Category Archive

As other people note from time to time on their blogs, sometimes people find this blog using the strangest search strings.  My two favourites in the last two days are:

“mark worthing dental surgeon”

and

“traffic noise 15th floor”

Things I didn’t like

1.  SBL Auckland is the first conference I’ve been to where meals are not included in the registration. I found the whole business of working out what I was going to eat where rather tedious and I didn’t really end up getting anything much better than I do at catered conferences.  It also cut down on the networking opportunities because you more or less had to find someone to have a meal with rather than just sitting down at the same table with people and getting to know them.  See my comment about the potential to be very lonely if you didn’t know anyone before you came.  It was also a bit difficult to know how much to budget for meals.

I am sure that I understand why the US meetings don’t cater - the numbers are, I gather, horrific - but I wonder if catering might not be an option for the smaller international conferences.  We certainly manage to do it for international university chaplains conferences which are a similar size to Auckland.  Although Auckland might be unusually small.  The one I went to in Vancouver gave us vouchers for meals that could be presented at the university’s eateries and if we wanted to spend more than the agreed amount at each meal, we had to pay the difference.

2.  Leaving the questions to the end of a program unit.  If five or six people present in a session, it’s very difficult to remember what you wanted to ask the first and second presenters, so they tend not to get questions.  Perhaps this isn’t so bad for established researchers, but for grad students, getting some feedback from the audience is really very helpful.  I was very glad that Harold Ellens decided to do questions at the end of each speaker in the unit I presented in.

3.  Changing the order of speakers without notice (see a previous post)

Things I liked

1.  The huge range of topics available.

2.  The opportunity to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for ages and meet new people

3.  The high level of organisation and the helpfulness of the SBL and Uni of Auckland staff

4.  Beginning with the welcome from the Maori people

On the whole, a great experience.  Pity I am not rich and my school is not rich, so I can’t manage to get to many of them.

My daughter is sitting for her NSW Higher School Certificate in a few months and is reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South for one of her English courses. She’s trying to understand the church background to this book set in the UK in the 1800s. She asks:

Do you or any of your Biblioblogger type friends happen to know where I can find data from the 1851 religious census in England? I’ve found lots of stuff about what they did, and breakdowns of the country by regions, but I can’t actually find statistics that tell me useful things, like what percentage of the country were which denomination, despite the fact that the Victorian Web informs me that 14% of the English people were Anglican. I tried following the links that were cited as online resources, and got told where I could buy cheap concert tickets…

I can’t help her. Can anyone else??? I’m sure she’d be happy to share info on cheap concert tickets in return.

I think that at least 200 of the 450 delegates must be using the one wireless internet connection at the Quadrant motel at the moment. My connection is running sooooo slowly!!

The welcome powhiri was fascinating, as were the very intricate carvings in the meeting house. You can see something about this at Tim Bulkeley’s Sans Blogue and I need to have a conversation with someone who knows more about Maori culture before I can make sensible comments. That and the reception were opportunities for me to catch up with people I haven’t seen for ages, including two people I haven’t seen since I finished my ministry formation.

I have posted some photos of the powhiri on flicker at http://s173.photobucket.com/albums/w52/judyredman/auckland/ Please note that I was trying to take photos of the carvings, not the people, but there may be people in them that you recognise. Also note that I am not good at taking photos of people at conferences - I get engrossed in conversation and forget that I have a camera with me. You can probably next expect photos when I go on the tour on Wednesday afternoon.

Today I attended the Australian Association for the Study of Religion session and heard papers presented by one of my doctoral supervisors, Prof Majella Franzmann, who talked about veiling in Manichaean texts; a paper by Matthew Dillon who was a co-supervisor while Majella was on study leave - talking about Cassandra and gender and the natur eof prophetic experience in Ancient Greece, and Toni Tidswell, ex UNE talking about the spiritual world of Muslim Women in China.

Majella and Matthew were part of the morning session on Religion and Gender which also included Joseph Gelfer from Monash University talking about gendered spirituality and the problem of spatial representation; Stephen Hunt, University of the West of England on the secularized discourse of the anti-gay Christian movements; and Angela Coco, whose topic was Gender: Pagan style. The afternoon session was on identity and gender in contemporary Islam. Unfortunately two of the four speakers didn’t arrive, but as well as Toni’s talk (with photos), Ibrahim Abraham from Monash University talked about Islamic finance and their ways of dealing with credit without offending Islamic prohibitions on usury. Very interesting - as were all the papers in their own ways.

I also bought two books from the Australian Theological Forum - Biodiversity and Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Challenge edited by Denis Edwards and Mark Worthing and containing articles by an interesting range of people; and Stem Cell Research and Cloning: Contemporary Challenges to our Humanity eds Gareth Jones and Mary Byrne, and again, interesting range of authors. Each of them cost me NZD5 or USD3.78 and they threw in a free copy of Creation and Complexity: interdisciplinary issues in science and religion eds Christine Ledger and Stephen Pickard. Nothing at all to do with my research but probably useful for my chaplaincy and hardly a problem if they’re not.

Got back to my room and rewrote the last section of my own paper after seeing how these other people dealt with theirs. I should now have about 35 or so minutes of talk, plus 10 mins for questions at the end of my paper and then more time during the general question time. I am on first on Wednesday morning and will be followed by two very different papers and a morning tea break and I’d like some feedback, which may be limited if I wait until the end, depending on the audience interest in the other two papers.

Having not brought my printer with me, I asked at receoption about the possibility of getting the last few pages of my paper printed once I rewrote them. I emailed it down an hour ago and have just had the printing delivered to my room!!!

Here I am in Auckland. My watch tells me it’s 10.24 pm and my computer which is still on Australian Eastern Standard time tells me it’s only 8.24. OTOH, having been up since 5 am and awake since 4, my body is fairly keen to believe my watch rather than my computer. : -)

Spoke to my brother about getting out to his place on Friday and he tells me that I need to catch the train to Papakura or Pukekohe station. I am good at spelling, but had to ask how both of those were spelled, because I do not totally have my head around Maori spelling conventions. I do know that ‘wh’ is pronounced ‘f’, so the powhiri I’m attending tomorrow is actually a PO-fear-ee, although I had the accent on the wrong syllable until I spoke to my brother. I’m quite good at Australian Aboriginal names, but I’m going to have to work on the Maori ones.

Since I gather that it is almost obligatory to include photos of your motel room on your blog when you attend an SBL conference, here are two photos of my room. It’s on the 15th floor and I think it has an interesting view, but it’s a bit hard to tell when you don’t arrive until after dark. It will also be interesting to see what it’s like to sleep in - the bedding appears to have some eccentricities and there’s a bit more traffic noise than this “regional resident” is used to.

one end of my room

So, now I think I’ll believe my watch and go off to bed and hope I wake up at a sensible hour in the morning!

the other end of my room

Here I am, sitting in the departure lounge at Sydney airport, waiting for my flight to Auckland. My gate lounge is next to the staff entrance to the Qantas Lounge, so I am enjoying complementary internet access without being a Qantas Club member.

Much amusement a little while ago - a passenger was not arriving for her flight to Denpasar and was not responding to the polite but increasingly urgent messages in English from the gate staff. Suddenly, we got an impassioned plea in a language other than English from a different voice. I’m not sure if it was her mother, or a tour guide or what, but whatever she said, the final passenger came at a dead run and the flight was able to be closed off.

I’m not feeling as organised as I’d like to be - on the agenda for this evening is putting slide transitions into my powerpoint presentation and removing the auto-looping and some other interesting effects that come with the university template. I was informed by my supervisor that I should use this, but it’s been set up by the marketing people for use at open days and careers fairs. It has about 12 different slides, each with different photos of scenes around the uni and the automated transitions. I really want my audience to be waiting to see what scene will be on the next slide rather than listening to what I have to say, and the auto-forward every 13 seconds has the potential to be very embarrassing if you don’t realise it’s there.

My presentation has my favourite photos on the title page and then a nice plain UNE green bar, logo and crest, without the photos, on successive slides. I will have a conversation with the marketing people when I get back, about developing an academic template.

