On Being Ph(inishe)D, On Finished Being

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On Friday, Southeastern Seminary’s Graduate Studies faculty accepted my dissertation, “The Hermeneutical Roles of the Teacher of Righteousness and of Jesus of Nazareth in the Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts and in the Epistle to the Romans” (abstract). This acceptance followed Wednesday’s oral defense where the committee had passed my project with minor revisions (i.e., correcting some remaining errata, describing a few further implications). The Southeastern committee members included Andreas Köstenberger and Benjamin Merkle, and I was also privileged to have James Charlesworth as the project’s external reader.

Throughout, I found the project particularly rewarding, and the oral defense certainly proved stimulating. I am very glad to have finished the PhD, and I look forward to completing several more writing projects that are already queued up, including pursuing the dissertation’s publication. As are many other new graduates, I am continuing to seek a regular, full-time faculty posting, but meanwhile, I am working to collect adjunct teaching opportunities, particularly online and in the Greater Nashville area.

So, as one phase concludes, another begins, and whoever started using the term “commencement” to describe graduation exercises certainly seems to have made a very appropriate choice.