San Diego

Last week we visited San Diego  for the Bible and Archaeology Fest.  It was held in the next hotel over from the one where we attended Bouchercon last year.

The B&AF is run each year by the Biblical Archaeology Society. The Society was founded by Hershel Shanks 49 years ago, and he more or less invented a new hobby: the Middle Eastern archaeology groupie.  The Fest is normally held in the same city as the annual conference of the Society for Biblical Literature and the American Society of Overseas Research (essentially Middle Eastern archaeologists) but this year ASOR was meeting in a different city.  The idea is that scholars give their formal presentations at their big conferences and them some of them sneak over to give dumbed-down versions to us.  

The Fest is not religious, by the way, although clearly a lot of people attending this year were Christians. No prayers or anything like that.  I do wonder how believers cope with some of the decidedly un-believing speakers.  Generally the crowd who say "How dare you claim the rocks around Jerusalem are millions of years old? The whole worlds was created six thousand years ago!" have already cancelled their subscription to Biblical Archaeology Review and self-selected out years before. 

This year, for the first time, the Fest linked up with the SBL/American Academy of Religion conference, not so that we could attend their lectures, but so that we could visit the exhibition hall.  This was almost as big as the hall at Worldcon, but all books. No jewelry, paintings, or stuffed animals.  Just thousands of new books.  Wow.

So what do you find  among the books from mostly religious publishers?  It was mostly the kind of books I would expect, but a few things surprised me.  There were a lot of books about the African-American church.  A ton of books on how to cope with Christian nationalists.  

And many books on the theology of popular culture.  Middle Earth. Horror movies. Good Omens. And two on Leonard Cohen.  Interesting stuff.

Oh, and Cali Cream has some of the best ice cream we have ever had.