Imaginary Grace

Get Real

2008-04-08T07:27:00.002-05:00

I subscribe to a daily email from CharityFocus, which offers great inspiration and ideas for serving. I try to execute each one in some small way, and it makes a difference in my day. Here is the inspiration for today. You can also link directly to it on CharityFocus.

I admit the framing is a bit New-Agey for my taste, but the idea here is very powerful. Can you think of relationships at home or at work, with friends or colleagues, where you just think "If only he or she could be real" or "If only I could be real" things would be so much better? Have you ever thought about how much an honest, open, compassionate, and loving conversation can fix? Aren't you frustrated when you can see a beautiful outcome that just doesn't happen because we and/or others are enslaved to affectations, false assumptions, anger, and fear? Yeah, me too. Well, we can't change much about the world or others, but we can change ourselves. This bit of inspiration offers hope that even changing ourselves might have a greater impact.

The Energy of Being Real

"Mana" is a term originally used in a Polynesian and Melanesian cultures to describe an extraordinary power or force residing in a person or an object, a sort of spiritual electricity that charges anyone who touches it. Carl Jung later defined the term as "the unconscious influence of on being on another." What Jung speaks to is the fact that the energy of being real has more power than outright persuasion, debate, or force of will. He suggests that being who we are always release an extraordinary power that, without intent or design, affects the people who come in contact with such realness.
The beautiful and simple truth of this can be seen in looking at the sun. The sun, without intent or will or plan or sense of principle, just shines, thoroughly and constantly. By being itself, the sun warms with its light, never withholding or warming only certain things of the Earth. Rather, the sun emanates in all directions all the time, and things grow. In the same way, when we are authentic, expressing our warmth and light in all directions, we cause things around us to grow. When our souls like little suns express the light of who we are, we emanate what Jesus called love and what Buddha called compassion, and the roots of community lengthen.
In this way, without any intent to shape others, we simply have to be authentic, and a sense of mana, of spiritual light and warmth will emanate from our very souls, causing others to grow -- not towards us, but towards the light that moves through us. In this way, by being who we are, we not only experience life in all its vitality, but quite innocently and without design, we help others be more thoroughly themselves. In being real, in staying devoted to this energy of realness, we help each other grow toward the one vital light.
--Mark Nepo

Quotable Tuesday

2008-03-18T18:00:00.003-05:00

"The art of writing is perhaps the most important skill the scholar ought to acquire, and it ought to be the subject of faithful attention and practice. But the student does not acquire it; he learns instead the honoured forms of drab discourse, the arid niceties of documentation, and the simple-headed regiments of a proper bibliography. All that he might learn of a really profound and meaningful kind about the nature of the discourse whose exercise will be a large part of his life is relegated to accident."

- Robert Plant Armstrong, "The Qualities of a Book, the Wants of a Dissertation," in The Thesis and the Book (ed. Eleanor Harman and Ian Montagnes; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976) 18.

Well, if that's not a kick in the butt, I don't know what is.

Leftover Land (or, How I'm Going to Finish my Dissertation)

2007-11-26T11:50:00.000-05:00

After a busy week full of SBL and cooking, I am back to the grind. This is my last week exclusively devoted to dissertation. I'm hoping the leftovers will get me through it. We cooked a rockin' Thanksgiving this year, and my fridge is filled with the remainder of:

Appetizer

Soup of Matsutake Mushrooms and Squash in First Dashi
Venison Terrine
Dr, Thankisch Riesling Auslese 2001

Main Course

Apple-Scented Roast Turkey with Cider-Calvados Gravy
Winter Fruit and Nut Stuffing
Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Apples
Green Beans with Mushroom Madeira Sauce
Tarragon Creamed Corn
Fresh Cranberry Relish
Chateau Beauchene Cotes-du-Rhone
Darting Rieslaner Spatlese 2001

Dessert

Cheese Selection with Dried Fruit and Nuts
Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Caramels
selection of old French brandies

This should get me through the week... If the copy-editing gets really bad, I may have to turn to the "leftover" brandy. Maybe when this week is over, Imaginary Grace will actually be more of a biblical studies blog than a wannabe food blog.

May you have much to be grateful for this year, and may what's on your table be only the start.

The Vatican Rag

2007-11-04T20:52:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Dr. Claude Mariottini for making us laugh with The Reformation Polka. To even out the demoninational humor, here is one of my personal favorites.

Breast Cancer Stamp

2007-10-31T17:14:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite easy ways to make a big impact with not much effort is to buy Breast Cancer Awareness stamps. They cost a little more, but I hardly notice the difference. And each time I send out a letter, I'm helping the many women I know and love, and millions I'll never meet.

The impact of breast cancer is quite staggering. A couple of years ago, I walked in one of the many national events sponsored by the Susan G. Komen foundation. They give you an opportunity to celebrate the survivors you know, support those who are currently battling the disease, and even memorialize who have died by wearing tags with their names pinned to your shirt. When I put all mine together, I had at least 7 or 8. I was floored. My mother-in-law. A volunteer I worked with. The wife of a colleague. An old friend who fought it brilliantly but died and left behind her husband and 5-year-old son.

Buy these stamps. It's so easy, and you won't miss the cents. They raise millions of dollars nationally. But even more importantly, write your Senator and tell him or her to have the stamp reauthorized. If the Senate doesn't approve the bill by the end of the year, they will no longer be available, and those millions of dollars we raise just by sticking postage to our letters lost. The Komen Foundation has made it very easy to show your support. Just go here and fill in the form.

The women you love will thank you.

10-20-30

2007-10-29T11:46:00.000-05:00

John Hobbins tagged me for the 10-20-30 meme, for which one must write a post reflecting on what one was doing 10, 20, and 30 years ago. Here goes:

1977: I saw my first movie in the movie theater, the original Star Wars. Darth Vader scared me nearly to death. I suspect my interest in spiritual matters began here, assuming these things aren't innate. This may also have been the first year my grandparents took me out for dinner to celebrate my birthday. I proudly announced to my mother that I was going to order lobster and apparently brought home the shell to prove that I actually did. Thus the beginning of my foodie days.

1987: I decided I wanted to be a professional violinist and started practicing all the time. This career path didn't pan out. But my interest in music brought me years later to sing in a choir. Here I participated in the world premiere of a setting of biblical texts for two choirs, which we performed with the National Choir of Israel. The piece was in Hebrew. This was the first time I encountered the language, and I guess the rest is history. Prov 3:13–19 is still one of my favorite texts.

1997: Like John, I was a student at the University of Wisconsin, reading Hebrew constantly. I'm not sure I did anything else that year. Or, if I did, I can't remember.

I tag Charles Halton, Christopher Heard, and Simon Holloway.

Max Rudolf and Me

2007-10-28T15:17:00.001-05:00

As a classical music lover, I was delighted to find out recently that I live in the same neighborhood that the great conductor Max Rudolf once did. In fact, an acquaintance of mine lives in his house just a few blocks away.

I also found out that Herr Rudolf was frequently seen taking brisk walks in the neighborhood, up a very steep hill to this gorgeous park.

As it turns out, I too am an avid walker, and regularly take this same route. While I don't wave my arms in the air madly conducting symphonies as I walk, as he is reported to have done, I do listen to Beethoven quartets on my iPod. Hardly the same, I know... But, while we certainly do not share a gift, we do share a path. While fun, useless trivia, the strange thing that Max Rudolf and I happen to have in common is a lovely reminder of how small and interconnected our world is.

Homeland Security Blanket

2007-10-16T06:46:00.000-05:00

For a good laugh, check out this link. Mom, will you make me one of these for Christmas? (Just kidding.) Be sure to check out the link to Slate for the slide show that includes humorous and useful crafts for members of both political parties.

Unexpected

2007-10-13T16:16:00.000-05:00

Another step in the Heath brothers' guide to SUCCESsful communication is to get and hold people's attention through the unexpected. They offer a number of suggestions about how to make ideas stick by making them unexpected, one of which is to create or tap into a knowledge gap and then close it. We should be good at this in academic writing, because this is how we justify the paper our articles and books are printed on and the time we spend researching, as well as how we convince foundations to give us grants so we can eat during that time.

We should question consensus A because...
Scholar X thinks one thing; scholar Y has a different view. The missing piece of knowledge or approach that can resolve this debate is...
We don't know enough about N, and that hinders our understanding of the Bible because... So here's some new information about it.

Moreover, because this is standard fare, we're good at doing it without obnoxious gimmicks to get people's attention.

Another way to use the unexpected, according to the Heath brothers, is to break a pattern, subvert the reader's expectations, break their schemas, or "guessing machines." This technique is perhaps more or less relevant to academic writing depending on how paradigm-changing the new scholarship is.

I notice that some scholarship plays into controversy in order to get people's attention. This is particularly true of scholarship on the history and historiography of ancient Israel which invokes the "maximalist/minimalist" debate, about which I've written some critical thoughts here. The chapter on "unexpected" in Made to Stick gave me some new insights into why this way of framing things is problematic. It doesn't break people's schemas, but rather invokes them.

As an example of creating a knowledge gap, the Heath brothers discuss a scientific article about what Saturn's rings are made of. It involves a debate about two traditional views, and the author shows how both views are a little bit right and a little bit wrong, offering a different way to look at the problem. But this author subordinated the debate to the fascinating question that people want an answer to. At least in the excerpt printed in Made to Stick, I was less focused on who I agreed with and more focused on what a new answer might be.

That made me realize that a lot of scholarship invoking the "maximalist/minimalist" debate puts the debate moreso than the question up front. This affects my involvement as a reader. Instead of following the data and the argument for a new answer to an old question, I'm more like a spectator at a boxing match. (And, when it gets really bad, sometimes more like an episode of Jerry Springer.) I can easily find myself more concerned with who wins and what the dynamics of the show are like than what new data or new arguments are being offered. When I catch new data, I simply fit it into one of the old schemas. New ways of thinking about the data tend to be few and far between, and are often just one of the old schemas that has undergone a makeover.

In my previous post on the "maximalist/minimalist" debate, I subverted expectations and created the unexpected by suggesting that something was wrong with the schemas. While I know a bit about dialogue, conflict management, and group dynamics, I'm not sure I know how to close the gap I opened. But the Heaths' take on how to get a reader's attention inspired me to strive for discipline in putting the questions first, not the controversy. That can be a struggle. But I'm certain it's a step in the right direction.

(This is the third post in a series called Sticky Academic Writing. For previous posts, see here and here.)

Simple

2007-10-03T18:10:00.000-05:00

Chip and Dan Heath offer an easy and attractive acronym to help you remember the basic concepts they discuss in Made to Stick:

SUCCESS

In this post, I will talk about the first "S":

SIMPLE.

