My First Sabbatical: A Retrospective

Last updated on: August 25, 2009 at 6:56 am by James F. McGrath

My First Sabbatical: A Retrospective 2009-08-25T06:56:00-04:00 James F. McGrath

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I toyed with the idea of calling or subtitling this sabbatical retrospective “the good, the bad and the ugly”. Certainly there was some of the latter: a severe case of bronchitis early on, and an attempted break-in at my house (I was out of the house for perhaps 5 minutes, came home and found the patio door had been opened, and heard someone trying to get in. I was extremely grateful for the mop handle that prevented it from being opened wide enough for the would-be burglar to enter). We now have a new patio door, with an even sturdier broom handle to go with it.

For the most part, however, I have no complaints about how the sabbatical has gone, and am not sure whether I will approach my next sabbatical with a shorter “to do list”. Perhaps it is best to have an implausibly long list and to do what one can, and have multiple things to work on. I have found over the years that when I have just one project I’m working on, if I am finding progress difficult, then I simply stop making progress. If I have multiple projects I’m working on, then when one hits a bump I can shift gears and work on something else for a while – usually with the result that when I return to the other project, I do so with renewed enthusiasm.

The jury is also out on whether it is better to start the sabbatical in the winter or the summer. It seems to me that, while starting in the winter means having the cold weather and shorter days working to unmotivate you, when you realize your semester off is essentially over in May-June, you still have the summer to try to do a few more things and tie up loose ends. Both probably have advantages and disadvantages.

My list of things to do included a number of things that didn’t happen. I hoped to spend more time reading Greek than I did. I mean reading outside of the New Testament. I’d hoped to spend some time reading Josephus, and perhaps other authors, but it didn’t really happen. I did manage to read the Hebrew Bible more regularly than usual, to work on my Syriac and spend some time reading the New Testament in Syriac, work on Mandaic, and also on modern Hebrew, modern Arabic, and a smattering of Farsi. And I was glad I did, since all of the languages I spent time working on proved useful at some point at the conference on the Mandaeans.

I had two book projects lined up for the sabbatical, and I didn’t finish either, although I did make significant progress. The more academic of the two was on oral tradition in early Christianity. The main reason for not having done more writing on this topic is having instead spent time reading and pondering the role of memory in understanding this aspect of the transmission of the Jesus tradition. I hope at some point to get to devote some attention to the question of what it would mean to take seriously the claim of the Gospel of John that its contents derive from an eyewitness, while also taking completely seriously the fact that the Gospel of John seems to thoroughly transform and transmute the words and actions of Jesus through a very specific and personal angle and lens. Perhaps the two are not as incompatible as is sometimes thought. I’ve also been giving some thought to the relationship between intertextuality, Christology and the primarily oral/aural medium through which most early Christians would have encountered texts, and echoes of texts. That subject I’ll be talking about in New Orleans in November.

I made more progress (in terms of having actual completed drafts of more of the chapters) when it comes to the book on Biblical literalism that I’ve been wanting to write, aimed at a more general audience. I drew on things I’d written on my blog, but worked through it all and reworked a lot of it substantially.

I have a completed article on robots and religion that I just need to send off to a journal, or contribute to a book project if a relevant one comes up before I get around to doing that. There is no one obvious journal to which to submit it, since it is a consideration of how artificial persons might appreciate, or fail to appreciate, human religious traditions of various sorts.

Working on the Mandaeans has led to some exciting new avenues of research and future publication. I’ll leave future projects for future posts, but I had the chance to lay quite a bit of groundwork during the sabbatical. And one Mandaean-related project is currently occupying my attention more urgently, after which I’ll return to finishing up articles and sending off articles and book proposals.

Right at the beginning of the sabbatical, I received an invitation to contribute to the article on the burial of Jesus in the Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception. I eagerly accepted, but soon realized that the section of the article that I was being asked to write was about the modern period rather than the most ancient, and so I had a significant amount of further research
to do on Holbein and Dostoyevsky and the like. I ended up spending the first two months of the sabbatical focusing mainly on that, but have no regrets at all about that, since it is nice to have added something more solidly academic to my publishing on the subject of the burial of Jesus.

Outside of the aforementioned projects, all at least marginally related to academia, I put on my list of things to do learning at least one more piece for the piano. I made a little progress on Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante défunte”, but didn’t finish it (and discovered that Ravel appears to have had quite large hands).

On the whole I’m starting the new academic year refreshed, and feeling more like a scholar than I have in a while. And although I don’t have a huge stack (or to use a more modern way of putting things, thumb drive full) of completed articles and chapters written and ready to be sent off, I got a lot of work done that will drive my research and inform my teaching between now and my next sabbatical. And several things are far enough along and have sufficient groundwork in place that what remains to be done on them can be done even during the usual teaching and perhaps even grading activities that typify any given semester.

The only firm recommendation I have for those who take a sabbatical is this: at the end of it, write about what you’ve done on your blog. It will encourage you to think back and to put things in writing, and may shift you from wondering “Did I really get anything done?” to feeling enthusastic about what you’ve managed to do, even if not all of it has become tangible yet in the form of printed sheets of paper. And let’s face it – things that are physically printed are quickly going out of fashion.

Oh yeah. One more thing I did during the sabbatical. I blogged. 😉

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