Beeson Podcast, Episode 425 Anna Moseley Gissing and Dave Nelson January 1, 2019 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Well, today we're coming to you from Denver, Colorado, where there's been a meeting this week of theologians, biblical scholars, a number of professional theology meetings. Really several thousand people together, and today I have the wonderful privilege of talking to two friends, both of whom are graduates of Beeson Divinity School, both of whom are editors involved with major publishers. So we're going to talk about writing, we're going to talk about what it means to be involved in this line of work. Some of you are interested in writing and maybe you'll get some helpful hints as we talk with these two friends. They are Anna Moseley Gissing, who received a Master of Theological Studies degree from Beeson in 2003 and Dave Nelson, the following year he got an MDA from Beeson. Timothy George: Anna is associate editor at InterVarsity Press, and Dave is senior acquisitions editor for Baker Academic and Brazos Press. Now I have to make a confession of my sins. I have written for both of these publishers and I have people who are mad at me at both of these publishing houses for not turning in my work on time. So let that be sad and if there was any absolution to be given, I'm grateful to receive it. Anyway, Anna let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background at Beeson and how you got into this line of work. Anna Gissing: Sure. I am originally from [inaudible 00:01:52], and went to college in North Carolina. After I graduated from college, I moved to Birmingham to work in local church ministry, especially in youth ministry. So while I was working in youth ministry, I started exploring seminary education and considered several different schools but ended up wanting to stay in the Birmingham area. So I only ended up applying to Beeson. One of the things that was really attractive to me about Beeson was the interdenominational aspect of the school. That seemed like a good fit for me and I stayed in town. Anna Gissing: After Beeson, I moved back to North Carolina to work in campus ministry with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. So my journey into editing was long and complex. I don't know if we want to do that now, but I was in campus ministry and then started teaching theological research and writing for Gordon Conwell students and really enjoyed that. So I thought, well that might be an indicator that editing is in my future. And then a friend of mine hired me to do some freelance editing for a curriculum company. I learned more and more about the different aspects of editing and really felt like it was a role that brought together several of my guests interests strengths. I moved into editing for InterVarsity, an online publication called The Well, a website for women in the academy and professions. That made me realize that editing was the career trajectory that I thought God was calling me to. So when a position opened up at IVP, I applied to transition to book editing there. Timothy George: Now, while at Beeson, you met this wonderful fellow named Jeff Gissing, and somehow y'all got connected. Tell us about Jeff. Anna Gissing: Well, that's right. I have a Beeson love story. I was Anna Moseley at Beeson, and I noticed Jeff in the computer lab at Beeson. He was talking with another student about theology and I was trying to write a paper which at that time you had to do in the computer lab and I got drawn into the conversation. That was when I noticed Jeff and then we started dating as students at Beeson I think one day after a lecture, one of the special lecture series, he asked me out. So yes, we have fun memories of Beeson, especially the computer lab and the bookstore. Places that have changed over the years. But that will be special, you know there are special places in our [inaudible 00:04:31]. Timothy George: And God has blessed your marriage with two beautiful children. Anna Gissing: Two children, yes. We got married the week after I graduated from Beeson. Jeff graduated the year before and he has done campus ministry and pastoring and is now in marketing for IVP. We have two children who are eight and ten. Timothy George: And y'all are Presbyterians, right? Anna Gissing: We are. Jeff is a presbyterian pastor. That's right. Timothy George: Oh Dave, let's go to you. You also have a base of the story. Dave Nelson: I do. Timothy George: And tell us about it. Dave Nelson: Sure. I grew up in Birmingham and did my undergraduate studies at UAB in history and English. Through a personal time of prayer and devotion, started to sense a call to the ministry and began looking at different seminaries. Went around, visited a few places here and there. I had considered Beeson but really hadn't looked too heavily into it. But then I met my now wife [inaudible 00:05:27]. We met ... I took a year to learn Greek at southeastern Bible college before I went into the application process and didn't learn any Greek but met my wife there. When we started dating and it became apparent that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together, Beeson seemed like the obvious choice because that way we wouldn't have to uproot or try ... we weren't quite ready at that point to get married. So we didn't want to do a long distance relationship. Dave Nelson: But boy, I'm really grateful for my time there. I bragged about Beeson all the time to folks and I think it's what Anna spoke to a moment ago, the interdenominational vision for evangelicalism that really fuels what Beeson is all about. It was so great to be there to meet other students who are going through the throes of training for ministry who were from different places. Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, nondenominational, Pentecostals and so on and so forth. It was a great experience. Dave Nelson: Then after Beeson, I graduated in 2004. I immediately applied actually while I was at Beeson applied to study with John Webster at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, is the only place I applied. I knew the moment I read, the first ... first essay I read that he wrote was called Discovering Dogmatics. And I knew from that moment it was love at first sight as they say. Love at first read. I knew I was going to go study with John. Timothy George: We should tell our listeners who John Webster was. He just passed away a few years ago. Great, great theologian of our time. Dave Nelson: He was. He was Anglican, of a reform sort, but he wrote his dissertation with George Newlands at Cambridge on Eberhard Jüngel, that was also the subject of my own dissertation. I was one of two of John's students who wrote on Eberhard Jüngel and we had a lot of fun doing that. And then he was a fine interpreter of Carol Bartz theology, but then right around the turn of his second decade in teaching in theology, he really started looking at constructive dogmatics. And in doing more constructive work or trying to unfold the system of dogmatic theology. Dave Nelson: One of these funny stories that happens in our world all those years, he was my doctoral supervisor trying to get me to write my dissertation. And then when I got to Baker I became his editor and tried to get him to write those manuscripts that he [crosstalk 00:07:57]. Timothy George: Talk about fair play. Dave Nelson: So we had this fun reversal of roles. But anyway, so after I graduated in 2011, possibility opened up at another press. Gerald Bray, professor at Bayesian and a good friend encouraged me to apply to that position and I did and then Baker opened up the next day and I applied for Baker and had been doing it ever since. I've been there for seven years now. Timothy George: Now, Anna and Jeff are Presbyterians. You are Lutheran? Dave Nelson: Yeah. We all have things we're not proud of. Timothy George: Well I'm proud of the fact that you are Lutheran and you enrich that tradition by your scholarship and your love for the church. Dave Nelson: Thank you. Timothy George: So that's wonderful. Well, let's talk a little bit about the work both of you are engaged in doing, and that is a how to write a book. How to get it published. What are the steps to take? If you're speaking ... a lot of listeners to the podcast are either writers or want to be writers. What would you say to people like that? Anna Gissing: Well, I'd say if you have a book idea, the first thing is to do a little research and see what else has been written on that topic so that you know where the gaps are and where you might be able to speak into that. Where a book needs to be written that doesn't already exist. That'd be my first step. Timothy George: So get a lay of the land. Dave Nelson: Yeah. I usually, I've been going around for the last few years and doing these little publishing presentations for whatever it might be worth. Little bits of wisdom from the publishing world in the three things I always tell folks who are there listening to those presentations is know your publishers. So getting that lay of the land, know what's out there, know you're yourself. Know what kind of books you want and need to write for your career. Not everyone is ... you know, Dean, not everyone has to write the same kinds of books. So knowing how your career, your trajectory of your own work will unfold. Dave Nelson: Now, of course in the academic theology publishing, so that's one particular kind of niche in there. But I think that wisdom applies to all sorts of writing. And then also know your project really well and write a good proposal. Editors are weird people. We edit each other's emails, we're neurotic folks. We don't get out of the sun that much and when you send a proposal in, the proposal needs to be written really well. We're ideas people in the publishing world and we like to see really well formulated book ideas. And I think one of the biggest early mistakes and author can do is to put together a crummy proposal. Timothy George: Let me ask you all a big question, kind of a general question. Books, are they on their way out? We're here, we live in a digital world, you know the line. A lot of reading we do comes from websites and all kinds of things. You both are fairly young, not beginners, but you're fairly young and do you envision a time on 10, 20, 25 years from now we won't need books and therefore we may not need you editors of books? Is that even a question you can entertain? Anna Gissing: Well, I think we've been fearing that for many years and it has not proven to be the case thus far. We have more books coming out in the US each year, more titles, new titles than ever before. Timothy George: That means somebody is buying them and reading them. Anna Gissing: And people are still