This message is really, well, simple. If you don't communicate a core message that is clear and compact so that people can remember it, your idea is not going to stick. Ever read a book, shut the back cover, and say to yourself "I have no idea what I just read"? Yeah, you know what I mean. But even the most complex ideas can be articulated, if only in a nutshell, in a way that is elegant and simple.

The key, according to the Heath brothers, is prioritizing. They relate the story of James Carville's efforts to come up with a campaign slogan for the first Clinton campaign, how the team narrowed the message down to three items, but finally settled on "It's the economy, stupid." If you say three things, you don't say anything. This illustrates what happens when we fail to be simple. If we offer too much information with no core, people get lost in it and cannot discern what is important. As a consequence, what they take away is this: nothing. Well that's no fun. Just ask my dissertation advisors...

This often happens in academic writing when we are too focused on content. "I have to talk about this, and that, oh and make sure I touch on this other thing over here because it's related to my topic." This is a fairly easy problem to manage when you're writing a course paper or a 20-minute conference presentation, simply because your space, time, and content are limited. When you're working on a bigger project, however, it can be difficult. I would love to hear how you experienced writers out there, who have produced multiple monographs, deal with this issue. No doubt we'd all learn a lot from you. Please leave any nuggets of wisdom you have to offer in my comments section. In my experience with my first such effort, I have found making the shift from content- or topic-focused writing to argument-focused writing to be the biggest hurdle. That simple message simply gets lost in the fray.

The good news is this: It's not a difficult hurdle to overcome. Writing with a focus on content is an important stage of the writing and thinking process. It's o.k. to be there. It's not o.k. to stay there. If you're experiencing this rut, you can climb out of it by:

Putting your prose aside for a while and looking at it with fresh eyes.
Giving your prose to others to read.

What you're looking for here is perspective. Seeing what in that mass of stuff you wrote is important, critical, relevant...simple. Where's the message? I recommend doing this yourself and giving it to others, whether in your writing group (see here) or from another context. Others will see things you do not simply because their head is not swimming in the content. This is invaluable, no matter how bad the news is. The next step is this:

Lose your fear of the "red pen."

Find your message. Highlight it. Then take out a clean sheet of paper and prioritize it and brainstorm how to phrase it until you can articulate it as SIMPLY as possible.

The rest is, as they say, details. Find a way to make all of your details serve this message and axe the rest. Hacking up prose can be fun and very satisfying, especially when you see the new and improved result. The biggest hurdle to doing this is getting hung up on the amount of time and energy you put into the draft. Don't. You didn't waste your time, because now you've got raw material to work with! So have a good laugh at what a lump of coal it is, believe that there's a diamond in there somewhere, pull out your colored pens and highlighters, and chop away. Take as much delight in making big red Xes through whole paragraphs and even pages of material as you do in highlighting that one little sentence that really contains the meat of your idea. Both activities are necessary to make your prose the best it can be.

"Well, isn't this simple message just called a thesis statement?," you say. Well, yes it is. But this book made me think about thesis statements in a new and useful way. Make them statements that people can remember with relative ease. Statements that, when they shut the back cover of the book, they can recite. I don't know many people who craft thesis statements with this in mind. I surely never have. Granted, we will never write thesis statements like "It's the economy, stupid" or "Just do it," and nor should we. But I think there's great benefit in making them core and compact enough for people to remember in a similar way:

Our readers will be more likely to remember our idea accurately and less likely to misrepresent it.
It will stick with our readers longer and have a greater chance of influencing their thinking. Long after they've forgotten that boring book they read, they'll still be remembering our work.
Our ideas can be communicated to people of a variety of different backgrounds and thus reach and influence a wider audience.

The details in our scholarship may provide the argument, the "why," the nuance. They're important. But they're not what a reader will or should necessarily remember when she's cooking dinner or driving along the expressway. In my experience as a reader, actually, the simpler and more memorable the core message, the more details I am likely to remember three days or a week or a month after I read a book. Rather than losing your message in the details, give your reader a simple idea and let the details, well, stick to it.

(This is the second post in a series called Sticky Academic Writing. For previous posts, see here.)

Sticky Academic Writing

2007-09-30T17:09:00.000-05:00

I have just finished one of the most thought-provoking books on writing I have ever read. There's nothing in it about mechanics (booooooring...unless you're reading Constance Hale; see here). It doesn't address issues of style. Actually, it's not really about writing specifically at all, but about how to communicate ideas effectively—in ad campaigns, sales pitches, board rooms, etc. The book is titled Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, two brothers who must have had a really good time writing it.

The last thing it focuses on is academic writing. But it's all applicable to the academic writing process in one way or another. Check out this quote:

There is a curious disconnect between the amount of time we invest in training people how to arrive at the Answer and the amount of time we invest in training them how to Tell Others (245).

Besides the Milnesque capitalization, what I love about this quote is it tells it like it is. They're not talking about academia specifically, but this is it in a nutshell. And that's no slight on those who trained me, as I count myself fortunate to have studied with some of the finest thinkers and teachers in the business. We simply do not, as a group, put enough focus on the communication aspect. In my years of graduate school, the only seminar I encountered to help students improve writing skills was one I taught. That was fun, but it didn't help my writing much. I don't know about you, but I am always encountering new writing challenges and wish for help that can be hard to find.

In a series of upcoming posts, I hope to apply each one of the Heaths' core concepts to writing in biblical Studies. This effort is partly selfish, a way of prompting myself to process and apply what I've read (writing being an excellent way to do that...). But it's also to share these exciting ideas with you, in the hope that you'll be able to improve your prose along with me.

A Biblical Dessert Recipe

2007-09-20T18:34:00.000-05:00

KORAH'S CREME BRULEE
A truly sinful dessert.

1/4 C sugar
yolks of 4 quail eggs
1 3/4 C cream

Beat sugar into egg yolks. Mix with cream and stir over the low heat of a burning bush until the mixture thickens. Top each serving with a thin layer of manna and caramelize with an 'esh zarah until it turns hard as a rock. Strike twice with a staff and enjoy.

If you're expecting weekend dinner guests, be sure to make a double batch on Friday, as ingredients are unavailable on Saturdays.

The Ladybug Hours

2007-09-01T21:20:00.000-05:00

September is my favorite month of the year. Cooler temperatures, leaves beginning to turn, fall fashion, and, well, school begins again. There is something visceral for me about the first day of school. I have seen many such days (no, I will not count them...) and hope to see many more (as a teacher, not a student... although the best teachers are just students who get paid to help others be good students). Yet each one feels a little as though I am starting the first grade all over again. New people. New ideas. The promise of new growth. August was filled with vacations, preparation to teach courses, and a lot of writing. My blog silence is not indicative of a lack of cerebral activity, just the lack of time to share it. (Compensated in the previous sentence by the use of too many big words and unnecessarily complicated syntax. Oops. I did it again.)

My study happens to be on a porch enclosed with old windows. Quite hot in the summer and barely tolerable during the coldest weeks of the winter. During these liminal days as we transition to fall, however, I am blessed by the appearance of a number of tiny red spotted study partners. They don't know much Hebrew, I'm afraid, and almost no Akkadian. But they fly around my light, especially at night, and they do look cute. Even little bugs have to have a purpose in life, I suppose. Their presence with me makes me laugh as they crawl around the bottom of the lamp, over the keyboard, and across the top of my line of commentaries as though it were the Great Wall of China, and especially as they fly into the post-it notes with a smack. They remind me to appreciate the changes going on in the world around, and to remain curious and light-hearted, willing to crawl all over everything in the interest of exploration.

Cuneiform Cuisine

2007-08-10T20:06:00.000-05:00

There is a wonderful article in this month's Society of Biblical Literature Forum about Akkadian recipes. Alice Slotsky relates the drama of her struggle, with Jean Bottero at her side via correspondence, to recreate some ancient recipes despite the obscure instructions, uncertain or entrely foreign ingredients, and...of course...tablets broken (as they always are) in just the wrong places. She shares the fruits of her culinary struggle in the form of a transliterated and translated recipe that, with a little kitchen smarts, you too can cook.

The Akkadian version reminds me a bit of my grandmother's recipes for sauerkraut and pie crust, and sometimes her elderly writing on old recipe cards can be about as easy to read as cuneiform (and as wonderfully rewarding...). Unlike Alice, however, I have the benefit of having made these recipes with my grandmother as a child. Making them now, as an adult, brings me joy and helps me connect with my past. While we might have to recreate some of it with imagination rather than memory, the opportunity to taste something that approximates what the ancient people of Mesopotamia ate is a fantastic way to connect with the past we study. I hope the workable versions of these recipes might be published, so more of us can do this at home. (I know I want to!)

Have a Good, Long, Hard Laugh...

2007-07-31T13:37:00.000-05:00

...at this classic from The Onion on God and antitrust laws. Be sure to read all the way to the end. It's completely worth it.

This reminded me of and inspired me to put up the new "Thought for the Day" (see right):

Laughter is carbonated holiness. - Anne Lamott

I am, however, drinking an almond Italian soda, and, frankly, it's a toss-up. I say both laughter and almond Italian soda qualify as carbonated holiness.

By the way, if you're interested in becoming a better writer and haven't yet read anything by Anne Lamott, you should. It's fantastic stuff. I'll review her book Bird By Bird in my next post on writing resources.

Heroine of the Day

2007-07-26T18:14:00.000-05:00

Can you believe it? The last volume of the CAD (Chicago Assyrian Dictionary) has gone to press. Wow! This project, a comprehensive lexical study of the the Akkadian language, has been going on now for more than 80 years, making anyone's seemingly endless research project look like a drop in the bucket. How's that for perspective? The University of Chicago's online magazine celebrates the occasion with an article that begins with an image of the project office, now empty of coffee mugs, post-it notes, and stacks of books, and also silent of the frustrated cries that periodically emerge from rooms where people study cuneiform. (The article doesn't mention that last part, but I can assure you it happens.) Apparently the Hittite Dictionary project is moving in soon. (That made me laugh. I'm not exactly sure why.) So the hubbub is not gone for long.

This prodigious occasion aside, the real heroine of the article is Professor Martha Roth, the project's director. The article is a chronicle of her career and her outlook on scholarship and academia as she moves into a new position as dean. I have not had the good fortune to meet Professor Roth, but this article makes me want to. Here is a woman who reads legal texts thousands of years old, written in a language that requires acute attention to detail, yet sees and articulates how they fit into the big picture in a way that makes them interesting and relevant to us today. She also sees the big picture of academia, serving as an advocate for her colleagues and students, courageously articulating a vision and exercising diplomacy to get all involved on board the train. Plus, she is a mother of three and weaves in her spare time. Some may see a picture of an academic Wonder Woman. I see someone whose life and career are something to emulate. I'm not sure how she does it—I am certain it's not as easy as it looks—but she sure makes me, anyway, want to strive for it.