After having huge problems with plagiarism last year, my university implemented TurnItIn originality software in the first semester this year. All text-based work submitted for marking is run through TurnItIn and is given to the marker complete with originality report. Students are able to submit their work to TurnItIn for checking before submitting it for marking, to make sure that they’ve acknowledged their sources correctly. Around the traps it is being referred to as the “anti-plagiarism software” although those in charge insist (rightly) that it only checks for originality and it is the author’s responsibility to check that the non-original material has been correctly atributed.

As a doctoral candidate, I don’t have to submit work for marking, but I can submit chapters and journal articles to get some idea of whether I’ve acknowledged my sources appropriately. “How useful”, I thought, so I did, because one of the things I worry about in my work is unintentional plagiarism.

On the basis of my (admittedly not very extensive) testing, I am sure that TurnItIn is an excellent tool for making sure that people don’t simply cut and paste from the internet, but it has a number of significant drawbacks for serious researchers in the fields in which I work. I submitted two drafts, each of which contains a significant literature review and it didn’t pick up much, apart from the bibliography. It suggested that I might be quoting from an economics journal and an article on church music, neither of which I had consulted. There are a number of examples similar to “It should be noted, however, that the work of Parry, Lord and Havelock …”, where the words in bold are the non-original words. So, obviously, like everything else, this software needs to be used with common sense.

Of significantly more interest/concern was what happened to the bibliography. Both papers had about 15% of the text as bibliography and footnotes. The paper I’m working on for SBL has a lot of psychology literature and the software was aware of most of it, although there are a couple of journals that it can’t access. Some of the rest, however, it “knows” because the items are listed in reading lists and on-line bibliographies, so the database can’t compare my text with the text of the articles and books I’ve cited. The second is the lit review chapter of my thesis and, as I had suspected, the software simply isn’t aware of about half the literature in the field. The titles don’t even seem to exist in on-line bibliographies or reading lists, let alone there being access to full-text versions. So it seems that, despite assurances to the contrary from the enthusiasts, people working in biblical studies and other somewhat esoteric fields are not in particular danger of having intentional plagiarism picked up by originality software and are not going to find it particularly useful in helping them to avoid unintentional plagiarism.

Do other people have experience with this kind of software? If so, what do you think?

As I was typing a comment on Jared Callaway’s Antiquitopia blog about the ordination of women in the Catholic church, I looked out my office window and saw a Saudi couple passing. They are both studying English at the university and they go everywhere together, always holding hands. She wears black from head to toe, including a veil in front of her eyes. In very hot weather, she exchanges the eye veil for mirror sunglasses. If I were her, I wouldn’t be letting go my husband’s hand, either. I would be scared that I would trip or get run over by a passing car.

I reflected that the ways in which women are restricted in some branches of Christianity are very different to the ways in which women are restricted in some branches of other religions. And yet, within our local Muslim community we have Pakistani women who are here to do PhDs, with their husbands tagging along to keep an eye on the children.  These women  cover their heads with their saris, as do Christian and Hindu women from the Indian subcontinent, so it’s as much a cultural thing as a religious one, and we can certainly still see their hair.  They are women who don’t appear to be any more restricted than I am.

Catholicism restricts women more significantly than does my denomination, but there are other branches of Christianity that make the Catholics look liberal.  Which isn’t to say that I agree with the policy of the Catholic church on ordination - it’s one of the reasons that I am not a Catholic.  I am, however, somewhat surprised that people seem surprised that the Vatican has condemned the priests who ordained women and the women who were ordained.   Unless they are very naive or very stupid, they would have been aware when they did it that they were going against the rules and taking on the authority of the church and that the church was unlikely to say “oh, cool, now that you’ve done it, let’s everyone follow suit.”  But it still sucks that women are in general given less freedom and opportunity than men in most societies and most religious systems.

Tim Bukeley on SansBlogue continues to update his information on Zotero. In the last few days, he has put up a post which contains a video on how to include multiple references in one citation (often useful) and also another quick demonstration on how Zotero works. One day, when I get a bit of spare time, I’m going to see if the Zotero SBL style works better than the Endnote one. If it does, I’ll be using Zotero.

Tim Bulkeley over at SansBlogue has recently posted about writing differently for the web. I started posting a comment but it grew out of all proportion, so I decided to move it here instead. Tim talks about the need to write more simply on-line than for print and I agree. I think we need to think very carefully about the relationship between content and formatting and I offer the following observations:

1. For some reason, it is more difficult to follow long, multiclause sentences on line than it is on paper. Shorter, more simple sentences are easier. I wonder if this is because we tend to think of the web as a more informal medium, so we expect less complex material?
2. I am sure that extended argument is more difficult to follow on line because of the nature of the medium. I know that I tend to want to glance back at a previous part of most extended academic works and this is far more difficult to do on line than in print. I think this is how it works:
3. Mostly, when people read an academic article, they read with a purpose in mind - to find out more about X. This means that they don’t pay as much attention to some parts of it as they do to other parts, because they really only pay careful attention to the bits than are informing their quest for information about X. The author almost certainly doesn’t have the same purpose in mind in writing as most readers do in reading. Thus, the reader reaches various places in the text where s/he goes “huh? I don’t remember her/him saying that!” and needs to backtrack. I don’t know about others, but some of the way I navigate around a paper text is visual - I know that the bit I want to re-read is on the top of a left-hand page and several pages back. On-line text doesn’t work like this, so there need to be other landmarks. Thus, just dumping a paper text into electronic format doesn’t make it on-line-friendly.
4. It is also very much more difficult to skim-read effectively on line. We teach our students that in order to get the gist of an author’s argument they should read the abstract (if there is one), then the opening paragraph or two, then the first sentence of each paragraph and then the conclusion. This is reasonably easy to do with a paper text and very much more difficult to do on-line, where it involves constantly moving the text in front of your eyes, rather than working with a stationary text.
5. I have been proof-reading an PhD thesis for an international student who is now producing his final draft back home and emailing chapters to me for final proofing. I am reading on-line and adding comments/suggested changes electronically and I find it most uncomfortable to read from the top to the bottom of a screen, then move the line at the bottom of the screen to the top. It takes time for me to relocate myself in the text before I can read on. This suggests to me that when writing for on-line rather than print, we need to try write in “chunks” that are no more than a screen long and to format so that each sense unit is easy to find.
6. I have access to quite a large number of journal articles on line one way and another and I find that I need to print them out in order to be able to get the information that I need out of them. The on-line version is fine for seeing if it has enough information in it to make it worth printing, but not for reading. Some journals offer me the option of html or pdf format, but the html is invariably not formatted well for either on screen on paper reading!!
7. Even with paper versions, formatting makes a huge difference. I read the manuscript version of April DeConick’s <i>The Thirteenth Apostle</i> while I was working with her at Rice University and then bought a copy of the book when it was published. The published version is much nicer to read because the publisher has paid significant attention to formatting.
8. There are simple things about web vs print that people often ignore - like:
• a serif font works better for blocks of print, while a sans serif font works better for blocks of on-screen material so just using the “save for web” option in your wordprocessor to turn your manuscript into html is not a good way to go.
• two columns are quite nice to read in print, but if the columns are more than a screen long, they are the pits to read on-line because you have to scroll down and then up and then down. ( I wish my daughter’s school would understand this about formatting their newsletter, which is now distributed by email - I try to tell myself that it’s not too environmentally unfriendly to print it if I either use recycled paper or double side it.)
• there is an optimum number of words per line for comfortable reading of large amounts of information and high resolution displays on large screens put far more than this on your screen, so on-line text needs to be formatted to control this somehow

Mike Grondin has scans of the facsimile edition of the Gospel of Thomas up on his website at http://www.geocities.com/mwgrondin/splitv.htm. They’re in a split screen format, so you can display his interlinear version of the text on one half of the screen and the facsimile of the text on the other half and compare them. You click on the Saying number on the right hand side of the screen to display the correct section of the interlinear. This is very cool!! Finding the corresponding text in the facsimile is a little more difficult. In his email about it to the Gospel of Thomas email list, he says:

There’s only one difficulty, and I can’t figure out how to do anything about it without a heck of a lot more work - you’ll have to count down to the correct line of the image. What I mean is this: suppose you’re looking at logion 19, for example. The page and line numbers given in the presentation indicate that it begins on line 17 of page 36 of Codex II. No problem in bringing up page 36 in the bottom half of the screen, but you will have to count down to line 17 to match it up.

