Reflections

QOTD: Leonard Cassuto Pt. 2

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 16:11:00 +0000

Continuing on from my QOTD from last week, here is another quote from the same chapter from Leonard Cassuto ("Professionalization"), but focusing on student debt--which given the current public discourse should be very relevant:

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Jeffrey J. Williams of Carnegie Mellon University persuasively compares student indebtedness to indentured servitude. For a new Ph.D. who is lucky enough to land an intellectually rewarding job in his or her field (whether in or out of academia), the burden of paying off student loans on a relatively modest salary means a life of poverty from which the gentility wears off like a cheap coat of paint. Economist Paul Krugman warned in 2005 that the United States is threatening to become a "debt peonage" society, in which borrowers work endlessly for creditors to service debts they can never retire.

We can't talk honestly about professionalization--or the larger meaning of being professional--without bringing debt into the conversation. Debt affects what kind of professional a student is or can be. Graduate students don't explore many of the assumptions that underlie their own professionalization, but they are unsurprisingly well aware of the onus of their loan debts. In this case, it's the professors who lack self-awareness. When professors and administrators countenance practices that maintain (or even increase) time to degree, we make ourselves complicit with a system that hurts our students' lives.
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But we can also view the time-to-degree question--and with it the idea of professionalism--through the prism of graduate student debt. When I complained in a newspaper column about how academic job searches tend to privilege candidates who stay in graduate school longer, some commenters disparaged my concern. "Who wouldn't hire a [more experienced candidate]?" asked one, while another declared, "Potential is just that" and called it a "risk" to hire a less experienced Ph.D.

But if more time in school equals more debt, then a preference for more experienced Ph.D.'s essentially adds to graduate student indebtedness. If we ask for graduate students to acquire a hyper professionalism in order to get a professor's job, we're essentially asking them to buy that training out of their future earnings--which, given the shakiness of the job market, are uncertain at best. Put simply, we're asking them to spend money that they haven't got and that they can't be sure they will ever get, to acquire a specialized skill set (how to succeed in academia) that they may or may not be able to put to direct use. And we ask those who want to try for a professor's job to do this at the expense of shaping their preparation for other kinds of work.

Viewed thus, a preference for more experienced job candidates is not simply instrumental. It's also pernicious, and redolent of malign neglect of one of our most pressing, but least visible, concerns as teachers of graduate students. We can debate the intellectual pros and cons of graduate student professionalization (hyper specialization, the utility of graduate student publication, etc.) until the next millennium; but let's not forget that money is at stake, and it belongs to the poorest members of academic society.

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From the outside looking in, there is something very disturbing about this: by creating an entire class of professors who can never retire due to debt, we are only exacerbating the situation that is the dismal job market. Because modern medicine has extended the quality of life for all (which is a good thing), people can literally work for longer number of years. And this all the more so for jobs that are less physically intensive such as the professorship. All things being equal, even without the debt, I can imagine many professors wanting to work for many decades, well past the usual age of retirement that is common (or required) in other jobs. Therefore, professors can work a longer number of years (because health and desire) but they will and must (because of debt). That means even less jobs for those finishing graduate school, which means bigger debt for such graduates, which leads them to lengthen their years of work if they make it to the other side, and on and on goes this downward spiral.

QOTD: Leonard Cassuto

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 14:25:00 +0000

Another recommended reading for anyone interested in higher education is Leonard Cassuto's The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2015). I've had the pleasure of meeting Lenny on several occasions as he served as a consultant/guest for events we hosted at Emory University. He has provided sage advice and has been gracious enough to listen to my own story in academia (mind you, our fields of expertise are completely different and I have never met him before these events). Anyone who has talked to Lenny about higher education will know immediately how much he cares about "the university" as an institution while simultaneously caring deeply about the graduate students' success and the need to reform the way doctoral programs are set up currently. To provide just a quick background: Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University and is a frequent contributor to The Chronicle of Higher Education (see here). I highly highly recommend this book. It is thoroughly researched and includes ~50 pages of endnotes for all of you who want to pursue these questions further.

In the sixth chapter of his book, "Professionalization," I came across the following (likely resonating with many friends and colleagues out there):

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Hiring committees now routinely choose among applicants who have accomplished much more than their interviewers had at comparable stages of our own careers. At the same time, though, we've been calling for reducing the time that graduate students take to complete their degrees. How can we square that imperative with our hiring practices?

Just about everyone agrees that graduate students--and academic culture as a whole--would benefit if our Ph.D. students could graduate in fewer years than they do now. Deans call loudly and frequently for streamlined degree programs, and many, if not most, graduate directors have been asked to figure out ways to reduce the amount of time students spend in graduate school …

One important reason that graduate students take longer and longer to finish is because departments don't reward quick finishers with academic jobs. In fact, we do quite the opposite. In the search for the best candidate to fill an opening, hiring committees privilege the kinds of achievements that can be attained only when graduate students stay in school for more time, not less. We offer the highest prizes--full-time faculty positions--to the ones who stay longer.