Congratulations on your new position, Professor Roth, and on finishing the CAD. We're all anxiously awaiting U/W. But, perhaps most of all, thanks for the inspiration.

Which Language are You?

2007-07-11T12:05:00.000-05:00

I find many of the silly little "tests" available all over the internet sort of annoying. I have nothing against silliness. But they remind me a bit of the quizzes in women's magazines, which are only fun if you're drinking cosmopolitans with your girlfriends. Besides, I really don't need an internet test to tell me how addicted I am to coffee. But this one I could not resist. Here are my results:

You are Egyptian Hieroglyphics! Monumental, ornate and even in technicolour! Your users contributed virtually all ancient knowledge on inks, dyes and writing surfaces - to the point where the popular reed of Papyrus became the universal name for organic, manufactured writing surfaces in the western hemisphere for thousands of years. Proud, upstanding and dignified.

And much easier to read than Akkadian, I might add. Unless you're demotic, in which case it's far worse. You out there who actually know me? I can hear you laughing.

(Check out Hieroglyphs.net to learn some Egyptian.)

Historical Criticism in a Nutshell

2007-07-10T07:50:00.000-05:00

"The historical critical approach to the Bible is about flushing out rabbits from rabbit holes, not pulling them out of a hat."

-John Hobbins

(For the whole post, see Use and Abuse of Etymology over at Ancient Hebrew Poetry.)

Why I Blog

2007-07-08T20:30:00.000-05:00

Tim at SansBlogue and Doug at Metacatholic, as well as Rev Sam at Elizaphanian, have started a discussion about why they blog, noting the social and intellectual benefits of time spent in virtual conversation with the rest of the world. I've been thinking about this a bit myself lately, and now's as good a time as any to share some thoughts about it, while the subject is live.

Writing practice. One very important reason I started Imaginary Grace is that I was having an inordinately difficult time writing anything coherent and articulate in a Microsoft Word document. Emails? No problem. Yet one of the chapters of my thesis went through 5 drafts (I kid you not) before it was remotely comprehensible. I had no idea why, as I never had this kind of problem with writing before. Well, guess what. It now makes sense and, moreover, is turned in. And I now understand what the problem was. I needed to tackle it in much smaller segments. Creating blog posts showed me how to do that in an environment with less pressure and on subject matter that seemed less overwhelming. Once I got the hang of it, the skill (and, more importantly, the way of conceptualizing the writing task) transferred over.

Thinking practice. I'm the die-hard academic product of a liberal arts approach to education and life. The sit-around-all-day-and-think-about-one-thing lifestyle that seems to characterize writing a dissertation is not good for me. Not good for my work, either. Thinking and writing about something different, even a range of different things, has energized my brain and improved my ability to chew my way through the conceptual challenges of my work.

Branding. Charles Halton has a great post on branding yourself as a scholar. That may be too corporate a word for it for your taste. (I'm good with it, but the ivory tower idealist that occupies a little corner of my psyche thinks it sounds a little cheap, so if it makes you uncomfortable, I get where you're coming from.) But the idea is still important, no matter what you call it. So think of it as cultivating an academic identity, identifying those assets you have to offer the whole, cultivating your unique voice, and communicating those things to others. At the end of the day, we brand ourselves with our blogs whether we do so consciously or not, because people (including potential employers) can and do Google us. If you don't believe me, check out this post. I think of my blog as an opportunity to make a first impression to people I might not otherwise have a chance to meet and, what's more, in greater detail than than I might have in 30 seconds at some place like a conference or in an airport. It's no accident that I talk a lot about writing and dialogue here on Imaginary Grace. These subjects are skill areas I have which don't fit well into traditional modes of academic communication (like journal articles and conference papers) and often fly under the radar on academic resumes.

To talk to (and learn how to talk to) a wider audience about biblical studies. I want my thinking and work to be relevant. Not merely to other scholars, but to people in churches and synagogues as well as people who avoid churches and synagogues. I think it matters a great deal how we think about text. But my vocabulary and writing style are, by virtue of my professional training, geared toward people who are like me. Writing for a broader audience gives me an opportunity to learn a different mode of communication. This, in turn, makes my academic prose better.

To remind myself that the desire for perfection should never outweigh the importance of participating and making a contribution. I try to make each post the best I can with the time and energy I have. Which usually isn't much, because I (like many of us) have other important projects that cannot be sidelined by blogging. But making the time to post something once in a while that accomplishes the above-mentioned goals has been a real benefit. It's meant that I've had to force myself to write a post even if I don't feel "ready," remembering that all ideas are in process. But I also feel like I'm making a contribution, a perspective that often gets lost when you're working on those Microsoft Word projects that it seems no one but you will ever read. Sometimes it pays just to "get it out there" even if it's less than perfect. This, too, has transferred over to my Microsoft Word projects, with important benefits.

I very much enjoy the social and intellectual benefits that Tim and Doug have mentioned and reflective comments of the sort offered by Rev Sam have also crossed my mind. But I also see blogging as a useful professional development tool in the ways I've noted here. I hope I've added some other dimensions to the answer to "Why blog?" In fact, my own answer to that question evolves as I think of new ways to use Imaginary Grace. So, in line with what I've said above, I've offered you something that is imperfect and in process.

Why do you blog?

Food For Thought

2007-07-07T19:21:00.000-05:00

...Red Quinoa Salad with Bell Peppers and Pine Nuts, to be exact.

Clothilde over at Chocolate and Zucchini is currently preparing a new cookbook manuscript for her publisher. I am afraid I can relate to the idea of taking breaks from writing to do things like, say, take a shower or walk around to get the feeling back in your foot. In this post, she blogs about the importance of having good (and interesting and delightful) nourishment to get you through long stretches of writing. She has a great strategy: make a big batch of something so that it will last you a few days. That way you don't have to worry about cooking, but you also don't have to settle for PB and J or whatever oddball thing you happen to concoct in 5 minutes from whatever happens to be at the bottom of your refrigerator. I do this often. (I mean cook a big batch of something. Although I have on occasion dredged the refrigerator, but the result is usually pretty depressing.) In the winter, it's often lasagna, which you can freeze quite easily, or chicken soup. But here's a great summer recipe that will keep your tummy, your brain, and your spirit nourished.

On top of that, Clothilde is someone who turned her blog into a publishing deal. Gotta find out how she did that... Well, she writes about food. That's a start. Now to figure out how to connect biblical studies and food.

How Not to Be Your Editor's Worst Nightmare

2007-07-04T20:07:00.001-05:00

Here's a link to a great article called "No Bad Authors," which gives a fantastic perspective on how to be a successful academic author, from the perspective of an editor. There are some great tips in here, and I encourage you to check it out. Basically it boils down to this: Your editor is your partner and you share a common goal, namely, to produce a successful book.

Treat people as allies, and they will be. Hey, not a bad philosophy for life, if you ask me.

Writers' Muscle Pain

2007-07-03T20:27:00.000-05:00

Back and neck pain is one of the real job hazards of academia, the result of too many hours in the same position, often with poor posture and poor breathing habits. I struggle with this immensely. I've known mornings when I've awakened still sore from the night before. Ugh. But I've recently found a fantastic way to manage this problem, plus get a well-deserved few moments (or as long as you want) of true relaxation at the end of a long day at the computer. A friend who has three children and a lot of stress and back pain told me about The Miracle Ball Method. Yeah, it sounds too good to be true. But I'm learning one exercise a night, and it makes a phenomenal difference. The method relies on breathing techniques and the weight of your body on two small, flexible balls to release tension and stretch and lengthen the muscles. I've been able to carry the breathing techniques through my writing day, setting my computer alarm at intervals every couple of hours to remind me to be aware of how well I'm breathing. Even this has done a great deal to prevent the tension and pain in the first place. While it may not exactly be a miracle, it makes a huge difference. If you experience any of these problems, I highly recommend it.

On Interfaith Dialogue

2007-07-01T20:11:00.000-05:00

There has been some discussion lately on a few blogs about Ann Holmes Redding, an Episcopal priest who has also recently become a practicing Muslim, without renouncing Christianity or her ordination. You can read about Rev. Redding in The Seattle Times and some of the blog discussion here, here, here, and here. Her situation is indeed fascinating for the issues it raises, and it prompts me to share some thoughts on interfaith dialogue.

Religion is not merely a set of beliefs about God, the meaning of human existence, the afterlife, morality and ethics. It also provides one with a community. By that I mean not simply people to socialize with, for that can be found up the street at the local bar or coffee shop if you're a regular. Religion provides community in a much bigger sense, connecting you with a history, a tradition, a culture which is and has been shared by many. I also think religion—and I have primarily the text-based religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in mind, but my thoughts could perhaps be applied to others as well—gives those who participate in it a narrative of which to be a part. For Christians, this narrative is the life of Jesus. Through imitatio Dei, Christians bring the grace they understand to be the message of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection into the world so that others may experience it. For Jews, Passover is a key part of the narrative, reminding them that they have been freed from slavery and inspiring them to work for the freedom of others who may be enslaved. So this narrative is not just a story, but a way of living. Although the abstract messages may often be a great deal alike, the stories and the rhythms of life they foster are quite different. The differences, it seems to me, are important not because the beliefs are fundamentally different, but because the differences foster an identity, a sense of belonging, an address in the world.

Because I view religion in this way, Rev. Redding does not really challenge me on the level of "How can you believe in Jesus and Allah at the same time?" The outward forms and the details are indeed different, but at the very root of it, a lot is the same. The question raised for me is this: "How do you form an identity? Who are you? To whom do you belong? Where is your address in the world?" The rituals we observe make us different. And the more we tap into the rich cultural traditions offered by different religions, it seems to me, the more this is true. If you doubt the importance of the sense of identity and belonging that observing Shabbat or taking communion on a weekly basis or praying five times a day provides, ask someone who knows its potential but lacks it. Perhaps a mix such as Rev. Redding's—and, more to the point, finding comfort and identity in the mix—is a matter of the postmodern world in which we live. But, as much as I have been positively influenced by postmodern thought in my work, I admit I am still a bit old fashioned. It seems to me that one has to find an address, which means making a choice.

That is not, however, to say that we cannot participate in the narratives and rituals of other groups. In fact, I think that not only can we do so, but we ought to do so. Dialogue with others helps us to understand them better, understand ourselves better, and leads us to see what, under the surface of the narratives, we have have in common. Only by engaging each other in this way can we see where collaborative action can happen. And collaborative action needs to happen in order to live peacefully and achieve important things together. I think of the efforts on behalf of Darfur as an example of this type of collaborative action. (Incidentally, it works both ways. By engaging in collaborative action, we can learn that we're not so different after all.) Going one step further, participation in the narratives and rituals of others to the extent we can builds empathy and connection. When we worship together or sit together around a seder table or Sunday dinner we do more than engage each other intellectually. We share experience that binds us to one another. Why is this important? Despite differences, it's pretty hard to stigmatize and hate your friends. Religions may provide a community which can help one find that address in the world, but membership in the larger human family operates right alongside it.

