By “that,” I mean the 5.8 earthquake that hit SoCal this morning, about 30 miles east of downtown LA, near Chino Hills. We actually live about 45 miles or so west of downtown LA. The quake was felt as far away as Las Vegas, according to early reports. The ripples that reached us were very noticeable, but too mild to do any damage this far away.

You may have already seen a notice somewhere else, but the Ramat Raḥel excavation team now has a blog going, chronicling their fourth season of digging there.

Hey, this is strange. I just tried to use Firefox 2 for Mac to download Firefox 3 for Mac. Doesn’t work. I get gobbledygook, unusable disk images with meaningless names. Camino, however, happily downloads Firefox 3. Very interesting.

P.S.: Firefox 3 doesn’t handle Hebrew vowel pointings any better than Firefox 2 or Safari, so it’s back to Camino. /shrug/

Last night, around 11 PM, my family and I rolled back into our own driveway after a six-week road trip. A few minutes ago, the AT&T U-verse technician drove away after a couple of hours trying to troubleshoot our internet and television service, which had gone down during our absence. In a few minutes, I’ll leave home again, but just for the afternoon, to help a friend move into a new place in Agoura Hills. Expect my web presence to go back up now that I’ll be splitting most of my time between an “Internet 2″ campus at work and AT&T U-verse service at home, rather than working through my in-laws’ 28K dial-up line.

… and I missed it. But you can catch up again by visiting Biblical Studies Carnival XXX on Tyler Williams’s Codex blog and Biblical Studies Carnival XXXI on James Getz’s Ketuvim blog.

I am so far behind on my “online life” that I barely know what month it is. I love my in-laws, but 28K dial-up (I kid you not) makes certain parts of my life very difficult.

This summer, one of my major projects is to enable a convergence of two of my geekdoms, role-playing games and biblical studies, merging them with my day job, teaching Old Testament courses to undergraduates.

For the past ten years, I’ve taught required Bible courses for first-year students at Pepperdine University and (before that) Milligan College—courses whose catalog descriptions billed them basically as Old Testament surveys. I’ve never been quite happy with the survey format, but I’ve taught the courses as such, not rocking the boat too much in terms of scope and sequence.

All that is about to change.

Back in the spring, I attended a conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in Boston. That meeting was mostly about assessment, and I dutifully attended the sessions and wrote little reports back to my colleagues who sit with me on an assessment committee. On the last day of the conference, however, I went to a session that was actually about teaching, and it knocked my socks off. Mark Carnes of Barnard College and some of his colleagues were there describing and demonstrating a history/humanities course used at Barnard and elsewhere. This course, called “Reacting to the Past,” involves students in complex live-action role-playing games to help them experience dramatic historical moments. Now, students don’t have to stat out characters or dress up (though I suppose they are allowed to dress up) or anything like that; basically, they spend a lot of time making speeches and politicking with each other. For example, one game casts students as Parisians during the French Revolution; another game I played in a conference at the University of Kansas cast us in the roles of Athenians debating democracy and other topics right around the time of Socrates’s trial and death.

I got so excited about this pedagogical method—which is not all fun and games, but requires a lot of reading and writing as well as public speaking from students—and resolved to employ it as a pilot project in my Religion 101 class this fall. The problem is that no Old Testament games currently exist using the Reacting method, so I’m currently grinding away at “alpha” versions of such. My goal is to have at least two scenarios ready to go by the beginning of the fall term—a very ambitious goal, but quite necessary if this is to work well.

Today I’m in the Samford University library working on the first of those scenarios, set in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah and focusing on issues of communal identity. Before anybody jumps on me, please know that I’m well aware of the potential pitfalls of using Ezra–Nehemiah (the books) for historical reconstruction. That’s part of the lesson the students will learn. But since the entire pedagogy is more or less based on students making persuasive speeches to one another, Ezra–Nehemiah is an excellent choice for this project. Davies—that is, Gordon F. Davies—explains why in the introduction to his Berit Olam commentary on Ezra–Nehemiah. Davies actually writes the following to support his use of rhetorical criticism as a primary interpretive strategy for these books, but his words apply equally well to my choice outlined above.

Rhetorical criticism is not the only approach for reading Ezra–Nehemiah. But the leaders bring the people around to their plans, and they do so without the violence of coercion or the grace of any theophany. Their strategies of argument to achieve their goals are a pass-key to the theological understructure of the book. To apply rhetorical criticism at its most straightforward we will concentrate on the public discourses and prayers. The very quantity of orations, letters, and prayers in Ezra–Nehemiah reflects its emphasis on the word. This approach to Ezra–Nehemiah fits it as a text of declamation more than action. (p. xiii)

From the “credit where credit is due” department: I stole the phrase “convergence of geekdoms” from a conversation with Joe Weaks.

There are other Midrashim that are not to be taken literally, they have a secret meaning, an example being the Midrash to the effect that the Torah pre-dated the world by two thousand years. This Midrash is true only according to its secret meaning. However, many do not understand it so. Actually, it is impossible to take this Midrashic statement literally because a year is made up of a given number of days, and the measure of the minute and the day is contingent upon the motion of the sphere. Hence if there is no sphere there is no day, certainly not two days or a year or two thousand years.

—Abraham Ibn Ezra, in his commentary on Genesis
Quoted from the translation by H.N. Strickman and A.M. Silver

I try to avoid using Microsoft products unless I just have to. Today I just had to, in order to maintain cross-platform compatibility with some colleagues using PCs. When I launched Word, the Office Auto-Updater kicked in with a request to update my system. I clicked on “Update,” then everything else slowed to a crawl while the updater did its thing. A background update should be low priority on the CPU’s to-do list, but apparently M$ thinks their software should hijack the machine.

Oh, by the way, I’m in a library with high-speed internet access today, so I can blog my Microsoft complaints and read my e-mail and stuff like that. My in-laws’ home has only dialup, and wouldn’t you know it, my MacBook Pro doesn’t even have a modem jack! A while back, my in-laws had cable and cable internet … then they cancelled that and went back to free dial-up with Juno (!) and satellite. Yes, even though they live in an area where they get lousy satellite reception and frequent storms. DSL is not available in their exchange.