New blog look

Hope you like it!

Larry Hurtado's Blog

In case you haven't noticed yet, Larry Hurtado has put up a blog now. He is a colleague of mine working in Edinburgh on early Christian devotion to Jesus. Welcome to the blogger world Larry!

Blogger has added static pages!

Thanks to LucValentine who brought my attention to the fact that Blogger has listened to us and added static pages! We can add up to ten static pages to our blogs now. Just go to dashboard and click 'edit pages'.

So I will be working on this blog and getting the static pages put up instead of relocating to another host.

Blogger and Wordpress question

I have not been satisfied with Blogger's inability to support webpages. I would like to be able to have one integrated website-blog that is EASY to manage. I like Blogger because it is so easy to use. And I really dislike my website because it is so cumbersome to alter, which is why nothing is ever updated.

So I tried to alter Blogger to give me some static pages last summer. But this is a temporary fix. I need to find another platform and integrate website and blog.

My biggest concerns are threefold.

1. Is there a way to automatically move my subscribers to a new URL? Or not?

2. Is there a way to automatically move my past three years of blogging history/archives to a new platform?

3. Finally, is Wordpress what I should be looking at? Or are there other recommendations? I like to control the look of my pages, so I am concerned about Wordpress if it is the case (which I don't know) that I can't access the html code.

A response to Pastor Bob

Pastor Bob left this in a comment, raising the issue that he too, as a theological blogger, has been on the receiving end of attack, and notes that the attack is not just positional but personal.

I blog on theological issues, issues in the PCUSA and sometimes Biblical issues as related to issues in the PCUSA. I'm male but have noticed the tendency to react by some bloggers with derogatory comments not only about what I say but also about me.

Being a Calvinist I suppose I understand the reason people don't respond in calm and ration manners. Winning is more important than rational discussion and some believe the proper way to win is attack.

I have participated in April's blog for a while now and while I don't always agree with her I like her perspective.

If you can get more women who will participate in rational discussion (while I have noticed that males tend to attack more often some women do too.) I would love to participate.

BTW I am not surprised but also disappointed that disagreement in academia is as virulent and demeaning as it is in church circles.

Bob raises two issues I would like to respond to. Regarding biblioblogging, I think we need to agree among ourselves to cultivate an atmosphere of respect, and demeaning remarks need to be left out of our conversations. Fair criticism is one thing. Demeaning a position or a person is another.

As for the viciousness of academia and the unwritten rule that we need to win at all costs, this is a climate we too can choose to change. Who made up this rule anyway? Who says that we have to fight like dogs in order to be good scholars? Now I don't want to be misunderstood here. Criticism is not a bad thing, but it needs to be constructive, it needs to work to move our thinking forward. We must take stands when a stand is needed. BUT let's face it, most of us are fairly close on our general views, and our arguments are generally (not always) over the small stuff.

Recognizing this, about fifteen years ago, I helped put together a group to study Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism. One of the things that was important to me was that the group function constructively, that the environment was not hostile and warlike, but collegial and cooperative. That group is still in existence, and I have had scholars come up to me more than once and say that the ONLY reason they bother coming to SBL anymore is to attend our group. Why? Because we are actually doing something constructive in an environment that is cooperative. Why most of our conference continues with this old model of fighting and bickering is beyond me. It serves none of us well, it does not move the field forward. It reflects a mentality of scholarship that is harmful not helpful. Academia is not a war. In fact, we can accomplish a lot more by putting our heads together in a think tank then we will ever be able to do fighting each other as individual scholars.

Dutch Biblioblogs

I just received a very kind e-mail from Jan Pieter van de Giessen who has been watching the positive and negative reactions on the blogs regarding my postings about what we are going to do about the gender gap. This became the starting point for some Dutch biblical bloggers who write only in Dutch to notice that there is a "gap" for Biblioblogs written in non-English languages. So they have just created BiblioblogNED to represent Dutch voices. Jan also noted that this collection of voices is different from other lists because it does not make distinctions between male and female bloggers or the churches from which they come.

This is an example of a positive initiative that was sparked by our heated discussion. And it is a reminder that the community we are writing to on our blogs is international. I don't read Dutch, but I will link to this in my blog roll for those readers who do read Dutch!

Thanks Jan for sending this to me.

What does "insidious" really mean?

Sexism is insidious.

The Latin etymology is fascinating, meaning something like, "sitting there and waiting to ambush." It has a hidden treacherous quality. The lurking lion. Unknown to us. Behind the bushes. Quiet until it strikes with great force and surprise.

