Blue Cord

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on a report produced by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The report contains the result of a survey of academic salaries for the 2007-2008 academic year. The salaries are broken down by rank and discipline.

Those of us in religion and theology can take comfort in Jesus’ words that the last shall be first, because salaries for full and associate professors rank dead last in average salary.¹ We fare slightly better for instructors’ salaries and newly hired assistant professors, but we are still almost at the bottom in those categories. Law, business, and engineering are at the top.

Looking at salaries tells us something about what we value as a culture. But I think the more striking thing is that this shows that universities value those disciplines that have more marketing power. If graduates from your field will earn high salaries, then you must be worth more as an instructor. This comes out of the prevalent understanding in America today that says the purpose of higher education is to train you for a profession. Despite what our mission statements say, pay scales show that universities and college are more interested in creating people who are ready for a career than they are in shaping graduates who are able to understand the world with an understanding informed by multiple disciplines and are able (and willing) to make a positive contribution to society.

I think a very interesting study would be a survey of religious colleges to see how their salaries stack up to the standards of non-religious institutions. Religious colleges say they value their faith tradition and think it is important that their students study religion, but do they pay their religion faculty salaries that reflect that? Remember: the market does not set salaries; the administration does. If the administration of a religious college merely pays what the market says a professor is worth, they have abdicated their responsibility to reflect the values of Jesus Christ instead of the values of the culture.

(Hat tip: Charles Halton at Awilum)

1. Do you know how bad it feels to get beat out by English majors!?! [back]

While I was on Spring Break last week, I rented two movies that I thought might be good ones to use in an introduction to Bible class. I wanted to offer reviews of each here. This post will discuss the first movie, The Ten, while a subsequent post will review the other movie, The Final Inquiry.

The Ten is a rather quirky film. It is a set of ten short pieces, each of which is introduced by a narrator who is having some personal problems of his own. Each piece is related in some way to one of the Ten Commandments, and the narrator does his work with two huge stone tablets sitting behind him. I rented it because I thought it might be a good film to show to get some discussion going when I cover Exodus. Having watched the film, I don’t think I will be showing it in class.

The pieces turn out to be only vaguely related to the Ten Commandments. For example, “Thou shalt not kill” is a piece about a woman who falls in love with a ventriloquist puppet and steals him from his owner. “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain” is about a virgin librarian who takes a trip to Mexico and falls in love with a man who she later discovers to be Jesus Christ, who has returned to bring about the end of the world but keeps putting it off because he is having a good time down on earth. The only part connected to taking the Lord’s name in vain is when she calls out his name during sex. The “Thou shalt not covet” scene involved two neighbors in a battle to see who could purchase more cat scan machines, while “Honor the sabbath” centered on a guy who liked to skip church and spend Sunday mornings hanging out with a bunch of naked guys while listening to Roberta Flack music.

The short stories are not really an attempt to explore the Ten Commandments. Instead, the Ten Commandments are little more than a gimmick to tie the stories together. Because of this, I doubt the film would provoke much discussion in a class room, or if it did I doubt the discussion would center on the Ten Commandments. And given the crude language and situations, I am not sure it would be entirely appropriate to show this in a classroom anyway. For instance, even though there is no frontal nudity, there are sixteen different men who appear in the credits only as “Naked Guy.”

The movie has a number of actors that are recognizable. Paul Rudd plays the narrator, while Winona Ryder is the woman who falls in love with the puppet. Other actors include Jessica Alba, Famke Janssen, Rob Corddry (from The Daily Show), Janeane Garofalo, Gretchen Mol, Oliver Platt, Jason Sudeikis (from SNL), Robert Ben Garant and Kerri Kenney (both from Reno 911).

The DVD cover has a quote from the Chicago Sun Times that called the film “Uproariously Funny!” That is apparently a Chicago idiom that means “mildly amusing in a crass sort of way.” I can forgive the film for not inspiring deep thoughts about the Ten Commandments, but the least they could have done is make me laugh. Instead, while I found myself vaguely interested in some of the skits, for most of the film I just sat there wondering how such good actors could have let themselves be attracted to such a bad script.

“Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends!” — Karn Evil 9

Once again, the Biblical Studies Blog Carnival is up and running. Join us as we stroll down the midway, taking in the best that bibliobloggers had to offer in February.

We first stop at the hospitality tent, where we welcome a few newcomers to the biblioblogosphere. My colleague Jin Yang Kim at Wartburg College started a blog this month called Old Testament Story. Jin is a Ph.D. student at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. The Prime Time Jesus blog at Bible.org also added a contributor this month. Their new blogger is Bob Webb, who teaches at McMaster University and specializes in the Historical Jesus. Alan Lenzi at the University of the Pacific began blogging on the last day of January, but we can include him as a February newcomer as well. His blog is Bible and the Ancient Near East. And although he is by no means a newcomer, we want to welcome Jim West back to the blogging world. His previous blog was hacked and deleted in mid-February (the list of suspects is too long and illustrious to mention), but Jim is back up and running at his new address, jwest.wordpress.com. For those who wish to follow the conspiracy theories about the deletion of Jim’s blog, Lingamish is a good place to start.

