Being the curious sort, I followed up on the post I dropped the day before Valentines. I had written about Scholars Press and how details were hard to find. I kept digging after that post. I learned some things. The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) used to meet regularly with the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). ASOR was all about archeology. Then, in the year 1969 SBL and the American Academy of Religion (AAR), formed the Council for the Study of Religion. The next year they began holding their conferences together. ASOR was still part of it. In fact, the three societies, along with Brown University, formed Scholars Press. (For those in the know, this is why SBL now publishes Brown Judaic Studies.) Scholars Press churned along, but ASOR was increasingly being shunted aside. The conference started being called AAR/SBL, with no ASOR. In 1997 (I remember this personally) ASOR started holding separate conferences.
Two years later, in 1999, Scholars Press dissolved. SBL, the oldest of the societies, began publishing as Society of Biblical Literature. AAR partnered with Oxford University Press to do their publishing. (By the by, AAR started out as Association of Biblical Instructors in American Colleges and Secondary Schools). ASOR went its own way, and Brown settled on SBL to continue its religious studies publishing. As a young scholar, I was a member of all three societies. (I didn’t attend Brown, though. But I did go to a graduation there once, if that counts.) I wondered why they couldn’t get along. In a word, it was because of politics.
Those who know me personally likely know that I have tried to pursue the ordination track in three different denominations. What they may not know is that the reason I never got through the process was, you guessed it, politics. I started to learn, when in college, just how many power plays were involved in covens of ministers. When dealing with the ultimate power, I guess, everyone wants to get the upper hand. That bothered me as a seminarian. The second and third denominations both showed their politics up front, and those sharp, flashing teeth made me realize that I’d never be free of politicking had I moved ahead. I suppose I could go be a hermit and live in the desert—I might escape it that way, but whenever two or three are gathered, the politics start to show. ASOR, SBL, and AAR have quite a lot in common. All are under threat as part of the dreaded “humanities” category, and yet that’s not enough to make them want to pull together. Politics just go that way.