buying and reading books even though yes, readers spend a lot of time online. I think there's still an appreciation for a book and especially a hard copy, a paper book where you can turn pages and take notes in the margin. There's a different quality to that experience than reading online. And as we know a lot of time reading online affects our attention span. I think people are starting to notice and talk about that and wanting to get back to reading long form. Dave Nelson: I think that's great and I agree with that completely. I think that there's something about a book going from cover to cover and reading an argument that unfold. Especially in the world that we're in, theological publishing and Biblical studies publishing, you want to see ideas that unfold over a big space. So far the short form publishing that's done online hasn't killed that yet. I worry I guess more intellectually about kind of thinking about it as an intellectual problem. I worry about what all of that short form publishing and writing that is being encouraged these days, what that actually does to the minds of the authors who will be writing. So I worry a little bit about that. I worry a maybe not so much that there won't be a market for the books in the future, but that we may see, we may see a decline in the ability people have to write. Dave Nelson: I teach a little bit on the side and some of the papers that I've seen that have come through are really, really bad from these our seminary students. And that worries me. That's an indication that there seems to be a decline in the ability to communicate through the written word. So I worry a little bit about that. I always think one more thing, that we're doing fairly ... we do have books that we publish at Baker Academic and Brazos that sell a lot of copies and I'm sure you could do at IVP as well, but we're not trying to reach the entire world with these books. It's a relatively modest slice of the reading market. I think that will always be able to find a few thousand people in classes here and they're reading theology, reading about scripture who will die these books. I'm fairly competent that will not be rendered obsolete so quickly. Timothy George: One of the things I like about this meeting we're at, which is a combination over a week, I guess, ETS, SBL, IBR, what have I left out? SBL, AAR. If you're not familiar, these are kind of the alphabet soup of theological scholarship covering the waterfront. One of the things I like about is walking through the display area where both of you have displays from Baker and from IVP, and your new books or your projected books are there and you get to sometimes not only talked to editors as the two of you, but also authors who happen to show up to see if there are books on display. I know somebody who did that that just today, but anyway, I think that's a that's a great thing because there's a ferment of ideas here. You meet people, why do we need a book on this? Sometimes I would have been utterly surprised that somebody wrote a book on that, but they did. So that's a good thing about this kind of gathering. Dave Nelson: Absolutely. Going around, I enjoyed just walking around the booths myself as someone in the industry looking to see what you guys over at IVP are doing. What Ordinance is doing right now and just seeing all of these ideas that are finally on the written page. It's a good thing. Timothy George: Let me ask you both this question. What have been some of your favorite projects to work on so far? And when I say your projects, I mean you're editors, and so part of what you do is acquire projects I guess, but then also shepherd them through the process. So what are some of your favorites and maybe you could talk about that process a little bit? Dave Nelson: Sure. Well, briefly about the process first. So I'm an acquisitions editor at a Baker Academic and Brazos and we do things just slightly differently from the way they do things that IVP. I basically govern the process of writing from the idea in the head to the manuscript on the page. Once the manuscript is submitted, someone else actually takes it all the way through. They do cover copy, they do all of the copy editing and everything else. They're project editor who shepherds things through. So as an acquisitions editor, only what I do is meet with authors. There's a bit of talent scouting a that I do. I find the more than anything else, all of that stuff that I learned at Beeson about pastoring comes in handy. I pastor authors. Dave Nelson: When my supervisor died, I thought a lot about what he did for those of us who were students and I realized I'm doing the same thing, but to [inaudible 00:16:18] and to Matt Levering and to Phil Ziegler and to Timothy George. So you are in a way someone who is under my care and I'm shepherding you through the process of getting the manuscript ready. So my favorite so far, I enjoy the books that I've published with people who I've really enjoyed and loved working with. Matt Levering has become a dear close friend of mine and I love working with him. So far I've done four books, and I have only been here for seven years and I've published four of Matt Levering's monographs. Very impressive. Timothy George: Let's talk a little bit about Mathews. Dave Nelson: Sure. Timothy George: I can say I've known him in different contexts. One of the