Gentle Summer Inquiry

Does one start talking yet about how close we are to fall classes?

Or shall one still maintain at this point a show of denial?

“Defacing” the Bible? Art and Religion

As a teacher of seminarians, I have enough trouble getting some of them even to annotate the margins of their Bibles with Hebrew parsing notes. So I was glad to see that The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow…

…has invited art lovers to write their thoughts down in an open Bible on display as part of its Made in God's Image exhibition.

The placard next to the Bible instructs visitors thusly:

"If you feel you have been excluded from the Bible, please write your way back into it".

The linked article takes a decidedly negative view of the display. It is titled, “Gallery Invites Visitors to Deface the Bible”: this presupposes that any writing in a Bible is inappropriate. Further, the article cites only comments that it considers offensive or provocative.

Let’s look at the article’s first examples of so-called “abuse and obscenity”:

"This is all sexist pish, so disregard it all," one message read.

And:

"I am Bi, Female & Proud. I want no god who is disappointed in this".

See that the writer of the article chose the feminist and LGBT comments as the flagship examples of “abuse and obscenity.” These are strongly worded, to be sure, but for my part, I do not find them abusive or obscene (and as a straight male, I am not at all convinced that I am in a position to judge the appropriateness of these expressions of complaint). Some other visitors were more obviously mocking or obscene in their comments.

What is your view, O reader? Tell me in a comment: In what ways do you find the exhibit exciting or problematic, both in its conception and in how visitors have responded? Would you feel differently if it were some other sacred text instead of the Bible? (The Quran? A Torah scroll? The Constitution or Declaration of Independence, or Bill of Rights?) What do you think of public art exhibits that challenge sectarian sensibilities in this way?

Student Surveys: Suggestions and Resources?

Many teachers give their incoming students some kind of start-of-term survey. Goals for such a survey might include:

• Establishing a provisional set of major questions that the course is designed to help students address;


• Getting a sense of what the term is going to be like, what sort of unique character this incoming class brings with them;


• Getting a sense of how students are prepared for the kinds of work demanded of them in the course (for example, what their previous education looks like or what sorts of careers lie in their backgrounds).

I am teaching three different courses this fall, but the one I have in mind right now is “Introduction to the Old Testament.” As most of my readers will know, this course involves (among other things) the study of history, and the study of literary criticism (broadly conceived). Importantly, the academic study of the Bible involves dealing with questions in an evidentiary way. For students who have only read the Bible in a devotional or expository way, this is an adjustment: we bring such questions to the Bible as can be worked out using shared evidence and a communicable line of reasoning. So, some of the things I wonder about my incoming students are:

• How many of them are avid readers of narrative fiction? How many are familiar with the experience of being changed and moved by an encounter with fictional characters, lives, worlds?


• How many are avid readers of poetry? How many believe in the truth-telling power of figurative speech?


• How many have a background in the use of evidence and reasoning to answer questions? How many have been physical scientists, lawyers, judges, mathematicians, plumbers, electricians, medical professionals?


• How many have had sustained or varied cross-cultural experiences? How many have learned to bring open-ended questions to a person who is “Other”?


• How many have worked full-time jobs, in or out of the home? How many are accustomed to budgeting their time in an organized way?

I could add others.

Here are my questions for you:

1. Have you used start-of-term surveys, and if so, what are they like? What sorts of questions do you go at in such surveys?


2. Do you know of any resources for finding samples of start-of-term surveys. Can you recommend resources or suggestions for their creation?

Thank you!

Bloggers at SBL, and Tweetup Tweeting

Daniel and Tonya had the terrific idea of compiling a list of bloggers presenting at the annual meeting of the SBL (Society of Biblical Literature). The meeting is always the weekend before Thanksgiving (U.S.), and takes place this year in New Orleans. Thanks for this resource!

Speaking of SBL, there have been occasional rumblings of an SBL Tweet-up for Tweeple who, well, go to SBL. To my knowledge, it is still at the “let’s keep in touch on this” stage. I recently revived the hashtag #SBLTweetup, so keep an eye on that tag and we’ll see what develops. Me, I think the most logical venue is Jim West’s hotel room. :^) (Jim, I’m probably with you on Twitter in the pews, if only because thumb-typing while crossing yourself sounds ludicrous and even dangerous.)

[Later: I should add that, confusingly, the initialism “SBL” is already used on Twitter for “Spam Block List” and some other things that I don’t know what they are.]

