This afternoon I learned that I’ve been chosen as The Citadel’s delegate to one of the Jessie Ball duPont Summer Seminars at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.
The particular seminar I’ll be at is on the subject of early Christian Apocrypha (the “other” gospels and biblical books that most folks don’t know about), which has long been a fascination of mine. My first published article was on the subject of the first-century development of Christianity, in fact, and it has moved in and out of my work since (especially in things like the Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament).
That’s enough to make this awesome … but there’s more. The seminar will be led by Bart Ehrman, from UNC-Chapel Hill, who has taken his specialty in this somewhat arcane subject and made it popularly accessible: he’s had at least three books hit the NYT best-seller lists, and he’s a constant as a talking head whenever the subject comes up (like, you know, every Easter and Christmas).
As if that wasn’t enough, the seminar will also give me a chance to get a lot of research done (knock on wood) at the multitude of high-powered libraries that fall within the Research Triangle in North Carolina.
Oh, and then there’s this:
It costs me nothing.