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Loading...So I started this short thread on teaching by saying that I wanted to reflect on the different kinds of institutions of higher learning there are in this country. What prompted the thread (I thought it would take all of one post, but this is #4 and some more may be coming) was my experience at two very fine liberal arts colleges over the past ten days, Colorado College in Colorado Springs and Centre College in Danville KY. These two schools are very different from one another in fundamental ways, but they are both small colleges (I forget the numbers; I think Colorado College is maybe around 2000 students and Centre around 1200) that focus on the liberal arts.
I teach at a state research university with about 29,000 students. It’s a big difference. And I’m struck by it whenever I give a lecture at a small liberal arts college. Let me say yet again, I absolutely love teaching at UNC and don’t want to trade it for anything else. But there are pluses and minuses to the major research university.
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Have you figured out how you will keep blogging when you return to teaching in August? You will keep blogging when you return to teaching, right? I sure hope so, because I just renewed for another year. 🙂
I’m praying for a miracle.
Just kidding….
I, for one, am glad that you teach where you do, because the fruits of your research reach not just hundreds of students per year, but tens or hundreds of thousands through your books, lectures, etc.
HI Bart, this is a off key question, and I know you are busy right now so please answer when you see fit, however I would like to know a bit more about your “in limbo” days, in other words your days when you were a “liberal christian” so the time in between you becoming a agnostic from evangelical christian, you have pointed out it was paintstaking but if you don’t mind talking about it I waouild like to know in what ways and what thoughts, processes and torments you had to go through and how difficult it was with examples,
thanks
sam
Good suggestion. I’ll think about it. I’ll be touching on this a *bit* in my next book, very briefly.
great thanks, I just thought if you could share your own experiences then perhaps other members may also want to share their own, I know if others did, I would like to share my own.
thanks Bart
Sam
Interesting! Pardon my ignorance, but in which journals do biblical scholars commonly publish? What’s the prestige journal that all aspiring scholars in your field wish to see their name and research? In my days in research science we all had the short list of where we hoped to publish.
There are a large number of academic journals in the U.S. and Europe that deal with Biblical studies. Among the main ones in the field, or just in NT, are Journal of Biblical Literature, New Testament Studies, Novum Testamentum, Biblica, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Zeitschrift fuer die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, Journal for the Stufy of the New Testament — and many more!
Before I first went to an evangelical Bible college, then a mainline seminary, and then a religious studies department at a research university, I never imagined how different each are from each other. Some out there may wanna hear the differences your thoughts why things are so different in those contexts and what the concerns are in each of these contexts.
Good idea; I’ll think about it!
I’m curious as to what types of research you can do while also teaching classes – having to be physically on campus. I understand the part about keeping abreast of the latest scholarship; that can be done online. But don’t advances in the field (those that involve research rather than theorizing) depend on such things as finding and analyzing previously unknown documents? Or analyzing those that have been inadequately studied? Isn’t it necessary in those cases to travel to where the documents are?
Most scholarship — outside of archaeology — does not require travel to foreign lands. The texts are available; but they regularly yield new information leading to new scholarship. You could take my recent study of Forgery and Counterforgery as an example. It’s over 600 pages long, some of it rather dense, but based on texts that are readily available and that have been studied before. It’s a bit hard to explain this kind of scholarship (which is by far the most common kind of scholarship) to someone who hasn’t experienced it (kind of like describing color to someone who is color blind). If you want to see how it works, I’d suggest just breezing through that book — or any one of many hundreds I’d be happy to suggest!