RIAH @ 10: Wooooo!
Michael J. Altman
I wrote Paul an email saying something to the effect of:
I’ve tried to walk a line between history and religious studies in my work. I learned how to walk that line by writing for this blog. How do I take the theoretical work I do and make it not just intelligible, but useful, for someone trained in a history department? What can I learn from these historians?
This blog is my academic baby book. I went from a baby just out of coursework to a professor with a published book. It’s all there in the posts. Along the way, this blog helped me find my voice. It allowed me to play, experiment, pick up this idea and set it back down again, and send up test balloons. I think it functioned that way for a lot of us young scholars and it still does. It’s an independent wrestling circuit where we can try out new moves, try on new characters, and see what really gets the crowd going. Paul Harvey is our Ric Flair—the world champion always willing to put the young talent over.
And that’s the real truth of this blog. It was Paul’s blog but it was never about Paul. There are senior scholars who publish as much as they possibly can. There are senior scholars who try to get others published as much as they can. Paul is the latter. I still can’t believe he let me write here. It was one of the best things that happened to me as a scholar.
There could have been less fantasy football, though.
I wrote Paul an email saying something to the effect of:
“Hi, I’m Mike. Your blog ignores Asia. I can write about Asia.”I still can’t believe Paul let me on this blog. The idea that you’d just give me the ability to post something without anyone reading it or editing it is insane. The freedom to just put ideas out there and then get a response from a ready-made audience who was interested. The challenge of figuring out how to provoke that audience, how to get them to engage, was intoxicating.
I’ve tried to walk a line between history and religious studies in my work. I learned how to walk that line by writing for this blog. How do I take the theoretical work I do and make it not just intelligible, but useful, for someone trained in a history department? What can I learn from these historians?
This blog is my academic baby book. I went from a baby just out of coursework to a professor with a published book. It’s all there in the posts. Along the way, this blog helped me find my voice. It allowed me to play, experiment, pick up this idea and set it back down again, and send up test balloons. I think it functioned that way for a lot of us young scholars and it still does. It’s an independent wrestling circuit where we can try out new moves, try on new characters, and see what really gets the crowd going. Paul Harvey is our Ric Flair—the world champion always willing to put the young talent over.
And that’s the real truth of this blog. It was Paul’s blog but it was never about Paul. There are senior scholars who publish as much as they possibly can. There are senior scholars who try to get others published as much as they can. Paul is the latter. I still can’t believe he let me write here. It was one of the best things that happened to me as a scholar.
There could have been less fantasy football, though.
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