Safely home now from the SBL meeting in Boston. I had a great time. Hopefully we can blog the key moments in the next week as a retrospect on the conference with some interaction with the papers. I won't start that right now as my brain is not fully connected yet. Some personal highlights:
- surviving a busy schedule of presentations which all seemed to go well (although I may hear different in due course)
- getting some exercise in the hotel gym every day (except the first day when I went jogging around Boston at 5:00AM and just about froze my throat)
- meeting up with friends and colleagues and potential students for chats and coffee and meals (I also enjoyed the food, but figure I should give the impression that people matter more to me than my stomach)
- hearing a load of interesting papers, some of which are making me rethink some things. (Only a couple made me think: 'I'd rather be somewhere else right now')
- turning up to one session with a dozen donuts in a box and offering them freely to those around (to general surprise and amazement - I guess grace does that)
- a really good ETC dinner on the Monday evening: good fellowship and spirited discussion (also good food, but see above)
- buying only one book (which is one that I really wanted - another one I wanted to buy the author kindly gave me for free) [this left more money for food]
- a great manuscript-viewing seminar in Harvard on the Tuesday (doubtless we'll get some details on this later [I could perhaps mention the Chinese meal six of us shared, but that might get distracting])
- getting loads of ideas and some good offers for things to do in a possible future sabbatical.
A forum for people with knowledge of the Bible in its original languages to discuss its manuscripts and textual history from the perspective of historic evangelical theology.
- Contributors
- Peter M. Head (ed)
- Tommy Wasserman (ed)
- P. J. Williams, and others
Last year, SBL was at San Diego. Someone who is not an American made a general comment last year about how militarised America is. Of course, he was generalising based upon his experience of San Diego which is a significant centre of military activity in the U.S.
ReplyDeleteThis year in Boston, I didn’t see a single military person in uniform. I suppose it is possible that Boston has largely been demilitarised since the days when its harbour was clogged with British warships and citizens were required to provide room and board for Redcoat soldiers. :)