It’s never too soon to get amped about a long weekend of…well, why reveal our society’s hidden mysteries? Come to New Orleans and see what there is to get amped about.

Plaintive Haiku: Summer Vacation Edition

∞∞∞

No course load. Out there:

Warm, green, bright freedom. In here?

Chained fast to email.

Modern Hebrew Vocabulary Videos

Jacob Richman offers a series of YouTube videos that teach modern (Israeli) Hebrew vocabulary. He organizes the videos by topic: for example, there is one on fun and entertainment, another on clothing and accessories, and so on.

Jacob’s YouTube channel includes other language vocab videos as well, including Spanish and English. As with any YouTube user channel, you can enter a search term in Jacob’s video box to narrow the selection: when I enter the term, “Hebrew,” I get a page with only the Hebrew videos (more or less).

The videos show still pictures and pointed (vocalized) Hebrew script, along with general-use transliteration and English translation, with the Hebrew word being read aloud. The format is clear and consistent. The videos focus only on vocabulary: they do not teach phrases, syntax, or plural forms.

You can find an index of the Hebrew videos on Jacob’s web site. The web site also includes other approaches to the vocabulary.

Help Me Write a Metaphor

I am writing an introductory paragraph to an essay about poetics. I am trying to craft a catchy metaphor to kick things off. Need help. Here’s the idea behind the content of the essay, then I will show you the current state of my metaphor.

Overall, the quick-and-dirty that I am trying to get across is that poetic speech calls attention to itself, and yet, at the same time, tries to work with enough subtlety that its use doesn’t completely stop dead the basic task of communication.

The content: In normal communication, the language we use is trying to be a clear window: we do not want the hearer to pay attention to the language we use, but rather to the meaning alone. Just as she would look through a clear window to see what is behind it, we want her “listen through” the language to hear the meaning, the message.

In poetic speech, however, we deliberately “fog” or “tint” the window.* Our language is crafted such that it calls attention to itself. Take this sentence from Chapter 17 of the Hobbit:

Winter thunder on a wild wind rolled roaring up and rumbled in the Mountain, and lightning lit its peak.

This is not a selection from a poem, but is rather just one sentence in a narrative paragraph. The wind is the first warning the protagonists receive that the Goblins and Wargs have arrived unexpectedly to join the battle in progress. Still, the sentence is strongly poetic, mainly in its use of alliteration (winter, wild, wind; rolled, roaring, rumbled; lightning, lit). The sonorant, liquid consonants beat forward, reaching a sharp but delicate crescendo in the unvoiced stops of the t’s in “lightning lit.” (In a comment I may say more about the poetics of this snippet.)

My point is that the alliteration slows the reader down slightly, calling her attention to the poetic device (the fog on the window, as it were). At the same time, the window cannot become so opaque that the poetic language stops the reader dead by distracting her completely from the meanings unfolding between her and the text: she either cannot or will not continue following the story. If the poetic language goes too far in calling attention to itself, communication stops. If the goal of everyday language is clarity, then the goal of poetic language is translucence, but not outright opacity.

The metaphor: At the start of the essay, I wish to compare the poet to a certain kind of criminal, the reader to a member of the public who hears of the crime, and the critic to a detective. I am thinking of cat burglars, or graffiti artists, or anyone else who commits an act that calls attention to itself, that seeks to send a message. On the one hand, this brand of criminal wants to accomplish a mundane task: she wants to steal something of value, or vandalize a public space. This mundane act corresponds in my metaphor to the simple act of communication. The criminal, like the poet, wants to get away clean with the task at hand (for the poet, the task is communication). On the other hand, the criminal wants the public not only to know that a crime has been committed, but to pay attention to the details of the crime: its difficulty, its elegance, its mystery, perhaps how it bears certain signature elements characteristic of the criminal. These elements call attention to themselves for the hearer the way that poetic language calls attention to itself.

Sometimes some of the witnesses will be aware that a crime has happened (something’s missing, a wall is tagged), but lack comptetence to see the artistry (no sign of forced entry; there’s no apparent way to get to that wall). The detective, though (our literary critic), has enough experience to help other witnesses see the elements that they might otherwise miss.

