Northwoods Seelsorger

As of August 26 I finally finished the reviewed stage of my rough draft:  106 pages of research, 3/8 of an inch thick, clearly the longest paper I have ever written.  It now awaits being proofread by my wife, then submitted to the assigned readers at Nashotah House.  After their review with predicted suggestions for revision, I will revise and then schedule the defense.  I hope this all can be accomplished well before the first of the new year.  According to past posts I finished up my course work back in the summer of 2011, a long 4 years ago.  About that time and stretching over the next couple of years I wrestled with the proposal phase, eventually completing a total of two different thesis proposals, totaling over 40 additional pages of work. My final proposal was submitted in the Spring of 2013, over two years ago.  It appears that I was finally able to start writing around August of 2013, once I received the green light from my adviser.  I...

Some books keep you tied to the page unwilling to take a break, waiting eagerly to discover the next point.  This, unfortunately, was not one of those. This reviewer took far too long to finish the book. While the format was interesting at times, the latter part felt slow and encumbered with a bit too much detail seemingly unrelated to the immediate point at hand.  The first section attempted to tell the story of life in a Medieval Irish monastery through historical fiction.  It traced the early beginnings of Skellig Michael, a small outcropping of rock off the coast of Ireland where a limited group of monks led a rather austere existence, to the ending of its active existence and the eventual migration of the order to the mainline in the matter Medieval era (588 AD - 1222 AD).  Enlightening to students of Christian monastic existence was the revelation of the harsh and demanding nature of the early Celtic practice.  The Irish not only withdrew from the world, t...