One of the potential dangers I see of "bi-religious" practice is not simply the loss of particulars that foster identity, but the use of such a position specifically in order to gain converts. In his blog post on this subject, Iyov wonders why some Christian leaders vilify Rev. Redding but turn a blind eye (if not provide outright support) to Christians who also practice Judaism while retaining their Christian beliefs. A fair point. The goal of at least some such sects is the conversion of Jews to Christianity. In such cases, the simultaneous practice of two religions is not honest, not carried out with the integrity which appears to characterize Rev. Redding's practice however confusing it may seem, but disingenuous. In my own personal experience with Messianic Jews or Jews for Jesus, the aim of conversion has been forthright and the knowledge of Judaism abysmal. Furthermore, opportunities to learn more about Judaism produced not interest and excitement but outright dismissal. I say this neither to stigmatize every Messianic Jew nor to provide a blanket characterization of Messianic Judaism. I mean simply to illustrate with an example that "bi-religious" practice is not all of a kind. Some are perhaps called to it and engage it with openness and interest in order to foster their own spiritual growth. Others use it as a tool to achieve ends, whether knowingly or out of ignorance.

The latter use flies in the face of dialogue and participation with others because it does not respect the integrity of—let alone see the beauty in—the other, but sees the other as something to be assimilated. Have you ever had a dear friend who was very different from you, through whose eyes you have the privilege to see things about the world you would not otherwise see left to your own experience of life? This type of enrichment is what is lost when we strive to neutralize or assimilate others who are different rather than rejoice in sharing the world with them. I'm personally in favor of picking an address and inviting those who live on a different street and a different town in for dinner once in a while and visiting them in their homes as well. I have a hard time understanding Rev. Redding's choices. But at least they seem to be honest. And I suspect there are many more in the world like her. Judgements aside, there may be something to learn from Ann Holmes Redding, however inconcievable her situation may seem or however ill-conceived one might think it to be. She is a mold-breaking other. I, for one, would love to sit with her one afternoon and learn to see the world through her eyes over a cup of coffee. I may not change my mind, but I would almost certainly come away enriched.

Quick Writing Tips

2007-06-28T18:20:00.001-05:00

Well, it seems my blog may be turning into a hub for writing resources. I do think a lot about writing these days, mostly about how to do it better and faster. So I figure I may as well share the wealth. One of my favorite blogs is lifehack.org, where I read great (and quick!) tips about how to do everything better, how to be better. Here's a great post I found called A Guide to Becoming a Better Writer: 15 Practical Tips. If you don't want to or don't have the time to read some of the books I blogged about here, this post will get you going.

Feeling Useless?

2007-06-21T20:02:00.000-05:00

Having one of those downer days when you feel like you've done nothing useful despite your best efforts? Try helping a woman in need get a free mammogram. Yes, you can do it by going to the Breast Cancer Site and clicking on the big pink button.

I have this site bookmarked (along with many of your blogs) in a folder of things I read while I'm eating lunch or backing up my dissertation, and try to click on it once a day. It's easy. There are also links to sites for hunger, children's health, literacy, rainforest preservation, and animal rescue.

It's a small thing, but it can make a big difference in someone' s life. And maybe in yours, too.

Whittling Away the Dip

2007-06-15T06:22:00.000-05:00

Blogs can be a lot of things. I use mine for spreading information and inspiration, developing ideas, making you laugh (or at least making me laugh, anyway), and developing a narrative voice and greasing the wheels of my writing skills. Although I think I've alluded a few times to the fact that I am currently writing a doctoral thesis, I have deliberately not used Imaginary Grace as an outlet for dissertation angst. There's nothing graceful about trying to learn how to write a book, and nothing imaginary about the angst that comes with it. So on one level it just doesn't fit the theme. Perhaps there's something to be said for preparing people for what's ahead. I can't count the number of times when I've thought "%!#*&#*@, why didn't anybody tell me?!" Well, honestly, I think it's like childbirth. Nobody can really prepare you for this, and on some level it's better if they don't. Besides, when the baby arrives, you forget the pain. Or so they say.

But I'll make an exception to this moratorium on dissertation metanarrative to share some inspiration with you. The other night I read Seth Godin's Pushing Past the Dip, a manifesto from the ChangeThis website, which is full of challenging and inspiring stuff. The manifestos are short pieces you can download and read in only a few minutes. Good ideas delivered in small, easily digestible packages. (Now there's a novel idea...) Godin's manifesto talks about the rut (i.e., The Dip) one often has to go through before becoming the best whatever-they-are they can be. It's a diatribe against mediocrity. The Dip is that hard place where mediocrity sometimes seems like an acceptable alternative to climbing out of The Dip because the climb out is so difficult. But Godin provides equipment and butt-kicking motivation for your climb. Like the following:

Successful people don't just ride out the dip. They don't just buckle down and survive it. No, They lean into the dip. They push harder, changing the rules as they go. Just because you know you're in the dip doesn't mean you have to live happily with it. Dips don't last quite as long when you whittle at them.

Godin has a whole book by the same title. I'd read it if I had time. I encourage you to read it if you do. But I'm too busy with my hammer and chisel, whittling away The Dip.

Geniza Fragment of the Month

2007-06-14T10:52:00.000-05:00

There are wine-of-the month clubs for yuppies, bacon-of-the-month clubs for meat-lovers (yes, indeed there is such a thing from the Grateful Palate; the site's a kick even if you, like me, don't get excited about bacon), and fruit-of-the-month clubs so that people in Minnesota can actually eat good fruit in the winter.

Now, there's something for us geeks...

Geniza Fragment of the Month!

They don't come to your door by FedEx. But you can check out the website of the Taylor-Schechter Geniza Research Unit. The team is posting photos and commentary each month on some of the most interesting fragments they're working on. They started in April and have three months' worth up for view. May features a masoretic list containing commentary on 1 Samuel 9 written over the top of one of St. Augustine's sermons (I hated reading Augustine, so I find this endlessly humorous). The pictures are absolutely fantastic. I've always wanted to learn more about the genizah, but never had the time. Now I can just check in once a month while I'm eating lunch to see what's new.

Can anyone tell me what night of the week and on what channel I can tune in to GRU: Cambridge?

Writing Groups

2007-06-01T21:03:00.000-05:00

Charles Halton over at Awilum has challenged us all to take active steps to improve our writing this summer. Here's an idea:

Form a writing group!

Pull together 3-4 or so of your colleagues, or maybe just find one study partner, yeshiva-style. These should people who are equally interested in improving their writing. People you can trust to be honest with you, who will commit to spending quality time with your work, and, of course, who will not steal your ideas. (Sadly, that does happen...) You want people who will tear your prose apart, but love you anyway. And, by the way, be willing to be one of these people for your colleagues.

Set up a regular time to meet, whether via email or in person. If in person, make it fun. Meet for drinks. Meet for breakfast.

You might just share short pieces you wrote that week (or whatever time interval you choose) for any feedback others feel like giving. But I recommend something a little more focused. Pick a particular issue or skill out of a book like Joseph Williams' Style (see here for more info) and focus on only that one thing in a given round. Say you pick topic strings (chapter 5 in the 1990 edition of Style). Email your pieces to each other and spend the week critiquing just that one thing in your colleagues' writing. Then go home and revise, with Williams by your side, taking your colleagues' suggestions into account.

This activity has some great advantages:

It keeps you writing on a regular basis because you are accountable to others. It doesn't matter what you write about, how short or long, how good or bad. Just write. Don't wait until you've "figured it all out" (my personal favorite excuse). And when the time comes to hand it over to your colleagues, do so no matter what state it's in. They'll have mercy on you, because they're going to want it from you in return.
It shows you that writing comes with ups and downs... And that's O.K. Not to sound like Stuart Smiley, but... I would say that for every page of writing I keep, I've written about ten that get put in the dump file. (See below on dump files.) Being a perfectionist is a writer's worst enemy. Believe me, I know. Sigh. Do whatever you can to shake yourself of it. Easier said than done. But a good way is just to write a lot, and you'll begin to recognize that you do write good stuff amidst the junk. As you commiserate with your colleagues, you'll realize that they do, too. When you realize you're all in the same boat, it gets a lot easier.
Your skills will improve all around. As you practice looking for a particular writing problem in others' writing, your ability to spot it in your own will improve. As you grapple with how to fix it in your revisions, your newly-written prose will, over time, manifest it less. In general, you'll become aware of problems in your writing you never knew you had. "Well, that doesn't sound fun," you say. Yes, but every problem is an opportunity!

If you try this, drop me a comment to let me know how it's working. Happy composing!

(A dump file is a word-processing document where you put all the stuff you cut out rather than just trash it. You never know when you might need some of your ideas again for another part of a paper. Or when you might need to go back to a previous draft. Always use one of these.)

Should Blogs Be Cited?

2007-05-22T16:52:00.001-05:00

Christopher Heard asks:

If a student gets an idea for a term paper from a blog and doesn’t cite the blog, is that academic quality control, or something more akin to plagiarism? ("The 'whom not to cite' kerfuffle, part 4")

Stephen Carlson has further comment here (see Friday 18 May entry). It seems to me there are two issues here that ought to be separated. Whether or not material is worthy of quoting is one issue. The content of blogs is of course highly varied (in general and from one blog to the next), and involves as much gossip and junk as innovative thinking. The impact of blogs on academia, their advantages and disadvantages, and how they might be used are all interesting subjects, very worthy of debate. These two posts and the comments on them indeed raise a lot of good issues. If you're interested in the subject, they're worth checking out.

The other issue is whether one ought to cite whatever one quotes or borrows. This one's unambiguous: YES!!!!!!! There is even a format in the SBL Handbook of Style for it: 7.3.14, An Internet Publication without a Print Counterpart, on page 63. It doesn't refer to blogs specifically, but is easily adapted to them. I'd love to hear a copyright lawyer's take on this, but it seems to me that our blogs are not "personal communications" because we publish them for everyone to see. (Perhaps it's akin to vanity publication in the broader scheme of academic publishing.) Many of us actually claim our intellectual property rights with statements of copyright. (Mine's at the bottom, in case you're looking.) For basic information on copyright and the web, see Copyright Basics for Web Authors and Users, a website which also has links to more detailed resources.

Ownership of our ideas ought to be respected (and, conversely, responsibility for our words taken), whether we're posting our newest great idea or just kvetching. If I've inspired you enough to quote or borrow and develop my great idea in your own direction, I'm honored. Thanks. Please cite me. (I promise I'll return the favor.) If you quote my kvetching or the idea I thought was great but didn't quite fly, well, I'll probably be embarrassed (ahhh, the downside of blogs...). But it's still mine. This is not about the worthiness of our ideas, it's about ownership of them. It's also—and perhaps more importantly—about respect and collegiality in the community of thinkers.