This is the background thinking going on behind my paragraph. All I want to do is to pique their interest in poetic language by capturing some of the romance and grandeur of the master criminal. At the same time, I do not want to bring in the grisly, darker side of the metaphor (serial killers harvesting trophies, and such). Also, it has to be quick and short. Here is my first draft:

The writer who employs a poetic device—say a metaphor, or a bit of satire—is like the criminal who commits a sensational crime. On the one hand, the act must be done covertly enough to accomplish its work. The criminal wants to put over her crime and steal on. On the other hand, the act must be overt enough to be recognized for what it is. Those who discover the crime—say a cat burglary, or a bit of signature vandalism—must “get it,” must have a moment of “a-ha.” The artist walks a tightrope: how shall she weave language that calls attention to itself as language, and yet do so in a way that operates on the reader before he becomes cognizant of the device? The reader, then, like the witness, is confronted with an act that is both showing and hiding itself. The critic, like a seasoned detective, has the task of determining whether the apparent elements of the poetry of the crime are intended by the criminal artist at all, and if so, to demonstrate them to the rest of the public.

It still feels clunky and a bit forced in some ways. In your view, is the metaphor working at all? Is the idea sound but my implementation flawed? In what ways is it not working? Are there elements of the metaphor that raise tactical problems that I’ve missed? What suggestions do you have for improvement?

*(The concept of poetic language as opacity I first found in Gian Biagio Conte and Charles Segal, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology vol. 44. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.)

Seven Biblioblogs I Make Sure to Read

You can get the history on this meme from Chris Heard. John Anderson asks which seven biblioblogs we actually read most often (so, not necessarily favorites). I point out that the question is complicated by the fact that not everybody posts at the same rate. It is also complicated by the fact that I follow a lot of darned blogs. So, these are the seven that, if I’ve got 185 unread posts in my NetVibes feed and not enough time to really catch up, I make sure to read these.

• Akma’s Random Thoughts. Besides being a friend and example, Akma has always been, and will continue to be, my liaison to even other smart people with good ideas: Michael Wesch and David Weinberger alone have changed many of the ways I think about my vocation, and I first gave them a hearing simply because Akma seemed to think it a good idea.


• Higgaion. Chris Heard’s was one of the first Bible-related blogs that I discovered. My current rubrics for research papers are in direct descent from his grading flow chart, and who can thank him enough for his series on The Exodus Decoded? As one of the centurions was heard to exclaim,

Others Chris saved (from having to produce a point-by-point refutation to Jacobovici’s migraine-inducing woo-fest); himself he could not save!

• Abnormal Interests. Duane, I don’t want to encourage you in your unseemly hero-worship, but here’s an anecdote you might like. I found Mark Twain’s short story “About Barbers,” and liked it so much I read it aloud to my wife Michelle. After I read it, I asked her if she could guess the author from the prose style. Without hesitating she ventured, “Akma?”
  Shoppers who like Abnormal Interests may also enjoy Karyn Traphagan’s Boulders 2 Bits, Charles Halton’s Awilum and C. Jay Crisostomo’s mu-pàd-da.


• Hevel. Bryan is a friend, classmate, and fellow backpacker. Like Akma and Chris, Bryan does the work, so I don’t have to: if Bryan wants to figure out open-access education and Macintosh productivity software in his limited spare time, I should reinvent those wheels? Also, he’s a genuinely good person, so when social convention insists I pass as one I sometimes can just try to do like Bryan (but with a Chicago accent) and hope for the best.


• Exploring Our Matrix. I wasn’t raised in a conservative biblical tradition, but I teach many students who are. So, I have to seek out conversations that are critical aware and which engage thoughtfully the concerns of biblical maximalist readers. James McGrath is critical, generous, and his comment threads draw controversy like a post-diluvian sacrifice draws gods.
  Shoppers who like Exploring Our Matrix may also like Doug Mangum’s Biblia Hebraica and Art Boulet’s finitum non capax infiniti.


• Ancient Hebrew Poetry. Always keep up on John Hobbins, except when I find a certain critical mass of Italian, whereupon I simply stare for a few seconds and nod sagely in case anyone is watching. I wish more translators would “work out loud” like John does.
  Shoppers who like Ancient Hebrew Poetry may also enjoy Philip Sumpter’s Narrative and Ontology.


• בלשנות Balshanut. It’s not easy being a lazy semiticist: so much to read, so little time budgeted for keeping informed. Pete Bekins makes the impossible possible by reporting on his reading with detail and clarity. Like Chris Heard above, Pete does the work, so I don’t have to.
  Shoppers impressed that Pete Bekins, Art Boulet, Charles Halton, Karyn Traphagan, Philip Sumpter, and C. Jay Crisostomo accomplish so much blogging as students will also enjoy these other students with high-quality blogs: Adam Couturier at משלי אדם mišlê-ʾadam, John Anderson at Hesed we-ʾemet, Brandon Wason’s Sitz im Leben, and probably other student biblioblogs as well (thanks to Daniel and Tonya).