Let's compare two hypothetical new Ph.D.'s. The specs can be adjusted by field, but the gist of the difference should be clear. Candidate A completed her Ph.D. at a rapid clip and has emerged from her program with a passel of recommendations attesting to the publishable quality of her dissertation and to her creativity, perspicacity, teaching ability, and enormous upside potential. Candidate B, who took three years longer, is also coming out bedecked with praise. She's done more varied and advanced teaching than Candidate A, and she has placed a couple of articles in leading journals in her field.

We would naturally expect Candidate B to have more to show for the extra years she spent in school, and we see as much in the form of her publications, enhanced teaching credentials, and (depending on what field you imagine her in) perhaps work on grants or even some administrative experience. That extra expectation is amply reasonable: if you take more time, you should do something useful with it.

What happens when hiring committees compare the two applicants? This is not a hypothetical question. Hiring committees find themselves presented with versions of this A-B comparison all the time. And if you look at the profiles of the assistant professors who get hired these days, you'll see that the nod almost always goes to those who look more like Candidate B

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In fact, many departments take it even further and hire assistant professors who have been out for two or three years or even longer. These midlevel assistant professors (who typically show up with an armful of publications and other achievements) for entry-level jobs are then encouraged to reset their tenure clocks backward. Although that adjustment is made post graduation, it essentially converts an experienced faculty member back into a recently minted Ph.D. and thus contributed to the same overall trend (You'd think that departments would instead bring such well-qualified new hires up for tenure early, but somehow that never happens.) To be sure, junior faculty members are themselves complicit in such retrograde moves. Most of those who sacrifice years of experience do so in order to rise up the academic food chain, move o a preferred geographical area, or both. But we can hardly blame them for choosing options that employers make available to them.

What does it mean for an institution to advertise an entry-level position and then pit new Ph.D.'s against applicants who have years more experience? To begin with, it amounts to a preference for concrete achievement over raw potential. It also creates inexorable selective pressure in that direction. After a couple of years on the market, Candidate A gradually metamorphoses into Candidate B.

Choosing experience over possibility can result from the lure of achievement--and the achievements of today's graduate students are indeed considerable. But it can also result from complacency: instead of relying on one's own judgment, one substitutes the judgment of journals and presses. An emphasis on attainment over potential further implies that an applicant needs to have experience in order to get experience: a classic Catch-22 that is bridged by the willingness of departments to employ their student apprentices far past the point of simply training them.

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A friend and I have a phrase for that Candidate B. We call them "fake assistant professors." This refers to the fact that such candidates are usually 3-5 years removed, with at least 2-3 years of employment elsewhere. To our minds, they are "fake" insofar as when they are compared with newly minted Ph.D.'s. They often have 3-5 publications in top journals, at least one monograph published (sometimes even more!) and are, for all intents and purposes, "associate" level, but the timing of their employment/tenure hasn't brought them to that point. It is somewhat disturbing that such candidates are applying for what is essentially supposed to be "entry-level," pitting themselves against other new graduates (mind you, as Lenny noted above, this is not completely their fault). How likely is it that a committee will consider the "potential" of a new Ph.D. over such overwhelming portfolios?

QOTD: M. M. Mitchell

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 18:53:00 +0000

I've been reading Margaret Mitchell's Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and wanted to quote something from the near end of her book. I've really enjoyed reading this book, especially powerful and engaging despite just past ~100 pages. Something should be said about the many modern monographs that easily eclipse 300 pages... Anyway, in her final chapter, she has a section titled "Backwards and Forwards: Final Movements" where she writes the following (emphases original):

The adversarial nature of the agonistic paradigm also continues to pervade the discipline of academic biblical scholarship, in which the text, in whole and part, serves as a witness of a thesis on offer, and the readings of others are demonstrated to be deficient when the evidence is cross-examined. And yet the legal paradigm (long before de Saussure or Derrida!) was overt about the fact that texts do not just "mean things" but their meanings rely upon effort, of argument and evidence, to be adjudicated in some public court of appeal. Origen's telling phrase, "For without witnesses our interpretations and exegeses are incredible," is still as true in modern academic biblical scholarship as in his day (that is what footnotes, for one thing, are all about).

On one hand this is absolutely right; all ideas need testing in the court of human opinion, and scholars and students carry out their civic duty as public readers by submitting their interpretations to judgment. On the other, the dualistic framework can lead to the kinds of overstatements about different readings that the rhetorical handbooks recommend the young orator learn in order to press resolutely his own belief … I would like to suggest that what we learn from the ancient agonistic paradigm is that it is a commonplace to present the options as mutually exclusive, as either/or -- one reads a text either literally or figuratively, with no gray area in the middle (after all, juries are pressed by both sides to tender a verdict in their favour). But that binary, rhetorically constructed in favor of one's own reading and against that of another, is hardly an accurate analytical tool for appraising most reading, which is somewhere between the letter of the text and its intent or deeper sense as discovered later, as discerned by some but not others. Indeed, the "literal" sense itself is a construct, a rhetorical claim for textual, for biblical fidelity. But despite the commonplace, no texts stand "without interpretation," for even an appeal "to the letter" is an argument that depends upon focusing the eye of the reader on one or another chosen detail of the many letters which make up a text (no one reads each letter with the same level of emphasis or attention, akribeia, all at once).

