This year’s session of the SBL Blogger and Online Publication program unit will be the last ever, and we will be going out with a bang.
This final blogger session will feature a panel of well-known bloggers whose blogs – like their scholarly activity more generally – reflects and represents well the full range of kinds of blogging and scholarship that exist. The panelists are Bart Ehrman, Wil Gafney, and Lawrence Schiffman. Come hear them talk, then engage one another in conversation, and then answer your questions from the audience.
There will also be two papers, offered by Christian Brady and Rick Brannan. Brady has mentioned his paper on his blog. It will provide a retrospective on his own experience of blogging for more than a decade. Brannan’s paper will provide an example of how blogging by scholars feeds into, and sometimes turns into, a book.
We have not sought renewal of the program unit because, since the time it was created, blogging has gone from being a thing that had to be explained and justified, to a thing that many scholars simply do. And so we will not be disappearing altogether, as though there no longer ever need to be papers related to blogging. But we will be folding ourselves into the Digital Humanities program unit, which has invited me to join their steering committee, and which will have a session dedicated to blogging next year.
Another factor that made us decide not to pursue renewal is the proliferation of overlapping program units, which have a nasty tendency of having their sessions scheduled at the same time.
And finally, there is also the fact that, precisely because of blogging, there is constant blogging, which includes discussion and interaction about blogging. And so it seems that the best way to celebrate and talk about blogging at AAR and SBL is in a less formal setting. And so the blogger dinner will continue, and may be the best place for us to have the kinds of conversations that have been such a great feature of panels at the blogger sessions over the past several years.
Please join us for this final session, if you are a Biblical scholar and you blog, or have ever read a blog. If you’re reading this, you obviously fit into that last category.
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