Category: Uncategorized

It’s not that I didn’t have time to blog today. I did, this morning; but once the day started rolling, it was activities back to back. Late morning, I needed to drive the college boy to Laura’s house where he would celebrate Thanksgiving with them, today (Laura’s coming over to our house to celebrate with us tomorrow). When I got back from dropping him off, we walked down to the movie theater to catch Harry Potter on a less-crowded day (we thought). As it turns out, even with four or five screens showing Harry Potter, the theater was pretty crowded.

Once we got back from the movie, Pippa and I needed to go to the grocer to buy provisions for tomorrow’s banquet. That took a long-ish while. Then dinner. Then we watched King Kong, the original version.

That’s the day, friends. Capsule movie reviews? Goblet of Fire, excellent, though so much was cut from the book that non-book-readers must be bewildered by some developments (Pip and I took a long time explaining various elements to Margaret). I’ll have more to say about Harry Potter and Christian theology sometime.* Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (last night), excellent — though was Roald Dahl’s original quite so transparent to pop psychology and Michael Jackson? Johnny Depp, however, is an amazing actor, and I loved Helena Bonham Carter and Noah Taylor. King Kong 1933: Stagy and sometimes jerky, the power of the original vision shines through the hokiness. Hasn’t anyone learned not to shoot flash photographs at monsters, though? I thought that was Lesson One (or “Two,” after “Don’t twist your ankle.”).

* Yes, I know I’ve already promised to write more about romantic theology. Someday, I will fulfill each promise.

I’m determined to do absolutely nothing productive today. I’m sitting in the dining room, blogging on my battery-impaired iBook, sipping coffee from my Baker Academic travel mug, wearing my Fortress Press 2005 World Tour t-shirt, and re-gathering my energies after an intense four-day Society of Biblical Literature meeting.

Incidentally, the conference totaled 10,002 registrants at last count, of which nearly half were members of the Society of Biblical Literature, the slightly larger half being members of the American Academy of Religion. The two societies will no longer meet in conjunction as of 2007, but for now we can expect five-digit attendance totals. After the Great Divorce, Margaret and I will have to decide which meetings who will attend, since she’s in systematic theology and I’m in biblical studies — though a number of Christian-theologically-identified scholars will likely be meeting in cooperation with the SBL. I’ve been enlisted to join a parallel body, and that probably won’t be the only one.

Anyway, it’s time to begin reworking the paper I read at Monday morning’s session of the “Christian Theology and the Bible” section. I’ll post its current state below; over the next few weeks, I’ll flesh out the bit about Johannine theology (left inchoate to keep the paper within time limits) and liturgy as signifying practice (left undeveloped because I didn’t have time to write out carefully what I wanted to say on the subject). When the paper is fully revised, I’ll submit it to journals for publication.

But wherever it ends up in periodical print, it will inevitably end up in print somewhere else, since one reason I’m wearing a Fortress Press t-shirt is that about this time last week, I received a contract from Fortress. They’re going to publish a collection of my essays, edited for continuity, sometimes next year. We’re haggling over the title. Fortress suggested “Faithful Subversion,” a phrase they say I used in one of the constituent essays; I prefer “Walk This Way,” which I use as the title of another of the essays (cast your vote below). Start saving your nickels now, and next year buy a couple of copies of a vital contribution to the debates over theology and biblical interpretation. . . .

I’ll try to get back to clean up the links and note styles later in the day; for now, I’m off to run errands with Pippa.
Continue reading “Retrospect and Prospect”

Home safely, exhausted. Unnerving cab ride in from O’Hare. Battery-charging still unresponsive; I’ll try switching out batteries to make sure the problem is with charging. Fuller stories tomrrow.

Yesterday morning I gave my presentation on exegesis, theology, and signifying practices. It went well, I think, and the combination of papers (Gary Anderson, Sarah Coakley, Matthew Levering, with a response by John Webster) made fora very rich session — ample demonstration that exegesis and theology need not be disciplinary antipodes, but can strengthen and deepen one another.