"Privileged"

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 00:45:00 +0000

The NBA presents an interesting context within which to talk about society. It is represented, by all accounts, overwhelmingly by players of color. You could watch any NBA game on any given night and this would be clear as day. Today, in The Players' Tribune, Kyle Korver, a shooting guard for the Utah Jazz published an online article titled, "Privileged." Despite the fact that most NBA players are players of color, there have been numerous incidents this year and in years past of incidents of racism toward players from fans. The most recent one might be when Russell Westbrook's team (OKC) visited the Utah Jazz where a fan said some really nasty words to Westbrook. This is all the more shocking since even the Jazz has many of players of color. In "Privileged," Korver talks about this incident, as well as another earlier one involving his teammate Thabo Sefolosha. The latter incident was especially shocking, since it was clear that Thabo being a person of color led to the altercation leading to his arrest/injury and eventual settlement with NYPD.

Korver acknowledges his own blindness to the situation at hand and wonders how he can become an agent for change/solution rather than sitting idly by on the sidelines. He charges those in positions of "privilege" (i.e. in his case, white players and/or owners) to stand up for what is right and fight for true equity among everyone involved. The article has been received very positively by his colleagues as well as other professional athletes, coaches, and analysts.

When I read this article, I couldn't help but wonder about this idea of being "privileged" even within my own sphere of influence, namely, higher education/academia. This past year and a half, I have had many discussions with friends and colleagues, and it seems to me that academia remains largely a system that benefits those with a particular profile. Various institutions talk about pursuing "diversity" within their personnel, but too often this is just lip service and actual practices do not bear this out. Numerous theological institutions are struggling to deal with this issue. It seems rather crass to see that many schools will happily accept revenue from a particular demographic while failing to cede positions of influence within their own leadership to represent that demographic. I would liken it to throwing a few crumbs by the wayside while reserving the best for the privileged. We have seen with the recent college scandal that higher education is in dire need of serious overhaul since as it currently stands it is often those "privileged" who get into the best schools. If this is true about getting into the best schools, then this is true even thereafter: the (academic) job market. Those "privileged" start far ahead of the game from everybody else, and it leaves everyone else scrambling to catch up (if that's even possible).

If universities and theological schools want to tout themselves as bastions of knowledge, freedom of thinking, and progress, then they must consider how they have been complicit in practices that have favored the "privileged." If sports professionals can do it, then why not academics?

Video: Claiming Your Expertise

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 14:37:00 +0000

I came across this video from Emory University's Center for Faculty Development and Excellence. It is a clip from Carol Newsom who is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Old Testament at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. I did not have the chance to take a seminar with her (my one regret!) but I did have the chance to work for her for a different project temporarily and all the interactions I had with her were very positive. From everything I've seen and heard she is not only a great scholar (and teacher!, this is an important distinction, one does not follow the other, but my friends in HB have told me what a great teacher she is) but also an awesome and thoughtful person. She came to Candler almost 40 years ago and you can imagine she must have endured a whole lot to get to this point in her career.

I think her short talk is worth listening to and hope it will give everyone resolve to be positive agents of change for the academy as well as strength for their own pursuit of excellence and development as scholars/citizens of this world.

Public Scholarship

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 17:24:00 +0000

Currently, I've been thinking a lot about "public scholarship." I am involved in kicking off a brand new Mellon Teaching Fellowship that has, as a major criterion of approval, a component of "public scholarship" to be built into the proposed course.

The best definition of public scholarship that I could find comes from Imagining America, a national advocacy and professional institution for publicly engaged scholars:

“Public Scholarship refers to diverse modes of creating and circulating knowledge for and with the public and communities. It often involves mutually-beneficial partnerships between higher education and organizations in the public and private sectors. Its goals include enriching research, creative activity, and public knowledge; enhancing curriculum, teaching and learning; preparing educated and engaged citizens; strengthening democratic values and civic responsibility; addressing and helping to solve critical social problems; and contributing to the public good.”

I have a few friends who care deeply about engaging in great scholarship and also answering the "so what" question, i.e., the relevance of research and scholarship not only for the sake of knowledge or the academy (though those things, in and of themselves, can be valuable), but for the local or global community(s).

A few days ago, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an online piece titled, "'The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril,'" a quote taken from the interviewee of this article. The subject is Jill Lepore, who is currently listed as the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. All that to say, while her field is far afield from my own, she knows what she is talking about on the "scholarship" ("academic") front. On the "public" side of things, she appears to be a regular contributor to The New Yorker. What I appreciated from this interview, however, is not what she said about her academic works, as important as they may be within her guild, but what she said about the state of "the academy" writ large. She has been at Harvard for 15 years, so it's safe to say, she has witnessed the changing landscapes of higher education.

She observes an "epistemological shift" vis-a-vis knowledge, a transformation from facts to numbers to data.

