Every November, the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) (@AARWeb) and Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) (@SBLsite) (#sblaar & #aarsbl12) are held, affectionately known as the “alphabet” AAR/SBL convention. This year it’s taking place at McCormick Place (@McCormick_Place) in Chicago. Somersault (@smrsault) was there over the weekend, meeting with friends and making new ones among the vast number of publishers exhibiting their considerable frontlist and backlist academic, textbook, and reference titles.
Religion scholar and author Martin Marty writes about AAR/SBL in his column, Sightings:
The Program Book for the gatherings is 496 pages long. You read that right. When I mention that “a number of thousand scholars of religion” are meeting, my friends of secular ethos orientation gasp: they can picture restaurateurs, gun-sellers, and auto-dealers convening in such numbers. But “religion” scholars in abundance? Can this be true?
It is. It takes the cavernous, soul-less halls of McCormick Place and eighteen hotels to accommodate these North American religionists, while graduate students, “old friends,” and others bunk with acquaintances around the city. What these do tends to be invisible to off-campus populations and much is even ignorable on the campuses in which they thrive. The word is out that religious practice is declining in North America, that attendance at and support for religious ventures has been having harder times. But you wouldn’t know that from observing the conventioneers or opening the Program Book. They do not draw notice as do medics in the American Medical Association, and their religion and sacred rites are not experienced as intense as are those of the acolytes of the American Rifle Association or the National Football League, but there they are.
One sights astonishing variety here. The SBL “Sections” include “Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation,” “Disputed Paulines,” “Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics,” etc. and the AAR fosters groups on “Animals and Religion,” “Evangelical Studies,” “Queer Studies in Religion,” “Quran,” and scores upon scores more. Related Scholarly Organizations cluster alongside AAR and SBL, among them “Colloquium on Violence and Religion,” “International Bonhoeffer Society,” “Karl Barth” and “Reinhold Niebuhr” societies alongside “La Communidad of Hispanic Scholars,” and, again, many, many more. There are stars and shapers as well as promising graduate students and tenure-track newcomers to the fields.
Read this in full.
Publishers Weekly's (@PublishersWkly) article, "The Digital Revolution in Religion Publishing Brings Business, Technical Issues," highlights the difficulties facing publishers serving the academic market:
Maintaining sanity in this arena can be challenging at times. Example: books rich in maps, art, and ancient language characters need formatting across various platforms and require new digital permissions for every image. On the reader side, it can be maddening in class when one person's page 50 is someone else's page 47 or 53. And note taking on a screen is still in primitive stages.
Read this in full.
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