I think it really boils down to this: When in doubt, be a mensch.

I Hate Pachelbel (or, Thoughts on Intertextuality)

2007-05-17T08:50:00.001-05:00

Like many classical musicians, I have played Pachelbel's Canon in D more times than I care to count. So I can sympathize with this guy (see video below) even though I play the violin, not the cello, and actually got to play the "fun" parts. In addition to being brilliantly funny, this is a pretty amazing foray into musical intertextuality. How many of these songs did you realize quoted Pachelbel before you saw this? Four for me (U2, Blues Traveler, Aerosmith, and...I am woefully embarassed to admit...Twisted Sister).

But here's where the "thoughts on intertextuality" come in. Do all these songs really quote Pachelbel? Some of them just have the same or very similar chord structure, and it's a pretty simple one at that. Maybe like suggesting that two biblical passages are related because they have the same basic syntax. Not a terribly convincing case for dependence. Others call to mind the Canon in D a little more obviously. Is this just because that tune is so well-known and frequently played and has become such a part of the western musical repertoire that people draw on it without even realizing it? Or is there some discernible purpose, something semantic or aesthetic to be gained by a deliberate quotation of our least favorite round next to Row, Row, Row Your Boat? This sketch made me think about all the criteria we have to think about as we consider whether, how, and why two biblical texts relate to one another.

The comparison of this little video to the questions we ask and challenges we face when thinking about intertextuality may be silly on some level. But it does show that ideas—whether in the language of text or the language of music—are all around us. Sometimes we draw on them consciously and purposefully, other times we are so familiar that we draw on them subconsciously, while other times we think we see (or hear) relationships that aren't really there. Using music may also be an interesting way to teach these ideas. Food for thought.

Thinking Blogger Award

2007-05-13T20:23:00.000-05:00

I'd like to thank God, my parents, my mentors...

Seriously, though, many thanks to Tim Bulkeley at Sansblog for tagging me for this meme. It's an honor to have my thoughts and my prose recognized with a Thinking Blogger Award. I'm not sure what rights come with this (maybe there's some virtual exclusive club... I hope they serve good martinis), but here are five blogs I am thrilled to highlight in fulfillment of my responsibility:

Awilum. I really appreciate how Charles Halton asks hard questions, pushes envelopes, and challenges us all to participate in coming up with new ways of thinking about a wide variety of things related to biblical studies and ancient Near East. One of the best things he's written is his ChangeThis manifesto, which you can link to from here. I downloaded a copy and read it periodically for inspiration when I need to light a fire under my rear.
Ancient Hebrew Poetry. I met John Hobbins once or twice as I was beginning the same graduate program he was finishing. He is an intimidatingly smart man, and I appreciate his insights, especially on an area of biblical study which is not my own focus. I particularly enjoyed his post on Canon, Inspiration, and Authority. Its openness is inspiring and challenging.
Inspirations Far and Near. This is a rather atypical blog in that it has only one post, which just articulates what it's about. But it has a gazillion links to old thinkers and new thinkers about Bible, theology, and whatnot, and a list of "Dialogue Partners" which consists of a variety of blogs. I love the concept behind this, which is why I nominate it. It brings together a wide variety of participants in one big online conversation about things we find most important. Perhaps I can prompt its moderator into a second post.
Jewish Atheist. This is not a biblioblog, but covers a variety of topics from a perspective which is patently obvious from the title. This blog definitely challenges my thinking. I like the post titled "How can I be Jewish and an Atheist?" because I had a conversation about this very subject with some colleagues many years ago. It took me about five years to really understand the answer, but once I did, my understanding of religion—in theory and as I practice it—was completely transformed.
Chocolate and Zucchini. Because we ought to be challenged to think more deeply about what to have for dinner, too. Clotilde Dusoulier has wonderful ideas about food, emphasizes eating and cooking locally, and has great recipies. Check out this one for Chocolate Gelee with Pineapple and Violets. I haven't made this, but can't wait to. She makes me think not only about food, but also how to write better. Her prose is marvelous, a real pleasure to read, and an inspiration for how to write my own blog and other pieces.

Why God Would Never Receive Tenure

2007-05-13T08:51:00.000-05:00

He had only one major publication.
It wasn't published in a refereed journal.
Some even doubt that he wrote it himself.
It may be true he created the world, but what has he done since then?
His cooperative efforts have been limited.
The scientific community has had a hard time reproducing his results.
He never applied to the ethics board for permission to use human subjects.
When one experiment went awry, he tried to cover it up by drowning the subjects.
When subjects didn't behave as expected, he deleted them from the sample.
He rarely came to class, just told students to read the book.
Some say he had his son teach the class.
He expelled his first two students.
Although there were only ten requirements, most students failed his tests.
His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountain top.

(I wish I could take credit for this work of comic genius. If anyone knows who actually wrote this, I would love to know so that I could give him or her the deserved credit.)

Writing in Biblical Studies

2007-05-10T07:11:00.000-05:00

It might come as a surprise while we're writing a course paper, preparing a manuscript so that we can get tenure, or just sitting alone in our studies, typing away, but we don't write just for the sake of it. These are all good goals. But, ultimately, writing is about communicating ideas we think are important to other people so they might change the way they think or how they live their lives. In other words, writing matters. That is, assuming we want our work to make an impact on people. Good grammar is important. So is clarity. But so are things like grace, elegance, beauty, wit, humor, suspense. Yes, even in academic writing. These elements, which we may associate more with fictional genres, are what engage our readers' interest and make our ideas pack a lasting punch. Here I review a few works on writing that I find immensely helpful and that have changed the way I think about the task. They've helped me get better at making reading and learning an easier, more enjoyable experience. But, more importantly, they have and continue to help me learn to communicate ideas more effectively both to those within and outside of the discipline of biblical studies.

Academic Research and Writing

Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The Craft of Research. 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Need a companion to walk you through the steps of doing a research project? Whether you're writing your first graduate school paper or publishing your seventeenth article, here’s your best friend. I've used this volume as a help for multiple projects and each time assimilate a new idea or hone a new skill by revisiting it. The authors walk you through the process, from understanding your role vis-à-vis your readers and finding and honing a topic to constructing an argument, drafting, and revising. It’s in-depth, detailed, and deals with subjects not commonly treated in writing manuals, such as the role of claims, evidence, and warrants in constructing an argument and organizing your piece. Plus, it’s written by some of the best writers in the business, and their own prose is a beautiful example of the principles they aim to teach.

Williams, Joseph M. Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 2005.

This volume is an important companion to The Craft of Research. Style focuses on the smaller-scale task of constructing coherent and effective sentences and paragraphs. Williams does not just state the principles, but illustrates how they work with myriad examples of good and bad writing—so you can see what not to do as well. This can be very helpful in diagnosing and fixing problems in your own writing. He also discusses usage and how to employ elements of balance, rhythm, and metaphor to create not just effective, but also elegant prose.

Thinking Outside the Box: Non-Academic Resources

Hale, Constance. Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose. New York: Broadway Books, 2001.

Never will you have so much fun reading a book about, of all things—grammar! Believe it or not, this book will have you absolutely howling. It makes great bedtime or bathroom reading. Hale teaches you all the necessary grammar and usage rules about everything from parts of speech to how to write sentences. Perhaps most importantly, she helps you create a voice for yourself as a writer. There are useful sections on what not to do, and how to use (and break) the rules to create really stunning prose. She also has a great list of some other standard and not-so-standard writing references you can tap into. This book is not written specifically for academics, but academic prose does not have to (indeed, shouldn’t) be boring, and there are many ideas in here that can be very effectively applied.

Mosley, Walter. This Year You Write Your Novel. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2007.

My husband saw me reading this book and said, "Please tell me you're not thinking of writing a novel..." After a moment's reflection on the fun to be had by letting him think I was, I explained why I was taking this little detour into the world of fiction. (The book is only 100 pages long and a very quick read. The guy knows brevity. A lesson I could stand to learn...) Mosley reflects on how important it is for fiction writers to know something about poetry because the precision and creativity of word-use demanded by poetry can improve their fiction. I suggest that it may be important for academic writers to know a little something about fiction writing, as we can pick up tips that will vastly improve our prose. Here are a few I picked up:

Mosley speaks of the limitations created by "false aesthetics," which he defines as misplaced or out-of-date things we learned either in school or by imitating other writers—even the past masters—too closely. No matter how great these things are or how well they worked for others, this approach to writing is not fresh and denies you your own voice. It's a good way to get your readers to tune out.
Mosely emphasizes the importance of engaging your reader, making her care about and become invested in the characters and the plot. The same goes for an article on the Dead Sea Scrolls, a monograph on Pentateuchal composition, or even a short note on an obscure point of Akkadian lexicography or a text-critical problem in Isaiah. Even if our readers come with a pre-packaged interest in what we're writing about, hooking them is a good way to get them to remember and assimilate what they've read. Mosely talks about creating a narrative voice as a key way to do this. A good way to grasp the importance of voice is to think about a conversation with the most boring person you've ever met, and then with the most interesting person you've ever met. The latter could make a conversation about a postage stamp interesting and memorable. Other than narrative voice, showing your subject matter rather than telling it is also incredibly helpful.
I was also intrigued by his thoughts on dialogue. On the surface of it, this seems the least applicable to academic writing, because we don't have characters in our prose. Ah, but wait... yes we do. Every time we represent another scholar's views or, better yet, quote another scholar, we're inviting voices other than our own into our prose. Often we do this without thinking about why, what we gain from allowing conversations to happen in academic prose. I haven't fully thought this out, but my sense is there's a lot to be gained by using quotes more deliberately, both to tap into the benefits of another voice (who perhaps worded something very elegantly) and to move our "plot" along.

A lot of these thoughts dovetail with what Williams, et. al., have to say about academic prose in the two books I discussed above. While we in academia can't apply the techniques used by fiction writers in the same way we can use Williams' books (i.e., like a manual), they can help us think about our writing in a new way. I'm thinking about these things now as I write, and I hope you will, too. Let me know if you have ideas about how to apply them.

Teaching

Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.

This volume is full of a wide variety of fantastic ideas for how to incorporate writing into the classroom. Bean describes writing as both the process and product of critical thinking. He advocates a problem-based approach that encourages students to actively engage in critical thinking by learning to question assumptions and come up with alternative ways of approaching a problem. Writing and critical thinking are, in a sense, communal activities: "Good writing," he notes, "grows out of good talking—either talking with classmates or talking dialogically with oneself through exploratory writing" (Bean, Engaging Ideas, 7). I think this is just as true for scholars and professors as for students, and it encourages me to think more deeply about collegial activities. Perhaps most importantly, he asks us to draw on our own experiences with writing and revising as we consider how to incorporate writing into a syllabus. This is wonderful because it is bound to improve our own writing process and product as well.

