The last week has been incredibly busy. I apologize for the dearth of postings. There are a number of things upon which I wish to comment, but these will just have to a wait a little more. Due to various one-time commitments and responsibilities, papers needing to be graded have been stacking up on my desktop (take that both literally and virtually/digitally). This evening I finished off a couple of stacks, but there’s much more yet to be done tomorrow during football.

Due to my extreme business over the last little while, I have failed to “advertise” the following “biblioblogs” that I have just learned about within the last six weeks or so:

• Kata ta Biblia (Patrick McCullough)
• Narrative and Ontology (Philip Sumpter)
• Old Testament Passion (Anthony Loke)

Welcome to the blogosphere, gentlemen, and please forgive my tardiness in rolling out the red carpet.

Higgaion readers who are interested in matters related to conversations/intersections (or lack of same) between Christian faith and modern science should find the young (less than two months old) blog Quintessence of Dust interesting. QoD blogger Stephen Matheson describes himself as:

Associate Professor of Biology, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan | Reformed Christian | developmental cell biologist | evolutionist | NCSE Steve | baseball fan | Bardolator

Who knew that all that stuff could go together? But it just goes to show you that Shakespeare buffs can appreciate sports after all.

I am really, really tempted to jump into the whole Psalm 68 blogabout. Absolutely fascinating work is going on in this very engaging discussion/parallel play. But due to some other, offline commitments, I just can’t do it … yet. I must continue to focus my attention on the book of Amos for at least the next few days. More on that, and perhaps on Psalm 68, later.

Duane Smith, one of my favorite bloggers (and he knows some pretty good places to eat, too), hosts Biblical Studies Carnival XXI this month. Take a stroll over to Duane’s aptly titled blog, Abnormal Interests, for a very fine (and pleasingly illustrated) overview of what happened in biblioblogging during August 2007.

Recently Danny Zacharias undertook the job of migrating the Deinde blog to WordPress. It took a little while, but now the Deinde blog is back! “And there was much rejoicing.”

If you haven’t already seen the news on Mark Goodacre’s blog or somewhere else, R. Joseph Hoffmann of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion has released (via Robert Price’s website) a statement that seems to clarify a good bit of the confusion about the list of Project fellows on the Project’s web site. Read the whole statement for yourself to get the full scoop, but the short version is that the website’s list of fellows and their biographies was posted quite prematurely, as some of us had previously speculated. You may remember that I wrote in an earlier post:

So what we have here is something in the range of:

• a rush to put up a web site before all the ducks (er, fellows) were in a row; or

• a strange definition of “fellow” as “anyone who has been invited to speak at one of our conferences, or whom we would like to have participating in this venture”; or
• a case of para-academic fraud.

It’s hard not to feel the strong pull of the third item in the list, though I’m holding out for one of the other two, or some combination thereof.

Though he doesn’t quite put it in these terms, Hoffmann describes a combination of my first two bullet points above, mostly the first. Here’s the bottom line:

Anticipating a formal launch of its academic work in 2008, the Project floated (I have to stress this word) a website. It is here that an element of confusion enters the picture. While the website was only a model of things to come, a compilation of biographies of the entire list—UCD, listserv, and “under consideration”–was posted to the site together with some sample texts as active information. What was meant as a test has lingered on the site as a done deal. This was done largely because we were being hammered for information and were late in conceptualizing the site itself. The posting was premature; the website was not flagged as under construction. Results ran ahead of planning. Indeed, the website was (is) a work in progress: Even at the time of this writing, only a fraction of the 50 scholars comprising the Project have been chosen and perhaps they will not finally be chosen until January 2008. A fair number of those whose biographies were floated had already been deselected. My own work schedule has kept me—and there is real guilt in this—from surveilling the progress of the site, which I regarded as internet clay and not the pot. The very tentative nature of the site was not made clear on the site itself, and should have been.

Hoffmann seems unable to just leave it at that, however, and there’s a lot more to his diatribe. Click the “continue reading” link below if you want to read my more detailed reactions to Hoffmann’s statement.

Continue Reading »

And I would, if I could, jump into the discussion that Matt has been leading about whether God is evil. There’s much very interesting stuff to read in Matt’s two posts on that subject, but between class preparation for the fall semester, a weeklong seminar (related to one of my new classes) next week, and my attempts to keep up the review of Avalos’s The End of Biblical Studies, I just don’t have time at the moment.

So many interesting blog posts, so little time.

… then I would try to interact with Claude’s posts on the date of the exodus (I feel like a need a whole paragraph qualifying the phrase itself, not to mention the topic) and atheism and biblical interpretation, as well as Custard’s post on the (literary) history of the (book) of Jeremiah. I’m sorry that I don’t have more free time to do this. For now, I’m going to have to skip these in favor of other things (but this post can serve as a kind of bookmark, so perhaps more later).

Sounds like a grand title, doesn’t it? Well, in this case, America is a Catholic magazine, and the blog is called “The Good Word: A Blog on Scripture and Preaching.” I learned about it from a link in one of Claude Mariottini’s recent post on typology in biblical interpretation (read the whole series). The Good Word’s blogging team includes such folk as Diane Bergant, Dick Clifford, Carol Dempsey, Barbara Green, Felix Just, and Pauline Viviano, plus some New-Testamenty types. I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with several of these people at the CBA meeting that wraps up today, and now I’m delighted to learn of this blog. Thanks for the link, Claude!