A native of Middle Tennessee, I received a B.A. in History and Greek from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina in 2001. I earned a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Georgia in 2007; my thesis, “Ambrose and Stilicho: Politics in the Post-Theodosian World,” dealt with the political relationship between Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, and the Vandal general Stilicho, who seized power in the western Roman Empire upon the death of the Roman emperor Theodosius in 395. I am currently enrolled in an M.Div. program at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, with plans to pursue Ph.D. work in coming years.
I am employed as a proof-editor for the R.H. Boyd Publishing Corporation, the publishing arm of the National Missionary Baptist Convention of America; we publish Sunday school curriculum and sundry devotional-type books. Prior to returning to Nashville in 2006, I worked for two years as a Latin teacher in suburban Atlanta.
1831 Map of Tennessee
I am married. On 29 February 2008, my wife, Hannah, and I welcomed into our home twin daughters, Ruby and Lila. Between work, church, caring for our girls and studying, a few of my hobbies include: hiking, playing the mandolin, and a lot of reading. My intellectual interests, apart from the academic disciplines I am formally pursuing, include: agrarian/distributist/paleoconservative thought, the history of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, the history of Tennessee and the South (revolving around issues of culture and identity), and urban planning and design (especially as it impacts my own East Nashville neighborhood). I also fancy myself to be an amateur astronomer.
Flavius Stilicho
My professional interests center upon Late Antiquity, especially the intersection of Roman law and political rhetoric with the Christian faith in the late 4th and early 5th centuries AD. Geographically speaking, my focus is on late Roman Italy, Gaul, and North Africa. From a literary perspective, I am focused on the Roman historiographical tradition, manifested in authors such as Ammianus Marcellinus, Zosimus, Sozomen and Socrates, and other of the “fragmentary” historians of the period. Other genres in which I have broad experience are hagiography, especially Paulinus of Milan’s Vita Sancti Ambrosii and Possidius of Calama’s Vita Sancti Augustini, Late Latin poetry (Claudian, Ausonius, Rutilius Namatianus) and other kinds of Late Antique rhetoric, especially funeral oration and panegyric.
Contact Information:
E-mail: ccotten [at] hotmail [dot] com
Hate mail: anastasisblog [at] gmail [dot] com
I also maintain a web presence on Facebook.
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I began Anastasis in June 2004 as a vehicle to comment on the news, on books I was reading, and to track in writing various shifts in my own thinking on a number of theological topics (Here’s a link to the original Blogspot blog.)
While the blog will continue to serve those purposes, in coming months I will turn my attention increasingly to questions of historical theology: especially to patristic thought and to the theology of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, and of non-institutional Churches of Christ in particular. I am interested in more thoroughly examining the philosophical and theological underpinnings — as well as the distinctive practices — of the religious tradition that I inherited (and still identify with): gently critiquing some aspects, reformulating others, examining the whole NI project anew in the light of Scripture and of the tradition of which we are all a part.
