Forbidden Gospels Blog
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A link to Palin's interview
/I am terrified at the prospect that this person who can barely answer simple questions could be our next VP. The journalist appears more knowledgeable than she.
Palin's candidacy is a mockery
/Reading this morning in the newspaper about Palin's justification for her lack of interaction in the international scene is demeaning to me, the child of a working class family. A working class childhood is no justification for an adult VP nominee to have never obtained a passport before last year or to never have traveled beyond the US borders. These excuses are pitiful and they suggest that working class people have no ingenuity or abilities. Being from a working class background is no excuse for not being prepared for the job she wants.
I too am a working class kid. My father is a plumber and we had to deal with very tough times in Michigan in the eighties when there was no work for many people in construction. Nevertheless, during those hard times, I not only figured out how to go to college, but I also figured out how to travel overseas. Because my family couldn't afford to send me away to university, and I had to work and get scholarships and loans, I went to our local community college for two and a half years before transferring to a state university. During that time, I managed to travel outside of the US. many times, beginning when I was 20 and I won a scholarship from the local Kiwanis Club to support an educational trip to Greece and Turkey. I have never stopped traveling nor have I ever stopped learning.
Palin's candidacy is a mockery, especially of women politicians, but also of the way in which we select the people to run the White House. It is a last ditch ploy by the Republicans in power to draw attention away from the fact that they have crashed our economy, involved us in a war with no ethical justification, and have nothing except their own self-interests at heart. They are using Palin to present themselves as a party for Every(wo)man, when in fact, they are a party dominated by a white male elites who are more concerned about making quick money (and getting bailed out) at our expense and our children's expense and their children's expense. I have never been so depressed or embarrassed about my country as I am today.
Listening to an interview
/My reaction was complete embarrassment, especially for women in America. What a mockery of us this is.
What the evacuees face
/Wade returns to the Law and Justice Center on the island tomorrow even though the building is under generator power. The water is so bad that they are being told to not even brush their teeth with it or allow their pets to drink it. Residents are warned that mosquitoes, rats and snakes are swarming on the island. So everyone is supposed to go and get a tetanus shot which are being administered at the local Galveston grocery store. Wade was told to pack a brown bag lunch and all the sodas and water that he wants to drink.
The good news I heard is that the missing people have been reduced to under a hundred, perhaps even as low as fifty. I don't know how long before we know any more than this.
For photo and MORE GO HERE
Photo by David J. Phillip for AP
Galveston residents to return home to what is left (or not left)
/For those who weren't so lucky, it means tearing down the home completely (or what was left of it) and starting over. In the meantime, these people are homeless. Many are now jobless as well, at least until Galveston is up and running again, or they move elsewhere to find work.
What else do they face when they return to Galveston? The sewer system is leaking; the water pressure is so low that there is a boil water order in place; the ER room in the hospital can barely handle urgent care, let alone a car accident or heart attack victim; and did I mention that there is no electricity yet? Many of Wade's co-workers in the judicial system no longer have homes, cars, clothes, or any other possessions that we all take for granted. They are scrambling to try to find housing, which is basically non-existent in the areas around Houston. How can you house 40,000 displaced people in an area where housing is at a premium? They are bunking with family and friends on the mainland, or living in tents on their Galveston property and using make-shift outdoor grills to prepare food.
For these photos and MORE GO HERE
Photo 1 by Rick Bowmer for AP
Apocryphote of the Day: 9-22-08
/Gospel of Thomas, P. Oxy. 655.i.1-17 (reconstructed)
For photo and MORE GO HERE
Photo by Dave Rossman for the Houston Chronicle
Parishoners arrive for in the dark for mass at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church on 9-21-08
Aerial photos of IKE's damage
/For photo and MORE GO HERE
Photo by Smiley N. Pool for Houston Chronicle
IKE recovery continues
/The Galveston islanders have been very upset that they have not yet been allowed back on the island to inspect their homes and properties (see photo of a sign someone painted on a surviving trailer on the island). So, under pressure, the mayor of Galveston made another change in plans for their return. Now every citizen on the island can return on Wednesday beginning at dawn, although only those who live behind the seawall can stay. How this is ever going to be enforced is beyond me.
Can you imagine what kind of traffic jam we are going to see, since we are talking about 40,000 people driving on one highway (the only highway) and across one bridge (the only bridge) into Galveston? Can you imagine how much fuel is going to be wasted at a time when people are waiting for hours at the local gas stations to fuel up? Some gas stations still are out of commission because they have no power for their pumps, and gas is scarce because several of the refineries have been off line since the hurricane.
