NOTES - JUNE 30
On Wednesday, I made no report on the state of the South Carolina Supreme Court. This will be my practice from now on. Of course, I will report if and when the Court ever does issue a decision. After 21 months of waiting, I am beginning to have serious doubts that we will ever have a definitive ruling by the state high court. Obviously, something is very wrong in the process to create such a delay.
In writing my history of the schism, I had been waiting on the Court to issue a ruling in the Church case in order to have some closure to the story. I grew weary of waiting and went ahead and finished the book to submit for publication.
For readers who are curious about the status of my history of the schism:
I am happy to report that all is finished in the preparation for publication. The book is all set up for production, that is, the printing process. Unfortunately, I have no idea how long this will take. It depends on many factors such as the number of books ahead of mine with the publisher, Wipf and Stock. Perhaps the book will be in hand by the end of the year.
I am posting here some sample pages from the book. These are pictures from my cell phone, so are not very clear. But, one gets the idea of the format and appearance. I am pleased at how it turned out.
Title page. Publisher is Wipf and Stock, of Eugene, Oregon. They specialize in works of religious themes.
As evident, the publisher decided to go with a larger page and smaller print in order to conserve space. Even so, the text is 512 pages. Counting the index and front matter, the book comes to about 550 pages. I think the plan at Wipf and Stock still is to publish it in two volumes.
I believe that I have consulted all of the publicly available documents and have produced as complete a narrative history of the background, events, and aftermath of the schism of 2012 as possible given the evidence available today. The chapters are long and detailed. The 2,200 footnotes cite 900 of the 2,500 works I consulted. The book contains 300,000 words. I doubt that I have many words left to say about it. When published, this will be the first scholarly history of one of the five schisms in the Episcopal Church, 2007-12.
