Between 0 and 1: Updating the CV

I updated my Curriculum Vitae page here this morning. That sounds like an administrative sentence (and in one sense it is). A CV is supposed to be a fairly boring document: education, publications, presentations, teaching, service, and whatever else can be fit under a recognizable academic heading.

But looking at the new version, I realized that it also records something that has been harder for me to see while I’m actually living through it.

Over the last few months, a number of threads that I’ve been working through for years have started to come together in a more coherent way. My first comprehensive examination at CIIS became a paper on ecological intentionality, creaturely form, and what I’m calling the Ecology of the Cross. That work brought Edith Stein, phenomenology, metaphysics, and ecological perception into a conversation that I’m still learning how to describe. The second comprehensive exam is now pushing that further through Stein’s account of non-primordiality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later work on flesh, chiasm, écart, and the shared perceptual field.

Those terms can sound fairly abstract when collected in a paragraph like that. One of the most important developments this fall has been finding a way to put them under pressure outside the reading chair.

That’s where the Ecological Intentionality Field Notes have come in. Most mornings, I sit for a while with the black walnut tree behind our house in Spartanburg. I take a photograph, listen, watch, write, and then return to whatever questions have emerged from the reading. Sometimes Husserl survives the encounter. Sometimes Stein does. Sometimes a storm comes through, drops a branch, and reminds me that my carefully constructed language about gift, relation, and reciprocity may have gotten ahead of the tree.

The practice has become one of the most important parts of the current research. It has forced me to ask whether seeing another creature more attentively actually leads to adequate care, whether belonging can be constitutive without making relation itself the organism’s norm, and whether a shared ecological field can hold genuinely different and sometimes conflicting creaturely goods. Those questions feel much closer to the dissertation I hope to write than I could have imagined even a few months ago.

The updated CV also makes something else more visible to me. The academic work isn’t happening apart from the rest of my life. Teaching Scripture and theology, preaching, working with churches, writing about water and development in the Carolinas, teaching science, studying ancient art, and spending twenty minutes in a folding chair under a walnut tree have started to look less like unrelated chapters and more like parts of the same long inquiry.

I’m hesitant to make that sound tidier than it is. Most days it still feels a little like Zeno’s paradox. There’s some imagined point between 0 and 1 called “becoming a scholar,” and every time I cover half the remaining distance, another half appears. Finish coursework, begin comps. Finish one comprehensive exam, begin another. Clarify ecological intentionality, discover three new problems hidden inside it. Learn to see the walnut differently, then realize that better apprehension isn’t yet adequate care.

Maybe that’s not a problem to solve.

A CV inevitably makes a life look more linear than it actually is. Dates line up on the left. Titles sit neatly beneath headings. Research projects appear to have clear beginnings. But the actual work is messier, more recursive, and more dependent on people, places, books, classrooms, churches, trees, conversations, and accidents than the document can show.

Still, I’m glad to have this particular snapshot.

The updated CV feels closer to the work I’m actually doing now than the version I had posted only a couple of months ago. It doesn’t mean I’ve crossed some invisible line between 0 and 1. I’m increasingly suspicious that there is such a line.

But I can look back from here and see that some distance has been traveled.

And then, tomorrow morning, I’ll go sit under the walnut again.