Publishing

Germano, William. From Dissertation to Book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Germano, William. Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

While I have worked in academic publishing, I myself have not (yet) published a book, so my thoughts on these two books do not come from experience, per se. But these two books beautifully illustrate good non-fiction writing. That alone makes them worth the read. In both volumes, Germano masterfully creates a narrative voice and shows (not tells) us about his subject matter. I had fun reading his books. I learned important things and remembered them. And, perhaps most importantly, I trust his knowledge and experience. Not because of his credentials on the back cover, but because his mastery of the subject matter and the skill with which he gives it expression inspire my confidence. Here's an example:

Some passives we're glad we haven't had to see:
In the beginning the heavens and earth were created by God.
Arms and the man are being sung by me.
Ishmael is what I'm called.
The passive is a buffer, not only between the reader and the writer, but between the writer and her own ideas. I wonder if anyone experiences the world as a series of passive engagements. ("Yesterday, as the garden path was being trod by my feet, a beautiful butterfly was seen by my eye." Which sounds like a case for Dr. Oliver Sacks.) Academic writing often places the reader in just such a world, one where no feet cross any paths, no eye sees any butterfly. If your dissertation was worth writing, it's because you found a path you had to follow, and on the way you came upon something you want to tell others about. Do that. (Germano, From Dissertation to Book, 115)

Germano doesn't give us a staid rule for whether or not we ought to use the passive, but shows us why to do so is often ineffective by asking us to draw on our literary and life experience, making us laugh in the process (and surreptitiously helping us see how ridiculous such expressions sound), and then bringing the lesson right home with a frankness that makes you say, "Oh yeah... That's so obvious!" From Dissertation to Book has a lot of great concrete things you can do to revise your prose. I recommend reading it early on in the dissertation process so you can absorb it as you write. It can also be helpful when revising projects beyond the dissertation. Getting it Published gave me a great insight into the academic publishing industry, everything from what publishers do, to book contracts, to preparing a manuscript. As a result, perhaps I won't feel and sound like too much of a naif when I try to publish that first book.

Luey, Beth. Handbook for Academic Authors. 4th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

This is a pretty comprehensive look at academic publishing. Some of it overlaps with Germano's two books, which I think are better and more engaging, especially where manuscript revision is concerned. But Luey provides a lot of "things you ought to know but no one ever told you." About publishing journal articles, for example, she notes that you shouldn't put your name on pages other than the title page so that your manuscript is easy to send out for blind reviews. Duh. But who would have thought of that? She also has extremely valuable information about timelines for publishing both journal articles and books and the etiquette for handling delays. It costs money to produce journals and books, and Luey shows how some knowledge of the financial aspect of the business on the part of authors can improve the process and relationships with editors. The revised edition also has great information on electronic publication.

I don't mean to sound like an advertisement, but I highly recommend owning all of these volumes. I've read them all cover-to-cover, but I find myself turning to them again and again in the midst of a snag or while doing revisions for both solutions and inspiration. Learning to write is an ongoing process. I find that each new project brings not only new intellectual challenges, but new compositional challenges as well. These works have helped me stretch myself to meet both. I hope you find something helpful here, too. I'll leave you with a great quote on writing to challenge and inspire you, from a wonderful little book about teaching called Spitwad Sutras, by Robert Inchausti:

Consciousness does not exist inside us but persists all around us. Ideas are as numerous and as present to hand as the leaves on the trees. To think clearly, one needs to be less self-conscious, not more so. And finding your voice, as a writer, is really just finding your authority as a person. Knowing what you can say in all honesty from where you stand. Writing is, in effect, the soul seeking its context, and in finding its context, discovering itself. ...What we are seeking as teachers and writers too is our place in the scheme of things—our true authority. If we assume too much, we are sentimental and bombastic. If we assume too little, we are academic and thin. But if we can grasp our context with perfect honesty—and it sometimes happens that we do—then our writing becomes the perfect expression of who we are, and as such it has to be beautiful. Most students think writing has more to do with grammar than the search for reality. But learning to write—like learning to teach—is as much an act of courage as it is an act of linguistic skill.

Rostropovich

2007-04-27T10:05:00.000-05:00

One is compelled to pause for a moment and take stock when the world has lost one of its greats. When I heard this morning that Mstislav Rostropovich died today, I felt much as I did when we lost Copland and Bernstein in the same season in 1990. I was in my first quarter of conservatory studies, already intense enough. Despite all of the racket we made in practice rooms, it felt as though the world had temporarily gone silent, the rest indeed whole.

But reflections on the significance of such a life fill up such silence, with inspiration if not with music. Rostropovich knew his gift—his hands. And he used it with passion, throwing musical caution to the wind and producing some of the most incredible performances you will ever hear. His chutzpah was not limited to music, but he took risks even so that others might have freedom of expression. Four years of housing Solzhenitsyn and writing protest letters on his behalf got him exiled from the Soviet Union. The image of him playing Bach as the Berlin Wall crumbled is as fine a testament as any you can imagine to the fact that the ugliness of the world need not have the last word. Using his gift, he saw to it that it did not. Imagine if we all used our gifts in such a way.

Time to pull out those Bach suites.

The Sunflower

2007-04-20T06:44:00.000-05:00

(The following is an essay I wrote three years ago in response to reading The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Simon Wiesenthal. The book begins with the story of how Wiesenthal, a Jewish prisoner, was called to the deathbed of a Nazi officer, who asked him for forgiveness. Wiesenthal does not tell the end of the story, but instead asks the question: "What would you have done?" The remainder of the book consists of essays by Jewish and Christian figures about forgiveness. I highly recommend it. It'll make you think. Hard. I was inspired to write my own essay, and wrote it as though I, too, were a contributor to the volume. I'm sorry for the lull in posts and for giving you "old" material, and am curious for your thoughts, as always. What would you have done?)

In the vocations that are our lives, we often find ourselves called to seemingly impossible tasks. Sometimes these tasks are watersheds for us. They ask us to draw on all of our talent, skill, insight, and previous experience to respond to a situation in a way that perhaps only we can, and the experiences in turn shape the people we become. Perhaps the story related in The Sunflower was such an experience for Simon Wiesenthal, as he has dedicated his life to many of the issues that preoccupy him there. Such tasks being what they are, I cannot “mentally change places” with him, nor can I say what I would have done. In addition, to do so would be perhaps to rob him of his experience, his story. The value of his question—What would you have done?—may be found in the opportunity to reflect on and articulate the values I would hope I might exercise were I ever to find myself called upon to respond in a situation involving the same issues. What can I learn from Wiesenthal’s story that might help me to write, indeed to live, my story, whatever materials life might present me for doing so?

One of the key issues raised by Wiesenthal’s story is whether there is a difference between forgiving and forgetting; as Bonny Fetterman writes in the editor’s introduction, “Is it possible to forgive and not forget?” (xii). I learned the difference between forgiving and forgetting when at one point in my life I was terribly hurt by something another person did to me. After some time, I realized that I could remember and relate the incident in as much detail as I could have the day after it happened, yet I felt no sadness, no anger, no tension, neither when I thought about the incident nor when I saw the individual who had hurt me. My answer to Fetterman’s question is an unambiguous yes.

This is not the last word on the matter, however. It seems to me that we really need three categories, not two: forgiveness, restitution, and forgetting. I might describe forgiveness as the release of negative emotions pertaining to a situation, no longer holding a grudge, or (more positively) a sense of peace about a situation. Forgiveness is one-way, it is a gift. It is not deserved, and nothing is owed. It is a grace. I might describe restitution as the restoration of the victim and the persecutor to their roles as brothers and sisters to each other in the human family. And this is often quite complicated. In some situations, like Wiesenthal's, the roles of victim and persecutor are clear and mutually exclusive. In many of the situations that befall us in our daily lives, we are often implicated, whether intentionally or not, in both roles, and the healing process is much more complicated. In either type of situation, restitution is about taking steps to recreate wholeness out of the brokenness in individuals, relationships, and communities. I might describe forgetting quite literally as the erasure of memory of both the details of an event and its implications.

Forgetting itself is, I think, never desirable. Difficult situations and hurts in our lives become part of who we are. If we are wise, we learn things from them that we then carry with us as we move on in life. These things can serve as tools for dealing with future situations and can make us more compassionate and moral human beings. Our memory of such situations serves not to support a grudge but as part of our story—where we’ve been and where and how we go from there. This is especially true for situations like the Holocaust. Forgetting denies part of our story, part of what makes us who we are. We forget at the cost of our identity. The Holocaust teaches us that as humans we are capable of heinous things, but also of great things, that we would never have conceived possible. Unbelievably horrible acts of torture and murder were coupled with unbelievable acts of courage and compassion in saving lives and restoring dignity, both individual and collective; sadly the balance was not better. Forgetting also comes at the cost of our ability to deal well with future situations. It isn’t just the lessons we learn about ourselves, but what we do with that knowledge. Are we more compassionate? Do we take action to stop harm done to others? Remembering is important to remind us of both how and why do these things.

As for forgiveness, I’m not certain there are “rules”—whether a “magic formula” of steps to reach a state of forgiveness, things that are “required” before one can forgive, or stipulations about who has the “right” to forgive what crimes. Sometimes, as in the case from my own I life I described above, forgiveness just happens for no apparent reason. You wake up one day and the hurt is gone. Other times, restitution is necessary to move the process along. I’m inclined even to think that restitution and forgiveness may exist in a reciprocal relationship. Forgiveness in many cases may not be possible without active and sincere steps taken toward restitution, whether it be “I’m sorry,” teshuvah, or compensation sought and made through a legal system. On the other hand, full restitution—understood in terms of recreating whole individuals and communities—may not be possible without forgiveness, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa boldly and courageously illustrates for the rest of the world. Without the courage to let it go and to take the steps necessary to help that happen, we are condemned to our roles as victims and persecutors, both corrosive of human potential. Harold Kushner puts it succinctly in his contribution to the volume: “God’s forgiveness is something that happens inside us, not inside God, freeing us from the shame of the past so that we can be different people, choosing and acting differently in the future” (184).