I imagine that Wade will return to work this week once the island opens up again and the Law and Justice Center reopens. I will return to my office tomorrow, and try to get my mind back into my teaching and research. I have been trying to work on editing some of the papers for the Codex Judas Congress volume, but even this has been hard to concentrate on, given the situation in Houston which is nowhere near normal.
For this photo and MORE GO HERE
Photo by Karen Warren for the Houston Chronicle
Erasing women (again!)
/Really? And only a few days after the men of the Convention revised their position on women to make it possible for conservative Christians from the Convention to support and vote for the McCain-Palin ticket?
Remember ten years ago, when there was a hostile takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention? The result was the declaration that women's place was in the home, "to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation." She was not to be burdened with working outside the home, and was to happily embrace her duty as homemaker which was the backbone of our society. Only the husband should be vocationally oriented.
These were not just sexist words, they became a sexist policy that resulted in the purging of churches and seminaries of female leadership, including not only ministers but also professors who were fired along with any men who supported them. If you have never seen the documentary on this hostile takeover, "Battle for the Mind" by Steven Lipscomb (1997), it is well-worth the viewing time. In fact, it was a big inspiration for me to decide to begin writing next, Sex and the Serpent: Why the Sexual Conflicts of the Early Church Still Matter.
Enter Sarah Palin. Now the Southern Baptist Convention is in a pickle, unless its statement is reinterpreted in such a way that it denies what it declared to begin with. Robert Parham of "On Faith" reports that one SBC professor thus said, "the Baptist Faith and Message does not address the question of women in secular leadership, only spiritual leadership." Ahh, the secular loophole which allows Baptist men to vote Republication even though what Palin is doing is the opposite of their interpretation of women's roles according to the Bible. I wonder if this secular distinction means that all the women professors who lost their jobs will be reinstated in the seminaries too?
I don't even know what to say about the glass ceiling anymore. It doesn't look like glass to me, but cement.
Apocryphote of the Day: 9-19-08
/Gospel of Thomas 30.3-4
For photo and MORE GO HERE
Photo by Nathan Lindstrom for the Houston Chronicle
Galveston's Recovery
/None of the schools in Houston or Galveston have reopened. Most here in the city still don't have power, one week after IKE. In fact, only about 50% of Houstonians have power and water, and the temperatures are rising again. At the grocery store this afternoon, many people were milling around looking dazed and worn out. We are still under curfew, so the city becomes dark and still around 9 p.m. It is eerie and disconcerting.
For Photo and MORE GO HERE
Photo by Scott Olson
IKE Recovery
/As I mentioned earlier, these areas look like bombed out war zones, especially the West end of Galveston and the Bolivar peninsula where two cities (Gilschrist and Crystal Beach) no longer exist.
For some reason, the press is not picking up the main concern of all of us here - where are the missing people? The latest reports I've heard from Galveston are that 15,000 people stayed on the island during IKE. But at this point only 9,500 have been accounted for. Certainly many will show up over the next few months as safe and well living in shelters on the mainland. But right now we don't know where 5,500 people are and families are trying to find relatives and friends that they know stayed on the island but who they haven't heard from. The horrific question is beginning to be whispered among us: how many were washed out to sea?
After IKE in Houston
/Here are some photos from the Houston Chronicle that have just been released.
Riding out IKE
/A long post weighing in on Avalos and Koester
/When I first began teaching, I set up a proper curriculum in my mind at a liberal arts college in a religious studies department. I changed out the old curriculum which was canonically based with a new curriculum that did not include categories like "Old Testament," "Hebrew Bible," "New Testament," "Apocrypha" or the like. I did not want to continue to arrange the curriculum around religious categories that preferenced one particular religious tradition over another.
All went well until I offered my Christian Origins course. I enrolled six people. Then I offered my Ancient Israel course. Again I enrolled six people (not the same six, and in a different semester). Usually my courses enrolled 25-30, so these numbers were weird. So I decided to try an experiment. I changed the name of the Christian Origins course but kept everything else the same - course description, syllabus, exercises. I put it on the books as The New Testament and Christians Origins. The class enrolled at 25. I didn't get a chance to try out The Old Testament and Ancient Israel because I moved to Rice before I retaught the course.
Now I have thought about this experience a lot because it taught me something about the expectations of young people in America and their interests. The young people in my courses are not aware of the debates of the academy until they enroll and we get talking about them. What do most of them know? They know the words "Old Testament" and "New Testament" and they think they know what this means in terms of content.
Does the biblical canon influence us in America? Certainly, everything from politics (where I see the religious bible right moving to a hostile takeover [akin to what happened with the Southern Baptist Convention]) to literature. And wherever I have taught (Michigan, Illinois, Texas), it (as the "Word of God") has a prominent hold on a very large portion of our youth. And yet, in my experience as a teacher, these young people (before they enroll) know next to nothing about what the texts actually say, what the difference is between historical readings and doctrinal readings, how, when, and why the canon came together as it did and what the heck this means, and so forth.
