Tim gives voice to a version of this question that I’ve seen a few others say and probably several others have thought without actually saying it. This point gets to one of the big pieces in the dearth-of-female-bibliobloggers puzzle. This is about identity formation and setting boundary markers (can you help us out, Brian?). When it comes to biblioblogging, who is in and who is out? What is our “ruler” for considering a blog to be appropriately focused upon academic biblical studies?
Tim points to my previous post where I am reaching out to the Emerging Women community (see the great comments coming in over there). He highlights something I have said, italicizing it in this way: “I’m not certain that any would qualify as focused upon “academic biblical studies” (I haven’t searched through all of them), but they are definitely a collection of blogs of interest to our field.” Thank you , Tim, for giving me the opportunity to clarify the statement. In response, I would emphasize the words “I’m not certain” and “I haven’t searched through all of them.” Please read on . . .
I had been thinking about the very question that Tim so eloquently states in his post (one of the best posts on this topic thus far). Given the freedom of blogging, I cannot imagine setting a solid boundary line. I think for any blog to be considered a biblioblog, though, a few questions should be pondered:
- How many posts are on biblical studies in a given time period? Say, a month.
- What is the ratio of biblical studies posts to other sorts of posts?
- How tangentially related are those “other sorts of posts” to biblical studies?
- What qualifies as a post about “biblical studies”? We are not including every person on the internet that sometimes says interesting things about the Bible. No, we need some academic interaction.
- What, then, do we consider “academic interaction”?
It’s a bit of a balancing act. The thing with Jim’s blog is that, yes, it’s eclectic. But buried in those posts about the evils of one news bit or another are some posts that do indeed “interact” with academic issues of biblical studies. Maybe Jim’s “interaction” is more ranting than measured dialogue, but apparently that’s acceptable for biblioblogging (since Jim’s blog is accepted as a biblioblog). The key, I think, is that Jim refers to scholars and scholarship and people doing stupid things with archaeology. He addresses issues that are of interest to the academic world.
What I was uncertain about in the quote highlighted by Tim was whether we could all be on the same page about what defines an appropriate focus on academic biblical studies.
I think that if we can find women who are interacting (or ranting or whatever) with academic issues of biblical studies at least a few times a month and those posts are not totally overshadowed by the rest of their other interests (any more than Jim’s academically-related posts are), then we have found new bibliobloggers! So, I am suggesting we place Jim’s blog on the “margins,” in a sense, defining him as a good boundary marker. We are saying, “Okay, we’ll let Jim be Jim, but that’s probably as academically diluted as we want to go.” I mean no offense to Jim when I say these things. He is certainly confident and comfortable with his own approach to blogging and academics!
So, let the hunt go on for new female bibliobloggers! I will suggest two places to begin looking. I have already mentioned the Emerging Women community. I will also highlight the RevGalBlogPals ring of blogs (see the “Our Blogs” section on the right sidebar).