A very nice tool. Thanks, Mike.

Several weeks ago, I ordered three books on parables. They arrived in today’s mail. One, Hear Then the Parable by Bernard Brandon Scott, was published in 1989 and is probably well known to people who are interested in parables, so I don’t propose to comment on it. The other two are more recent.

The book I went on-line to order is Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to Parables by Klyne Snodgrass (Eerdmans, Michigan, 2008). It’s 844 pages and hardcover so I was happy to pay $31.50 at Amazon and I’m grateful to Chris Tilling over at Chrisendom for drawing my attention to it here (a review), here (scandal of the day) and here (guest post by Snodgrass). You can also find an interview with the author on Matthew D. Montonini’s New Testament Perspectives blog here.

The book starts with an introduction to the parables of Jesus - looking at what a parable is, how parables should be classified, the vexed question of allegories, a method for interpreting parables and then a section called “NT Criticism - Assumptions and Hesitations, Method and Procedure”. The next section covers Parables in the Ancient World - the Old Testament, Early Jewish Writings, Greco-Roman Writings, the Early Church and Later Jewish Writings. He follows this with analyses of individual parables. These analyses include helpful primary source material from the Ancient World, further reading and highlight issues requiring attention as well as providing comment on the texts themselves. There are also appendices at the back that detail the incidence of parabole in both the New Testament and the LXX and of mashal in the Hebrew Scriptures. These are followed by extensive endnotes. Snodgrass indicates in his guest post that he is no greater fan of endnotes than most other scholars, but some were too long to fit comfortable as footnotes. I’ve only skimmed the early material, but it looks like a really, really useful reference book.

The third book is a more recent one by Scott: Re-Imagine the World An Introduction to the Parables of JesusI (Polebridge Press, California, 2001). I must admit that it was something I bought because Amazon told me that other people who had bought Hear Then had also bought this one. It’s meant for a more general, rather than a scholarly audience, but it nevertheless provides some interesting insights into and background information on a number of parables, including the Woman with the Jar (Gos Thom 97). It also provides some information about the Jesus Seminar in the first chapter and it looks like the kind of material that would be useful for someone who is not trained in biblical studies but interested in progressive theology. He says in the introduction that this is not just a simplifying of Hear Then, but a rethinking of issues and in some cases he has changed his mind.

I know that Snodgrass’s work is going to have some effect on my thesis methodology. Scott’s Hear Then already has and Re-Imagine may do, too.

The SBL International preliminary program book is up.  I’m presenting on 9 July at 8.30 am - not my best time of day, but still…  Two other UNE people are also presenting - A/Prof Matthew Dillon, who was my second supervisor for a while; and Scott Charlesworth, another doctoral candidate in the School of the Humanities.  I knew Matthew was going, but only found out about Scott from looking at the program.  That’s what happens when you’re part time and have an office outside the school!  Majella (my adjunct supervisor because she is now at the University of Otago) is also presenting a paper and a number of people that I’ve known for years in various contexts will also be there, so I’m really beginning to look forward to it.

Now all I have to do is finish doing the psychology reading for my paper and start work on the biblical studies bit!! The psychology reading is absolutely fascinating, but I think I’m going to have to start a third lever arch file for it.

On Monday, I officially received word that I have been granted a Keith and Dorothy Mackay Postgraduate Travelling Scholarship by the University. This means that I can afford to go to the International meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Auckland in July to present the paper I have had accepted in the Psychological Hermeneutics of Biblical Themes and Texts Unit. Actually, as I said to one of the members of the selection committee who greeted me yesterday with “so, you’re going to Auckland”, we would have found the money somehow to get me there, but this means my family won’t need to give up things so I can go swanning off overseas.

I don’t know who Keith and Dorothy Mackay were, but they made a very generous bequest to the university quite some time ago, the interest from which makes it possible to offer scholarships to students doing their honours year and to postgrads who have had papers accepted at international conferences or who have arranged for an attachment to a university overseas for research purposes. The honours scholarships make a huge difference to needy students. One recipient I know was so pleased that her “Keith and Dorothy” meant that she could afford to buy text books and some new shoes and jeans and pay her rent and eat.

The prospect of presenting is not a little daunting. I’ve presented papers at international conferences before, but they’ve been chaplaincy conferences. This is my first presentation of my doctoral work outside the university.

Our new international students begin to arrive this week and I am actively involved in orientation activities for both them and the domestic students.  We then have to “bed down” the semester’s bible study and discussion programmes, so I don’t anticipate having much time to blog or read or think about anything much other than chaplaincy in the next few weeks.

Tim Bulkeley at SansBlogue has tagged me with the book meme. The instructions are:

Grab the nearest book.

1. Open the book to page 123.
2. Find the fifth sentence.
3. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
4. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.
5. Tag five others with the infection.

I am just back from three days in Sydney at a university chaplains’ training session with my denomination (this included a 6 hour drive each way) and have been internetless for that whole time. My supposedly ADSL connection is running like a 33K modem, to quote my daughter who has recently returned from Germany “Ich habe die Schnupfeln seit Donnerstag” (or perhaps that should be “seit Donnerstag die Schnupfeln?) and it’s all a bit much, so tagging five others is beyond me. I also need to cheat because the closest book is Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage by Martin Durrell and working out what might actually qualify as the fifth sentence on p 123 is really challenging. The one below it on the pile, however is Memory in Oral Traditions by David C Rubin (New York, Oxford. Oxford University Press, 1995).

The fifth sentence on p 123 is “How does the degree of learning affect later retention?” And for anyone who is interested, the answer is:

Over a wide range of initial learning form no learning to twice as many repetitions as are needed to just learn a list, and over a range of retention intervals up to 2 weeks, the more times a list is learned, the better retention will be.

So now you know.  Or maybe not.  Seeing I’m not actually up to p 123, I can’t really explain exactly why this is important, but I’m sure it will all become clear.

And seeing I’m not up to trying to tag anyone, if you would like to be part of this meme and no-one has tagged you yet, feel free to participate and say that I tagged you. I am quite happy to add your name retrospectively if you link here.

I think that in small group theory this means that I am taking on the role of the Includer.  We had a session on small group theory which was quite helpful except that one member of my group decided that he wanted to play a new part called A**hole (his word, not mine), which made the group exercise rather fraught.  As went the buzz-phrase for the weekend “If I wasn’t a pacifist, I would have killed him”.  Last night I learned to play a card game called Warlords and Scumbags and saw the movie V for Vendetta.  We decided that V is not a Christ figure, regardless of what might have been intended - Christ didn’t kill people to get revenge.

And now I think I should go to bed and hope that my brain is in gear for finalising the program for orientation for new international students tomorrow.

This blog turned one on 14 January, which was two days ago here in Australia, but perhaps only one day ago in other parts of the world. I meant to post something on the day, but was otherwise occupied (producing a powerpoint on Australian culture for new international students which I had promised to have ready for a meeting on the morning of 15th, actually).

It has proved far more popular that my work blog which mainly seems to be found by spammers. It has also been more interesting to write, despite it’s rather unimaginative title. Perhaps that’s the thing that makes it more appealing to visitors - it has contained my opinions and work, whereas the chaplaincy blog has mainly been a collection of articles of interest written by others, and notices of forthcoming events.

I have found my first year in the blogosphere an interesting and enlightening one, as well as being entertaining. I remain constantly grateful to Monash University Gippsland for giving me my first computer and telling me that if I could make it do something, it was probably all right to do it and to Matthew Spinks, the computer science doctoral student at Monash who assured me that what every chaplain really needed was a website and he’d teach me how to hand code it. The internet has made a potentially quite isolated year of doctoral studies significantly more collegial.

So, my task for the next little while is to contemplate whether I want to celebrate by coming up with a new title or whether I should just leave well enough alone.