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JL: That transformation … traces something else: the shifting prestige placed on different ways of knowing. Facts come from the realm of the humanities, numbers represent the social sciences, and data the natural sciences. When people talk about the decline of the humanities, they are actually talking about the rise and fall of the fact, as well as other factors. When people try to re-establish the prestige of the humanities with the digital humanities and large data sets, that is no longer the humanities. What humanists do comes from a different epistemological scale of a unit of knowledge."

Q: How is the academy implicated in or imperiled by this moment of epistemological crisis?

JL: The academy is largely itself responsible for its own peril. The retreat of humanists from public life has had enormous consequences for the prestige of humanistic ways of knowing and understanding the world.

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Q: You did your graduate work at Yale in the early ’90s in a post-structuralist American-studies department. You read a lot of Derrida and Foucault. You’ve said that you grew uncomfortable with how you were trained versus how you wanted to write.

JL: … Like any Ph.D. program, what you’re being trained to do is employ a jargon that instantiates your authority in the abstruseness of your prose. You display what you know by writing in a way that other people can’t understand. That’s not how I understand writing. Writing is about sharing what you know with storybook clarity, even and especially if you’re writing about something that’s complicated or morally ambiguous. Also, I like to write about people who are characters, who have limbs and fingers and toes and loves and desires and agonies and triumphs and ages and hair colors. But that’s not how historical writing is taught in a Ph.D. program.

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The entire interview is worth reading but two things stood out to me here which I excerpted: (1) the retreat of humanists from the public arena; and (2) the deployment of jargon to obfuscate. I find both of these things highly frustrating and wonder about my own complicity in system(s) that perpetuate this.

I study ancient texts and ancient peoples, but if Christianity (ancient or modern) are examples of ways of "being" human in the world, I wonder if there are ways I could write essays/books or teach courses that can address these issues in my own very small way. I have more to say about public scholarship, but this will be it for now.

Translation

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 01:03:00 +0000

This past year, in my work as one of the SIRE (Scholarly Inquiry and Research at Emory) Graduate Fellows, I had the wonderful opportunity to work with a team of other fellows in a variety of fields including Biology, English, Environmental Health, and Physics. One of the things we had to learn, as part of our professional development. is how to talk about research to an interdisciplinary group of researchers. This is certainly not easy, even less so when you start mixing humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences altogether. Still, I think this is supremely important in the current climate of academia, and there seems to be a real push (and not just in words) for interdisciplinary dialogue and getting out of our mini silos.

During the school year, then, we taught a group of undergraduate researchers on how to create an "elevator pitch," basically a ~3 minute presentation about their research that even the most novice of listener should be able to reasonably comprehend. This is important, as it shows the listener the value of the research being conducted as well as providing a helpful bridge between serious scholarly inquiry and the general public (= translation).

All this to say, I just finished a wonderful book by Professor Susan Eastman, who was one of my first teachers at Duke Div. She was an amazing teacher and a great person overall, who seemed to have that gift in straddling the academician/practitioner divide. Her book titled, Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul's Anthropology, is a great example of how she melds her interests in serious scholarly inquiry as well as in practical outcomes (the so what question) of that research:

This is a serious book. She wrestles closely with even contemporary discussions in neuroscience, personhood, etc., all in the service of her bigger questions in thinking about Pauline anthropology afresh. Her use of other disciplines, however, is not amateurish or faddish, she seriously took the time to digest and understand what contemporary scientists and thinkers are saying about these issues.

Anyway, in her concluding reflections, she wrote some words that really struck me as being a wonderful example of translation (or at the very least provoking translatable questions, as we will see with her probing questions at the end):

"... the complex overlapping of relational systems means that social institutions must live with imperfection rather than demanding closure and a resolution of differences that will inevitably benefit some and harm others. One aspect of Christian witness is thus to name the lack of closure and the continued ruptures and suffering in all humanity, including the body of Christ. To fail to do so betrays the bodily interconnectedness that underlies Paul's thought; when a community claims to have achieved perfect unity, one wonders who has been left out; when an individual claims to have achieved wholeness, one wonders at what expense that 'integration' has happened. Rather than pushing for some kind of personal or social perfection, perhaps speaking truthfully about the lack of wholeness most perfectly manifests Paul's realism about Christian existence this side of the eschaton …
I suggest that a conversation between Paul and current work on the person affords new opportunities for resourcing Paul's thought in pastoral and clinical settings … the participatory logic of his gospel needs interpretation and articulation to address particular contexts of care in churches and other institutions today. Those contexts include situations in which the worth and identity of the person seems to be at risk, such as the understanding and care of those who suffer from dementia and those who care for them; the articulation of personhood and relationship among and with autistic persons; support for people suffering the aftereffects of trauma; and articulating real hope in the face of death. All of these situations often result in social isolation; all of them are unavoidably embodied; all of them require care in interpersonal networks. How might Paul's understanding of the body as a mode of connection and communication be deployed in such care? How might his depiction of sin as a hostile, enslaving agent be deployed diagnostically in some traumatic situations? Does his view of persons as relationally constituted overlap with debates in psychology and psychiatry about the relationship between biomedical care and talk therapy? Does the understanding of personhood as a criteria-free divine gift speak to debates about the human status of limit-cases, such as fetuses, those in comas, extreme dementia, and so forth?"

