My wife and I are now back in Cincinnati. We had a fantastic time in DC–we caught up with great friends, saw neat places, ate at cool restaurants, and did really fun things. Plus, I was able to get some writing done as well in between my flights back and forth from Louisville to teach.
I just found out that a paper that I submitted has been accepted for publication in the Bulletin for Biblical Research. In this paper I examine the different interpretations of Jonah 3:3 and compare these interpetations to ancient textual and archaeological evidence.
Christianity Today has an article about the rise in distance and online educational offerings from seminaries across North America. While I think it is wonderful that seminaries are able to provide these opportunities, I still think that by far the best way for people to learn is in physical communities. The article quotes Timothy George, the dean of Beeson Divinity School, and I agree with his comments: “Our philosophy is that studying for the ministry is best taught and is best done in a setting where people know one another and interact with one another, can rub souls with one another.”
However, George also admits that Beeson has a fat endowment so they are not dependent upon tuition for operating income. What do you think about new educational models? Are they as effective as traditional one-campus schools?
Originally uploaded by charleshalton
Here is a picture of my really great friend, Todd, and I at the waterfront in Georgetown. We took advantage of Restaurant Week and had a nice dinner (our wives are out of the frame, I think Todd’s wife took the picture).
I have just added a new link (HT: Jack Sasson via Agade) to the Emar Cuneiform Archive. Here is their description of the project:
Sinleqiunnini is an open source project for collecting and browsing cuneiform tablets in transliteration. At present Sinleqiunnini includes all legal, administrative and epistolary Emar texts so far published, thus representing the first thesaurus of this wealthy Late Bronze Age Syrian archive.
One of the main features of Sinleqiunnini is an innovating searching tool: by typing a specific request in the search engine or by clicking on single words of the transliterated texts, users can look for, and work on cuneiform signs, logograms and lemmas, or can browse the database according to given categories (e.g. personal, divine, geographical names).
‘Unicode Standard’ makes all texts fit in the current transliteration methodology: each document can be read and reproduced in its original printed layout.
It’s really hot here in DC. I found this picture on Flickr and it was taken just a couple days ago outside of a restaurant here. Boy is that sign right. I’m from Texas so I know what hot and humid feels like, and in my expert opinion–this is it.
Even though it’s hot, I’m staying cool while getting some writing done so I can’t complain.
An article that I completed at the beginning of the summer has just been accepted for publication in Ancient Near Eastern Studies; it is slated to appear in volume 45 (2009). In this article I examined the rhetorical impact of supposed prophetic allusions within the Neo-Assyrian corpus to Adapa and the South Wind, Atra-hasis, and the Gilgamesh Epic. If you’re interested in this topic I’m also giving a presentation in November in which I relate some of the results of this investigation for biblical prophecy.
My wife and I are spending most of this month in Washington DC and I’ll be doing some commuting to Louisville as well so my posts might be spotty for a bit. But, one year ago I wrote a “manifesto” for changethis.com in which I gave some pointers on sharpening your teaching skills. Since the Fall semester is coming around pretty soon, this is a great time to do some last minute prep-work for teaching and this manifesto might come in handy. The title of the pdf document is Never the Same: How to Create Transformational Experiences. The people at ChangeThis did a great job at making it look really slick.
Tell me what you think of it. Do you have any tips on how we can be better teachers?