I finally tracked down a copy of the Catena Aurea — the Wipf and Stock team has reprinted it, God bless them — so I picked that up, along with a smattering of other books. Apart from the eight-volume Catena, though, I haven’t been as active as in years past. We’ll see how that holds up this morning as the book display closes.

Yesterday morning’s session (on Bible scholars who blog) went well, I think; a fairly small room but quite full, and Mark chaired the proceedings with his characteristic grace and élan. The papers went smoothly, and set the stage admirably for the subsequent discussion. Rick’s paper touched on some of the mark-up and information-architecture questions that interest me most, though I’m inclined to doubt that this current approach — which involves a fair amount of entering regularized well-formed metadata — will catch on with less information-intent bloggers. It’s not insignificant that Rick initially designed his personal metadata software to generate imprecise XML; if even he didn’t make the effort to distinguish [cite] from [i] from [em], it’s hard to imagine that less committed bloggers would keep their biblical references consistent, or would fill out the bibliographic metadata for every book they mention. Certainly we have many colleagues who, if they were inclined at all to blog,would give it up in an instant if it involved entering copious tags, keywords, precise identifications of biblical passages, and so on. I think that Flickr and deli.cio.us hit the right trajectory by generating a space for user-oriented metadata, such that if I see something on Rick’s blog that interests me enough to want to retrieve it or categorize it, I can supply the metadata that facilitates such indexing. At the same time, it would be handy if that capacity were integrated to blogging software itself (as it’s integral to Flickr’s photo-sharing software), so that tagging a post were as easy as tagging a Flickr photo.

Peter (I think?) raised the very pertinent question of gender; a panel of seven or eight biblical bloggers included only men. Sadly Helenann couldn’t come, and people such as Dylan (who’s also not here) and Mary (whom I haven’t seen here) blog about the Bible, but with more of a view toward homiletics. (Casual readers: it would be hard to overstate the interdisciplinary condescension with which conventional biblical scholars use the term “homiletical”; it frequently sounds as though the word would mean something such as “written in crayon” or “words of one syllable only.”) To the extent that Dylan and Mary don’t enter and link to the arguments that interest people such as Mark or Jim (to concentrate on the A-list biblical bloggers), it’s understandable that they not show up on their radar; that’s not strictly a gender problem, but a social-definition-of-disciplines problem intertwined with a gender problem (and that entwinement isn’t merely coincidental). At the same time, as I said at the session, I suspect that the greater barrier to women’s participation in Blogarian citizenship has to do with the historic pattern of risks and vulnerabilities that academia tends to impose disproportionately on women (and people of color — the panel was all-white, too, not that that would be as surprising in either the biblical academy or online discourse) (very sadly, and again not innocuously).

All of this is not by any means to say, “Buck up, look on the bright side” or “No, no, it’s not a problem, stop being so sensitive”; it is a problem, but I want to concentrate my attention on the points d’appui where this problem (and a variety of related problems) put down their roots — rather than only generating heat for the panel organizer.

And I didn’t know about Yasmin’s blogging (indeed, there are increasing numbers of biblical bloggers whom I don’t know, which is destined to be the case, further aggravating the “old bloggers network” effect).

Now I must get dressed to prepare for this morning’s paper on theological interpretation of Scripture and (of course) signifying practices (honest, I’ll give it a rest once this series of talks is through). More anon.

Really, I’d be blogging more — even live-blogging sessions — if my battery connection weren’t broken. I may borrow Margaret’s iBook for tomorrow’s “blogging panel” just for verisimilitude.

We arrived safely, with very smooth travel connections (apart from Pippa’s smoothie, erm, disagreeing with her in a near-projectile manner; all well after it departed).

But my iBook battery isn’t charging, so I’ll only be online in dribs and drabs for the time being. I tried resetting the PMU with a restart-hold-down-the-power-button maneuver; if someone has a better idea, please leave a comment (iBook G4 2004, running 10.4.2, battery doesn’t charge although the cord checks out and it seems to be operating fine while plugged in — just not charging the battery). Everything was working fine till I installed the World of Warcraft game, Joi. . . .

So I finished [mostly] my paper at midday, taught the Early Church History class (Augustine on Pelagianism always gets resistance), came home, and now I have to pack and get ready to fly to Philadelphia. It’ll be busy, but at least I no longer dread my Monday-morning presentation.

