On Friday and Saturday I attended the Southeastern Regional meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, reminding me that one of the benefits of being a scholar is the opportunity to use polysyllabic terminology without being unmannerly. It’s like Q-tipping your ear: it just kinda feels good.
At such a conference, you bring a seventeen-or-so page research paper and read it to any who decide to attend your session. Then, as punishment, you have to attend other sessions and let those scholars read their papers to you. In this way, you learn some new things, get up to date on some current research, and get to interact with others in your field, which is intellectually stimulating.
Like most of what I write, I presented a paper that demonstrated how the accepted interpretation of something is actually incorrect, and I showed what the correct interpretation is. And what good did it do? It added two lines to my resume, in case anyone ever bothers to read my resume.
I made a strategic error in my twenty-year academic preparation. I assumed, for no good reason, that if I knew my stuff better than anyone and could teach it more effectively than anyone, schools would want to hire me. In fact, in hiring a college teacher, there is a whole array of additional factors that have nothing to do with those two things.
The world of plumbing isn’t like that.
