Essentially, my thoughts were along the lines of Shawn’s above.

I apologize for the critical sounding nature of my first comment. It was unintentional.

But this would seem a secondary goal, whereas the primary one is collecting a group of well-written and relevant papers. You say that PhD’s have demonstrated a minimum level of scholarship. I agree. But your project, while it secondarily requires a general standard, primarily requires familiarity, exposure to, and participation in the blogging world. In this case the PhD requirement is antithetical to your primary goal since it excludes many (could we say a majority?) of the bible bloggers.

Thus, your concern seems to be establishing a standard. But that is the editors’ (your) task in reading the papers, PhD’s or otherwise.

You would not have “to read through all of their published works to find that out” but you only need to assess the article for its suitability to your project in order to deem whether it meets the standard that you have set. The PhD requirement here is irrelevant since you as an editor are the one setting that standard.

I do not know many editors that reject a work because it is not done by a PhD, before assessing the article on its own merit.

This is a great project and I wish you all the best on this. Note I am not trying to defend a place for myself (since I consider myself too young to the blogging world to contribute) but there may be a reason why people have questioned the PhD standard.

My reason for making it a requirement for contributing is that it ensures that the people who write chapters in this book have reached a certain level of skill and knowledge. It is possible that others would also have those skills and knowledge, but I would have to read through all of their published works to find that out. I don’t have the time to do that, so I have decided to use the doctorate as a minimum requirement.

I suspect most of us do the same thing in our daily lives. It is possible, for instance, to learn how to do surgery without going to medical school. But if I need to have surgery done, you can bet that I am going to look for the guy with an M.D. after his name. This doesn’t guarantee that this guy will perform a successful surgery, but it does at least indicate that he has performed surgery successfully in the past.

I do not have a PhD and once in a while, more by accident than design, I do competent scholarship. And I know of people with PhDs who seldom say anything that appears competent or even coherent. However, I think Kevin is correct in limiting most of the chapters to those who have the official “license” to practice the craft. Using the minimum standard for acquiring an academic position seems reasonable. On the other hand, I think a couple of chapters by students would be a good thing. The best news (for me) is that I neither have a PhD nor am I a student. So I can look forward to reading the book without pain or prejudice.