Current mood:

productive

Current projects
-- I finished my first piece that I've been asked to contribute to the book I mentioned. It's an annotated Mary Magdalene book list with 22 titles on it. Waiting for editorial comments.

-- I've been watching movies that feature MM characters in order to attack my next piece, on MM in popular culture. There are a number of films I've never seen (such as Cecile B. Demille's King of Kings) that should be included.

-- Several people have responded to my request for interviews about personal experiences with MM. I need to follow up with everyone and decide which stories I'd like to include, and how the "personal stories" piece will be formatted.

The above are my paid projects. Although I find them interesting, my unpaid projects are the ones that truly engage my attention.

-- I've been collecting material related to the old Syriac Christian tradition of replacing MM with the Virgin as the first witness of the resurrection. For some reason I find the literature and images in this tradition deeply beautiful and slightly haunting.

-- The Virgin/MM conflation material is an offshoot of a project I've been working on for more than a year, in which I've been gathering evidence that the epithet "Magdalene" didn't originally appear in one portion of the Gospel of John. I think I have all of the evidence that I need to mold an article or short book on the subject. Now I just need to decide what kind of background information I need to provide in order to argue my point.

-- Encyclopedia Magdalena is languishing, and I'd like to get back to writing entries.

-- I would like to do a rough translation of Hippolytus' commentary on Song of Songs into English. The only translation from the Greek that I know of is into German, from almost a century ago. Although I'm picking up some Greek here and there, I think it will still be easier for me to do a translation from the German. It's secondary, but at least it will be something.