brightest, maybe the brightest younger Catholic theologian working in North America today. Dave Nelson: He's brilliant. He is. He's been a joy to work with. Phillips Ziegler, who was my internal examiner at Aberdeen, wrote a book for us called Militant Grace on apocalyptic theology and it was just a delight. He's a dear friend of mine and working with him on that. It's been fun. Two of that are coming out and then I'll stop, but I'm excited next year. Well, I'll tell you three next year. Our theology list will be amazing. We have Tom Gregs who's at Aberdeen, he's a Methodist theologian. He's writing a three volume ecclesiology and volume one will be out next year and it's unequivocal brilliant. It's fantastic. Dave Nelson: Grant McCaskill who is also in Aberdeen, is writing a book on Paul, and it's on a topic that Grant's been doing work on for a while on participation, but it's on participation and Paul written for pastors and leaders at the church level in addition to students. It's a very good book. I just got that manuscript in. One I'm probably more excited about than any of those, even though those are great books, we do have a Webster book coming out. John Webster, it's a little a collection of essays that he published many years ago in New Zealand Journal and the book is called The Culture of Theology and it has a really great introduction by Ivor Davidson, who is an old friend of John's and a colleague at St Andrews, so I'm really excited about those. Timothy George: Wonderful. Anna. Anna Gissing: My job is a little bit of a combination of the steps that Dave discussed. As associate editor, I work in acquisitions and I'm also a project editor. I start talking to people about book ideas and I work with them through the manuscript revision process on cover and cover copy and all the rest, but I do hand off for copy editing and proofreading. I have only been at IVP for two years. There are very few books that I have both acquired and worked with and they're also out already, but I have worked on lots of different projects that I didn't acquire. A couple of my favorites are a book that's just out Sharon Gallagher [inaudible 00:19:19] church. She is at Gordon College and has written a book that's on ecclesiology and specifically looking at how we think about the relationship between young people and everyone else in the church and the role that young people have to play in the church community. It's a beautiful book. Anna Gissing: Another one that was a lot of fun to work on has been out a little while called Still Evangelical. Mark Lamberton, who is the president of Fuller edited this. Multi contributor volume that has a lot of interesting leading thinkers talking about the word evangelical, the label. In light of the last couple of years of politics, how has the word changed? What is the history of the term, how might we use it profitably today? It was a really interesting book to work on, especially to work directly with all these leading contributors. Anna Gissing: A third favorite that's just come out recently is Paula Gooder's novel called Phoebe. We know very little about Phoebe- Timothy George: Roman 16, right? Anna Gissing: ... from the scripture, but she has taken what we do know about the early church, the first century, and sculpted a fascinating and very lovely novel about Phoebe with helpful notes sections. You can read the whole thing without interruption as a novel, as a story. And then in the back she has extremely helpful notes about where she got these ideas from and what's the scholarship to back it up. The variety of the projects that I get to work on is really a thrill. And those three have been especially fun. Timothy George: That's great. Dave, you work at theological publishing, academic theology primarily. What needs to be written? You've spoken about some great things that are being written are about to be published by Baker Brazos. You're talking to people now who are thinking, this is where I want to invest my life. What field should I go into? What does the church need? Dave Nelson: Well, that's a great question. I wonder sometimes if a few years ago we seem to be sort of stuck in an ongoing third article age. So topics in the Apostles Creed, for instance, the Ecclesiology, Eschatology, Sacramental Theology and whatnot. They kind of all unfold under the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and I think there's a lot of good publishing that needs to be done, needs to be written. A lot of good theological work that needs to be undertaken in that particular set of issues. Dave Nelson: That being said, I think what I'm seeing of late is an interest in talking about God. It isn't it interesting that theologians can go and do all sorts of things and talk about politics and whatnot, and not even talk about God. But we're actually seeing a lot of publishing going on. Kate Sondra Rigor has a book that was published with fortress a couple of years ago. Her first volume of Systematic Theology, and it's just on God and the brilliance of it is to read this whole 450 page volume one and it really is a theology in just saying, “Can we talk about God and the divine attributes?” Dave Nelson: So I think those two things. I think the evergreen issue for what we're interested in as publishers and what I think is always needed is textbooks. That's a genre category that's a little clumsy, but a