While I was looking the other way, Jim West and John Loftus got into an argument about whether John properly qualifies as a “biblioblogger,” Hector Avalos came to John’s defense with, in part, a comparison of John’s and Jim’s educational background, and Jim decided that blogging was boring and deleted the latest incarnation (who knew biblioblogs could ride the wheel of samsara?) of his WordPress blog.
In the ensuing discussion, which has been voluminous (too voluminous for me to try to track, though better bloggers have attempted it), my name has been “dropped” a few times in reference to a post I wrote over three years ago during one of my not-terribly-infrequent public disagreements with Jim about home schooling.
When considering any writer’s/speaker’s/blogger’s argument on this or that matter of fact or interpretation (biblical, political, or what have you), educational pedigree doesn’t mean nearly as much to me as what that individual actually says. (Full disclosure: I don’t feel the same way when making faculty hiring decisions, where there are lots of other issues to consider, such as public relations, accreditation, rankings, and the promise of continued scholarly output that gains a hearing in the academy.) Thus, the source of Jim’s (or John’s) highest degree makes no difference to me in terms of weighing what Jim (or John) had (or will have) to say on any subject.
My argument three years ago (and I still agree with it today) is that Jim’s actual educational history (a Th.D. from a distance-learning institution based in Georgia, earned while Jim was pastoring churches in North Carolina and Tennessee) and actual pedagogical practice (teaching in online and distance-learning courses for institutions in Quartz Hill, California and Copenhagen, Denmark—according to his CV online at Quartz Hill School of Theology, last updated in 2005 as of this morning) do not cohere with a passionate hatred of home schooling. Jim’s own doctorate and the courses he teaches (or was teaching as of 2005) depend entirely for whatever legitimacy they have on the students’ self-direction and autodidactic pursuits, much like home schooling. Nobody doubts that some (perhaps many) home schooling experiences end up providing the students with pathetic excuses for instruction, just as some apparent distance education programs are really nothing but diploma mills. These facts do not indict home schooling as such or distance education as such, only certain implementations thereof. Either can be done well or poorly. My point in 2006 was that Jim’s actual practice of post-secondary education thoroughly embraces individual adults pursuing baccalaureate and higher degrees at home with guidance, sometimes quite minimal, from instructors. Jim himself is obviously a skilled autodidact. Yet on his blogs, Jim never failed to exploit any opportunity to criticize people who would apply the same educational logistics to elementary and secondary education.
In short, my comments about Jim’s educational background and teaching practices were not an attack on the quality of the credentials themselves (as I think Hector intends his own comments), but part of a critique of the inconsistency between Jim’s own educational practices and his intense rhetoric against home schooling.
I did not then, and do not now, want to get into a debate about the “worth” of a degree from Andersonville for ministerial or academic purposes. My argument with Jim about home schooling is long-standing and well known to those who have been around the biblioblogging community for a few years. Indeed, I started blogging partially for the very purpose of arguing with Jim about that very issue from a non-evangelical point of view (and because I thought the biblioblogging world, which was relatively small at that time, needed a voice somewhere in between Jim and Joe Cathey on historical issues).
For the record and in the interests of full disclosure, both of my sons (now in kindergarten and sixth grade) attend the California Virtual Academy of Los Angeles, an online public charter school, doing their lessons at home under the direct guidance of my wife and, one day a week, myself. A state-credentialed elementary grades teacher hired by the charter school supervises and assesses the instruction; CAVA curriculum adheres to all California state educational standards, and CAVA students are subject to the same standardized testing procedures (for whatever little they’re worth) as students who physically attend California public schools.
So if you see (saw) my name popping up in comments and such surrounding Hector’s criticisms of Jim’s declarations that John doesn’t count as a biblioblogger, please do me the courtesy of keeping the context in mind. If you disagree with my assessment and think that Jim’s Th.D.-granting institution and his teaching appointments c. 2006 (I don’t know whether anything has changed since then) are irrelevant to his criticisms of home schooling, that’s fine. I disagree with your judgment on the matter. But please don’t get or give the impression that one day I just woke up and decided out of the blue to write a blog post criticizing Jim’s educational background, as that’s an extremely distorted picture of what happened halfway through 2006.
