A Tale of Two Conferences Redux

A few days ago I posted a brief summary of two events I attended in September and October. Looking back at what I wrote, it seemed to me that some clarification about the events was in order.

First, they are not “conferences”—one was a workshop attended by a small group of invited scholars, one was a colloquium open to the public. Both had their attractions for me: the workshop featured scholars whose work I respect and focused on texts that I find fascinating (indeed, don’t we all?); the colloquium brought together scholars from a number of different disciplines (Patristics, Rabbinic Judaism, Gnosticism, OT and NT Apocrypha) to share their work and to honour the work of Dr. Charles Kannengeiser. Two very different events with very different goals.

My discussion of the events may have come across as an unfair comparison. Of course, the post was not intended as a “review” of the events, but merely an offering of comments about my experiences as a participant. The Montréal colloquium was of interest to me because of the diversity of the fields represented; but I did feel somewhat out of my element during the papers from outside of my own discipline, and assumed others might have felt the same (though such feelings may reflect only my own inadequacies). I commented in the post how it would be useful to see scholars of such diversity approach a more specific topic so that they could all benefit from working more closely together. Of course, that was not the goal of the colloquium, but it would be a worthy goal of any scholarly project.

More to come on the colloquium/workshop papers in the days ahead…