SBL Reflections

Not much damage done. I’m currently sitting in the Toronto airport waiting for a plane to Calgary so I thought I would type something up.

My paper went ok, except that there was a missed communication somewhere and the draft was never forwarded on to the respondents. Alas. Still, it was not as controversial a session as I thought it might have been. No one got burned at the stake or even lynched.

Barry Bandstra was very kind and gracious, even though Hector Avalos and I took issue with some parts of his otherwise excellent intro to the Hebrew Bible. He admitted that we had some valid critiques and I got a much better appreciation of what goes into writing an introduction. When both the critic and critiqued come away more educated, it is a successful session, I think!

I will post my paper here once I get a chance to edit it.

I though Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza really missed the point of the exercise, though, especially in regard to Zeba Crook’s paper which critiqued various introduction to the New Testament and how they handled miracle stories. S.F. wanted to assert that there were different ways other than the “naturalistic” by which to understand miracle stories and said that a Jew reclaiming the German language in the post-holocaust era would be a miracle. I wrote a note to my self, “What has this to do with floating axes?”

The highlight of the conference for me, though, was the Bible blogging and  online publication session on Monday. All the papers were great and delivered with a lot of style:

James Davila, University of St. Andrews-Scotland
What Just Happened:  The rise of “biblioblogging” in the first decade of the twenty-first century (his whole paper is posted on his blog).

Christian Brady, Pennsylvania State University University Park
Online Biblical Studies: Past, Present, Promise, and Peril (25 min)

Michael Barber, John Paul the Great Catholic University
Weblogs and the Academy: The Benefits and Challenges of Biblioblogging (25 min)

James McGrath, Butler University
The Blogging Revolution: New Technologies and their Impact on How we do Scholarship (25 min)

Robert R. Cargill, University of California-Los Angeles
Instruction, Research, and the Future of Online Educational Technologies (25 min)

The BIG NEWS is truly earthshattering! Dr Jim’s blog was mention at the outset of James’McGrath’s paper. Indeed, he even showed a couple of my lolcats! Horray! This is not the same thing as having my book cited fabourably, it’s way better. Here are the winning kitties:

So, go visit James’ blog, Exploring Our Matrix!

And here is one for him (pianist and Genesis fan that he is)!

Anyway, I met a bunch of other people too, including Scott Bailey and Joel Watts.

Well, boarding soon, so I must go