[Dialogue] A photocopy of Joseph Mathews' graduate thesis

Thu Oct 6 18:06:29 PDT 2022

I agree, Marshall.  Glad you dived into chapter 1.  Some years ago, I was
working on the JWM archives on the first floor of Kemper preparing them to
go to Wesley Theological Seminary, and I’m pretty sure they included a copy
of Joe’s dissertation.  Librarians are helpers by nature, and I’ll bet
there’s an archivist in the WTS library who would be glad to text a photo
of that item to us, especially if JWM’s archives are not in remote
storage!  The way I recall it, it may have been a bound book format.  Does
anyone volunteer to try?  Or I could try.
Nancy Trask

On Thu, Oct 6, 2022 at 6:23 PM W. J. via Dialogue <
dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:

> Friends, I actually read most of chapter 1 of JWM's dissertation, which is
> a long haul. (OK, so I speed-read the last part!)
> So here are my thoughts and questions.
> First, does anybody know what happened to the actual boxed hard copy I saw
> in the Archives office?
> Second, does anybody know whether Wesley Theological Seminary has a hard
> copy in their JWM archive collection?
> Third, can anyone confirm, correct, or elaborate on the story I heard from
> Marge (I think) about how JWM refused to 'tweak' his dissertation, and thus
> never got his Ph.D. degree? Or tell us anything else they know about the
> origin and/or transmission of the manuscript?
> I would love to hear about this from LiDonna, Sarah B., Fishel, Lingo,
> Gilles, Walters, Gene, Beret, Aimee, or any others still alive whose memory
> goes back as far as CFLC and the early days of EI. And anyone else who may
> have heard this story from Marge.
> Fourth: My own somewhat vague memory is that JWM wrote this at Yale for H.
> Richard Niebuhr. Is that accurate?
> (see The Founders – ICA Social Research Center
> <https://icaglobalarchives.org/collections/institutes-history/joseph-w-mathews/>
> )
> Fifth, how can we date the completion/rejection/abandonment of JWM's
> dissertation? I would guess that it was while he was teaching at Colgate
> Rochester as an ABD faculty member. Is there a date on the ms. or some kind
> of documentation?
> Sixth, is there a copyright notice, and if so, who owns the copyright?
> Seventh, who added the running page header that says "Chapter one mathews"?
> It just doesn't strike me as being part of the original typescript.
> Now, for the icing on this cake!
> I for one would vote to do all we can to reconstruct and correct the
> minutae of JWM's dissertation and produce a .pdf that could be widely
> available. Perhaps as a freely available document on a theological
> dissertation website. Or perhaps we could  reformat the text with added
> section subheads (you know, they did that to English translations of the
> Bible! those subheads are not in the original Greek and Hebrew!) and even
> add a contemporary Forward.
> Or even publish it on Amazon!
> At age 82 I always contemplate the option of Doing Nothing! So we could
> just do nothing more with the JWM dissertation.
> Plus, at 82 I'm aware of the mantra, 'Just do it now!' Or maybe later will
> be too late!
> Because, starting many years ago, it was not considered exactly
> missionally relevant. Even by JWM. He just moved on. And perhaps he
> considered all that effort to complete his Ph.D. a misfire. Or a most
> unfortunate fire! Or whatever.
> But I encourage us to think in terms of this (admittedly bad) analogy:
> imagine that Picasso doodled a face on a napkin. It's still a Picasso!
> (Please let me know if you have any of his napkins.)
> So here's what I got from reading (more or less) chapter 1.
> We may not actually care very much about how John Wesley used his
> classical 18th century education and intelligence to understand and
> describe the human condition in relation to his grasp of the nature of the
> physical universe and his personal relationship with Ultimate Reality.
> But Joe Mathews did.
> So if you read his dissertation, what you get is Joe's 20th century
> theological lens applied to understand Wesley's theological world.
> I would venture to add that, IMHO, Mathews has added a significant voice
> or POV to Wesley scholarship, getting inside Wesley's construction of
> intimate human reality by placing Wesley's words in the context of his
> functioning intellectual universe of Western scholarship (from Hume to
> Descartes to Aquinas, etc.).
> Mathews is charting Wesley's understanding of epistemology (including his
> perception of divine activity in human experience) and his theological
> anthropology.
