significant sections of chapter 1 and chapter 2 but have left most of the cutting of chapters 3-5 for later. One of the first things I will do is to complete my list of the number of times I discuss each parable, so that I can be sure to cover as many parables as possible and not concentrate inordinately on some parables (although since parables like the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan dominate receptions of the parables, there will be more discussions of the more "popular" parables).

Here is the outline of what I have so far. The bold print designates completed first drafts; the italics denotes sections I will write in the coming weeks (the formatting changes when pasted from Word):

 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 (~26,000 words)

1.     Gregory the Great

2.     Bede the Venerable

3.     Wazo of Liège

4.     The Golden Gospels of Echternach

5.     Theophylact

6.     Hildegard of Bingen

7.     Chartres Cathedral

8.     Thomas Aquinas

9.     Geoffrey Chaucer

10.  Antonia Pulci

11.  Albrecht Dürer

Not yet written

12.  Hadiths of the Laborers in the Vineyard in Sahih al Bukhari

Chapter 3: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (~38,000 words)

1.     Martin Luther

2.     John Calvin

3.     Anna Jansz of Rotterdam

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 (~27,000 words)

1.     Flannery O’Connor

2.     Thomas Hart Benton

3.     Parables and the Blues

4.     Elsa Tamez

5.     Octavia Butler

6.     David Flusser

Not yet written (sections may change):

7.     Thich Nhat Hanh OR Dalai Lama

8.     Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. OR Dr. Howard Thurman

9.     He Qi: His painting(s), The Good Samaritan, The Clever Bridesmaids, and/or Prodigal Son. Or other representative from Asia/South America (e.g., a painting from Solentiname)

10.  African painting/art (I have several options)

11.  Godspell (movie)