in video games and a discussion led by Tavis Smiley on his book The contract with black America, had lunch with my friend Beth, learned lots about the difficult separation AAR has initiated from SBL (the Society for Biblical Literature), had dinner with a Romanian grad student who told me about reading through Mircea Eliade's unpublished papers in Chicago, and finally heard the presidential address by my old adviser and colleague Jeff Stout on "The Folly of Secularism."Two of the panels merit a brief description. The first one, called "Born digital and born again digital," looked first at religion in and through video/computer games, and then at some evangelical Christian games. The former included an introduction to Kabbalah which took you through a serious of futile games on the way to teaching you to understand "the game of life" and that only Kabbalah will save you from losing at it, and a new age program called The Journey to Wild Divine which you manipulate through a special device with sensors on the three middle fingers of your left hand:
it reads your temperature and notes your pulse, and feeds them into game-like situations. The latter took us from the earliest evangelical games in the early 1990s, where conventional shooting programs were leased and modified (Wolfenstein, where a US agent hunts down Nazis in a labyrinthine German castle, becomes Super 3-D Noah's Ark, where Noah sling-shots food at animals in the labyrinthine corridors of his ark!), to the recent video game based on the Left Behind books, where members of the "Tribulation Force" witness to, pray for or shoot assorted characters in the streets of southern Manhattan eighteen months after the Rapture. This was the first panel on this topic, and drew a lot of gamers. It has a ways to go before it's truly religious studies, though. The participants all accepted the virtual/real distinction (or question: isn't the virtual real too?) which frames secular discussions on games, but weren't prepared to concede that the nature of reality isn't a given, and that different religious traditions describe different realities: for some, the real is less real than the virtual.The second panel, with an unwieldy title, considered intellectual, historical and ideological ramifications of the split between AAR and SBL. This requires a little context: SBL used to be quite big, and AAR (originally NABI, the National Association of Bible Instructors) very small, and they had conferences together to get to critical mass. (The conferences are held in parallel; the associations remain distinct, with distinct leadership, programming and membership.) In recent years, both have grown, but AAR is now bigger, and a few years ago its leadership somewhat precipitously announced that AAR-SBL had become too big: from now on, AAR would have meetings on its own. The decision bothered lots of people because of the autocratic way it was made, but also because the argument about size seemed to be concealing deeper reservations about SBL.
Today's panel was an AAR panel but most of the people present work in Biblical studies (many have long been members of both AAR and SBL) and I got to hear the aggrieved and grieving SBL side of what I had until taken to be a good if badly handled decision for AAR. I continue to think AAR is better off on its own - there's no reason to privilege one particular subfield, especially the culturally and historically dominant one - but learned that my preconceptions about SBL were largely mistaken. In some respects SBL is more scholarly than AAR, covering a broader array of thematic approaches and gathering a more international field of scholars. Elizabeth Clark gave an interesting history of the way Biblical and religious studies made their way into the curricula of different kinds of US educational institutions in the 19th century (Biblical studies came to colleges and universities as part of "humanities," an effort, she claimed, to anchor moral education in a conception of religion broader than Christianity). But most interesting to me was the observation by Gregory D. Alles that religious studies outside the west has a different focus from the AAR and one in its way closer to that of SBL: instead of studying the religions of others, it tends to focus on local traditions. Paradoxically, AAR's attempt to deprovincialize its image by parting from SBL provincializes it anew!
