little EGLBS award i won

I received this email last week from Holly Toensing, the EGLBS secretary. Woo-hoo! I won for the paper I presented at their meeting earlier this month.

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Dear Don--

I think by now you may have received word from Peter Gosnell, the convener of the New Testament sections at the EGLBS meeting..... that you have won the best student paper in the New Testament sections!! [And to think that you were nervous!!] :-) Congratulations on stirring up a lot of discussion with your fine paper!

Now I have to follow up with an administrative task: In order to get you your check, I need to have your social security number. If you don't want to provide this to me via email, perhaps you would feel more comfortable via phone: my office phone is 513-745-3796 my home phone is 513-232-7711.

Hope all is well for you!

--Holly Toensing
EGLBS sec./treas.

girls and macs

i watched 'supernanny' last night... i love that show. a 9 year old boy and 4-year old twin girls--and what girls they were! cute little monsters. supernanny did a great job helping the two helpless parents get a grip on things, as usual. even though the two girls were badly behaved (to the extreme), i couldn't get over how *cute* they were! even when they were throwing tantrums i found myself smiling. i just don't know how i'm going to be able to discipline a cute little toddler of my own without laughing and smiling... maybe after a few months of it, and enough sleepless nights, the humor wears off a little? let's hope.

i'm writing this entry on a new iBook G4. this is the first apple i've ever owned. in fact, i've hardly ever even worked on a mac before; not counting the Apple 2 I had back in the 80's.

here's my assessment of the apple so far, coming from a life-long PC person: the operating system is head and shoulders above Windows, no doubt about it. things work the way they ought to work... when you close the laptop, it actually goes into sleep mode ever time... not 75% of the time, as with my PC. when you open it up, it works great (unlike my Dell, where i have to 'repair' the wireless connection on wake-up). my bluetooth connection works flawlessly, unlike my Dell, where i had to screw around with COM port settings and such. seriously, why do i even have to know about COM ports anymore?? it takes me back to the days of autoexec.com and config.sys. the apple simply gets out of your way and lets you do what you want to do... how the PC ought to be.

my disappointments so far come mainly from the fact that i'm going from a high-end PC (Inspiron 8500) to a low-end Apple. i hope to remedy this soon by upgrading to a 15" PowerBook in the next couple of weeks. a couple of other gripes: no right-click button on the laptop keyboard. i simply cannot believe that you would not include a right-click button when it's so useful to have! my other complaints have to do with the low-end nature of the iBook: no ability to span across multiple monitors (unbelievable!); no S-video out capability (without an extra adaptor); pretty crappy resolution (only 1024X768); no microphone jack (that I can see)

god is beautiful... (in our backyard)

our magnolia tree


our forsythia shrub

the EGLBS meeting

it's been a while since my last post; mostly because i've been too busy to think about the blog...

the EGLBS meeting went great; arrived Wednesday night at about 10:30pm in Wheeling, WV. The meeting was held at a golf resort in the mountains there... beautiful scenery, but the room was small and kinda old.

the first day started off with papers at 11am. we're broken up into different sections (e.g. New Testament, Old Testament, Archaeology...) I was in the NT section. The first session was an hour and 45 minutes, and four people read their papers and took questions. Most of the people at this thing are professors or grad students at state colleges and universities, although there were a few seminaries represented. i was the only person listed as representing a non-college! i'd say that probably half would identify themselves as "Christian", and maybe %20 as "evangelical".

the four papers read in the morning session were fairly dull--mostly stuff that would only interest you if you were a biblical studies major... the Q&A was pretty tame. i was the first presenter in the afternoon session. i had a powerpoint presentation that was incredibly basic by vineyard standards (just one image, english and greek text, and some highlighting animation), but was the most 'elaborate' there! once i finished my paper, the moderator asked for questions, and four hands shot up! the first guy, a teaching fellow at the University of Michigan (interesting coincidence) sort of laid into me... he disagreed with my take on the miracles, and basically said that the pericope in question (the hemorrhaging woman) proved that Jesus didn't heal anyone, but that people healed themselves psychosomatically (though faith); of course, i disagreed with him, and i think i did a pretty good job defending my thesis. another person disagreed with me, saying that 'miracle' and 'magic' are merely words used to accuse or affirm subjective religious interpretations of events.... a classic argument. however, i think i did a pretty good job arguing that one as well.

once the sessions were done, there was a presidential talk (about religion and violence), and finally the plenary session, where Lawrence H. Schiffman was the featured guest... he's a big-wig in the dead sea scrolls community. it was actually quite an interesting talk; this guy knows his stuff forward and backward (literally... get it, he's a hebrew scholar, they read text backward... hahaha... that's a joke)

one of the coolest things about the meeting was that my thesis advisor from ashland seminary, John Byron, was also a presenter in the NT section, so he got to hear me give my paper. we also had plenty of time to hang out, eat meals, and talk... he was really encouraging about my talk, and said it was really quite a good thing to 'stir the pot' like that.

there was a final session on Friday morning, then i headed back home... a great experience!