If you are currently engaged in research, how do you imagine "translating" it for others and what kinds of provocative questions could be raised on the basis of that research?

Book announcement: Miracles

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 00:05:00 +0000

I would like to make a quick announcement regarding the recent publication by my doctoral supervisor, Luke Timothy Johnson:

Titled, Miracles: God's Presence and Power in Creation. Throughout the early period of writing my dissertation (he's already moved on to another project while I'm just about putting the finishing touches on trying to publish my first book!), we talked about him writing various chapters of this book. I'm glad to see it is finally out.

The idea of "miracles" is not an easy topic to discuss, still less to analyze and write about. I haven't picked this up yet but I will in the near future. I suggest you go and do the same!

Syllabi and Intellectual Property

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Wed, 29 Aug 2018 16:35:00 +0000

Throughout the course of my PhD, I've been helped by numerous friends and teachers on the construction of the syllabus. Most of this help was indirect, by way of them sharing their syllabi for various courses taught. I've done the same for other younger colleagues in my program as well as in my dissertation completion fellowship where we as graduate fellows had the freedom to create our own syllabus for the Fall-Spring semesters. This upcoming cohort of fellows were given our recent syllabi and hopefully that would be of service to them. I'm curious where syllabus falls under the idea of "intellectual property." It's also interesting to see that with the advent of Academia.edu and other digital avenues of collaboration, talking about syllabi and sharing them are now much easier than before.

Recent examples:
Peter Martens at SLU had a mini-crowd sourcing of ideas for his Fall 2018 course, "Alexandria and Antioch: The Bible's First Experts." People could join in via Academia and comment variously about the stuff he's already written up.
Michael Satlow at Brown posted his syllabus for the course, "Mishnah and Tosefta." This one is not crowd-sourced but he does write on his website "Should anyone be interested" (whatever that might mean).

I just wrote a post about writing syllabi for various courses so this is highly relevant.
If you are writing a syllabus for a course, how do you go about your business, and where does your syllabus (or another's syllabus) fall under the rubric of "intellectual property"?

What Would You Teach?

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 23:12:00 +0000

Sometimes during the time off from researching, writing, and editing, I take some time to edit my syllabi and/or create new ones for potential courses I would be interested in teaching. I suppose as a recent PhD grad some might say I am wasting time, but I have found it very helpful to think about the kind of classes I would like to teach, what books would be assigned, what kinds of readings/assignments, etc. This also gets me into the know with recent scholarship on said topic and possibly certain questions I would like to pursue on this topic for myself at a later time.

I currently have in my folder around six/seven courses that I would be interested in teaching (courses like "Exegesis of ____" or "Intro to NT" doesn't count, as that would be a given in my field).

If any of you guys are out there reading this, if you were given free rein, what would you teach? And why?

Historical Facts

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 17:45:00 +0000

I wonder whether those in the field of religious studies, or biblical studies more specifically sometimes feel what I feel, i.e., a sense that many people don't care about "history" the way we do. Now, I don't say this as a way to criticize others, in fact, I wonder if the problem lies within academia itself. What I mean by this is that we argue and re-argue the most minute details of some esoteric subject that it very well may be that we are just talking among ourselves while neglecting to think about just what kind of value these discussions have for the broader public (I also want to talk about "public" scholarship in a later blog post). To qualify my statement further: on one hand, I am not saying religious studies or other humanities fields need to be strictly utilitarian in their approach/aim. Specialists in any field, including something like cancer research, will inevitably get into the minutiae that only other specialists can understand or critique. On the other hand, having worked with many undergraduate students for the last three semesters engaging in natural scientific research, it is also clear that sometimes humanistic inquiry just doesn't make any sense to anyone outside of that specific discipline, at least in the way they are often packaged. This is on a very different scale than the cancer research I just mentioned: even my student in computer science and big data can understand (somewhat) and appreciate how my other student in cancer biology is engaging her research, even if he may not really understand the mechanism behind working with knockout mice and performing Western blots.

But, that does not mean of course that historical research is useless and that historical details can be blatantly ignored. The current socio-political climate reveals clearly why history matters and why facts matter. On a less serious note, I remember one time I happened to be watching Jeopardy and the answer was something about the "epistle apostle" in the New Testament from "the first century BC." Truth be told, I felt my snobbery coming out, though none of the contestants even batted an eye at this mistake.

Just this morning, I came across an article and here is a screenshot from a page of that article:

This comes from a CNN Travel article here titled, "Beautiful photos reveal Matera, the Italian city carved into solid rock" (Aug. 1, 2018). Part of it describes very old grotto churches in Matera that have frescoes of biblical scenes. The problem is the author wrote that these works "dat[e] back hundreds of centuries." This would locate these artworks into the Paleolithic period, thousands of years before Jesus was even born!