As Kushner’s remark suggests, the power to forgive resides with us. We cannot “leave it to God” to forgive, except at the cost of forgiveness and reconciliation themselves. One can say, perhaps, that “God’s forgiveness” is an ideal that becomes real only by our words and actions, no matter how big or small. This power we have should not be underestimated. Although we must recognize that forgiveness and reconciliation are extraordinarily difficult, requiring process and time, we ultimately cannot settle for what the “average” human would do or what is “reasonable.” To do so is to neutralize our ability to transcend the awfulness of the world and our baser selves. Most ordinary Germans settled for what was reasonable, at best enabling the murder of millions. It was only those who would not settle, who did not sit back and wait but rather drew on this power, who managed to save lives and preserve dignity and integrity, including their own. We are called on to envision a world in which wholeness in the self, in relationships, and in communities is possible, to stand up and say, “I refuse to settle for less,” and then to work with others toward that end. This requires courage, not a little stubbornness, and perhaps even a willingness to flout the norm. But this is fundamentally an assertion of hope.

Biblical Literacy

2007-03-29T16:23:00.000-05:00

The online edition of Time has an article in its March 22nd edition called "The Case for Teaching the Bible," which highlights some curricula written for teaching the Bible to students in public high schools. This article raises some absolutely fascinating (and perhaps nervewracking) issues. Here are some questions it generated for me:

Who is writing these curricula? Who should be writing these curricula? Should there be accountability to reflect what is going on in academic biblical studies?

What constitutes biblical literacy? Content? Knowledge of historical and literary context? Understanding of different reading strategies and what they yield? (The latter particularly important for navigation of how the Bible has been and is used in debate about issues such as slavery, homosexuality, etc.)

What happens when what a child learns in school contradicts what he or she is taught at home or in a congregation?

What are your thoughts?

Risotto with Asparagus, Figs, and Pomegranates

2007-03-28T13:47:00.000-05:00

Since I am taking a mini-break between writing one dissertation chapter and the next (i.e., an hour), I thought I would write my first food post. People who think a lot need nourishment, too. And what we eat should feed our souls as well as our bodies. For me, that usually involves chocolate. (I highly recommend Green and Black's Maya Gold and Dolfin's Earl Grey Tea bars, if you're a chocolate connoisseur.) But I'll get to chocolate later. Today, it's comfort food. No, not macaroni and cheese. Not hash browns, either. Comfort food of the Italian kind...

I don't have enough time to wax eloquent on the glories of risotto. You can find everything you ever wanted to know in Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (New York: Knopf, 1992). Marcella is one of only two women besides me who are known only by first name at my house (Julia is the other one). If you like to cook and do not own this, stop reading this blog, zip over to Amazon and order yourself a copy right now. I have many bibles in a variety of languages, but this is my Italian bible. Here is a fantastic riff I came up with on her risotto with asparagus, inspired by a friend who asked me, "What can you make with asparagus, figs, and pomegranates?" My answer:

1 pound fresh asparagus
dried black mission figs, cut into small pieces
pomegranate seeds
salt
stock (meat or vegetable, vegetable if you keep kosher)
3 T butter
2 T olive oil
2 T onion, finely chopped
2 C arborio rice
freshly ground black pepper
1/4 C freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

Blanch the asparagus, cut into 1/2-inch pieces. Add enough stock to the blanching liquid to make at least 6 C. Simmer. Cook onion in butter and olive oil over medium high heat until it becomes translucent. Add rice and stir to coat the grains. Add stock slowly, about 1/2 C at a time, and stir until the rice has soaked it up. Keep stirring. Keep adding stock bit by bit. Yes, keep stirring. (This recipie doubles as bicep exercise.) When the rice is nearly done, add in the asparagus. Stir in the figs and pomegranate seeds just long enough to warm them. At the very end, stir in the parm and pepper. If you've never made risotto, you should check out the full recipie (Essentials, p. 248) and Marcella's general comments on the dish.

This is a beautiful dish with a great combination of textures and flavors. The figs add a sweetness, while the pomegranate seeds add a beautiful red color, a little crunch, and some tart. When you're sick and tired of working on that article or that chapter, grading papers or preparing for next week's lecture, making and eating this dish is a great way to take a short break and both accomplish and enjoy something beautiful. Serve it with roast duck or eat it—in true comfort food style—by itself in a big bowl with a glass of nebbiolo.

Buon appetito!

Some Things Never Change

2007-03-23T17:48:00.000-05:00

I recently ran across five seals and seal impressions excavated at Ur, all belonging to various people who served Enheduanna, the entu-priestess of the god Sin and daughter of Sargon of Akkad. She lived in the mid-3rd millennium B.C.E. and may be one of the earliest known authors, as two hymns to the goddess Innana are attributed to her. One of these seals belonged to her scribe, another to her estate manager. And then there's this one, which also happens to be on two different seals and an impression:

Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon
Ilum-palil, her coiffeur

A girl has got to have people to manage her various affairs, but the guy who does her hair might just be the most important of the lot. Some things never change...

(For publication of these seals, see Douglas Frayne, Sargonic and Gutian Periods [RIME 2; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993] 38–39.)

More Funny Stuff

2007-03-17T08:34:00.000-05:00

For your St. Patrick's Day reading pleasure, sit down with a dram of Irish whisky and a slice of warm soda bread and enjoy the following:

Robert Krulwich has a piece on the NPR website called "Ides of March After-Party" in which he gives us a rendition of what it would sound like if the Romans sang "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall": XCIX bottles of wine on the wall, XCIX bottles of wine... Completely worth a listen.

Krulwich also has a piece in which he extols the apparently rather dubious virtues of the note B-flat. (This is for all you music geek types out there.) Apparently it makes alligators bellow, among other things. I wonder what Daniel Levitin would have to say about this. (He's a cognitive scientist who studies how we hear and process music, and the author of This is Your Brain on Music, one of the most well-written books I have ever read, very accessible to the non-scientist, and completely fascinating. I highly recommend it.)

Slaine!

Manuscript Errors

2007-03-15T13:06:00.000-05:00

I saw this joke today on a greeting card, very appropos for biblical scholars, calligraphers, and other such types. I hope it makes you laugh as hard as I did:

A group of monks are copying the laws of the church by hand. A new monk notices that they're copying from copies, not from the original manuscript. He tells the head monk, "If there was an error in the first copy, every copy after that would have the same error!" The head monk says, "Good point," and goes to get the original manuscript.

Later, the young monk finds the head monk with his head on the desk crying, "They forgot the R!! They forgot the R!!" He asks, "Father, what's wrong?" Choking back tears, the old monk replies...

"The word is 'celebRate!' 'celebRate!'"

Wish I knew who to give credit to for this one. Apparently, the monks were copying unpointed texts. Or perhaps the author of the joke simply doesn't know how to spell. Either way, that makes it even funnier.

"The" Old Testament God?

2007-03-10T13:20:00.000-05:00

Charles Halton over at Awilum has a very provocative post on the nature of "the Old Testament God" in which he contrasts a quote by Richard Dawkins that speaks to a violent god with Exod 34:6–7, which speaks to a merciful one. Charles has simply juxtaposed the quotes, leaving us to draw our own conclusions. I'd like to add a voice to the discussion (not my own):

When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you... when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. ...You shall devour all the peoples that the Lord your God is giving over to you, showing them no pity... (etc.)

- Deut 7

My intent is not to defend Dawkins (indeed, I wouldn't frame the discussion as a debate in which to take sides), just to point out that he's not exactly pulling his picture of "the Old Testament God" out of his sleeve. Dawkins has chosen which texts to emphasize. So has Charles. And so do most of us, I would guess.

I think the issue Charles has raised by juxtaposing those two quotes is critically important, but decidedly more complicated than his juxtaposition suggests. On what basis do we assign priority to one view of God over the other? My sense is that it's not enough just to choose one over the other, to highlight the beautiful picture of God (or the moral picture, or the compassionate picture, or the one that resonates most with Jesus' teachings, or whatever reason one might have for choosing it) and relegate the ugly one that we'd rather not deal with to the back corner of the canonical closet. Perhaps a more fundamental question is this: Why do we get such conflicting views of God in the Bible in the first place? This question, I think, comes down to what the nature of biblical literature is: how it was written, by whom, and why. How we answer these questions may tell us something about the nature of the depictions of God we find there.

Well, I'm sure I've ruffled some feathers with this post. In fact, I hope I have. Feel free to shed some down in my comments section. I'd love to hear what you're thinking. But right now I'm going back to reading The Edited Bible. (Yes, there's something funny in that.)

"Whither Iraq?"

2007-03-04T22:37:00.000-05:00

Imaginary Grace is fortunate to have a special field correspondent in Iraq. Really, it's just my friend who lives in Irbil. I don't pay her much, but I did persuade her to take some shots for me so that I could write a mini photo essay to share with you. This first one is really a stunner. Not what you see on the news every night. Iraq is beautiful!

These are the foothills of the Zagros mountains. This one was fun for me to see because I am currently studying some letters from an Old Babylonian archive at Shemshara, which is in the Sulaimaniyeh plain, not terribly far south of where this photo was taken. (You can find a map here.) One of the letters has an itinerary in it, and this photo enabled me to envision the kind of territory the recipient of one particular letter was meant to traverse. Irbil itself is, of course, ancient Arbela, and has been inhabited at least since the Ur III period. (That's the late 3rd millennium B.C.E.!!!!) This sign pretty much says it all:

A bit like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, ancient Arbela has not been excavated because this sits on top of it:

Wouldn't you love to know what's under there? Have trowel, need plane ticket... As you can tell from the sign, the people who live here on top of the tell were recently evacuated so that the decaying Qala can be repaired. It so happens that the displaced are among the poorest in Irbil, many of them already refugees from Baghdad, and the move to renovate is apparently very controversial there. I don't know the details of the controversy, but it involves weighing cultural preservation against the welfare of the most vulnerable in that society. That got me thinking about the value of what's buried beneath this decaying edifice and how it might be relevant to the people living on top.

This essay was put off a few days longer than I had hoped, but the delay turned out to be fortuitous, because The New York Times today published an op-ed piece by Matthew Bogdanos, titled "Fighting for Iraq's Culture." (Charles Halton over at Awilum also has some commentary on this.) Bogdanos points out how Iraq's ancient cultural heritage is being sold off, probably to the benefit of the insurgents. As someone who studies the ancient history of the region, I have of course fooled myself into thinking that this material is inherently valuable and respond accordingly with shock and anger, as though someone were causing harm to my child or my true love. But, as archaeologists know (it's the principle of our business), one person's trash is another's treasure. I do not say this to question the value of these artifacts altogether. I find this situation to be a tragedy. I say this to remind myself and us that the value of artifacts is not inherent, but assigned, created. Whoever is selling these artifacts clearly does not value them as a cultural heritage, or at least not as much as they value whatever they gain from exploiting the "trash/treasure" principle. If Bogdanos is right about the insurgents, that gain surely involves ammunition so they can go out and kill their neighbors. This, too, is tragedy.

Why don't they value their cultural heritage? That's an extremely complicated question to which I can't even pretend to have an answer. One factor I suspect may come into play is that they don't view it as "their" heritage. Iraq, after all, is a collection of separate ethnic groups that were split apart and lumped together by imaginary lines drawn in the sand in the 20th century. Bogdanos, with hope, sees the potential for this incredible ancient culture to be claimed as a common heritage, whatever the future of Iraq ends up being. But allow me to offer another possible factor for consideration.

