The SBL and the Blog

I just finished spending five days at my annual professional meeting, the Society of Biblical Literature, this year in Atlanta.   This is a very large conference, probably about 6,000 people here for it – not to mention another 6,000 here for the American Academy of Religion conference that is held jointly with it. For both conferences this is a chance for professional academics in their various fields of religious studies (New Testament, Hebrew Bible, early Christianity, early Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Religion and Culture, Religion in the Americas and so forth and so on – lots and lots of fields) to come together, attend academic papers on various topics (dozens of papers read by scholars all at the same time throughout the convention center), have meetings for various organizations, talk to editors, browse through the enormous book display hall where publishers in the field display all the recent books, and so on.   This is not a conference for lay-people interested in the topics: it is heavy duty scholarship.  But for experts in biblical studies, it is [...]