"Christian Unity and the Role of Authority" Dept.
(Musings of your humble servant at
Rerum Novarum)
A common pattern that I have recently sought to address with regards to my earliest writings is the voluminous nature of their compositions. One can only hear so much about the pieces being "economy-challenged" before coming to the conclusion that an army of people with the exact same criticism cannot be wrong. (Particularly when that army was in the vast majority of cases otherwise favourable towards the work.)
For a long time has the prospect of making such adjustments been on the back burner. (Over a year in fact.) But only recently (October of 2002) was it feasible for a variety of reasons to actually undertake the process. And even then it took about six weeks to actually start the wheel rolling - the mind finding a million excuses to postpone indefinately the inevitable.
When I started revising the treatise in late November-early December of 2002, the emphasis was on utilizing a lot of short urls to make the piece much easier to read. This pattern continued with revisions to another sizeable project from mid 2000 where the longer urls were divided into several shorter ones for easier reading.
My essays from 2000 were originally over eighty pages apiece on the average. Even adjusting for excessive length of certain projects, the per piece average was still over fifty pages. By 2001 with the exception of my essay on Christian Unity, the average essay was a shade under thirty pages per. (Including the longer work it was thirty-seven pages per.)
It is next to impossible to gauge what an average for 2002 was since only one piece approaching a web essay was actually written since November of 2001. (That would be the open letter to my friend Albert Cipriani.) That one was twenty-nine pages but it also does not have the customary bibliography and notes section that is my wont to put into web writings. So figure with a proper bibliography, etc it would be thirty-one odd pages long.
Other then that, the last five non-extract writings I have done were either for e-zines or were co-written projects for print periodicals.{1} In those cases they were under 2500 words or so per. In addition to those, there will be at least three additional essays published this year which were cowritten earlier in the year with Pete. All of this had me thinking that I needed to make the earlier writings more comprehensible. I had already abridged the first Svendsen essay back in early 2001 when the Appendix material from that writing was excised out. {2}
As the essays from 2001 were all in the 20-45 page range,{3} they did not need tending to in the sense of dividing them up onto multiple urls. (Though they all were to varying degrees refined a little back in January of this year.) However, there were still the essays on the Real Presence and on Justification which were fifty and seventy pages long respectively. They were too complete to be abridging{4} - indeed the one glaring defect they had was a lack of bibliography/notes section as I noted in a previous blog entry. So any revision would involve lengthening them both right out of the starting gate. Nonetheless, shorly after I corrected and resent all the templates from my writings where either Vatican II or the Catechism of the Catholic Church were referenced with live bibliography links,{5} the two essays were started concurrent to one another. The original plan was to rerelease the Real Presence essay on Holy Thursday and the Justification essay on Mercy Sunday. Well, in neither case was the target date successful.
The Real Presence essay ended up being re-released in a three url format on Good Friday. But in reviewing the divided templates of the Justification essay (which will be on nine urls), it hit me that the Christian Unity essay would be a pretty easy reformatting piece to do also. Unlike the Real Presence essay, there would be no adjustments of grammar or added paragraphs, no adjustments of piece sequence, indeed almost nothing to add except for a couple tiny segues where a few of the sections would be divided into urls. So in the span of two hours on Monday of this week, the piece was done except for url 8 where I wanted to tweak the final paragraphs of the essay a bit. That was done on Wednesday and the templates were sent off to Matt this morning. They are now available to be read
HERE.
As far as the justification essay goes,{6} it is about seventy-five percent completed now. Among the most noticeable differences it will have with its predecessor (other than the multiple url format) is that each of the nine urls have their own bibliographies and notes sections. There is also a more judicious use of emphasis in the work. And in a few spots some new material is added. It will also be more ecumenical. I will not budge from saying the hard things but at the same time the tone will be more irenic in doing it. This is keeping with the dictum of Bl. Pope John XXIII's Allocution to the Second Vatican Council about "the substance of the ancient deposit of faith is one thing, the manner in which it is expressed is another".
So those who have referred in the past to my rather
encyclopaedic length responses can be assured that upon completion of the justification essay reformatting there will be little if any truth to that charge anymore. Thus critics are going to have to find another way to avoid my arguments. Oh well, what else is new???
Notes:
{1} Two of them were co-authored essays with Pete Vere for periodical publication in 2001, two of them were pieces I wrote for e-zine publications from September 2001 and November 2001, one was the essay cowritten with Pete Vere for the March 6, 2003 edition of
The Wanderer.
{2} The material was duplicated originally in my treatise prior to abridging that work in December of 2000. Some of the material excised from that revision - which was duplicated in an appendix to the first Svendsen essay - resurfaced in February 2001 when it was published in a short 12 page essay
The Mass - A Short Primer.
{3} Except two which were under twenty pages - one of which was a cowritten essay, one which was a shade over forty-five pages long, and the hundred page
Christian Unity essay. Originally my
Syllabus essay was fifty pages long but I excised the seven page appendix section after finishing the treatise revisions.
{4} The two essays had received favourable email responses. (The essay on the real presence in particular had received favourable email responses - particularly from Eastern Christians.) Though I had planned to revise these two writings as early as late 2001, the circumstances of the time made such an endeavour impossible to do. (Not to mention losing the harddrive in early May 2002.)
{5} This was done in the days before St. Patrick's Day.
{6} The justification essay was actually critiqued by a Reformed Protestant in late 2001. The critique was for the most part ecumenical and I did make a few adjustments in the templates currently being revised which reflected what I could recall from that review. The planned Mercy Sunday release of the justification essay is not to be - though in retrospect, perhaps it is best that the reformatted essay on Christian Unity has been made available instead on that day. (In light of the theme of that piece.)