I’m woefully behind on blogging, so I’m doing a few short posts on recent conferences that I’ve been to over the past month. The first was SWCRS (Southwest Commission on Religious Studies, aka “swickers”), which was combination of the NABPR (National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion), SBL, and AAR. This was the first regional conference of this kind that I’ve been to (aside from a couple of International SBLs, which have a different flavor).
The NABPR meeting on Friday night and Saturday morning allowed the opportunity to catch up with some old friends and to meet others. HBU was well represented: David Capes was helping run things, and Randy Hatchett gave a paper on theological interpretation. There were other papers on the future of theological education that were interesting, and if you are interested, David Capes set up a blog to house the papers: NABPR-Southwest.
The rest of the weekend I focused on the SBL side of things, but I slipped into an AAR session or two. Notable sessions were on: Hazon Gabriel (the Gabriel Revelation), Participation in Paul via Yoder’s Politics of Jesus (David Cramer, Baylor), and Early Pentecostals on Pentecost (Acts 2) (Mikeal Parsons and Peter Reynolds, Baylor). Another, very recent Baylor alumn (that is, he just successfully defended his dissertation) and HBU colleague who presented was Tim Brookins.
Incidentally, I’m fortunate to have a good set of colleagues at HBU, but with Tim who’s in the thick of things Pauline and also Chad Chambers here, we have a nice set of Pauline scholars around. Chad did his work at Duke and is now doing his PhD at London School of Theology part-time while here in Houston. He’s doing a participationist reading of Galatians, which you’ll know is near and dear to my heart. Good conversations all the way around.
The biggest aspect I noted about SWCRS was how much Baylor is the big dog on the block in these meetings. Their PhD students are by far and away the largest cohort, and they presented several very interesting papers. I had the pleasure of meeting several of them, a couple of whom came to Baylor out of Duke Divinity’s MTS program, and from conversations there appears to be an informal link between the two. I was surprised to see not much participation from SMU, TCU and the like.
Dunelm Road 
Wednesday, 4 April 2012 at 3:42 am
Sounds like a good conference, Ben. David Cramer and Chad Chambers sound interesting. Are their papers on David’s blog?
Thursday, 5 April 2012 at 1:21 pm
Hi Mike. Unfortunately, the David’s blog is just for the NABPR papers which were given the night before. Cramer is working mostly with Sanders but he gives you a head nod at the end as the way to go forward. And Chad is just now (January) starting his program nothing written up yet–we just had discussions on the car ride up and back.