Plumbing the Depths

Just when you think the government can’t possibly be any more idiotic, they prove not only that you’re wrong, but that they can be.  $700,000,000,000 in the first round of big bailouts?  Why that’s chump change.  Today they decided, in their infinite wisdom (because the first round has been working so well) to toss another $800,000,000,000 down the gullet of corporate greed.

The glut of government initiatives, which included a $326bn bail-out of Citigroup on Monday, is taking place against the backdrop of a worsening economic outlook. It was confirmed yesterday that the US economy performed worse than initial estimates in the third quarter. Gross domestic product in the three months to September fell 0.5%, said the commerce department, instead of the 0.3% decline in earlier forecasts. The decline in GDP is the fastest since the 9/11 attacks and included a downward revision in consumer spending, which generates two-thirds of US economic activity, from 3.1% to 3.7%.

Yup- the election of Obama has made a huge difference.   Things are looking much brighter already.

Hubmaier Online

Historians of Anabaptist theology will be interested to learn that the

Writings of Balthasar Hubmaier, one of the most well known and respected Anabaptist theologians of the Reformation, will soon be available for online research, thanks to a project of European Baptist scholars.  The Institute of Baptist and Anabaptist Studies at International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague, Czech Republic, and the German Baptist Seminary in Berlin recently announced that photographic reproductions of all of Hubmaier’s surviving works would be scanned into digital images and made available on the Internet.  IBTS Rector Keith Jones called it a long-term project likely to take six months to a year to digitize the more than 30 short and long pamphlets that together amount to about 800 images.

Very cool indeed.  More of these kinds of things need to be done.  When the URL goes live I’ll do my best to post it.

Where in the World is Chris Tilling Now?

While many have been at the SBL, Chris has been on a trip to China.  Here, I’ll let you read it yourself.  I’ve made a few editorial adjustments so that the story makes better sense (you know, kind of like Matthew did to Mark).

A panda at a zoo in southern China attacked a student who snuck into its pen hoping for a cuddle with the endangered bear, state media said Saturday. The 20 60-year-old male student surnamed Liu Tilling jumped over the fence at the zoo in the tourist city of Guilin, ignoring warning signs not to, Xinhua news agency said.  “The panda, named Yangyang, was wide awake. Apparently scared by the intruder, he bit at Liu’s Tillings arms and legs,” it quoted an unnamed worker as saying after zoo keepers managed to calm the bear and rescue Liu Tilling, the report said.  “Yangyang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him,” Liu Tilling was quoted as saying from his hospital bed. “I didn’t expect he would attack.”

Chris, Chris, Chris… you crazy man.

Thank Heaven Chris Heard Went to Boston

I don’t mean to pick on my biblioblogging brothers, but for the most part they’ve done an underwhelming job of reporting on events in Boston at the SBL.  Thank heaven, then, that Chris Heard went (even though he thinks it’s 2009) because he has posted a very fine summary of the doings there.  I excerpt the most interesting part and commend to your attention the whole post which is certainly worth a read and a model for bibliblogging conference attenders.

On my way to find some nourishment, I ran into Doug Mangum, so we had a second dinner together. (He had tacos from Qdoba; I had clam chowder, lobster bisque, and a salad from a local outfit in the food court.) We chatted about typical academicky things, and I commiserated with him over his brusque ouster from the Guild of Biblical Minimalists.

