It's that time of year when catalogs of allsorts arrive in the mail--the ones from religious publishing houses. (I know you were thinking of L.L.Bean and other too-early seasonal offerings). Religious publishing houses want to tell us of their latest publications so that we can look for them at upcoming fall conferences or adopt them for our courses. It's one of the quaint features of religious publishing that it still puts out catalogs for us to peruse. Our colleagues in other (dare I say it, more modern) fields have long since given up the catalog as the source of information about books in our field. But we, apparently, have not.

So I picked up the new Zondervan catalog to browse. Caveat emptor.  Not one book in biblical studies or biblical languages is written by a woman scholar. There are plenty of women biblical scholars and linguists but none of them seem to be publishing with Zondervan. The only woman they published recently (remember this is a catalog of new books) is in the Theology section: Carolyn Curtis James' Half the Church: Recapturing God's Global Vision for Women. Ms James is described as a 'popular speaker for women's conferences, churches, colleges, seminaries and other Christian organizations.'

This just isn't good enough. Free exam copies for professors notwithstanding, I won't be ordering from Zondervan anytime soon.