Do historical facts matter to you? Why does it matter? And if it does matter, how do we show/teach our students and colleagues (of all types of disciplines) why it matters?

RCR (Responsible Conduct of Research)

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 18:41:00 +0000

As part of my final year of fellowship as a SIRE Graduate Fellow at Emory University, I am leading a summer course on Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) for undergraduate researchers who are engaging in full-time research over the summer. RCR is not distinct to Emory, but is mandated by the NIH and NSF for those engaging in research funded by its various grants. During the school year I had a mixed group (humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences) of undergraduate students, but over the summer, my students are entirely made up of researchers in the natural sciences. I enjoy this very much as my own undergraduate background was in biology/evolution and I remain intrigued and interested in the kinds of research conducted in the natural sciences.

What I began to realize throughout this summer as we talked about issues such as "authorship" and "conflict of interest," "data management," "human and animal subjects" (all important topics for any type of research), there is no governing guideline of literature, as far as I know, such as the one provided by NSF and a host of other scientific institutions for how such topics might be applied in the social sciences, still less in the humanities. A quick Google search, however, yields some results at various institutions (to varying levels of complexity/clarity) that have tried to address this.

It seems to me to be a deficiency in our own training and/or our teaching of undergraduate students interested in pursuing further research in the humanities. Certainly the NEH has something like this called "Research Misconduct Policy" (here), but I would not doubt if not a single person who is publishing in my field currently has gone through any kind of formal training in RCR that exists for every single undergraduate/graduate student (then postdocs + PIs) working under the auspices of the NSF, NIH, or other similar governing bodies. There are certainly cases of mentorship issues, professional misconduct, research ethics, and etc. that are found in the humanities, and the ad hoc nature of how some of these issues are dealt with in the humanities, I think, often gives the impression to those on the other side of the fence that much of what we do is subjective and/or just speaking past each other in the abstract.

Would it be possible to create such a curriculum for students/researchers in humanistic inquiry, and what would that look like?

My article is out (VC)

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Sun, 18 Mar 2018 21:21:00 +0000

I'm happy to announce that my article titled, "Τὸ πνεῦμα in 1 Corinthians 5:5: A Reconsideration of Patristic Exegesis" is now out with Vigiliae Christianae in volume 72, issue 2.

Here's the abstract:
This article questions the assumption that there was a standard patristic interpretation regarding the identity of “spirit” in 1 Corinthians 5:5 (ἵνα τὸ πνεῦμα σωθῇ ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τοῦ κυρίου). Recent scholarship on 1 Corinthians 5 either fails to provide a fair representation of the available data or ignores the patristic exegesis altogether. The present essay addresses this deficiency in current scholarship by presenting the varieties of ways that early Christians read and interpreted “spirit” in 1 Cor 5:5.

This was a couple years' worth of work in the making (from editing, submission, acceptance, etc.), a work that was derived out of my current dissertation. I hope scholars find it to be a good article.

Check it out here (you'll need to be part of an institution or a paid subscriber to access the article).

Race/Racism in Antiquity Pt. 1

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 19:55:00 +0000

I've been developing a course on race/religion in antiquity and am currently reading through a book titled, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2004) by Benjamin Isaac. He has a very interesting section in the introduction on how prejudices continue to be propagated even in modern literature (as supposedly innocuous as a travel guide!). I hope to blog through some interesting points I come across as I read through this book and continue to develop my syllabus.

He cites what he names as a "random example" taken from the Michelin Guide to Venice (1st ed. 1996) that says the following [with bold print and italics from original text]:

To stereotype the flavour of Venice would be detrimental to the magic of the place and offensive to her proud inhabitants. The Venetian is born with a positive outlook on life that is maintained by an imperturbable nature in which emotional involvement is tempered, in a very gentlemanly manner, by a certain indifference to anything that lies beyond the lagoon. This leads to him being noticeably predisposed to being tolerant, an innate quality acquired from a knowledge of different peoples distilled over the centuries. The blend of an almost Anglo-saxon [sic!] aplomb with boundless and all-embracing curiosity renders this personality even more fascinating.

It may be a random example, but Benjamin's comments are helpful: "This continues for half a page. It is a good example, because the authors are demonstrably unaware that they are spouting stereotypes—which they claim to reject. It is interesting that the rejection of stereotyping in the first sentence itself is justified by a stereotype: to stereotype Venetians would be offensive to those proud people, it is claimed, as if it is legitimate to stereotype the inhabitants of a town without magic, provided its inhabitants are not proud. Venetians are born with a positive outlook on life and tend to be tolerant because they dispose of a reservoir of knowledge accumulated over the centuries. This betrays confusion between acquired and inherited characters, comparable with what we encounter in many ancient texts."

Benjamin warns that even a "positive" stereotype is damaging in its propagation of prejudices.

