SBLogging

By complete coincidence I am sitting next to Ken Schenck, a good friend and fellow New Testament scholar and blogger, on a flight back from Atlanta, where this year’s Society of Biblical Literature conference was held. Neither of the main conference hotels provided free wi-fi, and so I didn’t manage to blog the conference as it was going on, much as I would have liked to. Delta, on the other hand, managed to provide us free wi-fi in flight, and so this is my first blog post written and posted while on a plane.

Before Atlanta I was in San Diego briefly in connection with the Mandaean Book of John project. San Diego airport provides free wi-fi, as did the hostel-like hotel I stayed in.

The Society of Biblical Literature absolutely must choose as conference venues only places that will provide wi-fi to conference attendees. We stay in touch electronically these days. few of us post our cell phone numbers publicly, but even if we did, others would need to access the Internet in order to find the number. We need to be able to connect with one another via e-mail, Facebook, blogs and other means, and for the sake of students and all attendees without institutional financial support for their expenses, wi-fi should be freely available.

I will blog about sessions in a separate post. For now, I just wanted to avail myself of in-flight wi-fi to resume blogging and comment on this important issue related to SBL.