“Congratulations…” And I don’t remember anything else said. And I don’t really care. After an hour of questions, I heard the magic words. Dissertation defended and approved. Doctorate done. Now I can read books about things other than African theology and contextualization theories.
Later, I read write-ups by the evaluation committee. One of them went into great detail about how he was sucked into reading parts of it. “You have a natural strength for making connections between seemingly unrelated cultural issues, drawing them to tangible ministry and theological conclusions. I found myself pulled into the Maasai world, intrigued, more curious as I read. However, a weakness was revealed in your academic writing style…” Three years ago when I was accepted into the program, I told the dean my greatest struggle was going to be writing four hundred pages in academic-eese. It’s not exactly how I’m wired. Guess what? Three years later, he said, “You were right.”
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