If you would like a review copy of the print version of my new book:

Tim Bulkeley, Not Only a Father: Talk of God as Mother in the Bible & Christian Tradition (Signs) Auckland: Archer Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-1468091373

Please contact me, please say both where you expect to publish the review (blogs are quite acceptable though a full review rather than a short note would be good) and when you are expect to write it. There are no conditions and you should be as critical as you normally would.

Do not thump the book of G’Quan. It is disrespectful.

Many discussions around the Bible founder on the shoals of factual accuracy. The “facts of the matter”, and claims that they are either accurately or inaccurately reported, generate much heat (and for those who like good knock down arguments¹ delight). This should not surprise us, for since the Enlightenment, we have worshiped “facts”.

Indeed respect for the facts has served us well. Truth is found when the facts are reported and marshaled into arguments accurately.

Yet, always, but especially in matters of relationship, there is another sort of truth. Faithfulness too can be truth. In fiction when a character acts in ways which ring true to their nature (as built up elsewhere in the story or the corpus) and to the relevant aspects of the world as we know it (remembering that willing suspension of disbelief plays a role in all poetics) we say the story is “true”. Likewise when the other things all good fictions communicate, the attitudes and elements of worldview “fit” with (i.e. are faithful to) what we believe, we say the story is true. Similarly, in the ancient world,² when an ambassador spoke a message that represented faithfully what his lord would have intended, his words were true. This would have been so even if the message was in fact contradicted by a written communication that spoke differently – if the lord would indeed have spoken differently in the changed circumstances.

To expect the Bible to conform to the first sort of truth, in a world which lived by the second, is mere fundamentalism (a thoroughly modern system).

Of course, to interpret a text which seeks to be faithful requires more skill and judgement than to interpret one which aims at the facts. And isn’t it interesting how often “the facts” serve to support and sustain the status quo?³

Amanda at Cheese-Wearing Theology has posted this month’s Biblical Studies Carnival, in what ways is the “world” (of bibliobloggery) it presents true?

1. What H. Dumpty described as “glory”.
2. Before modern technologies made swift or even almost instant communication at a distance possible.
3. At least until the pressure for change becomes almost irresistible, at which point somehow those flighty facts change sides.

Here is an extract from the long video I linked to the other day. The extract covers reasons why we should teach theology to adults and children together.

Miniature of men harvesting wheat with reaping-hooks, on a calendar page for August. Queen Mary's Psalter (Ms. Royal 2. B. VII), fol. 78v (from Wikimedia)

As part of my preparation for leaving Carey I’m moving to Gmail. On the whole I find the web interface nearly as good as (if quite different from) Thunderbird especially given the limitations imposed by the choice of living in the cloud. However, I am not yet a convinced cloud dweller,¹ so I wanted the “offline” feature. That meant installing and using Chrome (I use Google for my diary too). That’s OK, Chrome is hardly bloatware :) BUT while in FF mailto links open Gmail in Chrome they persistently ask me why I have not installed and set up Outlook Express !?* :(

I’ve searched the rabbit warren of user comments that serve Google instead of an organised help feature, to no avail. Apart from a couple of third party² plugins there seems to be no way to remove this weird “feature”.

I thought Chrome was supposed to be nearly as tweakable as FF or even (God forbid) IE³ but no, as a matter of simple basic functionality Chrome is a locked down Microserf shop. Weird!

1. Being often out of Internet contact – I have a 3G phone but don’t use the data services because of cost, and because 90% of the time I am not within cell phone coverage.
2. And lacking any seeming “official” acceptance.
3. Which at least back in the Dark Ages when I last used it, let me set up other email clients.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE "The Bridge to Nowhere" by Thad Roan - Bridgepix

Around now I’d be retired, according to our schedule. Actually I’ll be working at Carey for another six months, but we’ve just taken a big step on the journey.

On Friday morning as Barbara, Thomas and I began the final clean-up inside, workmen hammered the “For Sale” notice into the grass verge and our house in Auckland went on the market. On Saturday afternoon, as Barbara and I drove exhausted back to “the farm”, they held the first open home. That evening someone made the first offer, after a couple of phone calls they offered 20k over the CV and we accepted. (Subject to lawyers and a building inspection before Friday.)

