Is The Only True God “Copernicum”? Pay a visit to The Church of Jesus Christ and let me know what you think. I’d much rather my book be “Copernican”, personally, but for most authors that’s too much to hope for. But I’m willing to settle for “weighty”, which Element 112 certainly is. I suspect it is also ephemeral, and that too comes with the territory of publishing! 🙂
Elsewhere in the blogosphere, John Hobbins picked up on my mention of reading and hearing papers at SBL. He makes some good points, but as I was particularly interested in exploring a connection between what scholars do at conferences (read and more often listen to papers) and the most common form in which ancient people encountered the writings that are now part of the Bible, namely as read to and heard by them. As scholars reading and writing about the meaning of these texts in a literate context as part of the largely literary enterprise known as “Biblical scholarship”, we need to spend more time reflecting on the Biblical literature in precisely the ways John encourages us to critically reflect on our papers and our delivery of them. Surely one can imagine someone sitting in the congregation that first heard the letter to the Hebrews read to them, and feeling that it was a case of TMI – i.e. “too much information”. At least the author had a sense of humor about it…
On a related note, if you’re looking for an illustration of the way background information, or lack thereof, will aid or prevent appreciation of something, try viewing this trailer in the company of someone who has seen TRON and someone who has not. I suspect that the degrees of interest, appreciation and comprehension will be very different.
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