> It's Mathews' reading of Wesley's theological formulation of his personal
> process of his deepening, transformative experience of 'sanctification'.
> And, of course, it sounds more like Mathews' existentialist theological
> lingo than Wesley's 18th century theological formulations.
> For example, "the naked givenness of the impression" just doesn't sound
> like it was plucked from a Wesley sermon!
> In a nutshell, Mathews is 'decoding' Wesley for twentieth century
> scholarly readers. (Who else reads Wesley's sermons? I ask. Raise your
> hands, please! I thought so.)
> Maybe that's why it didn't pass muster with HRNiebuhr!
> Anyway, enough blah-blah-blah.
> I vote for resurrecting this hidden/undiscovered gem for the few remaining
> authentic Wesley scholars to chew on. And/or spit up.
> Any others of us are welcome to join in the fun by charting it.
> Marshall
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Links in the message (1)
> The Founders – ICA Social Research Center
> <https://icaglobalarchives.org/collections/institutes-history/joseph-w-mathews/>
> On Tuesday, October 4, 2022, 09:13:01 AM EDT, James Wiegel <
> jfwiegel at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Has anyone looked at Slicker's master's thesis?   He mentioned it as his
> formulation of RS-1 when we visited him in 2007
> 23 Joe Slicker My Masters Degree was RS 1
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-ly55WhjSk&list=PLUk2c_1SJ0s_SYiUeyuTyzZZ8k8AUblRA&index=35>
>
> 23 Joe Slicker My Masters Degree was RS 1
>
>
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-ly55WhjSk&list=PLUk2c_1SJ0s_SYiUeyuTyzZZ8k8AUblRA&index=35>
>
>
> The thought has crossed my mind . . . I wonder whether Joe's approach --
> Ecumenical Institute approach -- more on the ethical side, almost coming at
> theology as an anthropological study -- remember the quote to Msgr. Egan --
> we tried to show the church it was about humanness . . . sort of put him
> outside "real" theology in an academic sense -- or maybe it was just having
> to type it over again??
>
> Jim Wiegel <http://partnersinparticipation.com/james-wiegel/>
>
> The unknown is what is.  And to be frightened of it is what sends
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> jfwiegel at yahoo.com <marilyn.oyler at gmail.com>
>
> www.partnersinparticipation.com
>
>
> On Monday, October 3, 2022 at 10:04:14 AM MST, David Dunn via Dialogue <
> dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Marshall, Karen and colleagues.
>
>
> I’ve done a quick comparison of the four documents in the Archive (
> https://icaglobalarchives.org/resources/) and the photocopy of JWM’s
> thesis that I have. The four documents in the Archive are the four chapters
> of JWM's thesis. A quick survey suggests that the only parts of the thesis
> missing from the Archive copy are the Title page, the comprehensive Table
> of Contents, the Introduction to the thesis and a few footnotes.
>
> This means that we’ll have the entire thesis with the addition of scans of
> the Table of Contents (2 pages), the Introduction (4 pages) and the cover.
>
> A few good copy editor souls need to compare the PDF against the photocopy
> to correct the numbering of a few of the footnotes and other typos that
> might appear—easy corrections in the PDF
>
>
> I’ve forgotten whose photocopy I copied (my copy is at least a second
> generation copy), but that means that there is likely at least one 2nd
> generation copy in someone else’s hands.
>
> In any case, we’re close to having a pristine PDF of the entire thesis.
>
>
> This was a pleasing experience of network intelligence.
>
>
> David
>
>
> *On Oct 2, 2022, Karen Snyder wrote:*
> In light of it being about John Wesley, it either is JWM’s doctoral thesis
> or something he wrote related to it.  You can see what we have presently in
> the Archives under Periodicals here related to his doctoral thesis:
> https://icaglobalarchives.org/resources/.
>
> If it is different, than it should be added here as well. Are you able to
> scan it?  If not, send it to Chicago, and we will scan it. We do scanning
> four days a week so it would be done immediately. Once scanned and added to
> the Periodicals, it is available for anyone to read it who wishes to.
>
>
> *On Oct 2, 2022, Marshall Jones replied:*
> So David's precious xerox is probably copied from this original.
> I think the typescript is also available in a digital scan on-line.
>
>
> —
>
>
>
> "Mystery, possibility, and the power to choose"
>
> David Dunn
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>
>
>
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