We’re surprised and delighted, and I’ve taken a big step closer to retirement. So, this morning I woke thinking about “retirement”. Ceasing full-time employment marks the beginning of what, accurately if somewhat negatively, people used to call one’s “declining years”. This period is a time of life dedicated to (hopefully slowly) running down like a clockwork toy that no one winds any more. This is a period when, barring major illness or disasters, ones capacities and world gradually shrink. In traditional societies, as ones ability to act in and on the world around shrank, ones respect grew. Not so in the “modern world”. Here “old folk” just fade away.

So, how could anyone welcome retirement (the gateway to this twilight zone) and even deliberately choose to begin it early?

As in so many other things, I think of Grandad and Granny. Mum’s dad had planned and saved for retirement all his working life, took it early and enjoyed the “fruits of his labour”. He wasn’t well off, they’d been frugal all their lives and that couldn’t suddenly change.¹ But he entered retirement planning to enjoy himself. Projects like making a dining chair set, and building a garage, as well as his garden and show rabbits kept him out of mischief.² He enjoyed his grandchildren, savoured watching his children now safely grown into people he could like and even respect.

That’s what I want, come June. Oh, not the rabbits,³ and not the building and carpentry (much, though we do have some fences and a piggery planned) but the enjoying life. And like Grandad I don’t plan that my world should shrink too fast, so I do hope that nexct year will see real progress with the development of open resources for biblical studies.

1. Carpenters in those days were not highly paid.
2. Yes, in the UK in the fifties rabbits were scarce enough that people held Rabbit Shows and won rosettes for the best in breed. Grandad and Granny were practical people, so they also bred rabbits for meat ;)
3. In NZ they are a pest. We’re hoping a friend will come to stay and bring a gun to shoot the ones our place seems to attract.

Click for full graphic

Sadly the students who need this advice most probably don’t read my blog ;)

However, for students and others who do here  is some good sensible advice and a quick revision of some of the more useful operators one can use in searching Google.

HT: Lifehacker from HackCollege.com

PS more than 70% of students in NZ do not use Macs, they still cost too much for most students.

I have had a long term on again off again relationship with Logos.

Back in the early 90s it was my first chance to access the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek Bible texts with all the pointing accents etc. and, wonder of wonders, morphologically analysed (or at least Tense Voice Mood indicated). Before I’d been using Online Bible under DOS and Desqview.¹ My only complaint about Logos was that it was slow (but everything was in the WIMP environment of Windows).

However, it could not last… Logos introduced a new version I think it was 2, and the acceptable slowness became the sort of foot-dragging that gives snails a bad name. I spent some money that might have bought one, or even a couple of, reference works on Logos² and bought Bibleworks. Bibleworks just worked, it did everything i wanted faster and better than Logos.

However, one thing Logos has always been brilliant at is providing resources. I saved up an arm and a leg³ and bought the Anchor Bible Dictionary on Logos. I was preparing the Hypertext Bible Commentary: Amos and quick and easy access to the ABD was a real help.


However, Logos was so slow that most of my actual Bible work was done in Bibleworks, so  was using Logos as a sort of glorified e-book reader.


Then Logos, always brilliant at producing resources that I would dearly love to have, started producing syntactically analysed texts. I started to save arms and legs and began buying them.


However, before I could really start even installing them I was “upgraded” to a Windows Vista laptop. It was a nightmare. I installed Linux, and could not face trying to install logos under Wine⁴ so my Logos languished.


Then the laptop died and I was given a Windows 7 machine to replace it. The Logos videos looked great, and I really really wanted those syntactically analysed texts and all that biblical people stuff to explore… So⁵ I bought Logos 4.

So, after the longest intro ever, what are my first impressions?

Logos 4 looks nice, clean and sharp. It feels surprisingly responsive, after a wait while the program loads during which I can I think literally go and make a cup of coffee.⁶ It offers a bewildering array of tools and resources. Far too many. Most of them rubbish. Now, I admit some users rubbish is another users gold. But surely something called the Scholars’ Edition could hide 90% of the out of copyright devotional commentaries Matthew Henry’s great fans can always unhide him, ditto Charles Haddon Spurgeon and the rest…

And then there the windows, try as I might, and having just finished marking for the year I have managed to waste hours trying, I cannot seem to get the windows arranged in a way that suits me. There seems no way to put the menu box that chugs away trying to suggest which 13th century divine might have written something about Qoheleth 4:2 on the right and put the Bible text and translation left and or top. Since I’m of Western culture and I’m studying the Bible it seems to me reasonable to want the Bible at the top, and at the start. The help feature is not easy to point in the right direction… [Does anyone know how to move, and generate new windows?]