Why is sexism insidious? Because it is part of who we are as products of this society. It is built into the structures around us. It is our past and it haunts our present. None of us, no matter how well-intentioned we are, can completely escape it, although try we must!

Imagine my horror and guilt when I realized last week that my own blog roll sorely lacked women bloggers, that I, someone who is a vocal advocate for women's equality, was contributing to the problem of their silence in the biblioblog field! Yes, I had listed those few I knew, but I had not made a concerted effort to go out and find more. I had not networked with others in my field that might know their whereabouts. Thus my recent posts on gender included my own promise that I would try to build a blog roll that reflected what was actually happening in terms of women bloggers and the bible, whatever that turned out to be. Over the weekend, I found that indeed women's voices are out there, but they are largely unengaged, marginalized, hidden from us, or run out of the discussions. This makes it look like they aren't there or aren't interested.

So as for blame, well, who will cast the first stone? Not I. I am one of the crowd convicted by Jesus' words.

My response to the problem of the silence of women on the biblioblogs is not to fix blame, or spend a lot of time succumbing to guilt, but to analyze the problem and then immediately mobilize, to ask what needs to be done to correct it and go about doing so the best I can. So although I think that we are all part of the problem given the insidious nature of sexism, we can also all be part of the answer. We can make the choice to mobilize and make this the year that women bibliobloggers are brought into our community as welcomed and engaged voices.

What are some practical things we might do? These are only a few suggestions that occur to me based on what I have learned from other women bloggers this week and from my own experience as a woman in the blog world. I hope you will send along your own ideas so I can add to these.

The important part is to implement, whether that implementation appears to others as a "token" or not. Even something that is perceived by others as a "token" is a small step in the right direction that will help raise awareness. If we do nothing but continue to sit around our computers and complain, be bitter, criticize those who are trying to do something positive, or feel sorry for ourselves, nothing is going to change. The choice is ours.

1. Link to women bloggers on our blogs, through blog rolls and/or occasional posts that highlight a discussion going on among women bibliobloggers and religion bloggers. Engage positively with women who are blogging. Find some common ground between the two of you and blog on that. If in question, you might check out some male blogs whose authors have had positive engagements with women bloggers in their posts. I am reticent to name names in case I leave someone out inadvertently and give offense. I think it is very evident who those bloggers are.

2. Go out and support a woman in our field, help her get started with a blog of her own.

3. Follow the links on women's websites and blog rolls and find new blogs that none of us know are there. Let the rest of us know.

4. Invite a woman scholar, minister, or graduate student to write a guest post for your blog, especially if she is not already blogging. You might even do so once a month.

5. Include book notes and article notes on publications that women are making in our field.

6. Give bloggers the benefit of the doubt and don't jump to a negative conclusion immediately or sensationalize or trivialize their position. I think this must be the ideal we strive for, even if we might fail sometimes. We ought to read what they have said and allow it our best interpretation, not our worst. If in doubt, we ought to ask the blogger what he or she meant before drawing a negative conclusion. Ask for further clarification. Most of us are not trying to be jackasses.

7. Ultimately we need to recreate the biblioblog climate. My thoughts on this is that this network should not operate as a men's club. Nor should it reflect the conversation that might be going on in the men's bathroom. It should not be a male competition, an academic meeting, or a war. It is a very public and very international forum that invites us to speak together as a world community. We need to allow for the fact that different people with different backgrounds blog for all kinds of different reasons. If we want women to blog on the bible, and we want them to be counted among us, then their posts and their persons need to be treated civilly and respectfully. If in doubt, ask yourself if something you are posting about a woman or her words is something you would want said about your wife or your mom or your daughter.

I leave this post with a prayer whose words came rushing into my mind this morning while I was walking to my office. From St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

Expanding blog list with women's voices

I commented a few days ago that I thought that women blogging on the bible were invisible because we weren't including them on our biblioblog rolls and that if we linked to them and included them, that this would increase their visibility and hopefully change the appalling stats. So I had promised my readers that this weekend, when I had more time, I would get them into my own blog roll. My husband (thank you Wade!) and I are in the process of searching the web for blogs written by women who address the bible. As we find the blogs, we are putting them into my blog rolls. In order to try to organize this a bit, I have now put up two blog rolls. One I call "Women and Religion Blog Roll" and the other "Early Christian History Blog Roll." I will continue to add blogs as they come to my attention.

