NAPS 2012 Program

It seems that the program for the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society is already available. On the homepage of the society, it says that the program will not be available until April, but if you click on the annual meeting call for papers, you will find at the top that it says: "The 2012 program may be opened by clicking here." So, click on it and voila, the program. Also, on the 'call for papers' page, it says the program was released on Feb. 13.

It's nice to see the program released a bit early--it helps with planning the trip to Chicago. The opposite happened in the case of the SECSOR program, which was just released a week or so ago even though the conference itself is the first weekend of March. Mostly I don't stay for entire conferences, so I like to know when I'm presenting a paper so I can book the hotel for that night.

I still don't see any information on the NAPS website about registration or housing--they say that information will be available in March. I remember last time (in 2010) the hotel rooms were $142/night, which I thought pretty good for late May in Chicago, but I have no recollection about how much the conference itself ran.

Anyway, back to the program, I'm sure you'll want to examine the whole thing yourself, so I'll just point out the two places where my name appears. On Friday morning at 9:00, I chair a session on Jerome (session 30). That's pretty cool--I'm quite pleased not only to chair a session but that they assigned me that particular session. The first paper in that session is by Thomas Hunt at Cardiff, whom I met this past August in Oxford at the International Patristics Conference, and with whom I shared a brief email exchange about Jerome. I look forward to seeing him again. The other papers--by Stuart Squires (DePaul), Christine McCann (Norwich), and Peter Anthony Mena (Drew)--also look very interesting.

Later that same day, at 4:20pm, I'll present my own paper in Session 47. The session itself is called "Scripture: Commentary and Translation," and it is chaired by Mischa Hooker, whose website I use constantly. Other than me, the session features some big names: D.H. Williams (Baylor) on "The First Gospel in Service of the Early Fathers," Thomas Scheck (Ave Maria University) on "A Brief Introduction to Jerome's Commentary on Isaiah" (I'm very interested!), and Paul Blowers (Emanuel Christian Seminary) on "Anastasius of Sinai's Hexaemeron: Negotiating an Exegetical Via Media."

My own paper is called "Why Did Jerome Translate Tobit and Judith?" This is a topic I've been thinking about for some time, though I still have yet to put everything together into a coherent paper. That's why I like presenting at conferences--they give you a deadline to write the paper! I'll have to have it done by May 25.

I'll have more to say about my paper as the conference draws closer--you know, after I've actually written it.

UPDATE: Just a couple hours after I posted this, the NAPS website issued an announcement about the meeting, pointing to the conference program available on the site. But the homepage still says the program will be available in April.