Ever been tempted just to cite something that someone else has cited without checking the reference? You know, to say “Wheelbarrow cites Schnittwinkel to show that X is true” without bothering to read Schnittwinkel yourself? Especially if the Schnittwinkel article is in German (or some other language that you don’t read all that well) and you know that it will take you quite some time to make sure that you’ve understood it correctly? Well, I will be tempted no more! Not after yesterday’s research.

There is a very famous paper by Allport and Postman (1945) often cited in the psychological literature about eyewitness testimony that shows how racial stereotyping can influence eyewitness testimony. Allport and Postman showed their participants a picture of an African American man in a suit talking to an Anglo man in overalls, holding a cutthroat razor by his side. They are standing on a subway station. When questioned about it (a week or so later), over half of the participants remembered the razor in the hand of the African American and some of them had him threatening the Anglo with it. Lots of people have cited it, very much as I have.

Except that this is not actually what Allport and Postman did. They actually gave some people a picture showing the event I’ve described above and asked them to describe it while looking at the picture themselves to someone else who couldn’t see it . The second person (still without seeing the picture) then described it to another person, who described it to another, and so on. There were about six people in each “rumour chain” and in over half the rumour chains the razor switched from person to person at some stage in the retellings.

It’s not about eyewitness testimony at all. It’s about the way rumours spread. It was even published first in a paper called The basic psychology of rumor and then in a book called The Psychology of Rumor!

In 1989 (so a mere 44 years after the original) Molly Treadway and Michael McCloskey from Johns Hopkins published a really interesting paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology pointing out that quite a number of people over the intervening four and a bit decades had clearly not read Allport and Postman’s paper very carefully, if at all, because they’d all described the eyewitness version rather than the rumour version. The previous year Julian Boon and Graham Davies from the University of Aberdeen published a paper in the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science which pointed out the problem without listing those who had mis-cited the original research.

Oh, ooops!! I’m not all that impressed with some of Treadway and McCloskey’s analysis of their attempts to replicate the research that people said Allport and Postman carried out, but I bet there were some red faces when it first hit the streets (or whatever psych journals actually hit).

Fortunately, my regular visits to Mark’s Theological German/Theologisches Deutsch are improving my German reading skills and I can sometimes even skim read German text with understanding, which is also helping to reduce the temptation to report citings unseen, even in German.

And for those who are not good at recognising humour in written form and who haven’t seen my collection of painstakingly gathered journal articles and photocopied book sections, no, I do not make a habit of citing material that I haven’t read. There are just days when I wish I could!

Warning:  Those of academic bent should note that this post contains fairly random reflections that have only tangential relevance to my research. 

There are signs of Christmas everywhere. I arrived at church on Sunday morning and got “encouraged” to join the choir for the annual service of readings and carols. Had I known, I would have brought the harmony version of the hymn book and not had to sing soprano. No, wait - even though I am one of nature’s altos, I don’t sing harmonies easily without practice, so it’s probably just as well. Except that I did try to sing the descant to “O come all ye faithful” which probably wasn’t a good idea. Just as well I don’t have much volume in the top part of my register.

Having been out of town for the last several Sundays, I’d forgotten about our “empty Christmas tree”, but had fun choosing two gifts to put underneath it after the service - for a boy aged 1-2 and a girl aged 2-4. Not, mind you, that I have any idea what you might buy that is gender-specific and suitable for a child you don’t know in the 1-2 age group. I found a shape-sorter puzzle for him, whoever he is, and a really cool alphabet toy for her. The child selects a letter of the alphabet and puts it into the appropriate place on the toy and then presses the letter and is told the name of the letter and the sound(s) it makes. Pressing a musical note plays the alphabet song. There are two volume levels. I hope the child’s parents don’t hate me for life, but I didn’t find it irritating and I did include spare batteries.

I am ambivalent about Christmas. Not the event, but how we celebrate it. I remember the affront of a member of my congregation years ago when I pointed out that there is no biblical account of Christmas that includes the angels, the shepherds and the wise men and that the wise men never made it to the stable behind the inn. It occurred to me as I was listening to the reading about the shepherds on Sunday that “the heavenly host” that appeared were probably intended to include the cherubim and seraphim described in revelation and didn’t look the way the Christmas cards depict them at all. I guess that eyes facing in different directions and multiple sets of wings are hard to draw and would probably scare small children. And then I think about the recent blog conversations about miracles and figure that the angels are probably a part of the gospel stories that some scholars of early Christianity have placed very firmly in the “myth” category, so maybe it doesn’t matter how we depict them, anyway.

I’m in favour of sharing with others, but I don’t really understand why Christmas is a time when families need to get together, especialy since some families should never be allowed in the same room because of the trauma they cause to each other. Sure, Mary and Joseph were off to the town of their ancestors, but there is no evidence that they were in that stable with anyone except eachother. Where, indeed, was the rest of Joseph’s family?

I sometimes feel like a real Scrooge (as in Dickens, not Disney) when I suggest that some of our Christmas celebration stuff is neither necessary nor Christian. Although I must admit that my first planned task for my holidays (which begin on Thursday) is to cook a Christmas pudding, recognising that my grandmother is probably turning over in her grave (again) because she taught me that a good pudding should be cooked and hanging by October!!

What brought all this on, though, was a post on Cheryl Lawrie’s hold :: this space blog called pray peace, which reminds us that “peace does not always come in the shape of a baby”. She expresses clearly but gently the pain that many women who are childless or have lost children experience at this time of year when everywhere they turn there are pictures of madonnas and the pain of those whose unwanted pregnancies won’t end as happily as Mary’s did.

So, at this time of year I find myself once again reflecting on what might be an authentic Christian celebration of Christmas. The fact that I’m doing research into early Christianity brings new and interesting dimensions to this reflection. Although the Gospel of Thomas isn’t big on Christmas (having no nativity story) my research and being involve in the blogosphere have brought me into contact with a different group of people and range of opinions about the early Christian texts which give me new things to think about.  Which is almost certainly good for me.

I was at a postgraduate conference over the weekend and one of the external students asked about how people managed to do postgraduate studies whilst working full time. Last night, I didn’t get much sleep, so I’ve been feeling tired and I started to reflect on my work/research habits. This is what I came up with:

• I am not a morning person, so I quickly begin to resent any activity that requires me to get out of bed much before 7 am. Therefore, setting an alarm so I could get up at 5.30 am to write would not be an option for me for more than a very short period of time, in a crisis.
• I am quite happy to stay up late, but I find that there are some things I can’t do late at night (or when I’m sleep deprived).
  • I can’t do detailed textual analysis much after I’ve eaten my evening meal - especially if it requires me to work in Coptic
  • By about 9 pm, I am also past doing much in the way of creative new writing of any kind but can still write down things I’ve been thinking about earlier in the day for editing later
  • I can, however, proofread, check references and edit much later than this, although a time will come when I realise that I am skim-reading rather than checking for detail and I need to draw a line through the text and come back to it the next day.
  • I can file, staple and generally organise paper quite late into the evening.
  • I can also find and download references, export the citations into Endnote and even print paper copies if my laptop is talking to the printer at home.
  • I can play solitaire and contemplate what I’m going to write next when I am quite tired, but I need to make notes because my recall of my brilliant ideas won’t be as good if I’m tired.
• FWIW, I also find that if I go to the gym after my evening meal, I can’t walk on a treadmill or ride an exercise bike as far or as fast as I can during the day.

So, I try as far as I can to match the research-related task that I am doing to the time of day and my energy levels. I do most of my text work in the mornings on the weekends and most of my sorting and filing of paperwork late in the evenings (or in front of TV, during the ad breaks). Fortunately, my job is such that I can do research-related work during the day sometimes, because I do work-related tasks in the evenings and on weekends.

Cleaning the bathroom is one of my agreed tasks around the house. Visitors to our home might well notice that our shower recess isn’t as clean and sparkly as it might be since I enrolled as a postgrad student. If they pointed this out, I would strike them from my list of friends immediately.