Speaking of minimalists: at 7:00 PM, half a hundred people (Claude Mariottini and Joe Zias among them) packed into a room too small to hold them for a panel “discussion” (read: a series of short interrelated speeches) of Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History—Ancient and Modern by Philip Davies, The Old Testament between Theology and History: A Critical Survey by Niels Peter Lemche, and Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? by Lester Grabbe. (For those of you who have always wondered: say LEM-kuh and GRAH-bee.) Davies had already gone home (I don’t know what’s up with that); the other panelists were Lemche, Grabbe, Hans Barstad, Alice Hunt, Diana Edelman, and Oded Lipschits. Grabbe read Davies’s prepared comments, which more or less presented some highlights from the book. Hans Barstad called Davies’s Memories a good, informative, balanced introduction to the current history debate, and then he spent the rest of his time interrogating the language of “memory.” Alice Hunt opined that “everyone should read Lemche,” but then she went on to focus on the dominance of white male Protestant concerns as an “unnamed core that is not the core” on the SBL program. (This reminded me of a recent trend in intercollegiate debate in which debaters make speeches about the very activity of debate, and assert that it privileges while males, rather than arguing the actual annual resolution.) Diana Edelman directly answered the session’s theme question—can we write a history of Israel any more, and if so, what would it look like—without interacting extensively with any of the three volumes (though she referred to some of Davies’s earlier work). Grabbe reiterated some aspects of his own book, and argued just a little with Lemche’s. Lemche promised not to write a history of Israel; history, he said, must be written using primary sources, but when you set out to write a history of “Israel,” you’ve already distorted your work just by using the name “Israel” (this claim depends, in no small measure, on the prior claim that the Israelites originated as Canaanites, as in the similar but not identical models proposed by Mendenhall, Gottwald, and Finkelstein). Lipschits suggested that the task of writing a history of Israel nowadays is so complex that the job must be parceled to various authors focusing on various time slices. Lipschits criticized Lemche for presenting, in Lipschits’s view, an unbalanced picture of modern critical scholarship; Lipschits further characterized Lemche’s book as a “manifesto for the next generation of the Copenhagen school.” The big take-away idea in the Q&A and panelist interaction after the prepared statements was that textual scholars and historians would dearly love to have easier and quicker access to excavation reports.

Thanks, Chris.  Well done.

While Citi Gets Billions, Zimbabwe Starves

Bad financial decisions by corporate bigwigs have been rewarded time and again in the last weeks.  As sickening as that is, it is even more sickening to see the fate of the people of Zimbabwe take a back seat in the headlines and on the TV news.  Thousands upon thousands of Zimbabweans are on the verge of starving to death and silence roars.

Former President Jimmy Carter on Monday said Zimbabwe’s humanitarian crisis was far worse than he could have imagined and expressed dismay that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his government refused to acknowledge the problem even existed. “The entire basic structure in education, healthcare, feeding people, social services and sanitation has broken down,” Carter said at a news conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. “These are all indications that the crisis in Zimbabwe is much greater, much worse than we had ever imagined.”

NPR reported this morning that the situation has gotten so desperate that undigested corn found in cow dung is being washed and eaten.  This is unconscionable.

An estimated 4.9 million people in Zimbabwe are desperately in need of food aid and 300 have died in a cholera epidemic.

Who deserves aid more?  Greedy corporations or starving humans?  It’s fairly easy to see the sad, tragic, and demonic answer to that question as manifested in US Government economic policy.  CEO’s first, everyone else afterwards, if there’s anything left over.

Shame On You SBL, You Aren’t Friendly Enough To Evangelicals

That, at least, is how Bill Mounce sees it when he notes

ETS is now over and many of the people have move on to Boston to attend IBR (Institute of Biblical Research) and SBL (Society of Biblical Literature), which is the largest of the three organizations.  SBL is the least friendly of the organizations toward evangelicals and therefore perhaps our greatest opportunity for engagement in a non-evangelical theological culture.

So -what can SBL do to be ‘friendly’ to the poor, benighted, oppressed inerrantists?  Formulate a statement of faith asserting biblical inerrancy and force members to sign it or be denied membership?  Deny membership to anyone with a different point of view?  Permit only papers from Inerrantists to be read at the Annual Meeting?  Engage in a ‘hug a Fundamentalist’ campaign wherein members are obliged to walk the aisles of the book exhibit and hug every inerrantist they see? (and they are easily spotted by the Thompson Chain Reference Bible under their left arm and the sad and lonely ‘I feel out of place among all these unbelievers’ look on their face).

And finally, what does Mounce count as ‘Friendliness’?  I’ve never seen these poor Evangelical/ Inerrantist/ Fundamentalists treated badly by anyone at SBL.  Are we going to be required to buy dinner for  Fundamentalists or man the IVP or Baker booths to prove the fact that we really do like these people?

Institutions are neither friendly nor unfriendly.  People are.  Truth be told, the snottiest people I’ve encountered and the most unfriendly are precisely the superior acting and arrogant Evangelicals who assert their own ‘rightness’ in face of all evidence to the contrary.  It is in fact the case that the members of ETS who attend SBL are treated just as well as anyone else.  And in some cases, better than they deserve to be given their attitude.