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Home > Magazines > BAR > March/April 2002

Dancing in Denver

From one scholarly meeting to another

By Hershel Shanks

I didn’t realize how big Denver is. I learned when trying to cover three (or four) meetings at the same time last November in two locations in downtown Denver and nearby Boulder. Together the meetings included about 8,000 people—Bible teachers, religion teachers, archaeologists and interested laypersons who came to hear some world-class scholarship. 038 Long ago, there was only one meeting. In the olden days, three scholarly organizations held their annual meeting simultaneously under the same roof, moving to a different city each year. They were the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), the American Academy of Religion (AAR) […]

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Footnotes

1.

Kansas City, Orlando and Nashville, the sites of previous meetings, all proved to be fiascoes. See, in BAR, my “Not So Up-to-Date in Kansas City,” BAR 18:02; “A Mickey Mouse Operation,” BAR 25:02; and “First Person: Opryland=Orlando,” BAR 27:02. Denver, although better, was far from ideal. The main hotel was about six blocks from the Colorado Convention Center, where most of the sessions were held— an inconvenient distance, especially in bad weather. Price gouging was rampant at the Convention Center: Checking a coat cost $2; a plain cup of coffee cost $2 and a banana cost $1.75. It was also nearly impossible to move fast enough from the Convention Center to the meetings held in hotels to hear successive presentations in different places. Still, some registrants had it even worse—they could only get hotel rooms 25 minutes away by shuttle bus from the Convention Center.

2.

Unfortunately, his response had to be read by a substitute. Cross was laid up in Cambridge with a back problem.