I especially want to thank all those women who emailed me and pointed me to their blogs. It is unfortunate, however, that the biblioblogging environment appears to have become even more hostile to women since I started talking about this on my blog. Many women have said to me in those emails that they have not felt welcome in the biblioblog environment and some have faced such hostile reactions to their previous posts that they have retreated and stopped talking about the bible on their blogs anymore. This is so incredibly sad to me. What is it about women's voices on the bible that is so threatening, especially to male readers?

I have to say that it is striking how immediately aggressive and sexualized some of the male reaction to my gender blogging has been, and how the humor used (including the cartoons and some of my colleagues reactions to those cartoons and circulation of them) turned women like me into either bitches, madams, or dominatrixes. Much of the male interpretation of my words has literalized them and exaggerated them, so that my words have been turned into the sexist words of a "man-hater" as one blogger put it. I wonder if he would say this to my husband?

I wonder if anyone else has wondered what the purpose of this kind of sexually aggressive rhetoric is? What is it trying to accomplish?

So what have I discovered out of all of this about gender and biblioblogging?

1. Males dominate the biblioblogs, not just in terms of numbers, but in terms of voice and interpretation. Many women who have tried to blog on the bible did not find it a welcome environment. They talk about aggressive and hostile reactions to their posts from male responders, so they chose to retreat and stop writing on the subject rather than become involved in a fight they didn't seek.

2. Women bloggers are not showing up often enough in biblioblog rolls. This is compounding the problem of the appallingly low numbers of bibliobloggers who are women.

3. Women bibliobloggers are usually devoting their blogs to subjects that most bibliobloggers consider marginal or uninteresting or perhaps (dare I suggest this?) threatening. A good number of women bloggers I'm finding are either blogging on extra-canonical materials or feminist issues which is not considered "biblical-enough" to bother with.

4. Women bloggers who talk about the bible are not doing so exclusively nor in the SBL sense. Women's blogs show more concerns for the present-day church and gender issues related to their relationship with the clergy and the church. They are more in line with AAR considerations than SBL. Many are confessional and include a significant amount of personal journaling. So again they are "on the margins" of the bible and not turning up in the biblioblog conversation.

5. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Gage were right (more on Gage in another post).

Five Women Scholars who have most influenced me

This meme is easy. There are so many women scholars who have influenced me that I can quickly write over a dozen. These are not in any particular order. They all have influenced me in different areas of my work.

1. Matilda Gage
2. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
3. Rachel Elior
4. Jane Schaberg
5. Elizabeth Fiorenza
6. Daphna Arbel
7. Phyllis Trible
8. Rosemary Ruether
9. Holly Hearon
10. Elaine Pagels
11. Karen King
12. Anne McGuire
13. Elizabeth Clark
14. Virgina Burrus
15. Elizabeth Castelli
16. Madeleine Scopello
17. Ann Graham Brock

Gender is on my mind

Perhaps it is just coincidence that as I finish off chapter 3 of Sex and the Serpent, I have begun to see the biblioblog world differently. I am becoming more and more aware of how insidious sexism is, how it is institutionalized, how it is around us in ways we don't recognize, how what we do or don't do fosters it without our knowing it. A simple thing like a blog roll and who is on it can make a huge difference. If that blog shows up on 200 other blogs every time the author posts, consider how that multiples her voice. Consider the thousands of readers of our blogs who might look at that blog roll and see her post and think, hey, that looks interesting, think I will go over there and check it out.

I am keenly aware that our time is not a feminist time, but a negative reaction to it, or some would say against it. I have even noticed a turning back for women, as if we are so exhausted with the fight, that we are hunkering down in the trenches and retreating just to try to keep some of the ground that we have gained over the last thirty years. And men continue to dominate the churches, men continue make more money for equal work (in fact we are now losing ground in this stat the last time I looked it up), men continue to dominate the courts and the senates and the congresses, men continue to dominate institutions of higher education, men continue to dominate the corporate world. What is happening in the majority of homes, I can only guess, but I do know this, domestic violence is continues to plague our country and it is statistically the men who are violent to the women and children they live with.

My suspicion is that much of the male domination continues because deep in our communal psyche the bible reigns, where women are dominated by men from chapter 2 of Genesis, and depending on your interpretation of Genesis 1:27, perhaps even from chapter 1 itself. In fact, Paul read Genesis 1:27 in a radically patriarchal way, understanding it to mean that only men are created in the image of God, leaving women to be the "glory of men" (1 Cor 11:7). The male domination we experience today is not just social, something that can be changed through reasonable measures we take in society-building, because the domination is divinely ordained. It is fixed, something that God set it in place and women deserve because they are the temptresses and sinners who wrought (and still wreck) disaster on men and the world. No matter if we agree or disagree with this, it is out there among us, in the communal consciousness. Matilda Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were right. The biggest obstacle to the equality of women in our society is the bible, the Genesis story in particular.

