I’m finally retiring an old set of TextExpander snippets I built up during my Ph.D. work. Before I delete them, I wanted to keep a record, because a person’s text-expansion abbreviations turn out to be a surprisingly honest map of what was constantly on their mind. Mine were almost entirely about two theologians, their books, and one stubborn question: can you be scriptural without being religious?

Here’s the archive.

The people I couldn’t stop typing

SnippetExpanded to
xdbBonhoeffer
xddbDietrich Bonhoeffer
xkbBarth
xkkbKarl Barth
xnietzNietzsche
xSlotvan ’t Slot

Bonhoeffer’s works

SnippetExpanded to
xab / xasAct and Being / Akt und Sein
xcf / xsfCreation and Fall / Schöpfung und Fall
xdiscDiscipleship
xlppLetters and Papers from Prison
xltLife Together

Barth’s works

SnippetExpanded to
xcdChurch Dogmatics
xrom2 / xröm2Romans / Römerbrief
xderrDer Römerbrief

The concepts at the heart of the dissertation

SnippetExpanded to
xpor / xoffenbpositivism of revelation / Offenbarungspositivismus
xtcr / xttcrtheological critique(s) of religion
xtis / xttistheological interpretation(s) of Scripture
xvravicarious representative action
xspSchriftprinzip (the Scripture principle)
xbbrthe Barth-Bonhoeffer relationship
xkge / xgeknowledge of good and evil / good and evil

The biblical and theological furniture

SnippetExpanded to
x10cTen Commandments
xsomSermon on the Mount
xot / xntOld Testament / New Testament
xbtbiblical theology
xstsystematic theology

The workflow scaffolding

SnippetExpanded to
xcn[[[CITATION NEEDED]]] (in alarming red)
xpara
xs§
xreadingnotesa full reading-notes template (bibliographic data, interpretation, critique)

Looking back

What strikes me now is how narrow and deep the list is. Just Barth and Bonhoeffer, their major works in both English and German, and a tight cluster of concepts (revelation, religion, Scripture, good and evil) that I evidently typed so often I couldn’t bear to spell them out one more time. Even the [[[CITATION NEEDED]]] snippet, flashing red, says something about the anxieties of that season.

I don’t need these abbreviations anymore. But I’m glad to have caught a snapshot of the questions that filled my days before they vanish into a deleted snippet group.