Shortly before the United States invaded in 2003, a friend drew my attention to a book that revolutionized how I think about Iraq, even as a student of its ancient culture. Prior to reading Cruelty and Silence, written by Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi dissident whose previous books had to be written under a pseudonym, I had no idea of the kind of suffering that went on there. Particularly shocking was the effort to exterminate the Kurdish minority that took place in the late 1980s, referred to as the Anfal. I encourage you to read it, for it is powerful. He includes transcripts of interviews, including the following excerpt from his interview with a survivor named Taimour (Makiya, Cruelty, 199):

If you could choose, what would you want to do in your life now?
I don't know for myself.
Is there something you want out of life very much?
Yes.
What?
To be a known person.
A known person?
Yes.
Known for what?
The Anfal.
Do you want to be known more for the Anfal or for being a peshmerga?
For Anfal.
What do you mean "known for Anfal"?
I want the world to know what happened to me.

In addition to the interviews, Makiya also has an essay in this volume titled "Whither Iraq?," in which he gives us his vision for the future of Iraq. He characterizes Iraq in a very powerful and provocative way: "The problem of Iraq is that everyone was a victim, and most people...only know how to think and behave like victims" (Makiya, Cruelty, 225). Whether he is correct about this or not, I don't know. But when I think about what can result from impoverishment and violence in America's inner cities, I don't find it difficult to believe. Victims of violence, forming their identities out of violence, perpetrating violence. The possibilities offered by the riches of culture for defining identity sadly seem to go untapped. They seem to offer not just a common element to connect with, but also the possibility, or maybe just the hope, of a peaceful life.

How can those of us who appreciate and study and love this ancient culture help those who might find in it a common heritage? That's a pretty big question. I don't know the answer. In fact, I'm rather overwhelmed by it. But I thought I'd put it out there. Bogdanos has given us one idea. It's not just about the "inherent" value of the artifacts, or even their value as the earliest evidence of human learning, human technology, human religious impulse. It may also, somehow, be about the people who live on top of the tell.

OOPS!

2007-03-02T16:45:00.000-05:00

In this morning's online newspaper, I came across an article titled "Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein." I share the link because this put all of the mistakes I made today in perspective. I hope it will for you, too. None of them can possibly have been as embarassing as this one. Also so that you don't think I'm interested only in intense and serious things. (I have a post on Iraq coming up...but not until I'm done revising the current chapter of my dissertation.)

I had to do a double-take to make sure I was reading The New York Times and not The Onion.

"Invisible Children"

2007-02-28T20:37:00.000-05:00

A friend just brought my attention to a film called "Invisible Children" that is showing in a variety of locations across the United States in order to raise awareness about child armies in northern Uganda. Nope, I didn't know about it, either. Ignorance is bliss, huh? Check out the website for information on the film, their cross-country awareness raising campaign, and scheduled showings.

Maximalism and Minimalism?

2007-02-25T19:41:00.000-05:00

The terms "maximalism" and "minimalism" are used with great regularity in biblical studies, as those of us in the scholarly world and regular readers of Biblical Archaeology Review are aware. To the best of my knowledge, these terms were coined by William W. Hallo in his 1989 Presidential Address to the American Oriental Society, published as "The Limits of Skepticism" in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 110 (1990): 187-199. Hallo took up the problem of how Assyriologists use cuneiform texts to understand ancient history, religion, and society, and the terms have made it over into biblical studies to label how the Bible is used for these same purposes.

The core issue here, as I see it, is this: How do we read texts? On the surface of it, that seems like a silly question. You read a text, and it says what it says. But in fact we all—scholars and laypeople alike—have reading strategies that guide how we interpret a text. John Barton, a biblical scholar I especially admire for his insight and his ability to articulate important points extremely well, has this to say:

Anyone who reads the Bible is bound to be influenced to some extent by his general expectations about books, and by his experience of reading literature of other kinds. (Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984] 140)

A reading strategy involves assumptions we make about what a text is, how it was written, how it refers to things in the world, and—at core, really—how language works. We acquire these assumptions tacitly as part our cultures, and sometimes we acquire them overtly as we deliberately reflect on how and why we read the way we do. (My sense is this happens rarely outside the academy, but I could be wrong about that.) Either way, these assumptions play a role in our understanding of how a text means something. We often engage reading strategies without thinking about it. But when we name our strategies, we're able to be more conscious of (and deliberate about) what we're doing when we read. And we're also able to see that ours is not the only reading strategy out there.

In a certain sense, these terms are labels for two different reading strategies. Put very simply, a "maximalist" reading tends to trust that the details about history, religion, and society that we find in a cuneiform or biblical text are accurate. A "minimalist" reading, on the other hand, tends to approach such details with skepticism—not the neutral and healthy "questioning" kind of skepticism that ought to characterize scholarship, but doubt. I think these terms are really a problem, and that using them does us more harm than good. Here are a few reasons why:

They describe general attitudes rather than asking more specific questions about how we read texts. Put differently, they allow us to understand our reading strategies only on a surface level. Both "maximalist" and "minimalist" approaches do make specific assumptions about things like how language works. These are rarely laid on the table for discussion.
They're polar. They describe only two reading strategies. Actually, there are a lot of reading strategies one might choose from. Structuralism, Marxism, Feminism, New Historicism, Reception Theory—just to name a few. Plus, each of these strategies comes with a theoretical literature that lays out all those assumptions (even if they're not always clearly expressed and easy to read).
They're often now used in ad hominem arguments, although this is not how Hallo used them. In other words, we tend to use these terms more to situate ourselves (or others) on one side or another of a very polarized debate and defend a position rather than engage issues with the goal of better understanding.

I see the harm as being twofold. First, use of these terms in a sense prevents us from thinking more deeply about our reading strategies. The more deeply we can think about our reading strategies, the better we can understand why we disagree with others about the meaning of a text. We can better see the strengths and weaknesses of both our own reading strategy and that of another. We can also consider how certain reading strategies might be complementary to one another or yield different kinds of results. (Marxism, for example, works pretty well if you want to know about how texts are impacted by the social and economic factors that go into their production, but it is perhaps not quite as helpful for other things.) One of my goals in this post is to encourage us to think more deeply about how we read text. I deliberately include myself in that "us." I need constant encouragement in this department. It's not easy.

Second, when we use these terms, we engage in a certain kind of discourse. "Maximalist" debates "minimalist" in an effort to see who is right. This gives us only two possible outcomes and vindication of one side or the other, assuming the debate can even be resolved on these terms. (I don't believe it can, but that may be a subject for another post.) What it doesn't give us is new knowledge, better understanding. What's more, it puts us in both scholarly and lay communities at odds with one another rather than working together in dialogue to produce new insights. The difference between these two models of discourse boils down to what our goals for the engagement are and how we envision our roles in it. Is our goal to "win" or come to new understandings? Do we see ourselves as adversaries or partners? My second goal in this post is to prompt us to think more deeply about how we engage one another and why.

I'm personally in favor of abandoning these terms. But it's ultimately not about the labels. It's about what's really going on underneath. Isn't it always?

Audience

2007-02-25T18:07:00.000-05:00

One of the first tasks a writer faces is defining and getting to know her audience. This is a tough one in a blog because anyone and everyone can read her prose. I do have a couple of key audiences in mind, though, and I want to say a few words about who I envision you to be. One audience consists of those of you who, like me, study the Bible and the ancient Near East as your profession. Another audience includes those of you who, while you may not be professionals (or professional students) at it, have an interest in the Bible and religion in general. You might be a devoted churchgoer. You might be an atheist. You might attend synagogue only on the High Holidays. You might be generally interested in the role religion and the Bible play in culture and politics. And then, of course, there's you, mom. I know you read with your own very special kind of interest, and I'm thankful for it.

One of my primary aims in this blog is to cultivate discussion about important things that are going on in biblical studies and to help make these ideas and trends accessible to those of you who happen to live outside of the academy. I assume that we can help each other better understand the Bible and the world around us. Those of you who are scholars have a treasure trove of knowledge to offer. Those of you who are laypeople might ask questions and offer insights that those of us with our heads stuck in books (mine is, I fully admit it!) might not even have thought of. It is my hope that what goes on here at Imaginary Grace will add a few bricks to a bridge over the divide.

If you're interested in what's going on here, but don't feel you're part of either of these groups, by all means: Don't stop reading! Post a comment and let me know who you are (by name or anonymously), what you're interested in, and why. I expect—and even hope—that my picture of you as a collective will grow and change.

One challenge that such a broad audience poses for a writer is how to make things accessible without over-explaining them. I will try to toe this line well, but there will be a learning curve. In fact, part of the reason I started this blog was to practice at doing just that. So I ask your patience (and your feedback) as we go. And with that, off we go...

My "Torah Guys"

2007-02-22T21:09:00.000-05:00

For my very first post, I really wanted to explain the title of my blog. Seemed appropriate. And it's important, too, because it gets at what I'm about here (as a good title should). But I'm kind of new at this blog stuff, and I have a lot to learn about the technical aspects of it, so I thought I would write a shorter post that would involve uploading a picture so I could get some practice at that. No, I really am not a Luddite, although I am writing my dissertation longhand on legal pads. Just kidding. Here's the picture:

I love photographs. This one is from a much-loved volume of old photos of the Holy Land (Karl Groeber, Picturesque Palestine: Arabia and Syria [New York: Brentano's, 1925] 58). It rotates in a cycle of other such photos on my screen saver. It is a picture of three Jewish men sitting next to the Western (Wailing) Wall in Jerusalem. I call it "My 'Torah Guys.'" I don't know if that's really a Torah the guy on the left is holding, but I like to imagine these three deeply immersed in a wonderful (and amusing) discussion about some biblical text. The guy on the left is going out on a limb with some new and nifty idea he came up with that morning. The guy on the right is listening with skepticism. See the look on his face? You can just imagine what he's thinking: "Seriously. Come on now. You really expect me to believe THAT?!" My favorite is the guy in the middle. We'll call him the lurker. He's hanging out, having fun, maybe learning something. I can never decide if he's amused or exasperated by the proceedings.

This picture makes me giggle, perhaps because it's so much fun to speculate on what they're discussing. I thought it appropriate to begin my blog with this photograph because I think it illustrates one of the things I value most: impassioned discussion about important (and maybe some not-so-important) things, carried out with seriousness, but also a sense of humor. You see the personalities of my "Torah Guys" coming through brilliantly in this picture, and I am certain they are friends. I invite you, my readers, to participate with me in such conversations. We'll think new thoughts. We'll challenge each other. But most of all, we'll have fun.