Also, of course, I am not doing coursework, so I can fit my research in around my work commitments, rather than having to meet assessment deadlines. And I have a supportive husband, so the clothes and the dishes always get done. I have also discovered that lots of the casserole base sauces you can buy in bottles don’t taste too bad if you don’t have them too often and curries made from bottled pastes taste almost as good as those you make from scratch.

My family tell me that burritos from a kit aren’t as nice as home made enchiladas. I figure if they’re that desperate, they can all read the recipe book. However, when one child turns to the other when I come through the door and says “Who do you think this person is? She looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t quite place her,” I know it’s time to reorganise my commitments to spend more time at home but not in the study.

So far, I’m tracking reasonably well on my thesis timeline, so maybe I’m doing something right.

Mark Goodacre in his blogging about SBL San Diego, expresses frustration about people merely reading papers and calls for presentations instead. April DeConick disagrees, but I suspect that they may be saying more or less the same thing. Mark adds further thoughts, too.

Although I am a relative newcomer to the biblical studies research field, I’ve been attending conferences and presenting papers for quite a long time in my “previous lives”. My two pet peeves are the person who simply reads the manuscript that s/he plans to publish and the one who has five words written on the back of an envelope and has clearly not thought through how to present what they want to say or given any attention to the time it’s going to take.

On the one hand, the well-written academic paper is often boring and difficult to follow when read aloud because that’s not how it was designed to be accessed. The audience can’t re-read dense sections of an oral text to make sure they’ve followed your point. Audience members are more likely to lose the thread of long, complex sentences and wander off into their own thoughts. The person who is merely reading the text usually doesn’t make eye contact with the audience and has no idea whether the audience is following her or him, so they can’t add extra information, or skip sections that are clearly unnecessary.

On the other hand, if you only have 15 minutes to present and quite a bit that you’d like to say, it’s almost imperative to have a written script or you run the risk of either going overtime and earning the ire of the other presenters in the session and the session chair, or not covering everything you want to cover. And if you have an hour and you ramble all over the place, people will also lose the thread and will probably also feel as though you don’t think they’re important enough to prepare properly for.

And as someone who has been on the organising committee for a number of both national and international conferences, I also know that one of the criteria used for inviting keynote speakers is “has anyone heard her/him speak?” Organising committees don’t like getting feedback that the keynote speaker was boring and/or disorganised and a low point of the conference. It doesn’t feel like a good use of the money you’ve spent on getting them there. Some conference participants will also tell you that they feel they’ve wasted their money coming to the conference if your keynote speakers are poor presenters. “I could have stayed at home and read the proceedings.”

I would suggest that a good purpose-designed presentation is better from the audience perspective than even a competent reading of a paper designed for publication. However, listening to a paper that has been prepared to be read out loud and with which the reader is familiar enough to lift their eyes from time to time is better than sitting through a badly prepared and badly delivered presentation. The amount of preparation put in is possibly more important to how effective it is than whether its a read paper or a presentation, I think. I was sitting next to one of our university’s more effective presenters a month or so ago and he was mapping out a keynote address for a conference he is speaking to in July next year. He is presenting to a lay audience and he wants to make sure that he has time to think about presenting his material in a way that will be accessible to them!!

Update - the key to making real sense of the above paragraph is that I was sitting next to the person concerned on the plane while we were travelling from Armidale to Sydney.

The new photo in the header is of the Macintyre River at Kwiambal National Park (see also this page), not all that far north of here. It was taken by my husband, Bruce, with his new camera and is actually several photos “stitched” together.

In the course of looking at my blog stats this morning, I noticed a link to here from John Hobbins’ Ancient Hebrew Poetry blog and wondered why, seeing I never write anything about ancient Hebrew poetry. I discovered that as well as doing the latest Biblical Studies Carnival, he has produced a really amazing list of bible-related blogs which, of course, includes mine. There appear to be two listings - one which divides the blogs into categories - “very insightful laypeople”, “students”, “professors” etc, and another that is simply alphabetical.

Very well worth a visit, unless you’re trying to work to a deadline that doesn’t allow the luxury of surfing the web!

Tim Buckley has tagged me and while I’m quite happy to say where I was 10, 20 and 30 years ago, working out who to tag next is challenging.

Ten years ago I was in Melbourne, Australia just beginning what turned out to be the placement from hell - Outreach Ministries Coordinator for the Uniting Church Synod of Victoria. The upside was that we were living in the lovely bayside suburb of Edithvale, 10 minutes’ walk from Port Philip Bay. It also turned out to be anything up to a two hour commute to the office, so it was a downside as well. Got introduced to prison chaplaincy, which I found fascinating. Married, with two primary (grade) school aged children.

Twenty years ago I was in Melbourne for the first time, getting ready to be ordained as a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia (the anniversary of my ordination is 12th December, for those who want to send greetings). Living in a “surplus to requirements” manse in the northern suburb of Reservoir. Married, with a small baby who didn’t sleep much. Although my denomination has always ordained women (since it was formed in 1977) I was the first - or was it the second? - candidate in Victorian Synod who actually gave birth whilst training, but only by a matter of two weeks.

Thirty years ago I was still living at home with my parents, newly graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture majoring in Animal Husbandry, and working as an aide in the dietary department of Ryde Hospital. I was actually marking time until I could enrol in a graduate diploma in human nutrition course because I wanted to work with people, not animals. My game plan had been to work in Agricultural Extension, helping farmers to apply research to their farming, but they didn’t employ women because farmers weren’t even all that keen on listening to male AE officers at that stage. It was nearly a decade later that they employed the first women in this field.

So, are there rules to this meme/tagging thing? Am I supposed to keep to bibliobloggers or can I go elsewhere? Since no-one’s told me, I’m going to tag:

April DeConick whose Forbidden Gospels blog gives me food for thought on a regular basis.

Craig Mitchell who teaches and directs lay education for the Uniting Church in South Australia, does lots of alt.worship stuff using multimedia, comes from Australia and likes cooking.

Mark Alterman, or specifically his Theological German/Theologisches Deutsch site, because it encourages me when I can read things he posts without having to resort to the vocabulary lists too often, as well as encouraging me to keep up with my German.

I hope these people don’t put me on there “never speak to her again” lists.

Yesterday I ordered a copy of April DeConick’s The Thirteenth Apostle from Amazon.  I wasn’t sure whether to be comforted or concerned by the confirmation email I received that assured me that my order would arrive in one shipment.  I certainly had a good laugh about the possibility of their packaging it up chapter by chapter or page by page, anyway.

In the comments on my rant on making biblical scholarship available to congregational members, Michael Bird writes:

Also, I think you’ll find that Bauckham is not interested in purely “proving” the history of the Synoptics. His main interest seems to be in turning over the Form-Critical consensus that the eyewitnesses vanished and did not influence or affect the shape of the oral tradition. I think he overstates his case at points, e.g. his version of the ancient witness protection program, but the Form Critics have long been due their coup de grace. For what it’s worth, many conservatives have big problems with his views on the authorship of John’s Gospel and 2 Peter, so I don’t think Bauckham is writing apologetics for the masses.

I am still in the process of re-reading Bauckham (rotten head cold plus people thinking I ought to do other things as well is making this a slow process) so I may change my mind, but at the moment I think Michael’s right - ‘proving’ the gospel is not Bauckham’s main aim. I think, however, that he certainly sees the fact that eyewitnesses affected the oral tradition as a good thing. I guess I have always conceptualised the oral tradition as having been based on eyewitness account and assumed that eyewitnesses would have had some role in preserving it as long as they were available, so I am in sympathy with Bauckham at one level. I was, however, interested in the reaction of the psychologists here at UNE when I asked them about current research on eyewitness testimony and explained why I was interested.

Their reaction was that eyewitness accounts introduce a range of inaccuracies that have to be taken into account in evaluating what they say. They were puzzled about why anyone might want to do that, but it now occurs to me that maybe they have a fairly literal view of the Bible as inspired by God (not because I think they’re fundamentalists, just because I don’t think it’s an area they think about much at all). Coming from this kind of perspective, of course it would be puzzling that you would want to substitute human-produced inaccuracy for divinely-inspired accuracy!

