Make that a projected trilogy of posts. Bonhoeffer and “The Jew” ii) is now at The Weblog, and I still haven’t got to the passage I was originally going to analyse…

This is one of the reasons why I never got very far with that PhD - tendency to produce lots of interesting-looking ideas but to be unable to back them up because in the process of analysing the texts that backed them up I’d come up with lots more interesting-looking ideas that also required backing up (and would also place in question the ability of those background texts to back up my original ideas). At some point, the argument has to ground itself in some fairly banal matter-of-fact observations that don’t go spinning off into further exegetical adventures. Or, you have to decide just what points you want to make, and restrict yourself to making just those points…