ETS: Adventures in Baltimore

I just returned from a four-day trip to Baltimore, where Imostly attended the annual Evangelical Theological Society's (ETS) national meeting. Iused to go annually, but I have skipped the past few years to focus onwriting/editing/finishing my dissertation.

This year I had the joy of staying with my niece and herfamily in their new-to-them home in accommodations that overlooked a treeablaze with red leaves. She and her husband, a faculty member at Loyola, havethree small boys who loved scaring and tackling “Aunt Sandi.” The family iscommitted to going car-free as much as possible, so I used publictransportation every morning to get to the convention center, and I took cabshome at night. All in all, I spent about 1/3 of what I would have done on arental car, and I avoided the hassles of traffic and convention-center parking.My relatives also had a delightful houseguest who’s a don at Cambridge, so our little Anglican-Episcopalian-evangelical group spent the last night at their dining table spread with Girl Scout cookies andhome-brewed ale discussing everything from the new pope to the filioque clause to salted caramel icecream to sweater-knitting. What a lovely family we have, and I mean that inboth senses.

ETS itself, which requires a minimum ThM to join, iscomprised of 7% women. I’m told that only 1% of the presenters this year were female. One man asked me where my husband was. Another,upon seeing a few of us females returning from dinner one night, joked, “I’m going to tellyour husbands you were out picking up men.” Never mind that one, in hersixties, has never been married.  

I came away wondering this: If we believe in the complementary relationship of men andwomen, why don’t we see more men and women partnering to do theology? I pickedup a brochure from an organization that claims to emphasize this very thing.Yet the photos of their board indicated it was comprised of all “pale males.”An organization that has in its very name the word “womanhood” has no women onthe board?

If women were in the minority, it seemed that ethnicminorities were even more scarce. Considering that the future of Christianityis in the southern hemisphere, this struck me as a serious divide.#roomforimprovement   

Despite these deficiencies, I heard some greatpresentations, including one that traced how Luke in his Gospel contrasted menand women to make a point. One speaker looked at whether the quote about Jesusas a worker of miracles was original to Josephus. Another considered how wechange our hermeneutic to accommodate science, sometimes forgetting thatscience can be subjective, too (Freud’s theories on women came to mind). Onelooked at how Christians can grow in our interaction with art beyond critiquingthe worldview behind each piece. And one looked at the strengths and weaknessesof online education and how to compensate for the lack of embodiment (amongother things, require a local in-the-flesh mentor).

A former student, Caroline, looked at radical feminism andProcess Theology. She started late in the academic world because she raised herkids first. This came up during her Q/A time afterward, when a woman in theaudience went off about how we should be emphasizing to women to raise theirkids and focus on the home. Caroline graciously pointed out that she, too,valued children, which is why she waited to complete her education—but thatchildrearing is only a season of life, and that for a limited number of women. The anti-woman-in-education bias comes from both sexes. 

I attended a number of other presentations on gender. Onewas from a psychologist who studied 50,000 (!) marriages. His team concludedthat partnerships in which both spouses feel they both “speak up,” (husband feels thatboth he and wife do so and wife feels that both he and she do so) were most“satisfying” by quite a high margin as compared to more traditionalmarriages. (If a husband is dominant, both she and he were less satisfied.)

In a talk on gender differences, it was noted that as Barbie’swaist measurement has shrunk, Ken’s biceps have increased. This is the sort of importantinfo we get at theology conferences. Ha! (The workshop was actually quitegood.)

DTS had a big alumni breakfast one morning, and I had funreconnecting with old college connections. I tried to attend as many DTS faculty and student presentations as possible, but I was also staying up past midnight talking with my niece.

Lunches and dinners with colleagues, male and female, were ahighlight. Over Maryland crab soup and Puerto Rican rice, we enjoyed about ayear’s worth of relationship-building in three days. In a workshop onmentoring, I learned that in Southern California (where people are crazy busy),the best times for mentoring are said to be in the car, over coffee, and overdinner. That is true of fellowship, too, don’t you think?

Yesterday morning, I blew off academics (I attended ETS at my own expense), saw the harbor, and toured the BaltimoreAquarium with my niece and the boys. We ended our time with a Pot Belly’s lunchand a romp in the park before I went off to hear about whether an embryo has personhood and "The Future of Women inETS," while they caught their bus. 

When I arrived back in Dallas, I told my husband to expect word that I was outpicking up men. He said he looked forward to the call.