A Follow-up on the Carnival

It’s been brought to my attention that some bloggers are crying foul over the paucity of female bloggers in the current carnival. I first read the comments at Cheese Wearing Theology, where Amanda states,

All I can do is *sigh*. It is what it is. But even though there are 0 women, there are several good links that I hadn’t seen this month.

And then,

well, actually there is one link to RHE on the Mark Driscoll thing.

Then Rod of Alexandria at Political Jesus devoted a post to it, stating women are “still invisible” in the carnivals. He also states,

Suzanne and April and Amanda and both Rachels posted a plenty this month.

If he means April DeConick, though, he is mistaken. She published one post throughout the entire month of July, and it was a short one yesterday announcing that she was on vacation. I know this because her blog is in my feed and I always read it first if there’s a post. I was hoping to include something from her in the carnival, but obviously could not. J. K. Gayle has now added his own concerns, stating,

Daniel’s added many many many men, and he’s only included Rachel Held Evans in his very very extensive August 2011 biblical studies carnival.

I’d like to make a couple of points. First, Judith Weingarten, whom I believe to be female, has three rather fascinating posts included in the carnival. Rachel is not the only female included. Second, there’s a reason Judith’s posts were included in the carnival. I had never come across her blog before, but she took the time to email the submissions to me, and I’m glad she did. I learned quite a bit from her posts. Rod did not email submissions. J. K. did not email submissions. Amanda did not email submissions. In fact, I had a grand total of ten submissions for the month of July. I tried to include them all (I believe one was omitted because the link in the email didn’t work and my first hurried attempt to track down the post didn’t work). The most surefire way to get posts included in the carnival is to email your submissions.

All the other posts were ones that come from my feed, which is dedicated to biblical criticism blogs and ancient Judaism and Christianity blogs. I’ve been out of town for the majority of July, though, and hurriedly composed the entire carnival this morning, including only about half of the posts I had gathered on my own. The following posts were on the list but were not included in the carnival only because of a lack of time:

Suzanne McCarthy, Dan Wallace on 2 Tim. 2:12
Suzanne McCarthy, Sexual Harassment
Suzanne McCarthy, Junia, the Apostle: Index
Rachel Held Evans, Ask a Mormon
Rachel Held Evans, Sunday Superlatives, 7/17/11
Rachel Held Evans, Ask an Atheist

I sympathize with the concern for inclusiveness in biblioblogging. I run the Bibliobloggers Top 10 and am quite happy with the seemingly permanent presence of multiple female bloggers there. I have voted for female bibliobloggers each month. Before July began I had intended to have sections in the carnival on female blogging, Latter-day Saint blogging, and atheist blogging, as well as sections on Hebrew Bible and New Testament, Ancient Near East, Classics, and several other sections. I also wanted to include a portrait of Suzanne McCarthy. She was our number 1 blogger last month, but I didn’t have time to do a caricature then. I looked all over for a good photo of her yesterday, but could only find a fuzzy small picture and another picture with a microphone covering half her face (if she is willing to email me a good photo I would still like to do that portrait for her). The beginning of July was too hectic to put together an intricate carnival, though, and I was busy out of town for the rest of the month. When it came down to it, I rather hurriedly put together what I could.

If anyone out there would like to suggest other blog posts from female bibliobloggers, I am more than happy to add them to the current carnival.