Overall first impression there is loads here to explore, it will be really useful, but since it insists (so far) on prioritising all the pretty stuff and dead white guys writing over the Bible text I suspect I’ll use Bibleworks most of the time and only go over to Logos when I want one of the many resources it has that BW doesn’t.

PS: The program has crashed twice today. Ths may be a problem with the blasted OS (this laptop runs the accursed Vista) but OTOH no other program has crashed even once…

PPS: With a bit of playing I’ve discovered how to manipulate windows :) it’s neat, just a bit frustrating that I had to discover by accident and could not easily look it up, OTOH the interface does become more “intuitive” wit use :) Second impressions could be more positive than first ones ;)

1. A great combination that let me do everything Windows 3.1 did, but blindingly fast, except it did not run “new” programs like Logos.
2. This was the period when e-resources cost more than print.
3. This was by now the period when e-texts “merely” cost the same as print.
4. In any case Bibleworks, as always, just worked, more or less.
5. Another missing arm and leg.
6. Timed at approximately FOUR minutes!

There is an interesting confluence in aspects of two significant documents that John Kutsko (SBL) pointed me towards. Today was a news item in Inside Higher Ed, it’s titled The Promise of Digital Humanities and reports on a meeting celebrating (US) NEH grants to digital humanities projects. Among the items that caught my eye was a section stressing the importance of open publication to the future of the humanities, in an era of shrinking funding when even prestigious departments are threatened with closure (like a year or two back the University of Sheffield’s renowned Biblical Studies department).

The section I’m quoting itself quotes the NEH’s Brett Bobley:

A lot of scholarly data over the last hundred years or so is locked up in expensive journals that the public could never afford to subscribe to.

“We’re quite happy about how the digital humanities is, in some sense, opening up the scholarly world to a wider audience,” he said.

That could be the key to winning back support for the humanities, suggested Doug Reside, digital curator of the performing arts at the New York Public Library.

Basically the argument goes that open publication could, by raising the public profile, also reduce the danger of the humanities being seen as irrelevant and so not worth funding.

My mind flipped back to the other document Kutsko had pointed to a week or so back. This one was a report, New-Model Scholarly Communication: Road Map for Change from the Scholarly Communication Institute. It is a careful, yet visionary, document which is full of interesting and exciting ideas.¹ They talk near the start about how:

Advancing the humanities in and for the digital age demands the active engagement of many sectors of the scholarly community working towards a shared vision. The key actors in the successful transition of humanities to a digital environment are:
• Peer communities of scholars able to assess and validate new forms of  scholarship, including genres that cross disciplinary boundaries,  reach new audiences, and use technology in innovative ways
• Publishers able to support new communities of discourse producing scholarship in multiple media and genres, and engaging the attention of diverse audiences

They also spoke of libraries, administrators and funders, but I suspect these recommendations follow from the first two and that there are few of my readers who are administrators or funders! They then provide a series of “actionable ideas”. Which offer an exciting view of humanities scholarship finally adapting to the digital communications environment. Here I’ll draw attention to one:

Reengineer the system of credit. Explore and articulate criteria for assessing scholarly merit in the online environment; experiment with venues for peer review to increase transparency, reliability, and participation; devise methods to sift through the surfeit of available information and direct scholarly attention to meritorious work; and realign reward and recognition systems to apportion credit where credit is due

The peer-review system has served us well, despite its failings² for it has promised, and on the whole provided, a more level playing field and access to all, along with a filter to remove the trash and select the good.

But it is not adapted to assessing the worth of digital communications, nor at all “transparent”,³ nor does it begin to filter the huge and exponentially growing pile of trash (with the occasional nugget of gold) that Google presents to our students and the general public – though this steaming pile is all that the underprivileged (those without access to the fine academic libraries) can use as their starting point. And finally as they say current systems of reward and punishment calculated on “peer review” and “established esteemed journals or publishers” do not encourage – in fact actively discourage – experimental discourse in favour of more of the same old same old. Yet the humanities are about discourse and scholarship is about the new and innovative.

