From SBL: Sunday Afternoon

It has been a busy and good day here at SBL 2006. Cathy and I did get off to something of a rough start when the Renaissance Hotel got backed up on their breakfast room service. Breakfast came about an hour late, and they forgot milk and also cream for the coffee. Most of my morning was spent in the Ezekiel session, where about 35 people were in attendance. I particularly enjoyed the first two papers by Jill Middlemas of Oxford University and Dale Launderville of St. John's University. Jill's paper dealt with iconography and the lack thereof in Ezekiel, which of course relates to some of my current research and to some of the recent postings on the Imago Dei that I've been doing here on this blog. I asked the second question after one by Kathe Darr, and I remain very interested in this whole topic. Dale's paper was on Ezekiel's view of the Netherworld, which again, relates to the paper I gave yesterday morning, and about which I've also had several postings here on this blog. Dale and I talked after the session about having some correspondence on this topic, since we are arriving at similar results from two rather different approaches and scholarly procedures. I'd like to post more on the Ezekiel session soon, if possible.

Catherine and I immediately headed by metro to the National Gallery of Art on the DC mall:

We had signed up a long while back for the SBL tour on "Biblical Themes in the National Gallery of Art Collections," conducted by Terrence E. Dempsey, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at Saint Louis University. Terry led us on a very enjoyable tour of biblical art, including works on both Testaments by folks such as Giotto, Fra Angelioc and Fra Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, Savoldo, El Greco, Murillo, Grunewald, Rubens and more. I also hope to blog on this tour and the paintings we studied as soon as I get a chance. Stay tuned...

Immediately upon returning here, I met up with the bibliobloggers to record a one-hour oral conversation. The whole thing should be posted soon on Christian Brady's blog, so I'll be giving a link to that as soon as Chris gets back and gets it posted.

Got to run. More soon...