My haul from AAR

I had a great time at AAR in Chicago. I attended a few sessions, and spent a good bit of time networking and browsing the display floor. Here are the books I ended up buying or otherwise acquiring:

A Community Called Atonement by Scot McKnight
Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals by Stephen Webb
The Lazarus Effect by Ben Witherington III and Ann Witherington
Aspects of the Atonement by I. Howard Marshall
The Divine Authenticity of Scripture by A. T. B. McGowan
An Intro. to the Theological Interpretation of Scripture by Daniel Trier
The Blue Parakeet by Scot McKnight
The Drama of Doctrine by Kevin Vanhoozer
Dictionary of Paul and his Letters

A few thoughts about the exhibition hall part of AAR. This is the first year that AAR and SBL have been separated (and I am very disappointed about this fact; it certainly changes the experience, and is detrimental to the whole experience, I think), and it was noticeable on the exhibition floor. Pretty much all of the vendors talked about how it was quite slow this year. I didn't see a lot of people actually buying many books. The economy certainly could be a factor in this, but who knows. I was also disappointed that, since SBL is not part of this show, Eerdmans, for example, brought basically no books on the "biblical" side of their list, only the more theological things. Which was quite disappointing to me. But on the other side, IVP and Baker both brought the full array of titles, and the biblical areas were barely touched (except by me, as you can see above). Another thing worth commenting on is discounts and tax. A lot of vendors, IVP and Baker among them (again, note what I bought above!) discount their titles 50% at the show, which is a nice discount. Many other vendors discount between 40% (Eerdmans, for instance) and 20%. But the fact that the show was in Chicago took away some of this discount, since tax is 10.25%! Ouch. So most titles ended up being about 10% to 20% cheaper than their respective prices on Amazon (or more for publishers that don't discount as much on Amazon, such as Wipf and Stock/Pickwick, meaning I saved almost $10 on the Witherington book). I think in the end I saved about $40 or $45 on the books I bought. So I'm quite pleased, and have lots to read over the winter. And, as I remembered from my last trip to AAR/SBL in 2005, it was a theology-book-lover's dream. More about the actual conference later, but there's the books.