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Reading Diasaster
The way we read has changed in two fundamental ways. The historicist hermeneutic posited the text as an object. A post-historicist hermeneutic treats the text as a subject that the reader enters a type of relationship. The reader’s perspective now plays a more significant role. Hence the particulars of the reader’s life looms more on the interpretative horizon. With this in mind we see the disasters human and natural. The article in Wired magazine “Organizing for Armageddon†outlines how relief agencies are learning from the spate of recent natural disasters. As I read the article I found their findings interesting but more than anything I was impressed by the ubiquity of natural disasters. This post historicist hermeneutic and the greater awareness of disaster generates an increased sense of contingency.
Life after the Summer Faculty Institute: Towards a Life of Co-Inherence
The next several posts will be my attempt to debrief the Summer Faculty Institute at Baylor. Daily brief sessions became the watchword of the Baylor Summer Faculty Institute (SFI). Today’s Summer Faculty institute began as the Teaching Institute. How do you balance teaching with the rigors of publishing for tenure? You don’t it is all integrated. From the Cappadocian view of the trinity research and teaching co-inhere like the elements of the trinity. How does one use a principle of co-inherence to improve the balance and synergy of research and teaching? Our facilitators asked each participant to determine a discrete number of questions that we could contribute to the broader debate? For me this meant to identify the key problems in OT that I can solve or make a good beginning in solving
Even today the SFI continues the emphasis on teaching but with the principle of co-inherence, a term coined by the Cappadocian Fathers to talk about the Trinity that has been applied to the interface of teaching and research by Charles Talbert allows the present SFI to reflect the values of Baylor University as articulated in the Baylor 2012 documents. ? The SFI facilitators Tom Hanks and Lenore Wright invited us to think of this as a time to reflect on what it takes to flourish at Baylor. Flourish was an apt verb. It
Once one has the key problems and questions then one can ask what research program will best approach these questions. But it does not stop there. One should ask how this informs the teaching task. It can be as small as the readings that you have students review or it may mean something much more substantive.
Baylor University requires those seeking tenure to devise a research agenda and successfully accomplish that agenda. Hanks and Wright were able to place this research agenda in a broader context. Tom reminded us about the Nobel Laureate Barbara McClintock who shared several sources of ideas.
Where do you find your ideas and problems?
1. Dissertation: for the first five to ten years
2. Conferences this is the most up to date conversation
3. Journal conversations focus here books are behind the field
4. Teaching
What are the key questions that are worth the next several years of your life and research?
Toward a Typology of Introductions
The phrase the typical introduction begs the question, how do we type introductions. The typology would have to include the spectrum from research introduction such as Eissfeldt, Fohrer and Zenger Einleitung in das Alte Testament to the more popular introduction such as Anderson. The research introduction is thorough with extensive bibliography and often outlines the contours of the debate in the field. However, they are almost always seen as impenetrable for the typical undergraduate or even seminarian. Collins volume The Hebrew Bible tries to moderate the reference introduction and the accessible introduction. Gottwald’s A Light to the Nations (1959) before his methodological conversion embodied first in his book the Tribes of Yahweh and the subsequent introduction The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction (1985)
Beginning Again
The new semester and the new year are on the horizon.
Semester in transition
The Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting is over. The papers and conversations of New Orleans are done. Now what lies ahead is the grading for the end of this semester and the posting of the syllabus for the next semester. It is as if I were caught between the semesters each asking for its payment now.
Begining?
This is an experiment with blogging at Truett.