So this has prompted me to create a 100-level course called "Introduction to Biblical Studies" (which I taught in Illinois for years) and now "Introduction to New Testament Studies" (which I teach here at Rice). In this course I cover everything from oral culture, literacy, manuscript traditions, development of canon, diversity of early Christianity, and historical readings (source, form, redaction, social scientific, feminist, tradition, rhetorical, literary, post-modern criticisms - and how these types of readings differ from doctrinal readings in terms of purpose and questions). Frankly, I wish that every college in America offered this type of course. It is unbelievable how much this information excites students and motivates them to want to know more.
There is another issue that we face in the academy. Jobs. There is a difference between seminaries, divinity schools, private (often religious-affiliated) universities, liberal arts colleges, and state universities. Each of these places has different needs in terms of teaching religion, and when you go on the job market, you need to be clear and honest with yourself about which of these types of departments you want to work in.
For a department in a religious-affiliated school, including seminaries, the concentration there is going to be teaching canonical materials, and often the historical method is trumped by theological hermeneutics. This doesn't mean that the historical method isn't taught, but that doctrinal issues and contemporary hermeneutics are going to be emphasized. The students who are enrolling in the courses are enrolling mainly to become ministers of a faith tradition, or who just want to learn more about contemporary hermeneutical readings of the material. Historical methods and linguistics are background or serve to support the doctrinal hermeneutics going on in the course. These schools need and want people in Old Testament, New Testament, Gospels, Paul, Systematic theology, Ethics, and so forth. There are a lot more jobs in these types of institutions than non-affiliated religious studies departments.
When non-affiliated religious studies departments post in Old Testament and New Testament, or Biblical Studies, what they are after is someone who handles the religious textual, exegetical and ideological traditions from a historical perspective. This is different from a post in Early Jewish or Christian Studies which is likely looking for a historian who handles social, political, gender and religious history.
The Society of Biblical Literature is a society that works with both of these constituencies, as does AAR. These are societies whose members include everyone from theologians, to philosophers, to historians, to textual critics, no matter the religious tradition studied. Neither society is exclusively secular or exclusively religiously-affiliated. Both interests are found among its members and its units.
It is not new news that there are over a hundred people who apply ever year and do not get jobs. In my time, fifteen years ago, it was even worse than this. In the eighties, PhD programs admitted many more people into their programs than could ever be employed by the market. This led to many people not getting jobs, and ending up with an enormous amount of debt that they couldn't pay off. And yes, they ended up driving cabs, or going back to law school. I ended up working in university administration part time for three years, until I finally got my first tenure-track position at Illinois Wesleyan. Helmut Koester is the one who encouraged me, telling me that the average wait was going to be 3 to 5 years post-graduation.
The universities sobered up to this fact and realized how unethical it was to continue to put out so many PhDs with so much debt and no way to pay. So in the nineties, they consolidated their funding. This meant that they began to let into the program far fewer people but funding each of these people more fully. This hasn't fixed the problem entirely - there are still PhDs that never get a tenure-track job - but it has helped - and it has made getting into PhD program highly competitive.
Where does this leave me in terms of my thoughts on the subject? I understand Koester's position on the reality of American religiosity and what this means for those of us who study and teach early Christianity. I understand Avalos' position to rid the historical study of early Judaism and Christianity from its canonical limitations (including the name "Biblical Studies"), because these limitations support religious and theological interests. I personally have negotiated this front by breaking canonical boundaries in my own scholarship, creating sections at SBL which cross canonical boundaries, and teaching beyond these boundaries. But this doesn't mean to me that the biblical texts aren't essential to early Judaism and Christianity. In fact, their importance reverberates for centuries and centuries, and yes, they are still with us.
In my opinion, teaching the bible is more important than ever in America. We are faced with the religious right taking over the Republican party, a party who has just reformed its platform to denounce abortion even in cases of harm to the mother and rape. How many of us are now seeing emerge in our communities public policies like teaching creationism as science? What is next?
So rather than debate the semantics of Biblical Studies, I say we need to concentrate on educating our youth about the history of the Bible and its influence, so that our young people will have the information to evaluate for themselves the claims that religious faith traditions make before it really is too late.
Baylor Board fires university's president
/Baylor University's board of regents fired the Baptist school's president on Thursday, saying they had lost confidence in his ability to "unite various Baylor constituencies."
John M. Lilley, on the job less than three years, rejected an offer to serve out his five-year contract as regents searched for a replacement.