And there’s now time for me to return from my blog-absence, which is somewhat incongruous since one of my conference appearances will be on a panel discussing. . . . blogging. There’ll be two papers, then a panel involving Tim, Stephen, Torrey, Edward, James, and me.

You can tell I’ve been offline a lot when it takes me more than twenty-four hours to link to Boing Boing’s coverage of the new Barenaked Ladies album-on-a-flash-drive experiment (I’d link to their version of the story, but they don’t seem to provide permalinks). Jeff Pazen emailed me, because he connected this development with my previous posts about the coming wave of ultra-miniature, cheap, capacious media players. On that count, BNL are on the right wavelength, and Cory (I think) misses the point when he asks, “how many 128MB sticks can you usefully own?” I can manage a great many more flash drives than I can, for instance, pre-recorded CDs, but I have hundreds of CDs lining my dining-room wall (CDs that I hardly ever play, now that I’m mostly oriented toward mp3 selections).

Chris Heard tagged me for one of those “reveal all sorts of trivial secrets” memes, in which I usually don’t participate — though for the sake of showing that I’m not totally a humorless old grump, I’ll answer one part of the questionnaire.

Five things I would do with a lot of money
1. Get out of debt
2. Send money to the Gulf Coast and Pakistan
3. Underwrite formal online publishing a la The Disseminary
4. Take time off to work on all the writing projects on which I’m way behind
5. Depending on how much money was left over, I’d like to buy a retreat center, equip it with a good theological library (and broadband wifi, of course), and host scholars who need a quiet place to write.

Later: Was I really so out of it that I didn’t hear that David is getting a PowerBook?

I’m a big target for cartoons lately; Jane thinks I don’t need a book entitled Aerobic Preaching (if you subscribe to preachingtoday.com, you can see it here), Laura calls my attention to this (presumably referring to my own lecturing capacity), and Bob Carlton notes this all-too-apposite church sign.

Last weekend, the weather was early September. As of yesterday, suddenly, it’s late January.

(As you may have guessed, the essay isn’t finished yet. Getting close, though.)

No, I haven’t been hospitalized, nor fired for blogging. Still working on my presentation for the Society of Biblical Literature meeting — an extension of the argument from this summer’s lectures. The first portion of the paper, which hews closer to what I’ve already done, is set. The second, which takes me into areas outside my expertise, is resisting coming together. Will be done soon.

And not just because Pippa might have hidden the rubber spider with which she torments me into your sock drawer (she did that to me a couple of weeks ago, though, so you might be careful anyway). No, check your stocking because the proprietors of Redlex Software promise their customers that Mellel II will be released tomorrow.

I used Mellel daily for a year or so, then switched to Apple’s Pages (in my ritual word-processing transition, which takes place roughly every eighteen months). I like Pages; it looks great, its capacity to read and produce MS Word documents obviates the necessity of using Mr. Bill’s word processor; it carries some very heavy-duty page-layout functions with impressive grace. At the same time, I’ve run into some aspects of Pages that just bug me, and a few weeks ago I switched back to Mellel and wondered how that spritely, multilingual word processing app could have gotten to version 1.8 without columns.

Of course, version 2 (II) promises columns, and widow-and-orphan control, and a heap of other improvements. Tomorrow will be a treat!

(I realize that the proprietors of Redlex may well not observe the stocking-filling holiday custom that many North Americans and Europeans observe. It’s a figure of speech. Mellel won’t go into a stocking, anyway; it’s available by download. The point is, we’ll be in for a pleasant surprise tomorrow.)

I’ve been thinking about Rageboy on and off this evening, partly since it’s his birthday (and he doesn’t look a day over twenty-three; how do you do it, Chris?) and partly because I’m wrestling with a conference paper that wants to communicate a book’s worth of thinking in twenty minutes of talking. When I try to do that, I get pen-tied and blocked, and then write three-ton sentences that no listener could possibly make sense of. Chris, on the other hand, just tears this stuff off – he’s amazing. A toast to you both, Chris and Rageboy, and lend me just a little of that fluency for a week or so, OK?