Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Allow me a moment’s indulgence. This was the favourite hymn of my father (he loved to sing) and was sung at his funeral too many years ago. It was also my mother’s favourite, and today we sang it at her funeral.
It leaves me teary.
I never planned to be a librarian. An academic career was stymied as a consequence of joining up with the Worldwide Church of God. That episode brought chaos into my life that led to my early departure from advanced studies. Some years later after more advanced studies I was offered the opportunity to enter a master’s course but by then I was married with young kids and financial commitments and still involved with certain demands of the church so simply could not see that as a realistic option.
I only became an academic or university librarian after another tumultuous turnaround in my life that eventually took me out of the church. Librarianship promised a nice easy nine to five type job that I could leave behind at the end of each day (unlike secondary school teaching) in order to focus on other higher priority personal issues.
Those other issues eventually became past history and there I was, needing stimulation from my nine-to-five cataloguing job. Political and community activism and organizing became one happy outlet.
But when an opportunity came for me to advance up the ladder the job changed and once again I often found myself working extra hours to master all I wanted to master and make the best contribution I could. From there the job opened up international travel and eventually an international posting in a very senior position at the Singapore National Library Board.
Those are the background pluses one experiences over the years as both a cataloguer and reference librarian. More recent years have seen a complete change in my own responsibilities so that it became hard to even describe myself as a librarian in any meaningful sense to others. I worked in a library building but I no longer touched books or journals. It was all about metadata. I became a metadata librarian.
This shift was all about making publicly funded research in Australian regional universities publicly available through open access and research reporting repositories of digitized research publications and datasets. That over time was expanded to doing the same for special cultural collections.
All of that requires changes in academic culture and university workflows. The public standing and reputation of the researchers is to be advanced and that means close involvement with the researchers themselves on the one hand and the technology teams tasked with building and maintaining the systems that make it all possible on the other.
I was very lucky. I was involved in the very early days of a project to move libraries in this new direction so before long found myself for a while being possibly the only person in Australia who had a handle on what was required metadata-wise across different university sizes and specialties and the different technologies they all used. (Metadata, basically, is about the different languages required for organizing and accessing the different types of data — data for the content, data for the carriers of that content, data for the authors of the content, and so on — one of the many facets required to make the operation workable.) So being a pioneer in a new niche area I was very employable. It has been a stimulating and challenging and most enjoyable time. Helping create major changes for the benefit of researchers and publicly funded research programs, of the public, of cultural groups (in particular Australian indigenous communities) has been the most satisfying time professionally in my life.
I have regularly turned back to some of the professional training I was given to become a librarian even when blogging on Vridar. One of the most valuable areas of that education was in information and knowledge management. Coming to have a clear understanding of the distinction between “public knowledge” and “specialist or research knowledge”; the distinction between data, information and knowledge; the distinction between a creative work per se, the expression of that work, the manifestation of that work, and the digital or hard copy of the work itself — being clear about the differences and functions of each particle that contributes to our ability to share and acquire information — all of this has helped me in analysing different aspects of what I read and what I endeavour to understand and write about.
Before all of that, when doing postgraduate educational studies, I specialized in the essences of propaganda and genuine education, and how to guard against one and promote the other. And all of that further involved understanding the relationship between values and knowledge production and evaluation.
Before that, as a teacher, I found much of my time devoted to working on how to make new concepts clear and as easily understood as possible.
So though I missed out on an academic career I did find a very rewarding way to make a living nonetheless. And that demon that set me on the wrong course at the outset, the religious cult, in the end directed me into seeking to understand as completely and truly as I could the nature of religious belief, cults, radicalization, and even the origins of the Bible and Christianity themselves. One other carry over from that life-destroying demon: the experience has left me with an indelible awareness of just how easy it is for any of us to be wrong, and the importance of doing one’s homework as thoroughly as possible at all times.
Maurice Casey continues:
A number of Godfrey’s comments on himself when he was a member of the Worldwide Church of God are sufficiently similar to his comments on scholars as to give the impression that not only has he no clue about critical scholars, which is obvious from his many comments, but that he is basically expressing rejection of his former self. For example, he comments:
‘Only by lazy assumptions about their sources can biblical “historians” declare Jesus’ crucifixion a “fact of history”…” [Link is to the original source for this quotation]
Godfrey, however, comments on his previous self:
‘As a fundamentalist WCG believer I believed I had all the big answers to the big questions of life. I simply shut my mind to any idea that questioned those answers. In a little more detail, he comments on his movement out of the Worldwide Church of God in the 1980s, ‘So I seriously studied the origins and nature of the Bible for the first time in my life. Strange (or just lazy or cowardly or both?) that I had spent my whole life studying its content . . . but all that time I never before thought to study in any real depth, and with true open-minded honesty, the origins of that content.’
I do not doubt that these are fair comments on Blogger Godfrey, but that is no excuse for him to attribute similar habits to critical scholars. (p. 31)
(Well I’ve never accused biblical scholars of being cowardly but it would strengthen Casey’s argument if I had.)
Whether it’s laziness or something else I cannot say, but Casey does not address the context of the words he has quoted from my post. My laziness remark was a direct quotation from a biblical historian — one of Casey’s own academic peers.
I was actually quoting two of Casey’s peers making the “laziness” charge. One of them had been working at a university quite near to Casey’s.
“Laziness is common among historians. When they find a continuous account of events for a certain period in an ‘ancient’ source, one that is not necessarily contemporaneous with the events , they readily adopt it. They limit their work to paraphrasing the source, or, if needed, to rationalisation.” — Liverani, Myth and politics in ancient Near Eastern historiography, p.28. From my post: Lazy historians and their ancient sources
There has been a very strong tendency to take the Biblical writing at its face value and a disinclination to entertain a hermeneutic of suspicion such as is a prerequisite for serious historical investigation. It is shocking to see how the narrative of the Nehemiah Memoir has in fact been lazily adopted as a historiographical structure in the writing of modern scholars, and how rarely the question of the probability of the statements of the Nehemiah Memoir have been raised.(Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help, p. 164) From my post: Naivety and laziness in biblical historiography (Nehemiah case study 5)
The “laziness” of building a case upon “unquestioned assumptions” is a point regularly surfacing in the scholarly debates on research into the history behind the biblical narratives.
Am I imputing my own past habits to critical scholars? There is no way anyone can compare the process by which I embraced the teachings of the WCG and the scholarly processes of critical scholars.
Casey could have read my little biographical statements on this blog where I happily admit that I have brought some positives with me out of my negative religious past. One of these is an acute awareness of just how easy it is for me to be wrong despite my best intentions otherwise. Another was a resolve to always strive to double check my assumptions and learn how to validly evaluate everything. If I see a failure to question assumptions in some historians’ works I am reassured to find others who are similarly aware and who avoid those pitfalls. Would Casey accuse scholars like Liverani and Childs of likewise expressing rejections of their former selves?