I have been lamenting this for a long time, but now I am becoming angry about it. I have taught on the subject of women and the bible for fifteen years, and yet it is now as I write about the subject that the hundreds of years of suppression, the hundreds of years of divine sanction for male authority and domination, the hundreds of years of women's often willing silence is rolling over me. At times is is hard for me to write because my feelings of pain are so strong.

So today I want to leave you with some words I wrote yesterday for chapter 3 of my book, about the women in Corinth who faced Paul and his patriarchalism, women who read Genesis 1:27 very differently from Paul - to mean that they too were created in God's image and should no longer wear the authority of their husband's on their heads:

"From Paul's argument we can gather that the women in Corinth had removed their veils (at least while worshiping) in order to align their social lives with their spiritual experience. They had mobilized their church by making their spiritual experience a social reality. Since they had been baptized in Christ and received his spirit, they believed that they had been recreated in the androgynous image of God. As such, the strict gender hierarchy of their immediate world had been abolished for them. Freed from these constraints, they tore off their veils, toppling the male hierarchy and dismissing the now-illegitimate authority of their husbands. This is an astonishingly brave action for them to have undertaken, since it would have marked them to other Jews and Romans as licentious women, even adulteresses, a point which Paul takes great strides to press home."

What are we going to do about the blogger gender gap?

Alright, the gender gap among bibliobloggers is appalling. The gender gap has nothing to do with the internet or women being afraid to blog or publicly speak our minds since women do this in many other internet forums.

I continue to muse that it has nothing to do with the area of study since seminaries have plenty of women attending, as do the churches. I admit that women are sparse at SBL, and they are sparse in universities as professors in this field (I can count on my hands the number of women that hold professorships in biblical studies), and they are sparse in leadership roles in churches, but blogging is not being done mainly by professors and church leaders. Graduate students and people fascinated with the field make up a large portion of bibliobloggers.

Biblioblog Top 50 commented in my last post on the subject that they have considered this and have come to the conclusion that biblioblogging is mainly confessional so "Simply put, because the structure of Christian authority is male-dominated, and because most bibiobloggers have Christian affiliations, biblioblogging is likewise male-dominated."

This is a good try, but I don't think so. There is no Christian authority hovering over women and telling them they can't or shouldn't blog on the bible. Women are great talkers, and from my lifelong conversations among friends, women love to talk about their spirituality and religious traditions. The power structures that are keeping women from advancing in the field of biblical studies in terms of the academy, or keeping them from advancing in the churches into positions of power, do not control the internet.

Or do they? Let's consider Biblioblog Top 50's comment further. At the end of the comment we find this language in relationship to women's blogs on the bible.

(But, for those interested in reading at the margins: Tonya from Hebrew and Greek Reader; Ekaterini G. Tsalampouni from Ιστολόγιο βιβλικών σπουδών / Biblical Studies Blog; Amy Anderson from Evangelical Textual Criticism; Mandy from The Floppy Hat; Gillian Townsley and Elizabeth Young from The Dunedin School; Suzanne McCarthy from Suzanne’s Bookshelf; Rachel Barenblat from Velveteen Rabbi; Renita J. Weems from Something Within.com; Deirdre Good from On Not Being a Sausage; Iveta Strenkova from Bibbiablog; Cláudia Andréa Prata Ferreira on three separate blogs; Karyn Traphagen on Boulders 2 Bits; Julia M. O’Brien; Jane Stranz on Of life, laughter and liturgy . . .; Helen Ingram on The Omega Course; Lao Shi (Jennifer ) Chiou on 邱老師網誌
Chioulaoshi Blog; Ruth P. Martin on The Pioneers’ New Testament; Brenda Heyink on Joining in the Conversation; Judy Redman on Judy’s research blog; Annette Merz and Cathy Dunn on Acta Pauli; Lisa, White Bear Girl aka Sophie Clucker on Bible Study Connection; Megan Rohrer on Transcript.)

What? "For those interested in reading at the margins"?! Are women's biblioblogs at the margins?! At the margins of what? With this kind of language, it is no wonder that women's biblioblogs aren't in the stats. I have never considered my blog "on the margins" nor do I imagine have Deirdre or Judy or any of the other women considered their blogs to be marginal.