What seven biblioblogs do you make time for when time is short? (And what student biblioblogs are you reading?) If you take up John’s meme, trackback, ping, or link to this post so I can be sure to see it!

Discourse Approach to BH Verbs (Balshanut)

Pete Bekins (בלשנות Balshanut) has provisionally completed—in only about one month’s time—an eight-part teaching and learning series on “A Discourse Approach to the BH Verbal System.”

The series does not have its own unique tag, though a Wordpress search for Pete’s tag “Semitic Verbal System” gets you the series and lots of other Balshanut posts in that larger vein. So, I link here each of the posts, for anybody who missed some or who would like to start from the beginning.

• Part 8: Conclusion


• Part 7: Direct Speech


• Part 6: Turning Toward Poetry


• Part 5: Beyond Narrative


• Part 4: Exceptions and Refinements


• Part 3: Grounding in BH Narrative


• Part 2: Foreground and Background


• Part 1: A Discourse Approach to the BH Verbal System

Take your time and have fun. I’ll be making sure that my intermediate Hebrew students are aware of the series.

Let’s Play Woo: Hebrew and Physics

I have reason to take things easy this week, so let’s keep it light. Here is a YouTube video that I have designated as woo: it includes the trappings and language of reasoned argument, but uses various smoke and mirrors to dupe the gullible with that sweet-tasting, pseudoscientific woo.

Use the comments to play! Find as many problems as you can with the claims made by the video. Go for the details. Find more than your friends and taunt them with your bragging rights. Have fun!

Think broadly: not just about the Hebrew, but logic and fallacy, scientific inquiry, and so on.

Without further ado:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIQQX13FX3E (update: removed by user)

The Literal and Figurative as Subsets of Religious Speech

I am working up a longer post on this topic, but for now, consider this statement attributed to Francis Collins, Obama’s nominee for Director of the National Institute for Health National Institutes of Health:

…he thinks the presence of the divine can be directly observed, even if it cannot be measured and tested…

Now, I would prefer a direct quote, and know that Collins’ words may have been slightly different, but I’m going to provisionally take it as stated.

When a scientist says that something is “directly observable,” but nonetheless “cannot be measured or tested,” I am inclined to think that they are not using the word “observe” in a literal way. At least they are not using it to mean, “available to the five human senses or to instruments designed to extend the human senses beyond their normal reach.”

Rather, I suspect that the word “observe” is being used as figurative speech: a metaphor, a figure, a kind of poetry. I should add that I do not consider figurative speech to be a kind of window-dressing to literal speech: a figurative utterance has cognitive uniqueness; it signifies in a way not reducible to literal speech. For example, the figurative utterance

The stars are in blossom, the moon is in flower

is not simply reducible to some literal paraphrase like, “There are many stars out, and the moon has waxed to full.” The figurative speech (Tolkien, by way, from the final chapter of The Hobbit) means uniquely: it signifies something that no other utterance can quite match. That something is not “testable or measureable,” but it is something private, a something that unfolds between the text and the individual hearer. Therefore, it is not ultimately shareable, though productive conversation on the work might be shared.

I want to say that religious claims should be divisible into two kinds: literal claims that submit to “testing and measurement” (this would include religious claims about the age of the earth, the nature of sexuality,  and so on), and figurative claims that have the status of works of art (which might also mean to effect public opinion and policy, but after the fashion of Huckleberry Finn or the Corporate American Flag rather than in the way of a scientific discovery or a poll). When we say, “God is love,” or “God answers prayer,” or “God acts in history,” we should be able to make a clear accounting as to the literalness or figurativeness of our speech, submitting the former to “testing and measurement” and the latter to the rather different critical norms of art.

Ultimately, I have hopes that this line of thinking may help introductory students in religious studies to systematize and clarify the claims they make in collaborative discussion.

Thoughts on these reflections in progress?

Five Primary Sources

Looks like Kevin is the one who got the ball rolling on this meme. DanielandTonya, while kindly stopping by to see my “Five Books or Scholars” post, invited my response to this one. [Whups: also tagged by Adam.] I like the idea, I just wish it were easier to narrow things down. As before, Duane’s Caveat applies: this is the list you get today. Ask me tomorrow, you’ll likely get a whole different list (like one with Sinuhe in it!).

