The Long Conclusion - Part I

Erin Doom

Oct 4

4 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

An Introduction: Notes toward finishing a dissertation and living inside its question

Commemoration of the Holy Hieromartyr Hierotheus, Bishop of Athens

Commemoration of the Holy Martyr Domnina with Her Daughters of Syria

Anno Domini 2026, October 4

About a quarter of the files and folders from twenty years of doctoral work.

IN EARLY 2006, I began doctoral work at Durham University under Fr. Andrew Louth. The first board of the Saint John of Damascus Institute had encouraged me to pursue the degree because we hoped to build an academy. The doctoral work was meant to serve the work of teaching and formation.

Twenty years later, the dissertation remains unfinished.

The project changed shape more than once. I wrote roughly a hundred thousand words. Twice. That's a story for another time, maybe even in one of the installments in this series. For the second version, I received serious encouragement from serious scholars. I also received the same essential criticism more than once: the material was there, but the argument had not yet been drawn together. Eventually, I reached the heading Conclusion. But I could not bring the work to its end.

I kept reading, discovering connections, and trying again. There was always another thinker who might help, another question that seemed necessary to answer.

Meanwhile, life continued. I taught, sold books, helped raise four children, and spent nearly twenty years building Eighth Day Institute. There were friendships, conferences, feasts, failures, and more beginnings than I knew how to bring to completion. The dissertation receded from daily view, but its unfinished business remained.

So did its question:

How can Christians receive the living tradition of the Church, inhabit it faithfully, and bear creative witness within a secular age?

The later manuscript approached that question through two principal figures. Charles Taylor helped me understand the conditions of belief in the modern world. Georges Florovsky helped me understand Christian tradition as a living inheritance to be received and expressed faithfully and creatively in each new age.

I could write at length about both. What I struggled to show was how they belonged within one argument: how Florovsky’s vision of a neo-patristic synthesis could answer the world Taylor describes.

I now suspect that the missing word was formation.

Beneath the academic formulations lies a question that has followed me through classrooms, bookstores, institutional work, family life, burnout, physical labor, running, sales, early-morning delivery routes, and now Podvig:

How does truth become a form of life?

How does truth pass from a book into a person? How does doctrine shape perception, desire, and action? How do Scripture, worship, prayer, fasting, repentance, and life together teach us to inhabit what we confess?

I have continued living inside those questions even while the manuscript sat unfinished. In Podvig, they have begun to find ordinary language:

Behold. Practice. Become.

We behold what is true, good, and beautiful. We practice ways of attending and acting that allow what we have received to shape our lives. And slowly, through grace, repentance, and repetition, we become.

That movement connects the doctoral work to the academy we once hoped to build and to the work I am offering now. The books, letters, essays, and guided journeys of Podvig arise from the same concern: how to receive what has been given, learn to live within it, and hand it on.

Podvig has helped me recognize something I have long struggled to articulate. But recognizing it will not finish the dissertation. A life can deepen an argument; it cannot submit a manuscript. Eventually, I have to return to the pages and write.

The unfinished work has remained a weight. It is emotional and mental, always present somewhere in the background. It is marital and familial because my wife and children endured the cost with me. It is financial because of the debt already incurred and the unknown expense of returning to Durham. It's also personal: if I die without finishing it, I will have left one of the largest undertakings of my life incomplete.

For years, the difficulties of finishing have given me legitimate reasons to wait. They have also given me excuses. I have reached the point where leaving the dissertation unfinished has become more painful than taking the next step.

The Long Conclusion is that next step.

Beginning with the first installment, I will publish one reflection each week for eight weeks. The pieces will move between the dissertation’s ideas and the life in which those ideas have continued developing. I will recover the history of the work, revisit the people and books that shaped it, and tell the truth about failure, delay, and beginning again. Each reflection must also produce at least one paragraph that can be used in the dissertation itself.

This is a deliberately small practice. One paragraph will not finish a dissertation. One week of resolve will not undo twenty years of delay. But one completed paragraph is movement. Small steps, repeated faithfully, become a road.

You do not need to be familiar with Charles Taylor or Fr. Georges Florovsky to accompany me. The academic argument opens onto a question we all face: who are we becoming through what we attend to and what we repeatedly do? For me, returning to this unfinished work is one concrete way to practice the question Podvig asks.

I don't know whether Durham will allow me to return, what completion will require, or how I will afford it. But I do know that I have spent enough time waiting for perfect conditions and another burst of fire.

I began this twenty years ago.

With fear and trembling, I intend to finish it.