Hell Yeah, It Matters

Erin Doom

7 days ago

6 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

The Long Conclusion · Part 1 · No. 1

Notes toward finishing a dissertation and living inside its question

Commemoration of St. Symeon the New Theologian

Anno Domini 2026, October 12

My study carrel on the right at Durham during my first visit in May, 2011.

MY WIFE was sitting at the island between our kitchen and dining room when I asked her whether finishing my dissertation really mattered.

It wasn't a serious, carefully planned conversation. I had recently gathered the enormous folder on my computer that contains nearly twenty years of dissertation work: manuscripts, abandoned chapters, conclusion sketches, correspondence, notes on books, supervisor reports, and more attempts to bring the whole thing to an end than I can remember. I had received an encouraging assessment. There was, in fact, a legitimate dissertation in that folder. It was recoverable. It was worth finishing.

But did the degree itself matter anymore?

I'm fifty-three years old. I don't intend to become a university professor. I didn't begin doctoral work for the usual reasons: I had absolutely zero aspirations for an academic career. Some of the older and wiser men on the original board of the Saint John of Damascus Institute, later renamed Eighth Day Institute, believed a doctorate would matter if I wanted to build a serious educational institution. They were right. And I followed their counsel. But that institution is no longer mine to lead, and the life I'm building now doesn't require a PhD.

So I asked Christiane how important it really was.

Her answer was immediate:

“Hell yeah, it matters.”

I laughed. But I also heard what stood behind the answer.

She had lived through the dissertation with me. She had endured the time away, the money, the student loans, the years of my attention being divided, and the larger suffering surrounding Eighth Day Institute. My children lived through it too. Caleb once joked that his friend Joey would become a medical doctor before I finished becoming a doctor, even though I had started roughly fifteen years before him. It was funny. But it also stung.

Other people carried this work with me. Warren believed in it. Members of the Eighth Day community gave money so I could travel and write. Jim Logan let me work in his family's cabin. John Brown let me use his cabin in the Flint Hills. And there are several others whose names I'll leave anonymous.

The Weight of Unfinished Work

The unfinished dissertation has never been sitting harmlessly in a folder. I have carried it. The weight is emotional. It's mental, always somewhere in the back of my mind whether it surfaces on a particular day or not. It's marital, because Christiane carried the cost with me. It's financial, both in the student-loan debt already accumulated and in the money it would still require to officially finish. All of that weight belongs to an undertaking that still has no ending.

For years I've explained the unfinished degree by pointing to money. How in the world could I ever afford to finish it? That's a very real obstacle. But it has also become an excuse. I set the dissertation down because I can't see how to pay for its completion, and then carrying it unfinished adds another kind of cost. The burden feeds the avoidance, and the avoidance makes the burden heavier.

There comes a point when the pain of remaining where you are becomes greater than the pain of doing what change requires. I've reached that point. I haven't discovered the money. I haven't eliminated the fear. But carrying this unfinished has become painful enough that I'm willing to do something differently. The deeper problem has always been focus, and focus begins by choosing one next step.

Always Another Road

I love the open road. I love discovering another book, another connection, another possible route. That instinct is part of whatever gift I have as a synthesizer. It's also one reason my dissertation has remained unfinished. Again and again I found another thinker who might help me conclude it: James K. A. Smith, William Abraham and canonical theism, George Lindbeck, the Benedict Option, the Russian Option, and others. I was always working on the conclusion. I was also always leaving another road open.

The later version of the dissertation centered on two writers I loved. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age gave me a map of what belief feels like in the modern world. Fr. Georges Florovsky gave me a vision of Christian tradition as neither repetition nor retreat, but a living inheritance received for a new task. The problem was never a lack of material. I had written roughly 91,000 words and uncovered an enormous body of Florovsky’s work, including material most readers will never encounter. The problem was bringing diagnosis and response together in one governing argument.

When my supervisor Fr. Andrew Louth read the fullest draft, he pinpointed the problem by quoting a line he once heard Henry Chadwick, a famous British theologian, give one of his PhD students:

“Mr X, there seem to be two books contained in this thesis, and that is not the fault of the binder.”

In my case, one book concerned Taylor’s diagnosis of secular modernity; the other concerned Florovsky’s Neopatristic Synthesis. The problem was that I hadn't shown what bound them together.

The Missing Bridge

I now think the bridge may be formation.

Taylor describes a secular world whose assumptions shape us before argument begins. If that is right, then the Christian answer cannot be an argument alone. It must become a form of life. Florovsky’s Neopatristic Synthesis is not merely a method for producing updated patristic ideas. It is the formation of people who can receive the mind of the Church, discern the questions of their own age, and answer them faithfully and creatively. Scripture, liturgy, prayer, fasting, icons, saints, memory, community, work, and mercy teach truth to live in the body.

That's also the question I've continued living, even while the manuscript sat unfinished. Eighth Day Institute, Scrutopia, burnout, family life, running, physical work, selling water systems, delivering Amazon packages before sunrise, and now Podvig—they've all kept returning me to the same problem: How does what we behold and practice shape who we become?

Podvig may not be the conclusion of the dissertation. I need to be careful about saying that. It could become merely one more exciting path, one more burst of fire that fades before the work is done. But Podvig has taught me something the dissertation requires: beholding is not enough. At some point, knowledge must become practice.

I know this in my body. I want to run ultramarathons again, and I know the glute exercises I need to be doing. More information will not make me stronger. I have already beheld. If I want to become capable of running, I have to practice.

The same is true here. I know enough to finish. The remaining task is to choose one governing road and walk it to the end.

One Paragraph at a Time

In the introduction to this series, I committed to publishing one reflection each week for eight weeks. Each reflection must produce at least one paragraph that can be used in the dissertation itself. It's a small rule. And it's deliberately small. One paragraph will not finish a dissertation. But one paragraph is movement, and small steps repeated become a road.

I'm making the promise publicly because carrying this unfinished has become more painful than finishing it. I'm also making it publicly because I know my history. I've had bursts of fire before. I've announced things before. I've been administratively chaotic and inconsistent. I can't prove that I have changed by describing a new vision of myself. I can only practice a different way, one week at a time.

I may discover that Durham will not allow me to return. I may discover that the cost is presently impossible. I may need to find help I don't know how, or want, to ask for.

But I am willing to say the sentence now, with fear and trembling:

I began this nearly twenty years ago, and I intend to finish it.

Dissertation Paragraph Produced - No. 1

Charles Taylor’s account of secularity describes conditions of belief that operate not only through explicit propositions but through a pre-theoretical social imaginary that shapes perception, plausibility, and desire. An adequate Christian response therefore cannot remain at the level of counterargument. Fr. Georges Florovsky’s Neopatristic Synthesis is best understood as an ecclesial and ascetical mode of formation through which persons acquire the mind of the Church and become capable of discerning the questions of their age. Scripture, doctrine, liturgy, ascetic practice, memory, and communal life do not merely transmit Christian information; together they form a sacramental perception of reality from which faithful and creative witness becomes possible.