However, looking at some of the contemporary psychological writings on eyewitness accounts, it seems to me that what happens when you shift from the form-critical perspective to Bauckham’s perspective is that you substitute one set of problems for another. For example, if you say that text X came from a community that didn’t like the group A, then you need to look for signs of bias in its accounts of group A.  The problem with this is that if one text is negative about group A and another is not, how do we know whether this is because group A were nasty or whether the community out of which the negative text arose was biased? If you say that text X arose from a particular eyewitness, you need to look for the particular sorts of bias that eyewitnesses introduce. According to psychological research, there is an impressive range of things that can affect accuracy, including how traumatic the event is that a person is witnessing (negative moods result in more accurate remembering), the sorts of retrieval cues that are used (particular sorts of questioning can cause the remembering and forgetting of particular kinds of information) and whether or not the eyewitnesses attention was divided during the witnessing of an event. Many of these things are unknowns for early Christian texts.

I am very interested in looking at the sorts of complications that conceptualising texts as controlled by eyewitnesses will introduce. It might even become a paper at our forthcoming postgraduate conference.

…has a coffee shop. Not in the library, but right outside the entrance, selling a range of drinks and food at quite reasonable prices. Nice!!

It was very quiet, but it was also mid-semester non-teaching break. Bright, airy, books easy to find and a reasonable number of photocopiers. The library has been renamed with the move to its new location. When I was a student, it was just the Joint Theological Library (of the Uniting Church Synod of Victoria and Tasmania and the Society of Jesus) but when it moved the decision was taken to rename it after two very great men, Rev Dr Davis McCaughey and Rev Bill Dalton, SJ. Davis was Master of Ormond College, and Bill was Principal of the Jesuit Theological College, when the Joint Theological Library formed. Both of them taught me Biblical Studies and both were very distinctive teachers.

And on the subject of libraries in general and on-line databases in particular, I have decided that EBSCOhost is too smart for its own good. I have the ability to access EBSCOhost through a range of different library memberships, each of which allows me access to different databases. I used to be able to use all of them from my desk at the university, but now I can only get into the UNE subscription, which doesn’t include ATLA or any of the other religion databases. From my room at the conference, I can’t get into any because I don’t have a University of Melbourne student or staff logon - I’m just a guest with a guest account. Grrrr.

I have a quite extensive Endnote database of books and articles that might well be relevant to my research. Every time I get the chance to visit a different theological/studies in religion library, I take along a list of items that I haven’t already found. Obviously, every time I draft a new list, it’s shorter than the previous one, but also every time I visit a library, the proportion of items I am able to find reduces. Looking at what I don’t have in the way of articles after this visit, I think it’s down to the old and the obscure. For example, just how many libraries outside the Netherlands am I likely to find that have holdings of Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschift?

And, indeed, how much more do I really need to read, anyway? My literature review is already huge and all that I need to be able to do is to demonstrate that I am aware of the discussion and opinions in the literature, not that I have read everything ever written on the Gospel of Thomas! The law of diminishing returns must surely mean that there is a point beyond which there is no value in reading anything more that isn’t obviously new.

That’s the logical voice in my brain speaking. And then there’s the other voice, the one that says that the person who marks my thesis may have read (or even written) that article in the Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschift and may accuse me of plagiarising an idea that I genuinely thought was my own but was expressed very beautifully on the third page of the article I didn’t hunt hard enough for.

People have had their PhDs rescinded and lost their high-flying positions 25 years on because of plagiarism (well, one person that I know of has). My own university is currently investigating a plethora of plagiarism cases in one particular course. Our plagiarism policy says that unintentional plagiarism is still plagiarism and can still incur penalties. It’s easy to become paranoid.

Hey, maybe I can suggest this to Jorge Cham as a story line for a Piled Higher and Deeper comic strip?

Clearly, my particular research-related paranoia is plagiarism. What’s yours?

Here I am in lovely Melbourne at a national university chaplains’ conference. Finally got internet access last night (evening two) after a series of problems. Yes, there is an internet connection in each room, but you need to bring your own coax cable, and they need to generate a guest account for the conference attenders. Oh, your conference attenders wanted actual internet access? You weren’t just asking about it from general interest?

This and a range of other interesting problems means that no-one will be recommending this college as a conference venue, but it does have the advantage of being on the same campus as the largest theological library in the southern hemisphere, reasonably recently relocated to a new building. This afternoon is excursion time and we can choose our own, so I’ve chosen the Dalton McCaughey Library. Unfortunately, there is no wireless network in the library (funding constraints, I assume) so I won’t be able to connect direct to the library catalogue while I’m in the library, but I’m hoping to be able to find some of the journal articles I’ve been looking for for a while. And to see the new library of my theological alma mater, the United Faculty of Theology.

Over the last week or two I’ve been very busy doing the things I get paid to do (ie being a university chaplain) and thinking about a paper for the upcoming postgraduate conference here at UNE. I’ve also been reading Birger Pearson’s new book Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).

The chaplaincy has taken up so much time because we had a seminar yesterday on God and climate change and it took quite a lot of time to organise. I spent the first half of the week waking up in the middle of the night worrying that we wouldn’t get anyone arrive and then, after I’d done three radio interviews, the second half of the week waking up worrying that we’d get too many for the venues I’d booked. As it turned out, we got nice numbers and good discussion and lots of positive feedback.

The postgraduate conference is something of a challenge. Our university has recently been reorganised to streamline admin so we now have only two faculties and I am enrolled in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (the other is The Professions). I imagine that organising the papers being offered by postgrad students (that’s grad students if you come from the US) for that kind of range of disciplines is going to be something of a nightmare. There is a theme: “Global Directions • Regional Futures • Tomorrow’s Leaders”, but we don’t have to address it, which is just as well. I’m not sure how I could squeeze a paper on my area to fit this theme!

I’ve decided, in the interests of being accessible to as wide an audience as possible, to look at some of the psychological material on factors affecting the accuracy of eyewitness testimony and see what that might say to biblical scholars about the usefulness of being able to identify parts of the gospels as eyewitness testimony. (See my comments on Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.) I submitted the abstract earlier in the week and will now have to wait and see if it is accepted. In the meantime, I have a small stack of journal articles and a few suggestions from one of the Psychologists on staff about classic works that I need to read to get me going.

I’m about a third of the way through Pearson’s book and am finding it the most readable introduction to Gnosticism I’ve embarked on. Some of this may be due to the fact that I’m somewhat more interested in the topic than I was two years ago when I was reading to get some background for my thesis and some to the fact that this is the first book I’ve read that wasn’t a translation from another language, but so far I think that it’s money well spent. I’ll write a review once I’ve finished it.

I buy new books from Amazon because it’s often the only place that I can get them for a half-way reasonable price, but I’ve always been a bit wary about them because of the often outrageous prices they charge for second hand books.

At the beginning of last month, I ordered a copy of Ancient Gnosticism, Birger Pearson’s new book (see April DeConick’s review) and it should have arrived by 26 July. When it still hadn’t arrived yesterday, I contacted them, fully expecting to be told that they were very sorry, but… However, I got an almost instantaneous response from a real person saying it looked as though it was lost and asking if I’d like a replacement order or a refund. I asked for a replacement and they have sent it by express international post, although the original was only coming by standard! It should arrive at about the same time as my copy of Layton.

A fascinating little addition was the information that they would be charging $16.50 to my credit card and then refunding it because they had discovered that if they send replacement books with a $0 charge overseas, the lovely people at customs hold them up for ages investigating why. It’s easier and quicker for them simply to charge it and then refund it than to try to deal with customs.

April DeConick is the August biblioblogger of the month. In the interview, she talks at length about her views on the way the word Gnosticism is used and also about her takes on the Gospels of Thomas and Judas. Well worth a read.

One of the frustrating parts of research, at least in my field, is the fact that you can spend large amounts of time doing research that only shows that something or other is almost certainly not the answer to your question. You can never show beyond all doubt that it isn’t because you can never prove that you’ve looked at every possible source and it’s very difficult to document your lack of results convincingly.

