I mentioned in previous posts that a good deal of my career has developed because of serendipitous moments. As I look back on it (from this halfway point ), most of the good things that have happened to me seem to have come about by pure chance. Of course, I took advantage of the chances as they came along. But still, no one can deny that a major chunk of life is all by chance.

In those two earlier posts, I talked about how my first teaching position at Rutgers was pure chance – a professor of NT there had to take emergency leave in the middle of a semester because her husband had been diagnosed with cancer (and if I had not, as a result, landed that job, I never, ever would have been hired at the University of North Carolina, and could well be pursuing an entirely different career, as a result; I’ll say more of that in another post). And, far less momentously, I discussed in another post how I lucked into doing the two volumes of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library – I just happened to share a cab one day, at random, with an editor at Harvard Press and just happened to mention the older edition to her and the need for anew one. And so it goes.

I think I’ll spend some time in a series of posts, periodically here and there on the blog, talking about some of the other serendipitous events that have affected my career — some that were truly momentous for me (such as getting the UNC position itself; some real blind luck there, as it turns out — in ways my colleagues here don’t even know about!), and others far less so.

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