Lilley's relatively brief tenure was marked by disputes over tenure and even over the university's logo. But how best to achieve Baylor's goal of becoming a major research university without sacrificing its strong Christian character appears to have been an issue, as well.
More HERE
I do not have inside information about this firing, but from what I have read (the written news report was more detailed than this on-line version seems to be!), it appears to me that Baylor has a dual agenda. By 2012 it wants to be a top-tier research institution, but it also wants to be a faith institution.
To become a top-tier research university, drastic things have to happen in an institution, and one of them is secularization and a move to reward research above teaching in the tenure process. Apparently Lilley denied a dozen faculty tenure because he felt that their research contributions were not up to these standards, while the promotion and tenure committee disagreed. Teaching must come first. What this represents to me is not a call to rid of tenure, but a call to raise the bar in terms of research at a university whose goal is to enter the top-tier.
I think what we are witnessing is just the kind of conflict that can be expected when such a goal is put into place, especially at a faith-based university. There will be resistance to what needs to be done to meet such a goal, especially among those faculty who have devoted their lives to teaching rather than research, and who feel that the faith of the institution is threatened. I can't imagine that the next president is going to have it any easier.
I for one hope that Baylor sticks to their plan to move the university into the top-tier of research institutions.
UPDATE: Rebecca Lesses left this comment which is very good so I have moved it here to the main text.Without knowing anything about this particular case, it seems to me that there is not only a conflict over the university's faith identity, but over the expectations for faculty trying to gain tenure. If they were hired and were explicitly told that teaching was more important than research, and poured their energy into improving their teaching, then I believe it is extremely unfair to those faculty members to deny them tenure on the basis of a requirement they were not informed of at an early stage of their employment at Baylor. It seems to me that this sort of change has to be introduced slowly, over a period of several years, so that incoming faculty know what the expectations are that they must fulfill. I can see why the tenure and promotion committee disagreed with the president, if this is something that he did in only three years. I teach at an institution that places a higher priority on teaching than research in gaining tenure. If over the period of three years a dozen junior faculty were denied tenure by the president because they didn't have sufficient publications, there would be howls of protest.
Texas grand jury indicts polygamist sect members
/ELDORADO, Texas — A Texas grand jury indicted polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs and four of his followers Tuesday on charges of felony sexual assault of a child. Another was indicted for failing to report child abuse.MORE HEREAttorney General Greg Abbott said the five men are charged with one count of sexually assaulting girls under age 17. One of them, but not the 52-year-old Jeffs, faces an additional charge of bigamy.
Abbott said a sixth member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is charged with three counts of failure to report child abuse.
Jeffs, already convicted of being accomplice to rape in Utah and awaiting trial in Arizona on other charges related to underage marriages, is accused of assaulting a girl in Texas in January 2005, according to the indictment issued Tuesday.
"Our investigation in this matter is not concluded," said Abbott, whose office is acting as the special prosecutor in the case.
Criminal Probe into FLDS continues
/The teen girl was one of the children taken into state custody from the Zion Ranch. This is an excerpt from her diary:Warren Jeffs, the jailed leader of the nation's largest polygamist sect now under investigation for sex with underage girls, married off his own 15-year-old daughter to the 34-year-old son of his chief deputy, according to pictures, diaries and a marriage record obtained Friday by the Houston Chronicle.
In May, a series of similar scrapbook photos of young girls surfaced in court, showing very young girls in romantic kissing embraces with Jeffs, including a girl he married, who documents now indicate was 11 years old at the time.
"The Lord blessed me to go forward in marriage July 27, 2006, the day after I turned 15 years old."Next week the Texas Attorney General's Office will begin laying out a criminal case against the sect to grand jurors next week.
Texas School Board approves Bible class but not a curriculum
/This is just as I expected and wrote in earlier posts. It appears that the State Board didn't know what kind of curriculum would be appropriate to put into place, and figured that if it did so, they would face litigation. Well, they are going to face litigation no matter what they do, but to give no guidelines is asking for major trouble. How many education majors ever take a religious studies course? How many have any idea how to teach a religious studies curriculum? How many even are aware that there is a difference between teaching about religion and teaching religion?
But even this difference won't matter because there are going to be lawsuits no matter what kind of course is run. Consider the parents who will take the school to court if the teacher were to teach about religion? What will happen when the students begin to learn that the historical, literary, and social history of the Bible is not what they have been taught in church? The parents will scream that their children are being taught against their religion, and will sue or kick out the teacher just as we saw in the Friendswood incident. If the teacher teaches religion, that is proselytises and turns the class into a prayer bible study, then other parents will sue that the separation of church and state has been infringed upon.
What a mess!