So this is my hypothesis. I think there are as many women bibliobloggers out there as men, but they are not visible. Why? Because many of us women post on subjects that are considered marginal (even heretical, especially if there is any feminist bent) to bible studies by the men who are blogging about the bible. Our blogs are easily justified as unimportant. They remain unknown or unread because they haven't been linked to by the male bibliobloggers who dominate this blog niche and the field in general, a point that Julia wisely raised in the comments to my last post on this subject. Julia wrote: "But I also wonder about the role of networking and way that many of the blogs in the top tier regularly reference one another. How do we encourage each other's success, make sure that others find the good work that's out there?"

So I say, enough of this nonsense and rationalizations. This is what I'm going to do. This weekend when I have more time, I am going to get the women bibliobloggers (all of them) into my sidebar blog roll. I am going to start with this list that Biblioblog Top 50 has so kindly put together on women's blogs (their so-called marginal blogs). And if any of my women readers have biblioblogs not in that list, or if any of my readers know of other women bibliobloggers not in that list, send that information to me and I will add it to the blog roll. Those links will be there for anyone who wishes to copy them and get them into their own blog rolls.

Let's create some visibility for women bibliobloggers and stop the marginalization of women's biblioblogs. Let's change the stats.

Gender concerns among bloggers

I continue today writing on sex and gender and early Christianity (I'm finishing up c. 3 of Sex and the Serpent), but I took a lunch break and surfed over to the Biblioblog Top 50. I scrolled down the page and was struck by the fact that in that list of hundreds of names and blogs I am just about the only woman's voice represented. And as a voice, my woman's voice would have to be a voice asking us to rethink orthodoxy and heresy, to revision the struggle for power and authority, to listen to the echoes of those who lost the theological and social battles, and learn from our past to better our lives and those of our children.

Why are there so many male bibliobloggers? Why are there so few females on that list?

Working on the blog today

Designed a new banner for the blog today. What do you think?

New blog menu bar

I have been working the last two days trying to figure out how to put "static" information pages on Blogger which doesn't have such a widget or capability. It has meant study of html code and reading a series of posts on techno blogs and hours of tearing my hair out (okay, I'm not bald yet). But it has been achieved at least in a useable format although I am sorry to say that it is not pretty. Creating pretty picture tabs was just too much for me.

I promise to get back to posting real content, although it will continue to be slow over the rest of the summer. My little boy Alexander is starting Kindergarten, and so I want to give him some real home summer time during the month of August before he starts into the public school system. I will post sporadically, and will be tweaking the look of my blog in the meantime.

I am still considering whether to continue the Creating Jesus series, so if this is something you want me to do, please leave a comment.

Happy New Year!

These last few weeks have been family-filled, quite literally. My in-laws stayed with us since December 10th and celebrated with us my son's fifth birthday and Christmas. So I have not been near the computer to blog on anything, nor has my mind been particularly thinking about academics lately. But now I have taken down the tree, my in-laws have gone home, and on monday Alexander goes back to school, as do I.

I extend my blessings for a good New Year to all my readers and their families and friends. Next week, I will get back to regular posts, including apocryphotes.

For now, Kelly Sonora sent me a link to Jessica Merritt's "Top 50 Ancient History Blogs" and the Forbidden Gospels, as well as Apocryphicity and Paleojudaica made it! Thanks Kelly.

UPDATE: and Jared's blog Antiquitopia.

New Bible Blog Directory

Logos Bible Software has put together a new Bible Blog Directory. Check it out HERE>>>>

What is a biblioblog and who is a biblioblogger?

I have been thinking about this question for a couple of days now as I have been working to clean up my sidebar and going back through the year looking over other people's blog templates and older posts, including carnivals. Since I am especially attuned to the issues of canonicity controlling biblical studies' academic discourse, I began to notice the same marginalization of apocrypha blogs in the biblioblogsphere. Should they be included in carnivals? Should they be mentioned in roundups? Should they be listed under "biblioblogs" on websites?

This observation has made me wonder what the parameters are for biblioblogging if indeed there are any? Does a blog have to be focused on one of the testaments? Or can it deal with ancient Israel, Judaism, and Christianity on a broader scale? Does it have to be a so-called "conservative" blog? Or a so-called "liberal" one? Does it need to be "academic" or "theological" to be included?

My opinion? It is not too difficult to guess. If the apocrypha isn't taken seriously, we will never be able to understand the development of early Christianity fully, nor fully appreciate the traditions and texts that eventually were canonized in the NT.