Recently Notre Dame held a conference entitled “My Ways are Not Your Ways: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible.” Regular readers of this blog will be well aware that this topic is right up the alley. Actually, it defines a large bit of my research interests. In talking with my former Duke professor James Crenshaw, he made me aware that these papers are planned to be published with Oxford University Press, and so I set myself up to have to wait until their publication. Now, however, I am glad I will no longer have to wait but can rather hear and watch the conference proceedings from the comfort of my office!
HERE is the link to the videos.
The schedule:
Thursday, September 10, 2009:
Mike Rea: Welcome and Introduction
Louise Antony: Does God Love Us?
Friday, September 11, 2009:
Edwin Curley: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
Evan Fales: Satanic Verses: Moral Chaos in Holy Writ
John Hare: Animal Sacrifices
Mark C. Murphy: God Beyond Justice
Eleonore Stump: The Problem of Evil and the History of Peoples: Think Amalek
Saturday, September 12, 2009:
Richard Swinburne: What does the Old Testament Mean?
Nicholas Wolterstorff: Reading Joshua
Gary Anderson: What about the Canaanites?
Christopher Seitz: Canon and Conquest: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible
Concluding Remarks: Howard Wettstein
Panel Discussion: Gary Anderson, Paul Draper, Daniel Howard-Snyder
(my sincerest thanks to Dr. Claude Mariottini for making me aware of this resource).
Hesed we 'emet 
Thanks John. I put many hours into helping Seitz with his paper for this conference. All of these sessions will be published later in a book by Oxford Press.
Glad to see you’re still alive, Rob!
I haven’t yet listened to Seitz’ presentation . . . of course, you directed him to my article on God’s character in Genesis, right? (wink).
For those who prefer to listen in the car, I encoded the entire conference as an organized library of mp3s. You can download the whole thing here:
http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=4428
Thanks for pointing these out.
I was really excited to listen to this until I read the comment about Seitz presenting… A few years back, I decided to end my very first SBL adventure by popping into a review session of a book on prophecy and hermeneutics. Up to that point, I had been having the time of my life, but Seitz’s speech and follow-up to comments by those on the panel left a black cancerous stain on the end of my time in San Diego. I just couldn’t believe the things he was saying and how he simply ignored and sidestepped vital issues that were being brought up by the panelists.
Marvin Sweeney, for instance, had pointed out that “canon” meant different things to different people–that, for instance, the Jewish canon differed in respect to the Protestant one insofar as its textual placement or arrangement, and that if one was to do a “canonical reading,” this would produce a different meaning and conclusion in comparison to the other. And instead of addressing the giant elephant in the room raised by this–what is it that makes the Protestant Christian canon THE canon according to which one must do a canonical reading of the prophets and why should that meaning be favored over the meaning that comes by another canon–Seitz ignored it entirely in order to say that the so-called Jewish canon was not really any very substantial thing and didn’t even exist until a very late point in history without, somehow, seeming to realize that those very same things could be said about the Protestant canon on which he rested his whole argument!!!!! I mean, he was claiming things like the only way one should read the prophets was as a text prefiguring Jesus, that one should only read the prophets to understand the history that the texts PRESENT as opposed to any history that might or might not actually exist outside that text and upon which that text had its basis, and was throwing around the question-begging, anachronistic word “final form” so often I almost lost it. When the phone starting ringing, the building started shaking, and the lights went out, I almost believed YHWH was ready to strike Seitz down for contempt of scholarship if not contempt of honesty.
slave,
You’re acting like the statements he makes has not been substanitated. Read his books. You are in contempt of ignorance. I doubt you have even read one book on the canonical approach.