Ugaritic Baʿlu cycle (with Bryan): the characterization and activity of Baʿl and ʾEl just wonderfully illuminate many (most?) of the ways that the God of Israel is represented throughout the Hebrew Bible in his several hats (warrior, fertility god, judge, lawgiver, king, god of the father). What is more, the several conflicts of the monarchic period—temple or tent; dynastic succession or prophetic legitimation; centralized authority or local control—all are better understood in the light of this material.

Zakkur and Mesha inscriptions: yeah, I’m cheating by lumping some favorites into pairs. I put these together because they both show in Israel’s neighbors the belief that the king or people has a special relationship with the god, and that the god intervenes decisively in history on behalf of the king or people. The devotee of Baalshamayn and Chemosh, as much as that of YHWH, experiences the protective love of the god for the god’s own people.

Hammurapi: both for the prologue and the laws. I love how the prologue illuminates elements of the royal theology: that the god takes the king by the hand, and the human king imitates the divine king by protecting the weak from the strong, the poor from the rich. (You also get this about Marduk in Enuma Elish, right?) And of course the laws continue to raise excellent questions about the genre of the biblical law codes, particularly about their setting and function.

Jubilees, 1 Enoch 1–36: overlap with Jim here. Who can help but love these early co-readers of the Bible? Like us, they read with care the details of the biblical text at hand (like Gen 5:24; or Gen 6:1-4; or Gen 22), and like us, they found themselves saying, “Now, what the…?”

Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom: again I’m with Bryan here. Whether Asherah is imagined as a consort of YHWH or no, the symbol is associated with eighth-century goddess worship that likely descends contiguously from that known from earlier iconography.

Have you not yet been tagged on this meme? You have now.

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Run Along and Play Now, That’s a Good Reader

I’m snowed under with unexpected emails from students and some other urgent tasks. But what can you do while I’m busy? Hm…

You eager beavers have already crashed the new online Sinaiticus site, rushing in like manuscript geeks to a manuscript (I’m too busy even to concoct a metaphor), so that’s out. [Later: It lives!]

Oh, just read popular Ph.D. Comics for a while. And scrounge for your lunch out of the fridge, I don’t have time to fix you something.

Teaching Biblical Studies Like Steve Jobs

This weekend I read Carmine Gallo’s piece called, “Deliver a Presentation like Steve Jobs” (h/t to Akma). On the basis of the presentations by Jobs that he has reviewed, Gallo offers ten examples of the kinds of practices that make Jobs’ presentations so compelling.

We bibliobloggers usually wait until Thanksgiving weekend to gripe talk about what…makes…unsuccessful…presentations. But “presenting” is just a more palatable word for “lecturing,” and summer is a fine time to reflect on the teaching practices that we’ll be taking up in the fall.

Here, I copy the names of the practices Gallo lists (the bold-face phrases), but I describe them in terms of my experience with lecturing on topics in Hebrew Bible.

1. Set the Theme: Often, but not always, at the start. Don’t make the mistake of keeping it under wraps until it’s unveiled at the end: whatever ties the presentation together, whatever big idea I mean my students to go away with, I want to bring it in clearly and early, and reinforce it often.


2. Demonstrate Enthusiasm: Risk informality and the possibility of being ridiculed behind your back. It’s cool (and as infectious as hell) to be in love with an idea, or a text, or a discovery. For example, I love how features of El and Baal in Ugaritic religious texts help illuminate religio-political conflicts throughout the monarchical period in Israel and Judah. If you think what you’re saying is exciting, go ahead and bubble over a bit. No, a bit more: burn some calories. There, that’s it.


3. Provide an Outline: I give a written outline with lectures, though I am inclined to make it briefer and more spare this year than I have in the past. In any case, students have told me how much they depend on my giving clear indicators during the lecture about where we are in our itinerary.


4. Make Numbers Meaningful: To illustrate: does it matter whether Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in the 1950s or the 1850s? Or the 1650s? Does a social context of fire-hoses, Jim Crow, and “strange fruit” matter or no (over against Shadrach Minkins and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, or “perpetual servitude” and partvs seqvitvr ventram)? Insofar as you think it matters for Dr. King, then how might the differences between the 8th, 6th, and 5th centuries matter as social contexts for particular words of the book of Isaiah, and how can those differences be made meaningful?