I am currently working on why all but one of the Kingdom parables in the Gospel of Thomas talk about the Kingdom as a person. “Maybe,” said one of my advisers, “it’s a Coptic story-telling device. Have a look in the Desert Fathers.” Not only did reading the Desert Fathers not reveal any such convention, it was also quite expensive. I had to borrow one volume of works of the DF on interlibrary loan and made the mistake of taking it into the toilet with me. I have possibly done this several thousands of times before with no problem, but this day I managed to drop the book into the toilet while it was flushing. I had to pay to replace the book (fortunately only a paperback Penguin Classics), plus an admin fee and the lending library wanted the book back!!!!! I could understand why they might want something irreplaceable back, but a Penguin paperback??? I put it into a plastic ziplock bag with a suitable warning on both sides and warned our librarians not to open it and went off muttering about obsessiveness.

“Perhaps,” said another person whose judgement I respect, “perhaps it’s a convention of Greek rhetoric.” So I read some Greek rhetoric textbooks in English translation, but to no avail. And, of course, I didn’t read every Greek rhetoric text book, nor have I read every Coptic story of the period so I can’t say categorically that it isn’t either of these things, just that it’s unlikely.

In connection with a problem with a piece of text, I wondered if the Coptic words SOP and OUOEISH were ever used as anything other than a direct equivalent of the Greek kairos. I spent many, many hours with the Coptic edition of the Nag Hammadi library looking at every instance in the index of Coptic words, seeing where SOP and OUOEISH occurred and checking whether they appeared to have any nuancing that might make them mean something other than kairos. I am very confident that there is no indexed usage of either of these words in the Nag Hammadi library where they could possibly mean anything other than kairos, but of course the index may have missed one or two occurrences and the Nag Hammadi library isn’t an exhaustive collection of Coptic of that era, so again I’m stuck with “it seems unlikely that…” [28 July: let me nuance this by saying that I am at least convinced that they couldn't mean what they would need to mean in order for my hypothesis to be supported and that's all I needed to know.]

So, what I want to know is how I go about getting due acknowledgment for all this painstaking but fruitless work. My SOP/OUOEISH thing isn’t so bad. I can say something like “a careful examination of the Nag Hammadi texts reveals no evidence of either SOP or OUOEISH being used in this way”, but “I am fairly confident that this is neither a Coptic story-telling device nor a Greek rhetorical convention” with a footnote indicating what I’ve read doesn’t sound particularly scholarly, somehow. I guess I could put in an appendix called “Dead ends I have pursued in the course of this research” and document how I have explored each issue and the amount of time I have spent in doing so. I could list the issues and indicate why I thought they were worth pursuing, how I went about their pursuit, the references I consulted and what the significance of a null result is. It doesn’t actually seem to be done in academic circles, of course. I’m not aware of any other thesis/dissertation with one of these appendices, so maybe I could become a pioneer!!! OTOH, as I would actually like to be awarded at PhD at the end of all this, perhaps I’d better just keep my records of dead ends in a file in case I need to justify an application for extension of time to complete my work. Who knows, one day I might actually find a use for an Excel spreadsheet documenting all instances of the use of SOP and OUOEISH in the Nag Hammadi Library, together with instances of other words translated “time”.

One thing I find difficult to resist is quizzes, so I just had to try The Which Ancient Language Are You Test, thanks to Angela Roskop Erisman on Imaginary Grace . My results was:

You are Akkadian, a blend of the incomprehensible symbols of the Sumerians with the unwritable sounds of the early Semitic peoples. However, the writing just doesn’t suit the words and doesn’t represent everything needed, so you end up a schizoid mess. Invented in Babylon, you’re probably to blame for that tower story. However, crazy as you are, you’re much loved and appreciated, and remain actively in use by records keepers long after schools have switched to other languages.

Not sure quite how I feel about this, mind you. Other members of my family were Linear A and Older Futhark.  I was nearly Older Futhark - if I answered one or two questions that I was tossing up about differently, that’s what I’d be.

The following obituary for Letty Russell was written by her partner, Shannon Clarkson, and posted on the WATER email list.

As a woman ordained in the 1980s I am very conscious of just how much easier people like Letty made being a woman minister for people like me. We didn’t have to be “the first” and we weren’t often the token woman on committees etc. Her theology was also helpful to me, and I am sad that she is gone.

Letty Mandeville Russell, one of the worlds foremost feminist theologians and longtime member of the Yale Divinity School faculty, died Thursday, July 12 at her home in Guilford, CT. She was 78. A leader for many years in the ecumenical movement, she remained active in ecumenical circles until her death, working for the World Council of Churches and the World YWCA.

She was one of the first women ordained in the United Presbyterian Church and served the East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York City from 1952-68, including 10 years as pastor of the Presbyterian Church of the Ascension. She joined the faculty of Yale Divinity School in 1974 as an assistant professor of theology, rose to the rank of professor in 1985 and retired in 2001. In retirement, she continued to teach some courses at Yale Divinity School as a visiting professor.

At various times Dr. Russell was employed as a consultant to the U.S. Working Group on the participation of Women in the World Council of Churches and as religious consultant to the National Board of the YWCA. Her first position was as a public school teacher in Middletown, CT in 1951-52. Over the years she served on numerous units of the World Council of Churches, including the Faith and Order Commission; the National Council of Churches, including the Task Force on the Bible and Sexism; and Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the successor to the United Presbyterian Church.

In an introduction to a festschrift published in Dr. Russells honor in 1999 under the title Liberating Eschatology, fellow Yale Divinity School theologians Margaret Farley and Serene Jones called Dr. Russells influence on contemporary theology monumentaland wrote of her uncanny ability to articulate a vision of the church that is radical in its feminist-liberationist critique but that nonetheless remains anchored in the historic traditions and communities of the Christian church.

In the East Harlem Protestant Parish, Dr. Russell focused her ministry on equipping her congregation of mostly black and Hispanic people to claim their voices as leaders in the parish and the community. Her experiences in Harlem led her to develop Bible studies that encouraged people of color to explore ways in which the Bible gives them voice and liberation.

At Yale Divinity School, Dr. Russells influence extended far beyond the confines of classrooms on Sterling Divinity Quadrangle. She was the inspiration behind creation of the schools international travel seminar program, under which Yale Divinity School students have traveled to countries around the globe for direct encounters with the realities of religion on the world stage, frequently in impoverished countries.

Dr. Russell graduated with a B.A. in biblical history and philosophy in 1951 from Wellesley College, and she was among the first women to receive an S.T.B. from Harvard Divinity School, in theology and ethics, in 1958. She earned an S.T.M. from Union Theological Seminary in New York in Christian education and theology in 1967 and two years later received a Th.D. in mission theology and ecumenics from Union.

A global advocate for women, Dr. Russell was a member of the Yale Divinity School Womens Initiative on Gender, Faith, and Responses to HIV/AIDS in Africa and was co-coordinator of the International Feminist Doctor of Ministry Program at San Francisco Theological Seminary. The author or editor of over 17 books, her book Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretations of the Church and her co-edited work, Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, characterized her commitment to feminist/liberation theologies and to the renewal of the church. In 2006, she co-edited a book with Phyllis Trible of Wake Forest University entitled, Hagar, Sarah and Their Children: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives.

Letty Mandeville Russell was born in Westfield, NJ in 1929. She was predeceased by her sister, Jean Berry of New Jersey and former husband, the late Prof. Hans Hoekendijk. She is survived by her partner, Shannon Clarkson; her sister, Elizabeth Collins of Salem, OR; seven nieces and nephews; 14 great nieces and nephews; and a great-great niece. In addition, Dr. Russell felt that her wider family included generations of feminist and womanist activists and scholars around the world.

Today, Patrick McCullough at kata ta biblia reflects on the dearth of women (or female?) bibliobloggers. It’s something that has interested me, too, but I don’t think it’s just a lack of female bibliobloggers - it’s a lack of women in any potentially interactive internet media. I belong to three biblical studies-related email lists as well - Gospel of Thomas (the scholarly one), Christian Origins and Biblical Studies. Very few women post in any of these forums. I’m one of the Gospel of Thomas moderators, so I know there are female members, but I’m the only who posts regularly (and I’ve been pretty irregular over the last couple of months). I could talk about lists as well, but I think this post is long enough just looking at blogs.