textbook is any book that is used for coursework for training students. So to find good theologians who are also good writers who are able to take complex ideas and distill them down and communicate them in a way that is clear and compelling so that students who are at places like Beeson going through wrestling with these things for the sake of ministry and whatever else they might be doing. Some decent students come out and become editors, but those formative years in the throes of theological education, the books that serve those communities, those are the books that we desperately still need. There's a lot of good ones out there already, but we still need more and more. Timothy George: Yeah. That's helpful. Anna, recently IVP began a Read Women campaign. What's the story behind that and what would you say regarding the state of women in publishing in general? Anna Gissing: Yes. That campaign came about when a couple of things came together to be the right time. IVP has always cared about publishing women, and our very first book we ever published was a Bible study by a woman. So it's been kind of one of our core values for almost 75 years. But one of our editors, Al Hsu who is a senior editor at IVP did his doctoral work in educational studies and did some research on reading and found that among the readers that he surveyed, readers who are men read 90% men authors and readers who are women read more like half and half, half men and half women. And so he was wondering why that disparity and how can we help more people read women authors. Anna Gissing: So at the Festival of Faith in Writing in Grand Rapids in April, there was a seminar where several authors got together to explore this idea and it was there that we launched the Read Women campaign where we highlighted many of the authors that we've published in recent years and their books and encouraged people to connect with these authors and these books. So it's not a new value for us, but it's a good time for us to promote all of the women that we have as authors at IVP and all of the lovely books that they have published. Anna Gissing: That's how it came about, and regarding the state of women in publishing, I think in academic publishing, especially where I'm working now, we still have a long ways to go to publish many more women. We are always looking for more women in the academy to publish, but especially in the theological academy there's nowhere near as many women as men in the academy and faculty positions. And so I think we still have a long way to go. We are publishing women, but if you look in our catalog you can tell that it's still skewed. We're still working on it. I think in trade publishing, I think that it's a lot more encouraging. We have about half and half men and women authors. Timothy George: Who was the first woman author? Anna Gissing: Jane Hollingsworth, who worked on an inductive study of Mark and which has been a bedrock for InterVarsity chapters still today working an inductive study of Mark. Timothy George: Well, this has been a great conversation that both of you were such good students. I remember you both well as students before and after Jeff, in your case, Anna. And Dave, you were in one or two of my classes. I remember both of you just were shining students and now you've gone on to do wonderful things in the world of publishing and editing and providing the resources for the people of God. If you could look back on your experience at Beeson and your life now and speak to a prospective student just as they're entering or about to enter, in one or two sentences, what would you say? Anna Gissing: I would say if you have the opportunity to go to Beeson, please take advantage of the relationships there. I made lifelong friends during my time at Beeson, got to know the faculty really well. So if you have the opportunity to really invest in relationships while you're there, the size of the school really provides an opportunity for close community. So take advantage. Dave Nelson: Yeah. We've heard this morning from Frank Thielemann talk about those foundational values, the principles of Beeson Divinity School. "No online education, we're discouraging students commuting from far away, come and live and be a part of this community for those four years and learn and grow together with faculty and students alike." I think that's critical. I think so many schools these days at the graduate and undergraduate levels are changing their models to meet all of these different needs for modern people today. But to have an experience where you can go to a place like Beeson and be a part of a community like that for three or four years to get that degree, but to be a part of that community, it can be life changing. And for me, I got a degree, that was great. I'm very grateful for the degree that was offered to me from Beeson Divinity School, but what was important to me with the relationships. Timothy George: My guest today on the Beeson podcast has been Anna Moseley Gissing and Dave Nelson, both our graduates at Beeson Divinity School. They're both involved in the world of publishing. Anna as associate editor at InterVarsity press and Dave as senior acquisitions editor for Baker Academic and Brazos Press. Thank you both for this conversation. Anna Gissing: Thank you. Dave Nelson: Thank you. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.