5. Try for an Unforgettable Moment: This may, but needn’t, correspond to the climax of the presentation. In your search for unforgettable moments, pay attention to student feedback. I remember learning that students were impersonating (behind my back, of course) my imitation of Israelite refugees fleeing southward in 722 B.C.E., frantically waving their copies of E, Hosea, the Elijah and Elisha narratives, and Exodus and Moses traditions. If they were impersonating it, then they were “getting it”: this may be a point in the presentation that I could sharpen into a planned unforgettable moment. Think big: could a colleague or student come in as a “special guest”? (Wellhausen? The Priestly writer?)


6. Create Visual Slides: Text shouldn't dominate: I use just enough text to show where I am in my outline, or to tick off Big Ideas. Often images alone are the way to go. Even with images, don’t feel tied to a literal or prosaic correspondence between the image and what you’re saying: abstract images or landscapes working in the background can create the desired atmosphere just fine. The idea is to create an imaginative space within which to arrange the spoken words.


7. Give ’em a Show: Entertainment has a structure, a flow: setting the scene; problem or conflict; rising tension; climax and resolution; denouement. A presentation may comprise one long arc, or a series of related arcs, but remember your hearers are sitting in chairs: for heaven’s sake, try to take them at least on an intellectual and emotional journey or journeys. (For example, a journey from the conventional wisdom of Proverbs or creation psalms, to the way Qohelet uses such conventional proverbs as a foil for his dissenting wisdom, to the guns-a’blazing blaspheming wisdom of Job 9 and 19, to a denouement reflecting on the pastoral goods of affirming the “blasphemous” anger that good people have against God in times of tragedy.)


8. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: For Gallo, the “small stuff” means technical glitches, and every teacher has her share of those. But there are other kinds of glitches: the student question that comes from far out in left field or that tries to hijack the thread; the total misunderstanding arising from a piece of wording that you had never realized was confusing; the quiz that runs late and that sets you fifteen minutes behind on the Most Important Lecture Evah. Students have been learning for centuries under the most preposterous of conditions, and ours will too.


9. Sell the Benefit: What are they going to be able to do that they couldn’t before? Will Brueggemann’s approach to “orientation and disorientation” in the Psalms allow them to integrate the imprecatory psalms into their pastoral ministry so that they quit telling people in pain to stop being angry? Will a frank recognition that Gen 1 and 2 order the creation of humans and beasts differently allow them to see that all texts (including the primeval story) invite certain kinds questions about God and the world while rebuffing others? Will quizzes and outlines on Bible content allow them not to look like total yutzes when their parishioners say, “I heard something weird about that one biblical story, where is that again?”


10. Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse: Surely we’ve all noticed that we are better the second time we lecture on a topic, and even better the third time. So, for a new presentation, why punish the first hearers with an unrehearsed draft?

A couple of bonus links: Dr. Crazy’s reflections on writing an article are written with an eye on conference papers; probably too focused on lit review for most teaching lectures, though. Also, here are Ten PowerPoint (or Keynote) Tips for Preparing a Successful Presentation.

What tips would you offer for creating presentations or lectures worthy of a Steve Jobs?

Five Book Meme

Yikes! So, Art tagged me way back when, and I missed it, and the meme has passed. But if I were of a disposition to be able to leave a loose end untied, I wouldn’t have completed even a week of grad school.

“Name 5 books or scholars that had the most immediate and lasting influence on how you read the Bible.” (The collected links to other five-book-meme-ing bibliobloggers are at the bottom of Biblical Studies Carnival 43. Congratulations on your discovery, Patrick!)

Duane’s caveat pertains: this is the list for today. Ask me tomorrow or the next day, you will likely get a very different list.

Here we go:

• Clark M. Williamson, A Guest in the House of Israel. Two thousands years of Christian teaching of contempt for Judasim, including the most unlikely candidates (like Bonhoeffer and Barth). Only one chapter is on scripture, but the whole book has made me alert to the double standard by which Christians read the OT (good stuff = proto-Christianity, bad stuff = proto-Judaism).


• Thorkild Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. My Intro to OT teacher, J. Gerald Janzen, had us read this before we read the Hebrew Bible. I still find myself reading God in the OT in terms of the providential numen, the king, and the parent, and blendings of the three.


• Shlomith Rimon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (2nd rev. ed.). There are plenty of great lights in biblical narrative criticism, but it took a critic from outside the field to make for me of narrative criticism a truly organized and phenomenological undertaking. Reading biblical narrative critics allowed me to appreciate the approach, but it took Rimmon-Kenan to teach me to do it.