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 16:23:00 +0000

I want to report that one of my teachers here at Emory University (and a member of my dissertation committee), Carl Holladay, the Charles Howard Candler Professor was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It is one of the most prestigious honorary societies for scholars and the ceremony took place on Oct. 7, 2017. Here is Carl signing the book of AAAS members after the induction:

See the news press here.
I am also co-editing a collection of essays by Carl Holladay, contracted with Mohr Siebeck, which we hope will be of great benefit to scholars of Hellenistic Judaism and the New Testament. I will report back here once we are further along in the publication process.

New issue of NTS + a little extra

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 19:30:00 +0000

The new issue of New Testament Studies 63.2 (April 2017) appears to be available online now (see their website here).

I also wanted to point my readers to one particular article in this issue written by my teacher Carl R. Holladay from Emory University. He served as the president of the SNTS (Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas) for 2016–17. Following tradition, he gave the presidential address at the SNTS general meeting last summer, held in Montreal and it is published in this issue of NTS.

Title: "Acts as Keryga: λαλεῖν τὸν λόγον"

Abstract: This essay argues that Acts is essentially kerygmatic in its literary texture and purpose. It assumes that literary purpose, even genre to some extent, can be determined by examining how language is used in two respects: (1) through the authorial voice of the narrative, and (2) by the direct speech of characters within the story. This is especially the case when there is a strong convergence in the pattern of usage in the narrative voice and the dialogical voice. Three literary aspects are investigated: (1) kerygmatic vocabulary, (2) the speeches, and (3) the expression ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ/ὁ λόγος τοῦ κυρίου. The operative kerygmatic vocabulary in Acts is displayed in two appendices containing statistical information comparing Lukan usage with other NT writings.

Go check it out.

New editors of NIGTC

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 03:12:00 +0000

Very happy to hear that Mark Goodacre has been named as one of the editors of the NIGTC series. With the passing of I. Howard Marshall and Donald Hagner scaling back his duties, Eerdmans named Mark and another, Todd Still, as the new editors of the series.

Congratulations!

HT: Eerdword

New commentary on Acts

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:49:00 +0000

Hello readers! I know it's been a long time since my last post, it has been a truly busy season trying to write the dissertation, finish up some teaching work, work as a TA for the college, send stuff off for review, etc. etc. I hope this post finds all of you in good spirits despite what is a tumultuous season in American politics.

I wanted to point out a fairly new commentary by one of my teachers, Professor Carl Holladay, Acts in the New Testament Library series. It was a long work in progress and I know he's very happy to see it finally out in print:

It's a beautiful hardback volume and it also contains a very good section (among other important things throughout!) concerning the text of Acts, which I'm sure many scholars will benefit from for years to come.

I think it will be out in the bookstands at SBL/AAR in San Antonio, so get yourself a copy there if you are able! Unfortunately, I will not be attending this year, but if you are going, I wish you all safe travels and an enjoyable time in SA.

RIP: D. Moody Smith

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Thu, 12 May 2016 19:49:00 +0000

I received word through the grapevine that Professor D. Moody Smith passed away a couple days ago at the age of 84. He was already retired by the time I took my masters degree at Duke, but obviously his influence there continued. In one of my first seminars at Duke, I took a Greek exegesis course on the Gospel of John with Dr. Joel Marcus. One of the main textbooks assigned for his class was Dr. Smith's John commentary in the Abingdon series. It was great to work through the entire commentary over one semester, and to this day I recommend it to those who are seeking a concise but insightful commentary to supplement their reading of the Fourth Gospel.

I did not have the privilege to learn from him personally but I'd like to think that my teachers at Duke were influenced by their senior colleague with the result that his knowledge was also translated down to the next generation of students such as myself.

RIP, Dr. Smith.

For details about a memorial service, please see here.

BOOK NOTICE

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 16:44:00 +0000

I just saw that Professor Kavin Rowe from Duke University Divinity School has a new book which is set to come out very soon, titled One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions (Yale University Press, March 2016):

I know he's taught NT and Greco-Roman philosophy at Duke Div on multiple occasions and I'm sure that was part of what he was working on here as well as his earlier book. The blurb from Yale is as follows:

In this groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary work of philosophy and biblical studies, New Testament scholar C. Kavin Rowe explores the promise and problems inherent in engaging rival philosophical claims to what is true. Juxtaposing the Roman Stoics Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius with the Christian saints Paul, Luke, and Justin Martyr, and incorporating the contemporary views of Jeffrey Stout, Alasdair McIntyre, Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Pierre Hadot, and others, the author suggests that in a world of religious pluralism there is negligible gain in sampling from separate belief systems. This thought-provoking volume reconceives the relationship between ancient philosophy and emergent Christianity as a rivalry between strong traditions of life and offers powerful arguments for the exclusive commitment to a community of belief and a particular form of philosophical life as the path to existential truth.

I also noticed that he is listed as a full professor now on Duke's website which is quite amazing (if it isn't an error) because he finished his PhD not that long ago at Duke. This probably speaks to his scholarship and other contributions to the school which from everything I've heard has always been very positive. It'll be interesting to see how this book is received once it's out; I wouldn't be surprised if there will be a future SBL session engaging with his book.