Patrick writes:

So, is it a lack of interest amidst female biblical studies scholars/informed-laypersons? Or a lack of welcome amidst those already in the biblioblogging world? Or something else? Or all of the above?

I think that there is something in all the things suggested by Patrick and the people he quotes:

• women’s uneasiness about telling random strangers what they think
• the fact that there are very few women in the biblical studies field (as opposed to pastoral theology, liturgical studies and even systematic theology, where more women scholars seem to go)
• what Mark Goodacre terms “the nerdy, geeky male electronic world”

I think that women, in general, are less confident about sharing their ideas with others. They have a much stronger need to have their ideas validated by others before they’re prepared to publicise them whereas I think men are happier to put ideas out there to be tested and to get feedback. I think women also tend to wait to be asked before expressing opinions. I wasn’t socialised this way because I was the only girl in a family of boys and the only girl in my neighbourhood, so I spent a huge amount of time playing with boys and I learned to speak up if I wanted to be heard.

I think women tend to have different attitudes to men about computers, too. Amongst my contemporaries, I think a larger percentage of women see computers as enemies than men. Probably not many men my age and older see computers as their friends, exactly, but I think more see them as a useful tool. Both my son and my daughter are extremely computer-literate but they and their friends use computers differently. My son sees his as a tool. When he wants to do a complex calculation, he will write a program to do it and then he can keep doing it with any set of figures he wants. My daughter sees hers as a communication aid. Her hard drive died recently and she is currently sharing with her father, which means that she is significantly out of contact with her friends because her father won’t allow her to install Messenger on his computer.

So, even though the upcoming generation of female biblical scholars are more likely to be comfortable using computers, they probably still aren’t going to get into blogging in the way men do. Biblioblogs are a problem for traditionally socialised women. No-one asks for your opinion, you just have to put it up there. Very few people give you feedback. My blog has had 1,724 views, but there are only 29 comments, and possibly a third of them are me replying to someone else. I notice that April and I are more inclined to reply to comments on our blogs than are most male bibliobloggers, incidentally.

Are women less interested in biblical studies? As an end in itself, probably yes. They are probably more interested in the implications of the results of their research in their everyday lives, which is why they tend not to go into biblical studies in the first place.

Do they feel welcome? Possibly not. Men tend to disagree by saying “you’re wrong, because . . .”. Women tend to disagree by saying “I don’t agree with you because . . .” and read “you’re wrong” as “you’re stupid”. Also, lots of religious-type bibliobloggers self-identify as evangelical. The others are “secular” bibliobloggers - those who do biblical studies from outside a specific faith context. Women are often not welcome as leaders/scholars within the evangelical part of Christianity. When I was training for the ministry, we had a number of visiting scholars who were biblical scholars. All the men were ordained. Most of the women weren’t. For some, ordination hadn’t been an option because they belonged to denominations that didn’t ordain women, but even those who belonged to denominations who did ordain women tended not to be ordained. When I asked them why not, they basically said it was not worth the fight. So I suspect that lots of women scholars and interested lay people don’t feel welcome in an evangelical blogosphere, even though I know that quite a lot of you are not Evangelicals (ie with an uppercase E) and don’t see women as second class citizens. Yet statistics would suggest that more women regularly practise their faith than men and they probably don’t feel comfortable and welcome amongst the bibliobloggers who come from a secular perspective either, because they feel that it’s not OK to blog about faith.

And maybe they have less time. I read an article last week that said that recent research shows that before they get married, women spend about 10% of their time on housework and men about 7%. After marriage, even if both partners have full time jobs, women spend 20% of their time on housework and men 5% and it gets worse when children arrive. Now I know these are statistics and they don’t reflect how every marriage works (I don’t know if this is the same for defacto relationships, incidentally), but they do seem to ring true for many of my female colleagues. I have a partner who only works very part time and does most of the housework, so I probably have a bit more spare time to devote to this kind of thing, but the downside is that we have far less disposable income than most of my contemporaries. I can spend time blogging because we can’t afford to go out anywhere.

So there you are. Lots of sweeping generalisations without anything much in the way of hard facts to back them up.

Update 15 June

Some more comments about this issue can be found over on Bene Diction.

Don’t panic.  You haven’t gone to the wrong place by mistake.  I got bored with the appearance of this blog, so I changed it.    Not bored enough to customise the css, mind you, but I thought this theme looked more like “musings”.

I finally arrived home at about 9.30 pm on Thursday (the plane was delayed for nearly an hour taking off from Sydney airport). I came home via Christchurch where I spent three days with my mother, brother, sister-in-law and their three children, hence the delay. Friday I spent washing clothes (ie doing laundry), unpacking, talking to my family and showing them photos of my trip. Yesterday I attended an 80th birthday party for my father-in-law four and a half hours’ drive from home. Today I’m taking things easy in preparation for returning to work tomorrow. It’s currently 17.6 degrees C (about 64 F) outside - it was around 30 C (86 F) when I left Houston. My feet are cold!

A number of good reasons for attending SBL International in Auckland next year:

• The airport security for New Zealand domestic flights is more laid back - didn’t have to take my shoes or my jacket off, or have my carry-on liquids and gels in little bottles in a ziplock bag. Even for the international flights they let you keep your shoes on unless you set the metal detectors off (I didn’t).
• New Zealand has some spectacular scenery - what I saw from the air was a series of very flat river valleys surrounded by steep, jagged volcanic/glacial mountains. This photo shows Christchurch in the background from a place called Sign of the Kiwi
• New Zealand is small and not very crowded and the people are very friendly. Unfortunately for North Americans and Europeans, they drive on the other side of the road, but there isn’t much traffic.
• The exchange rate with most major currencies is very favourable

Note:  If you’re thinking of flying to New Zealand, I would highly recommend Air New Zealand as a carrier.  Nice food, a surprising amount of leg room and a generally comfortable flight with helpful, friendly cabin crew.  And, no, they didn’t pay me anything to say this.

Well, today I emptied my locker in the Fondren Library reading room, returned the last of my library books and my locker key, posted two boxes of photocopies and books (mainly photocopies) back to myself in Australia, returned the ten or so books I had borrowed from April (DeConick) and said goodbye to April and Rice. Here we are in her office - photo taken by Anne Klein, who has the office next to April’s. Pity I wasn’t smiling, but still… The original version has a lovely medieval (?) Mary in the background but I cut her out in the interests of download speed.

Back where I’m staying, I’ve packed everything I can before tomorrow morning, said a temporary goodbye to Bruce (my husband) whom I won’t be able to talk to again for two days and now have time to worry about missing the plane, being charged for excess baggage, having them lose my baggage etc. Blogging sounds like a more profitable way of spending time.

I have had such a wonderful time in Houston and at Rice. The Religious Studies collection in the Fondren library is significantly better than the one at UNE and because there are several other Religious Studies/Theology collections in Houston, interlibrary loans tend to be much faster than they are in Armidale. The circulation desk staff were very good about my almost daily requests for receipts for photocopies so that I can claim the costs from my research allowance when I get back home.

I’ve also managed to have conversations with a range of campus ministers at Rice, University of Houston and Texas Christian University and am going home with some good ideas, as well as a better understanding of the church scene in Texas and the US. Everyone has been uniformly welcoming and helpful and I had a wonderful three days in Forth Worth with Brian and Carol Young.

The best part, however, has been being able to reflect on my research with April. I have been extremely grateful for her willingness to spend time with me, lend me significant parts of her library, let me read some of her pre-publication work, listen while I thought out loud, give me ideas about where I might go and what I might look at and provide me with feedback as I worked. I’m going home with a broader and deeper view of my material and a methodology that I am pretty confident will work with the material I’m looking at. If not, it will require only minor tweaking along the way. I also think that between us we have found the solution to a problem that has been fascinating me more or less ever since I started looking at “my” material, which is exciting. Neither of these was actually on my main agenda for the trip, but both will be at least as valuable as what I had hoped to do. My time here has set me up to write a much better thesis (dissertation) than I would have done wit