First Things About Last Things?

Oh, the frustration. Everything is running as usual. But I am still not quite well enough - getting there, but not there yet - to go in either for the quiz that I might have attended in the College Bar this evening, or for the Saint Chad's College Advent Procession. In the latter vein, I have still not found my way round to claiming back my MA gown and an MA hood as workwear off the tax on my pay from the dear old university, but I will do so this year. A practice entirely within the rules (why wouldn't it be?), and apparently fairly widespread.

But anyway, I cannot take any chances while the tablets do their work, what with College Council on Wednesday afternoon and then a ball there on Friday evening. Meandering up to the first will give me a chance to return some of the ludicrous number of books that we "Academic/management staff", as the University Directory calls me, are permitted to take out of the University Library at any given time, though well before I have to, so staggeringly long is the time for which we are permitted to keep them. We can even command that those already out be recalled for our amusement from lesser mortals writing mere dissertations or what have you. But I have never done that. After all, we do not know who the lesser mortal is, and it might be one of mine.

This batch has served its purpose - the books are written, and now largely out of my hands. So, what of the next ones? Among other things, my mind has turned to New START on one side of the Atlantic and to all the snowed-in discussion of climate-related matters on the other, following the reported Biblicist insistence of a United States Congressman that the Noahide Covenant placed the world's destruction strictly in the hands of God, with no human role to play. There is almost endless material on human co-operation by grace (mediated by, in, through and as the Church) in God's Work as Creator, as Redeemer and as Sanctifier. But does anyone know of any study, probably someone's PhD thesis, of such co-operation in God's Work as Consummator? I won't be writing it. But I could do with reading it. Can anyone help?