Novum Testamentum 58.1 (2016)

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Wed, 27 Jan 2016 16:47:00 +0000

Just wanted to bring to your attention the newest issue of Novum Testamentum 58.1 (2016), that includes an article by my friend and colleague here at Emory University, Devin White.

See the TOC:

Armin D. Baum, "Mark's Paratactic και as a Secondary Syntactic Semitism," 1–26

Devin L. White, "Confronting Oracular Contradiction in Acts 21:1–14," 27–46

Hans Förster, "Der Begriff σημειον im Johannesevangelium," 47–70

Seon Yong Kim, "Paul and the Stoic Theory of οικειωσις," 71–91

And a few book review articles.

Go check it out.

Christian Theology and the World of Law? (VIDEO)

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 18:08:00 +0000

One of the great things about being at Emory is that it is a school that values the study of religion and maintains on its campus the Center for the Study of Law and Religion. Early last year, Richard Hays of Duke Divinity School and Michael Welker of Heidelberg University came to give the McDonald Distinguished Scholar Lectures about the subject of Christian theology and Law.

Check out the video below:

VIDEO: Paul and "gift"

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 23:22:00 +0000

If you were at AAR/SBL this year in Atlanta, and your interest is in NT, or even more narrowly, Pauline studies, you would have likely heard about John Barclay's just published book, Paul and the Gift. On top of that, maybe you had the chance to attend the session devoted to reviews of Barclay's book, with a very serious panel consisting of Joel Marcus, Margaret Mitchell, and Miroslav Volf. I had kind of a packed schedule, so I only caught the back end of Dr. Marcus's review (honestly, all I remember is him saying that Paul and the gift is a gift that keeps on giving and some comments about 4 Ezra) and stayed for most of Dr. Mitchell's review before I had to scoot out for a meeting and run back when Barclay was giving some final comments. Again, I had to leave early again, so needless to say, I didn't get to hear a lot of the interactions regarding Barclay's book.

Also, I had meant to finish reading Barclay's book before this session but my schedule got ahead of me, so it was helpful to hear from Marcus and Mitchell on some of the perceived shortcomings of Barclay's book–though as far as I could tell, it was very well received despite the critical comments about it. In my opinion thus far, the book is very well organized and clearly argued; it seems to me that Barclay's book dances along that fine line between the appropriation of method(s)/analytical tool(s) (in Barclay's case, the 6 "perfections" of gift/grace) and careful sifting through the primary sources. Honestly, it's rare to find a book of this length and quality that doesn't seem unnecessarily long or difficult to read given the technical fine points of book x. It's so clear and well organized to the degree that I think even a non-specialist could derive huge benefits from reading his book.

Anyway, if you are interested, I also saw that there is a short clip of Barclay explaining his project. Check it out:

Book Notice: Bultmann

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 23:40:00 +0000

I want to mention a recently published book titled, Rudolf Bultmann: A Companion to His Theology (Cascade) by David W. Congdon. On his most recent blog post (go here) he mentions a promo by which you can receive 40% through Nov. 15.

Bultmann and his Theology of the New Testament still receives plenty of attention even in NT scholarship, seen for example in the recent publication of Beyond Bultmann. Last year in SD, SBL held a session devoted to this book (room was packed), and all the participants did a great job presenting their own interactions with Bultmann. My own supervisor also wrote an essay for the volume, though he was not in the SBL session. I'm still intrigued by his hermeneutical methods and his NTT, and I think Congdon's book will be a welcome addition to helping Bultmann dilettantes like myself wade through his vast oeuvre beyond just his Theology. Go buy a copy if you're interested!

QOTD: John Barclay

noreply@blogger.com (Mike S.) — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 20:43:00 +0000

Teaching/dissertating has been taking up most of my time, hence very little blogging as of late. I recently borrowed John Barclay's Paul and the Gift, a book that has been a highly anticipated work. As far as I am aware, Barclay doesn't publish a ton of monograph length material, but when he does, people read and listen. I'm less than a 100 pages in, but so far, I think this book is no exception. The book is not germane to my research, but I've very much enjoyed reading it when I can make time. It is a refreshing investigation into a term/concept in Pauline theology that continues to receive much attention, though as Barclay shows, with much terminological and conceptual slippage among those that talk about it.

Back to the title of my blog post, I will leave you with a short quotation:

"When two different authors speak of divine benevolence or grace, but disagree on its meaning and its implications, this may be not because one emphasizes grace more than the other, or grasps its 'true' meaning while the other does not, but simply because they are perfecting different facets of grace. As we shall see, Pelagius held firmly to the superabundance of divine grace, which was prior to all human activity; but (for theological reasons) he could not accept Augustine's perfection of the incongruity of grace. Augustine did not believe in grace more than Pelagius; he simply believed in it differently." (p. 77)

If you are attending SBL/AAR this year, you probably know that there is a review of his book. I'm planning to catch the session, which I expect will be very well attended. Unfortunately, I also have a meeting with a publisher that overlaps, so I'm hoping someone out there will have some kind of review of the entire session... If you read this and you are attending, please take some notes! :)