RBoC: T-Minus 21 Hours Edition

This time tomorrow, I will have finished with my first Hebrew session of the year, and be worshiping in chapel under the handicap of anticipating our first session of the large introductory Old Testament course.

On my mind today are the following:

• It’s my wife’s birthday. Why do academics marry people with early September birthdays? Sometimes we just can’t help ourselves, and besides, I wasn’t an academic when we married, or when she was born, for that matter.


• The Blackboard Help Desk never returns calls. [Later: that was pretty snarky. In fact, once they realized that our classes have started NOW, they have been very much on the case.]


• I want to post on the “women in biblioblogging” kerfluffle about as badly as I don’t want to post on it. (No link: either you’re up on it or you don’t need to know.) Preliminary observations: 1) Among the non-Bible academic blogs, women appear to me to constitute a pretty solid majority (for a self-selected and anecdotal glimpse, see my second blogroll). 2) With others, I point out that the soi-disant “bibliobloggers” are a skewed sample of Bible scholars: aside from being mostly male, they are mostly grad students, and (I am not dying to try to defend this or even define it too closely) largely somewhat conservative in background or readership. 3) Biblical studies as a culture tends to lag at least a few decades behind its ancillary disciplines (literary criticism, archaeology, history, culture studies, you name it, and yes-it’s-true-that-other-fields-can-be-slow-to-hear-what-we’re-doing-too). 4) Jobs are hard enough to find and keep, and more so for women than for men, and so far “bibliobogging” isn’t exactly up there in the requirements for tenure. I don’t wish at this time to try to tie these points together into a coherent set of claims, except perhaps to say, “It’s pretty early in the day yet, folks, yet not too early for attention to collegiality and justice.” More to follow, maybe.


• Pre-recording slide-enhanced podcast lectures takes, on average, four times longer than simply delivering the lecture in class. And that’s just for beta-version, not-ready-for-prime-time product.


• Fall ball? Why did we think that we had time for our son to be involved in fall baseball?


• I have a presentation to prepare for the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (weekend before Thanksgiving, New Orleans LA).


• I cannot wait to get back into some more substantial posts. Be patient, please, neighbors.