Accomplishments of the Past Year

Unfortunately, this blog has been inactive for nearly a year. However, this can be explained by the amount of work I've accomplished in that time.

Publications

'Gaining and Losing Imperial Favour in Late Antiquity: Representation and Reality' (Book Review), Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Forthcoming.

'"An Insult to the Incarnation?": Online Technology and Christian Worship After COVID-19', Didache: Faithful Teaching 20:1 (Summer 2020). Available online at: http://didache.nazarene.org/index.php/filedownload/didache-volumes/vol-20/1274-didache-v20n1-03-online-tech-and-worship-pottenger.

‘COVID-19: We’ve Been Here Before’ (Blog), Nazarene Theological Seminary, 4 May 2020. Available online at: https://www.nts.edu/covid-19-weve-been-here-before.

‘The Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic Age’ (Book Review), Ancient Jew Review, 26 August 2019. Available online at: https://www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2019/7/12/book-note-the-donatistchurch-in-an-apocalyptic-age.

Courses Taught

Nazarene Theological College (Manchester, UK):

Led an undergraduate level directed study in the life and thought of John and Charles Wesley (Fall 2019).

Edited and proofread a Ph.D. thesis prior to its submission to the University of Manchester.

European Nazarene College (Linsengericht, Germany):

Developed and led an undergraduate-level directed study on the topic of Women in Early Christianity (Romania Learning Centre, May-July 2020).

Created and taught a semester-length online course in History & Polity of the Church of the Nazarene (Kosovo/Albania Learning Centre, Spring 2020).

Public Engagement

‘The Cross and the Plague: Christian Hope and Hospitality in Times of Pandemic’. International Anglican Church, Colorado Springs, CO, 22 April 2020. Conducted online via Zoom due to COVID-19.

‘A Gospel for All: Faith and Politics in the Empire of Constantine the Great’. International Anglican Church, Colorado Springs, CO, 18 August 2019.

Conference Attendance

Association of Ancient Historians, 2020 Annual Conference, Online via Zoom due to COVID-19, 23-25 April 2020.

American Academy of Religion, 2019 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA, 23-26 November 2019.

Given all of the above, in addition to preparing my book Power and Rhetoric in the Correspondence of Constantine the Great for publication with a university press, applying for academic posts, starting a part-time job, and keeping all these plates spinning as best I can, it's no wonder that I haven't seen fit to write anything here in the blog for awhile.

Currently, my focus is on the book, which has been through peer-review. I've written my response letter, and sent it back to the editor. In the meantime, I've extensively revised and expanded the introduction and will continue working my way through the reviewers' lists of suggested improvements (mostly minor) to the manuscript as a whole.

I have backed off from applying for academic posts in recent weeks, having started a non-academic part-time job to help make ends meet. I will pick that back up this fall. I have two courses lined up to teach online for Nazarene Bible College, an institution that I have recently joined as adjunct faculty. Each will run for six weeks apiece, starting in November and running through February with a break in-between for Christmas. Both of these are church history courses: the one dealing with early and medieval Christianity, and the other focusing on the post-Reformation and modern periods.

Earlier in the year, I began reading about the emperor Julian, in whom I am interested in pursuing further research in some specific area (as yet undecided). Having spent a few years with the 'first Christian emperor', it seemed only fitting as well as highly interesting to cover the 'last pagan emperor' as an immediate follow-up. I do not, however, intend to make this a book-length project, but rather a series of journal articles. My goal is simply to produce one at a time, and see if my interest and inspiration holds to do any more.

Finally, I am doing a lot of 'catch-up' reading in a variety of ancient sources, since I lack an education in Classics at the undergraduate and master's levels. I don't regret my background in Christian theology, because as a historian of early Christianity and the later Roman Empire, my understanding and experience in this field gives me a valuable advantage over many historians whom I've read that seem to treat theology a bit awkwardly. I've long had a similar difficult with theologians, who observably also deal with history in ways that do a dis-service to their own arguments as well as the secondary field upon which they're attempting to comment.

But, as I've told my wife recently, 'If I knew then what I know now', I would have benefited immensely from a Classics degree. Rather than spend time in useless regret, however, I've embraced the opportunity to be a lifelong learner. I am reading everything I can get my hands on and reasonably digest when it comes to reading historians like Tacitus, Orosius, and Zosimus, or thinkers like Plato and Tertullian, or the letters of Cicero, the epics of Homer, etc. I'm reading some works in ancient Greek history to supplement my knowledge of the Roman world. It is often slow-going, partly because I remain so busy outside the books. But I'm determined to increase my exposure to and understanding of as many works of the ancient Graeco-Roman world as I can manage, and I expect this will be a lifetime pursuit. There are worse ways to spend one's spare time! So far, my proudest accomplishment in this area is doggedly working my way through Augustine's City of God in its entirety over a period of about five years. I've also read his Confessions and the complete corpus of his extant letters. I'd like to start on some of his treatises.

It's a busy life, and I'm not able to do or accomplish all the things that I would like to. However, looking back over the past year, I've managed to do a great deal more than I realized. Most rewarding is the fact that somehow I've enjoyed a fairly reasonable work-life balance in addition to gaining valuable experiences that will each hopefully contribute in some way to the goals that my wife and I have set for ourselves.