Fernando Gros

Books That Never Were

Over this week my mind has been pon­der­ing the failed book pro­pos­als I have per­sued over recent years. Whilst I had a few ideas at theo­lo­gical col­lege, these were tent­at­ive and didn’t get a very warm recep­tion at all. In fact at theo­lo­gical col­lege I made the same mis­take I made in my first years in London, which was to try and approach estab­lished writers with col­lab­or­at­ive plans. A number of “guides” sug­gest this as a poten­tial way into pub­lish­ing (par­tic­u­larly as co-editors of col­lec­tions), but I never man­aged to get this method any­where near the pro­posal stage; actu­ally most couldn’t even sus­tain a con­ver­sa­tion long enough for a second cup of coffee.

My first solo pro­posal was a crit­ical re-examination of Harvey Cox’s “The Sec­u­lar City.” Read­ing this book was pivotal for me (and many others inter­ested in Urban Min­istry). My idea was to look again at the book, par­tic­u­larly in the light of glob­al­isa­tion and the devel­op­ment of the inter­net. At the time, it was ques­tion­able how big the market for such a book would be, which, in hind­sight may have been a good call. Since a great deal of this work is already writ­ten and I had the chance to revise it when the Coffee, Theo­logy and Cul­ture read­ing group looked at Cox’s book, I am won­der­ing whether to release a ver­sion of this as a self-published work. Well maybe…

The second pro­posal went a lot fur­ther. It was for a short “life­style” book on port­able urban spir­itu­al­ity. I got a very good response, then the con­tact with the pub­lisher just died. Yes­ter­day, whilst ruma­ging through some old files (read clear­ing out piled up junk), I found the folder with mater­i­als for that book. It was very inter­est­ing, espe­cially as today Jonny Baker picked up a very inter­est­ing Stephen Said blo­g­post on spir­itu­al­ity in a con­tem­por­ary con­text. I am going to revist this, but I’m not sure in what form just yet; prob­ably as a series of blogposts.

The third pro­posal was the one I thought would fly (and sus­tain me during my time in India). It was for a thorough-going treat­ment of Theo­logy and Film (and alon with my PhD, a found­a­tion for more work in theo­logy, cul­ture and glob­al­isa­tion). Con­sequently I was inter­ested to see a new Regent’s Park Study Guide is coming out on this topic (thanks to Sean The Baptist a blog that well worth check­ing out!). My pro­posal looked very good for a while, but in the end died for reas­ons I am not entirely sure I under­stood at the time. Sev­eral chapters of this book are already writ­ten in full, having been ini­tially presen­ted as sem­inar papers and the pro­posal was very solid (thanks to the help of Richard Burridge and Andy Wright). My feel­ing is that I should try again with this book, but on some days I just wonder, is this a case of three strikes and you are out?

Either way, I have found the rebirth of this blog (which in its cur­rent form is coming up to one year of ser­vice) has inspired me to revist some dormant ideas and recon­sider these failed pub­lish­ing attempts. In whatever form my future writ­ing takes, it has been good to be involved in blog­ging and to reflect upon the feed­back this blog has received.

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Film, Pub­lish­ing, Theo­logy and Culture

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 27th, 2005 at 8:18 pm. It is filed under Daily Life, Film Theory, Globalisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.