This page contains my post-seminars PhD work. This includes my mentorship period, and the preparation for my prospectus and comprehensive exam. The major idea behind the period after you take your doctoral seminars is that you enter a mentorship with a specific scholar, and search out the specific question you’ll answer and which you’ve discovered during your 12+ years of academic research. The period then gets you ready to take a comprehensive exam, which tests you for your mastery over: (1) your general field [for me, political and theological ethics], a specific theological problem [for me, the problem of the individual and the community], and a specific theologian [for me, Oliver O’Donovan].

The period is designed to go from broad to very narrow. You had the broadest education during college (humanities, math, science, etc). Your graduate work then digs into a specific field (theology and ethics). Your seminary doctoral work focuses on specific disciplines (political and theological ethics). Your comprehensive exam proves you’ve mastered your discipline, and mastered a specific area, problem, and figure in that discipline. Once you pass a rigorous multi-day oral and written that tests you on everything, you can submit a prospectus, which is a document that tells your school what your dissertation will be about and what problem it will attempt to solve. Once that is approved, you get to write, revise, and defend your dissertation.

In short: this is an interactive mapping of my academic comprehensive exam level work and mind. This is literally a picture of how my brain works.

Soli Deo gloria.