Where I have been, where I am going
I haven’t blogged much lately—at least, not on Higgaion. This simply reflects the number of hours in a day, and how I’ve chosen to spend my discretionary time. All work and no play makes Chris a dull boy, and a grumpy one. I’m increasingly trying to separate my work life and home/personal life, getting my pedagogical and scholarly work done on campus 7:30–4:30, and then leaving it behind when I go home.
The thing is, if I get my pedagogical and scholarly work done 7:30–4:30 daily, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for blogging. Occasionally I will take time to post something when I feel I have something important or useful to say. However, I hereby officially, explicitly, and ceremoniously declare myself free of any felt obligation to post stuff. I am not “retiring” from blogging or any such nonsense, just taking a different approach to budgeting my time.
I appreciate all of you who post regularly on your own blogs; thanks to the iPhone, you provide some of my favorite bathroom reading (was that too much information?), even if I don’t comment frequently. I appreciate all of you who have contributed regularly to the comments on Higgaion over the last few years, and I hope you’ll keep Higgaion on your RSS feed, even my posting slows to a crawl.
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 page pace (thanks, G.M.!) of no less than two chapters per week, but cannot really aim higher than that at the moment.
שלום עליכם
8 comments Christopher Heard | Bible (specific texts), biblical interpretation (methods), blogging, books
Slowing to a crawl, I can handle that as it leaves open the honest hope of a post every now and then. And that is better than nothing.
Looking forward to reading your take on Van Wolde’s interpretation of Genesis 1!
(…scratching head…trying to figure out how the publisher managed to fit no less than 2 chapters onto the single page Chris is keeping up…what would my life be like without fresh Higgaion content…)
They’re really, really short chapters. :-)
Chris,
Since I’ve read other things by Ellen van Wolde, I’m convinced she has insights worth discussing. Maybe not the kind of insights that will get you worldwide media coverage, but still. It will be excellent to read your reflections.
Blogging in my case allows me to experiment. The subject matter(s) of biblical studies have so many tie-ins to everything else going on. There is an endless number of things worth blogging about.
I’m still trying to figure out what works best.
I”m sorry I thought that this was the same author that wrote “Living Dangerously” about Kiefer Sutherland. But apparently I was wrong. In any case if I’m not I would like to say that I appreciate the time and effort that went into the book, but I was disappointed in the amount of grammatical and punctuation errors. Besides those you also contradicted yourself on his tattoo as well. It’s like you started off strong then rushed through to the end. You left out a few of his works as well. Overall it was a good read so I thank you.
Sara, I’m a different “Christopher Heard.” There are at least a dozen of us out there … one is a film critic, but that’s not me. :-)
Wait a second, I’m not so sure Sara was wrong; the part about him contradicting himself is a dead giveaway. So are the grammatical and punctuation errors, yet overall you’re a surprisingly “good read”. I think she’s onto something. Has anybody actually seen both of these Christopher Heards in the same room at the same time? I rest my case.