To the right as we move down the midway is the translation booth. Zondervan posted an article by Karen H. Jobes entitled “Bible Translation as Bilingual Quotation”. They issued an open invitation to bloggers to respond to the article and several took up the challenge. Jim Getz at Kethubim criticized the article in his post “How to Lie with Statistics: Bible Translation Edition”. At Ancient Hebrew Poetry, John Hobbins wrote two pieces in response: “Karen Jobes Squares Off against the Essential Literalists” and “Defining Faithful Translation: Why Jobes is Only Half Right”. The Epistle of Thomas joined the discussion with “Verbosity in English Translations”. Wayne Leman at Better Bibles Blog has a short discussion that contains links to some additional posts on Jobes’s paper.

Next up is the Ancient Near Eastern booth. If you are interested in music, point your browser to Awilum where you can read Charles Halton’s post on musicians at Mari. Duane Smith at Abnormal Interests discusses KTU 1.48, a Ugaritic Ritual Text possibly written by a non-scribe.

Let’s head on over to the big tent, where there is action in three rings: Old Testament, New Testament, and the Bible as a whole. In the center ring is the Old Testament / Hebrew Bible.¹ Starting us off is Steve Cook at Biblische Ausbildung, who responds to a reader’s question about why Isaac took Rebekah into his mother’s tent. Here at Blue Cord, I discussed stories about the golden calf and what they suggest about the history of the priesthood. And lest we limit ourselves to the English speaking world, Jan Pieter van de Giessen had a post on gladiators in the Old Testament at Aantekeningen bij de Bijbel. Van de Giessen’s blog is in Dutch, but the Google translator does a decent job of making the text accessible to those of us who still haven’t gotten around to learning Dutch.

In another ring we have the New Testament blogs. Mike Aubrey at en epheso had several posts on linguistic questions in Greek. In his own words, he is working on “applying linguistic theory and particularly grammatical analysis to the Greek of the New Testament from a modified generative perspective”. This month he discussed the use of pas, predicative and attributive adjectives, and evidence for the Greek noun phrase. And if you are tired of reading and would prefer just to listen, Chris Christensen began a new podcast on the book of Romans at The Bible Study Podcast.

In the third ring, we encounter posts that don’t confine themselves to one testament or the other. Chris Brady (who fights crime as Targuman) has a series of devotionals for the season of Lent. There has also been a lively discussion on religious pluralism, inclusivism, and exclusivism in the Bible going on between James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix, Michael Halcomb at Pisteuomen, and Ken Brown at C.Orthodoxy. Ken Brown pulled together an index that includes links to their posts, as well as to others who have joined the conversation. The discussion includes an excursion into whether what they are doing should be call a diablogue or a bloggersation.

As we head back out to the midway, we can’t help stopping by the extra-canonical literature booth.² Jim Davila of PaleoJudaica has an excellent book review of April DeConick’s The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says. Deane at Merkavah Vision discusses a merkavah ascent in the Odes of Solomon.

After that, we drop in for a short snack at the hermeneutics booth, where we read what Esteban Vázquez has to say about apostolic exegesis at his blog Vox Stefani. Just around the corner is the tent for the guild of biblical scholars, where Alan Lenzi issues what is sure to be a controversial call for membership standards for the SBL.

There was so much to see this month at the carnival that we can’t help feeling a little tired as we head out the gate. But as we do, we notice a small booth that shows that all of our efforts do sometimes make a difference. Charles Halton at Awilum wrote a post last month pointing out that Baker Publishing had taken a negative review of a book and turned it into a positive blurb on their website through questionable use of ellipses. Charles returned to the Baker website this month and found that the blurb had been removed.

So, as the sun sets, we head back to the parking lot, our minds abuzz with the heady thoughts inspired by excellent blog posts from February (or maybe from having eaten too much cotton candy). We have our Biblical Studies Blog Carnival souvenir stadium cup and the kewpie doll we won by tossing a shekel in the sphinx’s mouth at the Ancient Near Eastern booth, but we can’t help looking forward to next month, when the carnival will once again roll into town at Thoughts on Antiquity. Be on the lookout for their call for submissions, and keep your eyes open for blog posts you want to nominate for next month’s carnival.

1. The OT is in the center ring because it’s my blog and I like the OT. So there. [back]
2. “It’s not just canonical — it’s extra-canonical. Now with 25% more canon!” [back]