Welcome! You’ve just stumbled upon (or were directed to) The Floppy Hat, the new cooperative blog of Calvin and Mandy Park! For those of you who are already familiar with our respective blogs, I just wanted to explain a little of the reasoning behind our new site, and what you can expect out of it. Let’s get started!

What exactly is this, you ask?
As you may have shrewdly guessed, Calvin and I have decided to open up our own domain, www.thefloppyhat.com. In the future, we may expand the site into more areas than a blog, but for now, this is just the home of our new joint blog venture.

So why have a joint blog?
As those of you who have already made the acquaintance of Calvin or I in some fashion know, we are both keenly interested in the Hebrew Bible and Biblical languages. We also both want to pursue a Ph.D. in the area of Hebrew Bible, Ancient Near East, Semitics, or some other related major. We’re also best friends, study partners, and life companions! For awhile now we’ve both maintained separate blogs, which have been more or less personal in nature. Since we both blog frequently (that’s Calvin) or occasionally (that’s me) about our studies, research interests, and general pursuit of academia, we figured why not do it together? We’ve always been a team, and love the idea of continuing to be a team as we pursue Ph.D work and ultimately our future careers.

But, “The Floppy Hat”!?!?
It’s simple, really: the floppy hat is my fond nickname for the doctoral tam. My desire to obtain a Ph.D started at convocation in college, when I saw all the profs with their marvelous doctoral robes marching down the aisle, with the crowning glory of a floppy hat! Of course, this morphed into more reasonable reasons over time, but to this day I still call the tam a “floppy hat,” and Calvin has picked up on the term as well. Silly, you say? Exactly! The name is now rather symbolic of the air that we bring to our studies: we love the Hebrew Bible, our goal is to teach it, and consequently we want those we teach to love the Hebrew Bible! We are firmly against boring, dour-faced, dusty academia. This doesn’t, of course, mean that we don’t take our scholarly efforts seriously…but it does mean that we intend to infuse our passion for the Hebrew Bible into our studies. I, for one, am rather whimsical and goofy, and I think it’s terrible (for example) for a good scholar to write a boring book!

So…now what?
You can expect that much of the more academic subjects that we posted about on our personal blogs will continue. We’ll talk about our research interests, Ph.D programs, classes, little tidbits in our studies that we found interesting, post book reviews, interact with other blogs – don’t expect anything really crazy! We’ll also keep in the works a series or two that we’ll work on together.

Are your personal blogs still open?
Yes, for the foreseeable future. I, at least, enjoy blogging on occasion about other subjects that pop into my brain, from my observations of the habits of ladybugs, to what it’s like to live in MA, and I know Calvin will continue to blog about the youth ministry, video games, and any other number of subjects.

Enjoy!