Excellent Movie! ...and some other stuff.

'Million Dollar Baby' is a beautiful movie; a movie with such power has not come out for a long time. And pay attention! - it's one of those movies where everything ties in...and there are few (if any?) useless lines.

Anyways I am slaving away with my term paper. I switched topics half way through my research. Originally, I wanted to take a look at Paul's anthropology and his comments regarding Torah in Romans, and then let that framework enlighten an exegesis of Romans 7.14-25 (the ever daunting "wretched 'I'" passage). Every day of research led to greater and greater confusion over the passage itself as more and more complexities emerged. I decided I just did not have enough time and experience with Pauline texts to come to any type of conclusion (and mind you, I've read a lot of/about Paul for a 2nd year kid). So realizing I was going to give up on that particular topic, I came to one that kept emerging as I was researching for Romans 7: the eschatological tension in Paul's thinking. In brief, the eschatological tension is the tension set up by what is already true in Christ--freedom from sin, justification, receiving of the Spirit--and what is not-yet true--destruction of sin and its influence, the redemption of the body which is only decaying, the restoration of all creation. I have come to see this already/not-yet tension run right through Paul's letters. So that is what I have set out to examine. Trouble is, I write too much. I'm already over the page limit and I have no introduction, no talk about eschatology in first century Judaism, no synthesis of my findings (very important part!), and no conclusion. So after my first draft is over I will probably have to go back to the drawing board and perhaps change my approach. Good thing is, all the relevant texts (all the authetic Pauline letters save Philemon) have been exegeted, so most of the hard work is done. But I need to find a new way to present the exegesis. That will be the concern for draft two.

I can taste freedom, summer is but a few days away. Yes.

Grace and Peace,
Kev