Later in the report they speak of the sweeping changes we are experiencing as an environment for scholarship. They highlight four

• changes in the nature and constitution of the audience (for humanities and all online information): readers now expect to be active users and producers of content, not passive receivers of information; the time span between creating and posting content is short, and reception and reaction equally short

Here there are two challenges, assuring quality within a quick turn around environment (for this modified forms of peer review would be helpful)⁴ and even more radical an environment where “readers now expect to be active users and producers of content, not passive receivers of information”⁵ this change, from a sequence (with considerable delays) of one way communications to a genuinely dialogical engagement, will require new forms of communication more like blogging than print journals.⁶

SBL as the largest and most active global association of biblical scholars has a huge potential to promote and develop such a shift in scholarly communications. Alongside (what I can’t resist calling) legacy journals like JBL the society should set up and sponsor alternative communications media that are more open and responsive, more dialogical and yet with robust processes of quality assurance. Such a move on it’s own would have a refreshing and renewing impact on the discipline, opening real scholarship both to producers on the fringe (the various sorts of “independent scholar” who are increasingly around but still have poor access to both resources and publication outlets) and to a new and broader body of consumers (who currently get their biblical studies from Wikipedia and any  blog Google happens to anoint today).

• rise of informal peer-to-peer networks of knowledge: the blurring of distinctions between expert and lay, academic and public scholars, and scholars and the public is potentially a sanguine development in a democracy that assumes a well-informed citizenry; but it poses challenges to professionals and the processes of professionalization

SBL is one of the prime sets of scholarly networks, with it’s massive “meetings” and the less formal networks that gather round (some of) the program units. Again technology exists (not least email, but with newer more social media offering richer affordances) and is being developed to allow far more contact and discussion to continue outside the framework of “meetings”. This would open the society further to scholars who are not Western or not employed in established educational institutions  (and who probably lack the means to spend a few days in a horrendously expensive hotel far from home as often as they would like). We could over the next ten years see SBL become a genuinely global “meeting place” for biblical scholarship.⁷

1. I hope to post about others in the coming weeks.
2. E.g. “peers” who are sometimes not peers but either old fuddy duddies, not specialists in the precise area of the study, or professional rivals; a review process that is not always as “blind” as it claims or where editors make the real decisions…
3. In fact it reeks of 19th century prejudice and pride meeting in smokey rooms in a “gentlemen’s club” ;)
4.  Paul Nikkel was already suggesting forms of review appropriate to the digital age in his paper “Through an Open Window: Exploring Openness in Biblical Scholarship” from the 2004 AIBI session I arranged.
5. My bold – to match the bold above.
6. The technologies for such media already exist, there are even (when one reads further into the report, and you should because it is fine stuff :) some environments designed for scholarly communications currently in development.
7. Initiatives like the International Meeting, the International Cooperation Initiative, and awards to enable non-Western scholars to attend meetings have already made fine steps in this direction, but digital communications could swiftly outstrip their combined effect in achieving this goal.

A search for "Christ as a man" brought up this photo by mararie

I have just posted another short section to my online discussable book on motherly talk of God Not Only a Father which addresses the question of how The Nature of Christ as a Man interacts with my ideas of the (non)gendering of God.

Not Only a Father  is an attempt at a new way of writing a book, discussing it with people as it is written. So the text currently on the site is subject to change, but I need your comments and questions or objections to help make this work. So please visit, comment/argue with me, and/or get your friends involved :)

You know it's a good bookstore when... by Ben+Sam

If yesterday’s post seemed a trifle touchy, it’s because the author I was criticising was himself unbalanced. I can rectify that today thanks to Jim W who pointed to this: 5 Ways That Paper Books Are Better Than eBooks this list is balanced and sensible, it takes the technological differences into account and points out not only why e-books don’t/can’t have the significant feature, but what they might have that is similar…
It is a really interesting post – read it! Thank you Jim :) Though your only comment:

And then take that e-reader and put it in the closet.  With thanks to Elaine Reid for the heads up.

…suggests that you have not actually read the post you point to. Perhaps that’s how you get all those posts every ten seconds, you’re a content sniffing machine, not a reader?