By the way, while I’m on the topic (and I’ve been on this topic far too long this morning), I might as well say something about John Loftus and biblioblogging. Back when the “Biblioblogger/SBL Affiliate” badge started popping up all over the place, I raised the following concern, among others:
2. The whole idea of constituting “Bibliobloggers” as an official group threatens to enshrine the perpetual “who’s in, who’s out” nonsense as a permanent feature of discourse within the group of bloggers who happen to blog frequently about academic biblical studies. Witness the recent flare-up of the perennial “Where are the female bibliobloggers?” question. Can’t we just blog about what we enjoy discussing without trying to define group boundaries (even if in/out status is self-selecting)?
Interestingly enough, in comments to that post, Jim West hotly insisted that he had no desire to arbitrate the boundaries of biblioblogdom:
Rochelle [Altman?] wrote: Official ordering of bloggers is a step towards controlling the content on the web through controlling independent bloggers.
Since when is Jim West a spokesperson for all bibliobloggers? That already implies an organization, which does not exist.
It’s not the carnivals that started this trend. Whoever started the top 50 opened the door for exactly this type of control. …
The SBL now has a self-elected blog czar. And if you do not check on Jim’s blog daily, you are now letting the the SBL and anointed bibliobloggers down — and those who do not bow to pressure will be marginalized.
Jim West wrote: you guys- you should take your comedy show on the road.
if you really, in your hearts, believe im trying to do ANYTHING besides organize a program unit for the sbl you’re idiots.
After raising the concerns I mentioned, I was assured over and over again on various blogs that neither Jim nor anyone else would attempt to draw boundary lines defining the “insiders” and “outsiders” of biblioblogdom. Not long thereafter, the new management (not including Jim) of Biblioblogs.com began to draft criteria for inclusion in Biblioblogs.com blogrolls, and a couple of months later, here comes the Jim-initiated fuss over whether John Loftus can play in the “Biblioblogs Top 50″ game.
Enough, already!
Blog about what you want to blog about. Read the blogs you want to read. Offer support for the ideas and arguments with which you agree. Offer critiques of the ideas and arguments with which you disagree. Stop arguing about names and labels (evangelicals and biblicists of all stripes may wish to invoke 1 Timothy 6:4 and/or Titus 3:9–11 at this point). Just write. Read. Comment. And enrich us all by substantive discussion of things that matter, not of artificial lines drawn in virtual sand.
Please.
By the way, I just started reading Ellen van Wolde’s Reframing Biblical Studies: When Language and Text Meet Culture, Cognition, and Context (Eisenbrauns, 2010). This book includes a fully-detailed English-language version of van Wolde’s arguments regarding the sense of ברא in Genesis 1, and I’m eager to read that. So far, I have finished only the introduction (chapter 1), but I can already report that Van Wolde’s argument is far more complex than it appeared when all that we Anglophone bloggers had to go on was a brief report from a Netherlands newspaper. I will share more of my reactions to van Wolde’s book as I work through it—I hope to keep up a 
At this time of the semester, I must evaluate quite a few student papers (208 of them, to be precise). I have grown weary and frustrated by getting hundreds of papers in .docx format with unnecessary, inappropriate, and just plain annoying extra white space in between paragraphs. And why have students suddenly started putting extra space between paragraphs? Because Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, set the defaults for the latest versions of Microsoft Word (on both PC and Macintosh) to put a 10-point white space after each paragraph. I have never in my life seen a style guide for college papers that called for 10 points of white space after each paragraph, but most students today either don’t bother to adjust the defaults, don’t realize that they should, or don’t know how. What on earth possessed Microsoft to stick in that 10-point white space in the first place?
On what basis, by what algorithm, can Netflix predict that somebody who likes The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air would also like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit?