• J.R.R. Tokien, LOTR and Silmarillion. Sorry, but this soaked into me so early that I compare everything to it. For me, the stories of Middle Earth will always constitute “the canon that got there first.”


• David Sibley, Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior. Sibley taught me to go beyond bird listing and into bird watching. Even your 500th Red-wing Blackbird still has something to teach, some wonder to disclose. What is true of my 500th Red-wing Blackbird is true, then, of my 500th reading of Gen 22, Psalm 23, or 2 Sam 7.

I don’t know that there can be anyone left in the biblioblogistanosphere to tag, and I’m ambivilent anyway about tagging at the tail end of a meme’s natural lifespan. If anyone comes on this post and wants to scoop it up into some other corner of the web, then consider yourself tagged and have fun.

The B-L “YKWI…” Effect

Back at PTS, my friend Bryan took his comprehensive exams a year ahead of me. When I set myself to “going to school” on his preparation, he gave me a heads-up on an experience to try to cultivate: that thing that happens when your head is processing several streams of facts at once, all the time, probably under terrific pressure, and semi-random creative syntheses are taking shape, until everything seems to be connected in significant ways to everything else. Elements of your subject matter combine unpredictably, not only with one another, but with your life: with cereal boxes, with street names, with chess, with love, with birdsong. In this mystic, calorie-consuming, emotionally precarious state of exam preparation (you're probably taking a lot of long walks), you find yourself constantly turning to the poor people in your life who are not your classmates and saying, “You know what’s interesting…” (It’s not, of course, but this is the least of the collatoral damage that they’ll suffer at your hands before you graduate.) I would later come to think of this synthesis-producing state of mind as the Bibb-Lester “You Know What’s Interesting…” Effect, or B–L “YKWI…” You know: it combines percolation, simmering, marinading, pressure-cooking, and that cooking that kids do together when they stir a little of everything into a bowl and dare one another to take big bites.

In my own exam preparation, I worked towards this B–L “YKWI…” state of mind, mostly by overlapping and staggering my topics for study. I tried to create conditions for the unpredictable joining-up of random bits of understanding, including the time to follow them up and sift the serendipitous wheat from the delusional chaff. Although individual elements of my written exams came under some fire at my orals, I earned praise for several examples of creative synthesis.

This all came to my mind while I read this piece (h/t Akma), featuring a study that shows some better learning outcomes for online students than for traditional in-classroom students. The study pointed out that students report spending more time on an online course than on a traditional course (I see that Targuman also took a special interest in this bit).

I would like to see the details on the questions and answers about time, because I have my own untested hypothesis about time spent on an online course. In a traditional course, students tend to “chunk” their study time into a small number of large pieces, and the course itself already encourages this by meeting for a small number of large blocks of time. Study time is starkly isolated from life-time, from the rest of life. But if the course and its homework are taking place on discussion boards, blogs, Chat, YouTube, Wikis, and perhaps Twitter and Facebook, then it’s possible that students will find themselves addressing the subject matter the way they address their other social, collaborative undertakings: they may assimilate their study time into the whole of their life-time. If so, then maybe—this is my untested hypothesis—maybe they will be more prone to synthesize the subject matter with the thinking they are already doing about politics, about religion, about church, about nutrition, about dog training, about diaper-changing, about whatever. Maybe they’ll be more susceptible to the rigorous delights of the B-L “YKWI…” Effect.

Not that I celebrate the fragmentation of attention. Okay, yes, actually, it is that I am tempted to celebrate the fragmentation of attention. After all, haven’t I told my students a hundred times, “Don’t try to do your reading and writing in four-hour marathons the night before class. Break it up into littler chunks, give yourself time to reflect, to simmer, to percolate.” What I am saying at those times is, “Fragment your attention a little, why don’t you?”

What do you think? Have you your own experience with the B-L “YKWI Effect? Have you found your own ways of acheiving or encouraging the unpredictable synthesis of your course’s subject matter with the random constellation of one’s interests and concerns? Do you think that the fragmentation of attention encouraged by social learning marks the end of attentive student work as we know it, or that it might have the balancing potential goods that I find myself hoping it does?

Three Month Bloggiversary Clouding

Today marks three months I’ve been writing in this space. According to Wordle at least (which I think may be skewed toward recent entries: you can’t tell me I’ve brought up Arabic as frequently as the Bible overall), this is what I have been writing about:

Academic Blogs Not in Bible

Readers may notice that I have added a second blogroll to my right sidebar. This new blogroll is for academic blogs that are not related to biblical studies (the main blogroll will stick with Bible-related blogs).

