Although today was the first day of the SBL conference, I don’t have much to report from sessions. Most of the morning was spent at the Employment Information Services, the people that provide interview space for all the universities that are hiring. I had a good interview this morning and was very pleased with my perception of the school. I can only hope they felt the same about me.

I did get to two sessions in the afternoon, but was only able to stay for thirty minutes of the second one. The first one was on teaching the Bible in a liberal arts setting, something that has been discussed on this blog lately. The papers certainly brought up a lot of good questions. One of them was a survey of students and how they respond to biblical studies courses. The most important thing I got out of this paper was that students who expect to learn new material in a biblical studies class usually learn more new things. Now, this may sound obvious, but there are some students who come to class expecting a Bible class just to be review of things they already know. In such cases, the students do not learn as much, even when confronted with new material. This suggests that we need to spend some time in the first few days of class trying to get student expectations to match our hope that they will be learning new things. In theory, this should help them learn more.

The highlight of this session was a paper by Christian Brady at Targuman, which he had made available on his blog. Chris referenced the recent discussions of his topic in the biblioblogosphere and his paper points out several issues that are involved in teaching a text that is inherently theological. We — as well as Steve Cook — were able to chat about teaching for a few minutes afterwards, and I look forward to getting together tomorrow with the two of them and other bibliobloggers.

I also was able to attend thirty minutes of the biblical exegesis for homiletics session. Although none of the two presentations I heard were ground breaking, they did point to the fact (often overlooked) that when we interpret a text we need to be aware of the audience for whom we are interpreting it.

Dinner tonight was with my good friend and hotel roommate Ramon Luzarraga who treated me to a dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House. We had a good discussion on issues of faith in the classroom, much of which built on questions raised by the session on teaching the Bible in liberal arts. Although Ramon is a theologian instead of a biblical scholar, the question of how to approach issues of faith in an academic setting overlap to a certain extent.

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