I’ve been playing catch-up recently on many projects, and those of you that follow Higgaion regularly will have noticed a recent upsurge in posting. In the “still catching up” category, it’s well past time that I acknowledged Richard Beck and Donna Bowman, both of whom kindly tagged me with the Thinking Blogger Award meme. As I understand it, once nominated, you’re supposed to nominate five other bloggers who “make you think.” The Thinking Blogger meme has been floating around for a while, and so it is entirely likely that any blog I would nominate has already been tagged. Still, I’m going to make the effort to tag five blogs that I haven’t previously seen tagged—which should not be taken to imply that Richard and Donna don’t make me think, but hey, their contributions have already been recognized.

Here, then, are five bloggers that make me think—and as far as I know have not yet been tagged with a Thinking Blogger award.

• Duane Smith at Abnormal Interests. Duane is a nice, hospitable guy with a good sense of humor and good culinary sense, but he’s getting this tag from me because of his frequent blogging on matters of Ugaritic and Akkadian philology and other abnormally interesting stuff.
• Dr. Claude Mariottini‘s eponymous blog often gives me ideas upon which to meditate, and sometimes, to which to respond here—often in the form of extending Claude’s ideas in a different direction than the one down which he started.
• Even if he occasionally resorts to a cheesy “Best Of” technique to keep the posts coming regularly, Tyler Williams is a thoughtful and thought-provoking blogger on biblical studies and related matters, including biblical studies software, the Bible in popular culture, and so on.
• Can it really be the case that nobody has yet tagged AKMA as a thinking blogger, or did I just miss it? To me, the breadth of AKMA’s interests, and the acumen with which he manages to comment on everything (yeah, yeah, that’s an overstatement, but go with it) is really quite staggering.
• Finally, it may be stretching the meme a bit, but I’d like to nominate the whole team at the Better Bibles Blog. If I have to pick just one member of the team, I’d nominate Suzanne McCarthy, with Wayne Leman as the first runner-up. Since Bible translation is one of my special interests, I always find something to think about at the BBB.