This near-double-handful are among my favorites. They stay at least as well on topic as your average biblioblog. Usual fare includes practices and experiments in teaching, as well as (for the pseudonymous blogs) some anecdotes and a bit of faculty-lounge venting. A couple of them are more political than the others; I include them because Bitch regularly writes about teaching and P.Z. frequently hammers on sloppy reasoning in an instructive (not to say caustic, expletive-bespangled) manner.

For the others: visit Michael Bérubé for issues in academic freedom, bleeding-edge literary theory, and hockey. Dean Dad has the adminstrative beat covered; think of him as your admin-friend who teaches you to deal productively with admins. Read Angry Professor for the laughs, especially her email correspondence. Flavia (Renaissance lit) and Miriam (Victorian lit) are in a quieter, more pensive mode, thoughtful and enlightening. New Kid has left teaching behind and views the classroom from the student’s side again, now in law school. Dr. Crazy digs in on some lengthy, deep-sounding* posts about teaching and professional development, with intervening short bursts of (academic) life-in-progress.

You’ll see that women’s voices dominate the selection; whether that is a reflection of academic blogs generally or my own readerly preferences I don’t know, but it does balance out the rather baritone-to-basso range of the biblioblogging voices.

Are any of these academic blogs already part of your reading? If so, tell me about it. If not, have a read. Tell me about your first impressions, and tell me if any of them take a place among your regularly-read blogs.

* Later: on re-reading, I see this needs clarifying. I mean deep-sounding like how one sounds the depths; not like she “sounds deep, man.”

Reminds me: I have also added Karyn Traphagen to my regular blogroll: run, don’t walk, to give her a read.

Arabic at a Distance

My “Intro to Old Testament” Fall ’09 session will be something of a hybrid course, incorporating many elements of distance learning. My Summer ’10 session will be entirely online. I have heard it said that, if you want to learn to teach online courses, then take a course online. This makes sense, and I’ve decided that if I am going to take an online course, it will be Arabic.

Why Arabic? Well, I’m already walking around with a pocketful of Semitic research languages (biblical and modern Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Syriac), so I have a good foundation for Arabic. A look at the job postings is also persuasive: I don’t plan to change my whole focus to Islam or religious politics overnight or anything, but who in Hebrew Bible is not looking for reasonable means to broaden her appeal?

Searching for a course, it is not easy to navigate past all the commercial software packs masquerading as online courses. And, as usual, navigating school’s websites is useful mostly as an exercise in controlling one’s blood pressure.

I do find that University of California has a program. The timing is unfortunate (I have a really busy autumn term planned), but the course looks good.

Readers: have you taken a course online, and what was your experience? Are you aware of opportunities for online Arabic that I’ve missed? (Accredited, credit-earning courses only, please.)

Hey Profs, Show Us Your Outcomes!

I am trying to take seriously two thing. First, my own admonishment not to use the academic cliché “take seriously” in any of my writing. But second, the logical need to clarify to myself what learning outcomes I am trying for, before revising the rubrics for my assignments.

The wording of my outcomes is not yet important to me; it’s okay if they are sloppy or a bit rambling. For example, in “Introduction to the Old Testament”:

1. Students will become fearless researchers in the field, getting over the “but I’m not a scholar” mental hump, and also the “but what if I find something that upsets my faith” hump.


2. Students will embrace collaboration, eschewing narrow competitiveness or fearful isolation and growing into the conviction that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” As Harry Tuttle put it, “We’re all in it together, kid.” I do well if we do well, and we do well if I do well.


3. Students will comprehend the difference between “Bible study” (devotional, expository; our theologies about the Bible; not primarily what we’re doing) and “biblical studies” (exegetical, literary and historical; the theologies discerned in the texts; what we are primarily doing).


4. Students will learn the details of the different historical situations in Canaan between the 13th and 2nd centuries B.C.E. They will be able to talk clearly about why those differences matter to how we exegete specific biblical texts.


5. Students will get a sense that, if they ever want to interpret the Bible with anything resembling authority, they are going to have to take Elementary Hebrew 1 and 2 the following year.


6. Student will just love the living bejeezus out of the Hebrew Bible.

[Edit: changed list from bullets to numbered list.]

I have other outcomes taking shape for Elementary Hebrew.

Readers, if you teach any courses at all, what are they and what learning outcomes are essential to you? If you do not teach, what learning outcomes have you experienced as essential, or what outcomes do you wish had been prioritized?