about your no.1, i am always puzzled by undergraduates and graduates alike whose approach to education seems not to be to see what their intructors can teach them but what they can teach their instructors, confusing academic freedom with their own inability to be open to new and different ideas. if only all students would give “proper amounts of respect and deference” to their instructors, as you say, life would be much easier.

Christopher,
It is a very good question. The details of my teaching are still being worked out, but I know that in addition to teaching in NT and early Christianity, I will be teaching departmental courses for majors in religion, so my experience in teaching theory and method courses in religion before will directly pay off. I also plan to list some of my classes in the gender studies program, and part of my teaching responsibilities lie in a new Jewish studies curriculum. These happen to be the three areas that I developed outside of my particular field and I imagine that they were influential in the hiring decision.

oudenos,
From what I’ve seen of you, I don’t think you have any reason to have an inferiority complex in the least! As for aspiring to be at a research institution, I sort of feel like it is similar to aspiring for callings. If you set your sights for it, it might work out, or it might backfire. For now, I am just going to focus on excelling at my current job as much as possible.

Smallaxe,
It is an excellent question. I’m not sure I know them all, but if you count tenured or tenure-track people, off the top of my head I can think of G. Hardy, B. Birch, P. Barlow, K. Flake, T. Givens (though he may be technically in literature, I’d have to check), and S. Taysom. No doubt I am missing many. In biblical studies, I can’t think of any, but I don’t claim to know all of them. There are of course a handful of excellent LDS graduate students and recent PhD’s in biblical studies who are teaching in non-tenure track positions around the country, so there will likely be many more in the near future. I do believe that Stephen Robinson of BYU was tenured at a liberal arts college in the 1970′s, but whether he was in a religion department or was classified as biblical studies, I don’t know. I’d love to know more about this history!

Seriously though, I love to read these and they are good reminders for those of us in more distant echelons, even if I my inferiority complex happens to mutate a bit more by the end of each post.

Taylor P., is teaching undergrads at liberal arts college a destination for you or are you considering making a run at research institutions at some later point in your career?