Terrible weather postponed this conference when it was first planned last year (or was it two years ago?). Now it’s back on.
I’ve got limited time, but I hope to hear several of the presentations live. For readers not in Greenville, I’ll try to remember to post some links to audio afterwards. I’m always happy to hear Mount Calvary Baptist Church preachers and graduates, so I’m sure Minnick, Casillas, Leedy, and Talbert will be on that list.
But I’m also very interested to see what Brian Hand will come up with in his semiotics of culture lecture. I’ve done a lot of thinking about the topic, but not nearly enough reading. One of the best things I’ve read on it has been Vanhoozer’s essay in Everyday Theology (part of the Kindle sample).
My brother-in-law (Tim Lovegrove) will be speaking, so I expect to catch at least his session on sermonaudio or wherever they post them afterwards.
It’s a decent roster of BJ’s best and brightest seminarians (with one glaring absence…you know who I’m talking about, Mark). I would expect higher-level engagement with the topic than would have been possible a decade or two ago. Still, for a topic that deals so much with issues of culture, society, and the like, it’d be nice if they could have brought in a few believing sociologists, historians, and scholars from other disciplines to do some of the application sessions.
For example, how great would it be to have Mark Noll come and talk about how mid-twentieth century evangelicals forgot that they were strangers in a strange land and so supported the racial power structure of the time?
Yeah, no offense to any of the other speakers—I simply named those I knew best.
And I haven’t been able to attend one of these, so I don’t know whether their stated purpose might include outside experts, or even academic papers rather than sermons. But I think the sexual abuse conference did have outside experts… I’d love to hear a Christian sociologist or historian talk about how to read culture.