August 2007

Unprovenienced artifacts

Jim recently linked to Christopher O’Brien’s post on the problem of unprovenienced artifacts—artifacts presented to the world with no information about the archaeological context of their discovery—in Syro-Palestinian archaeology. The topic is very important and Christopher deals with it very well. Please read Christopher’s post if you haven’t already.

If you don’t know Christ…

My colleague Michael Dula sent me the screenshot below, with his comment superimposed. Click on the image for a larger version.

The best job in the world

I have the best job in the world. Sometimes I get busy, and say “yes” to too many things, and feel the resulting stress, and then I gripe about being “overworked.” But every day, I get paid to talk with enthusiastic, intelligent, charismatic people (my students and colleagues) about big, important ideas (our subject matter).

As you can tell, the semester is off to a great start.

And so, it begins

The new fall semester, that is. Pepperdine’s academic year begins today. I have meetings but no classes. My class schedule begins tomorrow with Hebrew at 8:00 AM on Tuesdays and Fridays, Religion 101 at 10:00 AM on Tuesdays and Fridays, and a First-Year Seminar on Faith and Reason from 12:00–2:50 PM on Wednesdays.

Imprecations, exegesis, and hermeneutics

As if to verify the criticism leveled by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, et al. that religion, and specifically “Bible-based” Christianity, is hurtful and destructive, pastor Wiley Drake of the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park has “called on his followers to pray for the deaths of two leaders of Americans United for Separation of Church and State,” according to a Los Angeles Times story from a few days ago. Drake’s targets apparently asked the IRS to investigate Drake for violating tax laws by using church letterhead to campaign for a specific presidential candidate (which compromises the congregation’s non-profit status).

Coincidentally (or “providentially,” if you prefer), at church this past Sunday we were studying the passage in the book of James where the writer scolds Christians who try to bless God with their speech, but use that selfsame faculty to curse humans. Meanwhile, over on Jim West’s Biblical Studies Discussion List, a discussion of Psalm 137 (which includes the horrifying lines, “O daughter Babylon … [h]appy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rocks”) has witnessed an erudite attempt to defend that nasty imprecation.

To justify his praying of curses against Joe Conn and Jeremy Leaming, Drake appealed to a different psalm, Psalm 109:

“God says to pray imprecatory prayer against people who attack God’s church,” he said. “The Bible says that if anybody attacks God’s people, David said this is what will happen to them. . . . Children will become orphans and wives will become widows.”

So far, I haven’t seen much reaction to this story among bibliobloggers. Ben Witherington takes Drake to task for missing the “heart of the gospel.” Duane Smith took note of the situation but limited himself to one brief remark. Ed Brayton has given more attention to the situation than all bibliobloggers combined, if we’re just counting posts.

There is much that could be said about this, and one starting point is just about as good as any other. I’ll state from the outset that I think Drake’s curses are evil, and his actions embarrass me as a Christian. But the whole situation raises interesting questions beyond the obvious vitriolic spitefulness. I invite you to continue reading if you’d like more analysis of the situation and larger issues that arise from it.
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Deinde is back!

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.”

“The Dao of Qoheleth”

A few days ago, I posted one of my early articles online. The original wording of that post may have been slightly misleading; I’ve since corrected it. “Hearing the Children’s Cries” wasn’t my first article ever published, but my first article published in a widely recognizable US journal. My first article ever published appeared in Jian Dao, a journal published under the auspices of Alliance Bible Seminary in Hong Kong. This article was a revision of a paper I originally wrote for a Ph.D. seminar on “historical study of Eastern religious traditions.” This was in the second half of my first year as a Ph.D. student; we were required to take four seminars that first year (and pretty much limited to those seminars): historical study of Western religious traditions, philosophical study of religion, historical study of Eastern religious traditions, and social-scientific study of religion. By the time we came to writing papers for the Eastern religions component, I was feeling pretty detached from the field I wanted to study, Hebrew Bible. So I found a way to combine my interests with the scope of the class, and the editors of Jian Dao at that time graciously accepted a revision for publication. So I made my “scholarly debut,” so to speak, with “The Dao of Qoheleth: An Intertextual Reading of the Daode Jing and the Book of Ecclesiastes.” The current editors of Jian Dao have granted their permission for me to post this article on the web, so I am pleased now to make this article more widely accessible; unfortunately, few North American seminary and university libraries, as far as I know, subscribe to Jian Dao.

Jesus Project update

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.

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“Hearing the Children’s Cries”

Ten years ago my first third published article appeared in the “experimental” journal Semeia. A number of issues of Semeia are available online, either in the Society of Biblical Literature’s own Semeia archive (vols. 79–91, except for 82) or in the older RelTech archive (vols. 19 and 60–72). However, my article, “Hearing the Children’s Cries: Commentary, Deconstruction, Ethics, and the Book of Habakkuk,” was in volume 77, which is not in either archive. With the kind (and quick!) permission of the SBL publications office, I am pleased to now make this article freely available for your enjoyment and edification; just click on the link above.

I’d rather be a hammer than a nail

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.

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